Scientific Conservation came out of stealth back in the summer of 2009 after spending years developing and selling its product, a web-based software platform that links into a building’s existing automation system — which monitors heating, air conditioning and other energy-consuming systems — and applies analytics to continuously predict, detect and diagnose system faults and anomalies. CEO Russ McMeekin has estimated the company will grow from 15 million square feet under management today to 100 to 150 million square feet by the end of 2011, and customers include Neiman Marcus, California’s Santa Clara County, Boeing and General Electric.

Then-CEO David Wolins told us back when the company launched that building managers have been on the defensive in terms of energy-efficient buildings for a long time, because they are forced to react to a degradation of performance. For example, a room is too hot or too cold, and they have to adjust the system accordingly. But Wolins explained to us that Scientific Conservation’s software helps building managers go on the offensive, providing a tool for them to be able to react prior to a system turning too hot or cold.

Most large commercial buildings in the U.S. rely on some type of automation system for operators to monitor their buildings. Scientific Conservation’s tools pull in data from existing sensors installed in a building, combine that data with weather data and power pricing from utilities, run simulations, and identify faults. The software can predict imminent failures by comparing data with past performance. It also prioritizes the maintenance needed and estimates the cost of inaction. Sensors or other devices that are malfunctioning — even intermittently — are identified and, once replaced, make air conditioning and other energy hogs in a building run as they were intended

Other companies offering similar services include Pulse Energy, Building 2.0, and Cisco’s Building Mediator. While long-established companies like Johnson Controls have been developing automation systems for decades, these newer entrants are leveraging advances in information technology and the Internet to make buildings run more efficiently. But if these startups are to be successful, they’ll need to prove to customers that their technologies can save money and bring value, such as by making building operations more efficient.

Scientific Conservation’s funding round brings the company’s total funding to $24.65 million, and previous investors include the Westly Group. Scientific Conservation was also named by GE as one of its 12 Ecomagination Challenge winners. Alan White, SCI’s VP of corporate development, told us in a December interview that landing GE as a customer and potential technology partner was just as valuable as the investment involved in that transaction.

Image courtesy of roblisameehan

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Will the funding accelerate GridPoint’s long-awaited move from great expectations to real-world revenues? GridPoint has gone through several business plan reincarnations throughout its lifetime and has been making more changes as of late. In late October, the company replaced its founding CEO Peter Corsell with an interim CEO: former CSO and software and communications veteran John Spirtos. A search for a permanent CEO is underway.

GridPoint started out making technology for managing energy and solar panels in higher-end homes, then shifted to a broader smart grid software play, only to re-emerge recently with a building energy management focus. Along the way, it made a lot of acquisitions: vehicle-to-grid startup V2G in 2008, home energy dashboard maker Lixar, energy management company ADMMicro in 2009, and energy contractor Standard Renewable Energy in February of last year.

GridPoint has also done pilot projects with utilities including Austin Energy, Duke Energy, Kansas City Power & Light, Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Xcel Energy (s XEL), though it hasn’t yet disclosed any revenues from these partners. Last May, GridPoint announced a paying, $28.7 million contract with the U.S. Postal Service to install and operate energy management systems at some 750 locations, along with two, one-year extensions that could raise that to 2,250 facilities across the country. (It also disclosed the exercise of some $10 million in warrants at that time.)

GridPoint’s sprawling lines of business make it a potential competitor to companies in just about every smart grid field, with the possible exception of transmission and generation systems. Its home energy management systems will compete with those from dozens of startups — including well-funded Silver Spring Networks and its Greenbox home energy platform — as well as giants Google, Microsoft and Intel. As for building energy management, GridPoint will be going up against giants like Siemens, Honeywell and Johnson Controls — the latter two are partnering with IBM on building management — as well as other startups in the field.

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So how can U.S. companies, or even Valley startups, navigate this market? According to Zpryme, partnerships with Chinese firms, and industry and standards groups, will be a crucial door into the Chinese smart grid market. There’s really no other way.

That’s because the Chinese government and State Grid Corporation of China, China’s largest transmission company that is leading the smart grid charge, have a long-standing propensity to work with domestic companies. And the history of the growth of technology in China, in general, is covered in Chinese-born technology standards.

The largest portion of China’s smart grid market, according to Zpryme — and the best area to tackle first — is smart grid transmission and distribution technology, which is expected to be a $21.2 billion market by 2015. China is building out three major transmission lines in the country, each of which is expected to provide 20 GW of transmission capacity by 2020, and including the world’s first 1,000-kilovolt AC power line that will run between Shanxi and Hubei.

These transmission lines, and the subsequent distribution gear, will connect many Chinese to power for the first time and will also link China’s massive investments in clean power to the cities that will use the electricity. Amazingly, the report notes that 30 percent of the wind turbines in China are not yet connected to a transmission network.

Specifically for U.S. firms, providing the IT and networking for distribution automation will be a major opportunity, and the software and hardware segment of China’s smart grid market will turn into a $13 billion market in 2015.

Some U.S. and European IT vendors have made inroads already in China include GE, which this week announced a partnership with the State Grid Corporation of China, and the Chinese Academy of Science to develop standards for smart grid tech. Landis + Gyr also has a deal with State Grid. Spain’s Telvent is working with China South Grid Guizhou Electric Power Company, and IBM, ABB, and Siemens all have smart grid contracts in the country, too.

For more research related to smart grid check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

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Image courtesy of Mikex.

The health issue that angry consumers have raised has been over radio frequency (RF) emissions, which wireless devices like cell phones, microwaves, baby monitors, wireless routers, and yes, smart meters, emit. These devices emit RF at various rates, and at various power densities, depending on how often they’re used and what the wireless device does.

More studies need to be done on the long-term effects of RF emissions on people. But it shouldn’t be associated with the smart meter folks.

As the CCST study points out, a cell phone at your ear actually emits a much (much) larger dose of RF (as you can see in the graph) on a body, compared to a smart meter. Standing a couple of feet away from a microwave also emits more RF on a person than standing near a smart meter.

In contrast, smart meters are mostly installed outside homes, are installed to face the street (usually not the house), are low power, and during the initial installation phase, are only in use for 2 to 4 percent of the time (though that usage will clearly rise over time, and the graph assumes 100 percent on).

If consumers are concerned about living in apartments that are close to a lot of smart meters lined up outside their wall, there have been studies on that, too. In November 2010 the Electric Power Research Institute field tested how much RF was being emitted from a bank of 10 meters of 250 mW power level at a 1-foot distance. EPRI found that the RF exposure level was only 8 percent of the FCC standard (the FCC establishes an acceptable threshold of RF emissions, and cell phones, microwaves and smart meters all fit comfortably under the limit).

So basically, if consumers are worried about RF, they should give up cell phones and microwaves before blocking smart meter installations.

There is no evidence of health risks associated with RF emissions, but there’s a lack of long-term studies on how it could affect humans over decades or a lifetime. Some studies, which aren’t widely accepted in the science community, suggest that fatigue or even cancer could come from long-term RF exposure. Clearly, that area needs to be researched more, but it will probably need to be focused around cell phone use (and not smart meters), as that’s one of the biggest contributors to RF emissions and humans.

For more research about smart meters and smart grids check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

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Yeah, it’s not exactly what I expected from the almost two-decade-old firm which has, until now, built a business around its 8,000 weather tracking stations. But Earth Networks has already partnered with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has launched the first green house gas observation station in the network at Scripps.

There are a handful of these types of green house gas emissions observation stations in the world today, and the first was deployed by Scripps at the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii in 1958. (Check out this excellent article in the New York Times last month on the Mauna Loa tracking station). But Earth Networks says these observation stations aren’t networked together and don’t provide a global picture of emissions in enough detail and in real time.

The Earth Network will track both carbon and methane emissions and many of the observation stations will be built on tall towers and high up locations. The data that comes out of the sensor network will be used to provide detailed reports and will also be integrated into the WeatherBug app, so companies, governments, municipalities and consumers can check out the data. You can also observe some of it live online.

Earth Networks is initially working with Picarro, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup that sells $50,000 greenhouse gas-detecting sensor boxes. The analyzers are about the size of a desktop PC, and they work by firing laser beams into the air to determine concentrations of green house gases, and then measure the changes in wavelength signals. While the technology has existed in labs for decades, Picarro has stuffed all this measuring capability into a portable, 58-pound box of sensors that requires little maintenance.

The global sensor network will be an important tool for fighting climate change, but how commercially successful the operation will be, I’m not sure. No doubt if the U.S. ever passes carbon legislation, and if the U.N.’s green house gas negotiations make progress in the next few years, more governments and companies will want to pay Earth Networks to access its green house gas data.

Earth Networks did manage to build up weather-based services around its weather tracking stations, and the same type of products and applications will be needed for green house gas emissions data. In recent years, as AWS, Earth Networks started to sell its weather data to smart grid companies and utilities. The barrier to entry for Earth Network’s competitors is the $25 million worth of observation stations, but the intelligence of the network will come from the algorithms that sort through the emissions data.

To learn more about tools and companies that are hard at work crunching this type of so-called “big data,” come check out our Big Data conference in New York on March 23. I’ll be there.

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Basically, utilities can now buy a network with demand response functionality (used to reduce power consumption during peak demand times) via Silver Spring that connects into the home to Control4′s smart thermostats, dashboards, and smart appliance controllers. The partners are already providing this end-to-end network technology for the smart grid project of utility AEP Ohio.

Both these companies are well-known to utilities — Silver Spring is one of the oldest smart grid-specific networking companies around and Control4 moved into the smart energy home space in the summer of 2009, but had been selling home automation products for years.

The residential piece of the smart grid will be crucial to keep utilities’ customers happy, and will play a key role in reducing energy consumption in homes. A handful of consumers, mostly in California and Texas, have lashed out against smart meters for reasons as various as health and privacy concerns as well as claims that meters were inaccurate. The more established and trusted the players are in this space the better.

The indication that the utility-side of the smart home is making some progress, follows in the footsteps of a recent push by consumer electronics companies and telecom firms looking to tap into the smart home, including home energy management. As I noted in this article “The Telco Energy Home Is Coming . . .For Real This Time, which I wrote for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Verizon, AT&T and Motorola have all moved into this area in recent weeks.

Remember though, that the market for the smart energy home — from the utility side, the telco perspective, and the gadget makers viewpoint — is still tiny right now. It’s made up by a handful of utility trials, Verizon’s trial in New Jersey, and DIYers that have bought stand alone gadgets like the TED. However, Pike Research predicts that by 2015, 28 million homeowners around the world will be using some kind of high-tech tool to manage their energy use.

Silver Spring has placed more of an emphasis on the edge of the network (smart grid applications) in recent months, and earlier this month showed off electric vehicle charging connected to its smart grid network. And back in September 2009, Silver Spring bought energy management software company Greenbox. In this afternoon’s announcement Silver Spring says its Customer IQ web portal (the renamed Greenbox product) will connect with Control4′s devices.

Silver Spring had been rumored to IPO in 2010, but didn’t end up filing. Will 2011 be the year that Silver Spring goes for the public markets? As I put it in this end-of-the-year piece, a Silver Spring IPO would be a big score for the overall smart grid sector.

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Update: Viridity later disclosed the funding size as $14 million.

For a 3-year-old newcomer, Viridity has seemed to score more than its fair share of projects and partnerships. It will be building both the network and the commercial operations for the audacious transmission hub plan via company Tres Amigas. Viridity is also involved in two stimulus-funded projects: one with Consolidated Edison in New York City, and another with PECO at the Philadelphia campus of Drexel University.

Siemens is also working with Viridity, to combine Siemens’ decentralized energy management system with Viridity’s system for managing “virtual power plants,” a collection of loads and distributed generation resources at office parks, university campuses or other discrete entities. Because Siemens is so large and has so many broad smart grid offerings, it needs to partner with some of the smaller firms to deliver the most advanced technology across the network.

As Viridity Energy CEO Audrey Zibelman told us last year, the company can also help deliver effective microgrids, based on the premise that the customer owns the resource and maximizes its value by selling self-generated power — or “negawatts” of reduced power demand — into more and more markets that have traditionally been the domain of utilities and their big power plant partners.

Viridity says it will use the new funds from Intel and Braemer “to support rapid growth.” Braemar has backed both demand response player EnerNOC and lithium-ion battery company A123 Systems — both of which have gone public. Braemer and Intel Capital also previously invested together into smart grid software company Grid Net.

For more research related to smart grid check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

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Image courtesy of Doug Beckers.

The deal is the most recent in a series of partnerships on the plug-in vehicle charging front between large power companies and smaller players. General Electric, for example, has tapped smart charging software startup Juice Technologies for its WattStation charging system, and has more recently formed a multi-faceted relationship with battery-swapping startup Better Place. German engineering giant Siemens has a co-marketing deal with Coulomb Technologies to sell Siemens’ smart grid IT along with Coulomb’s charging station technology.

ECOtality will use the $10 million to support its work supplying chargers for The EV Project, an effort supported by the Department of Energy, Nissan and General Motors to install charging networks in six U.S. states. While the San Francisco-based company has installed about 6,000 chargers for forklifts, airport trucks and other private vehicles, ECOtality’s Blink charging stations are meant for consumer plug-in vehicles, with lots of communications options and units designed for both home and commercial use.

ABB also has a deal with General Motors to study using partly-depleted Chevy Volt lithium-ion batteries for grid energy storage applications.

ABB’s investment and strategic partnership delivers ECOtality a deep-pocketed partner with an enormous footprint in the electricity sector — important for vehicle charging networks that will need close cooperation and communication with utilities. ECOtality also plans to install its Blink fast-chargers at a dozen Best Buy stores on the West Coast this spring, which will open up the challenges of high-voltage, direct current, fast charging for plug-in vehicles — an area where ABB’s power grid expertise will no doubt be helpful.

ABB, in turn, will gain access to ECOtality’s Web portal and charging management network and its “Micro-Climate” system to design charging networks based on regional factors like traffic patterns, population density and zoning rules.

Maybe ECOtality and ABB will move toward an even closer partnership in the future? ABB has been one of the most acquisitive companies in the smart grid space over the past year, spending more than $1 billion for smart grid software vendor Ventyx in May and picking up electric motor maker Baldor and software maker Insert Key Solutions since then. ABB will gain two seats on ECOtality’s board of directors with Monday’s deal, making a future acquisition a definite possibility.

Whether ABB will form other charging partnerships in markets outside North America wasn’t mentioned in Monday’s press release, but given the potential technical differences that may emerge in those markets, other geographies could likely be on the table (for more on that subject, see my GigaOM Pro article from last week, subscription required).

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Image courtesy of Robfruth via Creative Commons license.

The move is important because Verizon’s smart home pilot — and commercial product that will come out later in 2011 — is one of the first moves from a major U.S. telco to offer energy management services, and could kick off the nascent energy management industry. To date, despite a lot of attempts by startups in the market, the home energy management space hasn’t yet taken off.

Z-Wave is a proprietary wireless technology that uses chips basically made by one vendor: Sigma Designs, which acquired Z-Wave chipmaker Zensys in 2008. The Z-Wave Alliance does have prominent members, including ADT, Black & Decker, Danfoss, Leviton and Ingersoll Rand, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have proprietary roots. In contrast the wireless standard ZigBee has tens of millions of chips and modules being made by multiple vendors for dozens of device partners.

But to date ZigBee has been a technology embraced by the power industry and utilities, instead of consumer electronics makers. Z-Wave has the lead in overall home automation products on the market, with about 250, compared to ZigBee’s 100 certified devices (these numbers are from December).

The smart home product from Verizon will include a connected thermostat, smart plugs, appliance modules, windows and door sensors, and a service gateway, all enabled by Z-Wave. The connected camera, which can be used for security applications, will use WiFi. Using this connected gear, consumers will be able to monitor and manage both their home energy consumption, and security services.

Verizon is working with 4Home, the home automation company that was recently acquired by Motorola, for its smart home trail. 4Home has long been a member of the Z-Wave alliance.

Verizon’s principle architect for its Home Monitoring and Control services, John Valdez, and Jack Eastman, Verizon product manager, told me in an interview last week that Verizon is initially focused on Z-Wave for its smart energy home service because the wireless technology is “more readily available,” than working with the utility-embraced home wireless standard ZigBee.

There are more consumer-focused and commercially available products based around Z-Wave, said the Verizon execs. But that doesn’t mean that Verizon won’t be including other wireless technologies including ZigBee in the future: “We are more than happy to integrate anything into it.”

The progress of Z-Wave in the smart energy home, is apparent in other deals, too, which we pointed out in this article for GigaOM Pro, subscription required. For example, Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo said in October it planned a Z-Wave-based home energy management offering, featuring “smart tap” power sensing devices and home routers from Sumitomo.

Smart meter makers — which have turned to ZigBee in droves — also aren’t exactly rushing to open systems to connect with home device makers, points out the Verizon execs. In fact in Verizon’s energy product it includes something it calls a “smart meter,” but not one of the ZigBee-based standard ones. Instead the Verizon energy product includes a circuit clamp, which records energy usage and connects to an interface via Z-Wave.

The Verizon execs said that they will be working closely with Sigma and the Z-Wave Alliance to push for a more open approach.

• Z-Wave: Gaining Ground on ZigBee for Home Energy Networking?
• Is the Opt-Out Model the Future of Home Energy Management
• The Developer’s Guide to Home Energy Management Apps

Image courtesy of Ytechblogs via Creative Commons license.

GE and the investors are calling for submissions from entrepreneurs building “eco-home” technology, starting on Jan. 18, and running until March 1, 2011. GE and the investors will be investing in some of these companies, will be partnering with others, and will also be allocating small awards ($100,000) to companies that stand out.

GE says so far, $55 million of the $200 million fund has been committed, and out of 4,000 ideas already submitted, there have been more than 1,100 in the category of home energy.

GE has a keen interest in the home energy market. At CES, GE is showing off its new Home Energy Management business, including its Nucleus home energy device, as well as its Brillion line of smart appliances and smart thermostats. All these are meant to connect within the home to GE’s smart meters, then as a gateway to the smart grid.

Home energy — and the smart home in general — has taken center stage at CES. Verizon has been showing off its first smart home energy pilot that it will roll out in New Jersey this month, and will launch commercially in the second half of this year. Verizon will be using technology from 4Home, which telco gear provider Motorola acquired last month.

Back in November, GE named 12 winners and five “innovation award winners” from its current challenge submissions. The 12 winners, which split most of the $55 million, included some well-known names like energy billing company OPower, cellular home energy startup Consert, data center efficiency firm SynapSense, tinting window maker Soladigm, commercial building energy company Scientific Conservation, and energy storage company SustainX. There were also some companies I hadn’t heard of before, like solar hot water company ClimateWell, EV charging data management company Columbia Engineering, powerline monitoring company FMC-Tech, green data center company Joule-X, distribution automation software company Sentient Energy, and grid security company Secure RF.

The five innovation award winners, which each received $100,000, included: Winflex, maker of fabric windmill rotors; IceCode, which makes technology to pulse heat through metal wind turbine blades to de-ice them; GridON, which makes a power grid fault current limiter; ElectricRoute, maker of a low-latency communications system for grid substations; and Capstone Metering, which uses the water pressure inside water meters to power monitoring and communications hardware.

All in all, the list is pretty strong and represents one of the larger smart grid investments out there. Now it’s time to submit home energy ideas folks!

To read more on the smart grid check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

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