C3 is a four-year-old startup that develops data grid analytics tools for utilities like PG&E, and is the software behind GE’s Grid IQ Insight product. The company was founded and is led by Siebel System’s Tom Siebel, and had been largely in stealth mode until earlier this year when it talked a bit about its smart grid plans at the DistribuTECH event in February. Previously C3 had focused more on collecting data about corporations’ carbon emissions and energy, but has seemed to veer away from that in recent years.

C3′s current big data software platform collects disparate data about buildings, energy generation and energy consumption from a variety of places like publicly-available data scraped from the web, utilities’ energy use info from its customers, and weather data from weather information companies. For PG&E, C3 aggregated at least 8 terabytes of data, which C3 normalized and loaded at 500 million records an hour. The data product helped PG&E do a year’s worth of energy audits on the commercial and industrial buildings in its footprint, said Siebel at DistribuTECH.

C3 plans to launch another five projects like this in 2013 and another five in 2014, and its other customers include Entergy, Northeast Utilities, Constellation Energy, NYSEG, Integrys Energy Group, Southern California Edison, ComEd, Rochester Gas & Electric, and DTE Energy.

Silver Lake Kraftwerk is private equity firm Silver Lake Kraftwerk’s clean energy growth fund, and it has a thesis to invest in later stage growing clean energy, waste and other types of cleantech companies. The fund, which also is looking to invest aggressively internationally, has raised at least $350 million, though I’ve heard the fund is closer to having raised $600 million at this point. Silver Lake Kraftwerk has invested in a later round in SolarCity (before it went public) and German recycled plastics processing and manufacturing company Friedola Tech.

Zoi spoke at our Green:Net event back in 2011. She also joined the Board of Makani Power, the high altitude wind power startup in Alameda, Calif.

This post was updated at 10:45AM PST on April 4th 2013, to change that C3′s data for PG&E was loaded at 500 million records an hour, instead of 5 million records an hour.

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Siebel, now CEO of the four-year-old startup, said that in September 2012, C3 launched a data grid analytics project for PG&E, which crunched a whole lot of data about commercial and industrial buildings (the kind owned and leased in California by the likes of Cisco, Kaiser Permanente, Safeway and Best Buy). C3′s platform collected disparate data about a half a million buildings, from places like publicly-available data found via Google, to energy consumption data from utilities, to weather data from weather information companies.

The entire project required 28 billion rows of data (at least 8 terabytes) that C3 aggregated, normalized and loaded at 500 million records an hour said Siebel, adding, “this is really hard stuff.” PG&E used this data analytics tool to work with building owners to perform energy efficiency audits in real time for all of the commercial and industrial buildings in its footprint. It was a major success, said Siebel, and in the first few weeks of January of this year PG&E exceeded their energy auditing goal for the entire year.

C3 was also quietly involved in a more high profile big data energy project with GE, which I profiled last week when it launched at Distributech, although at the time I didn’t know C3 was involved. Siebel described the project with GE as “a joint development deal” at grid-scale, trying to solve “petabyte type of problems.” As I reported last week, GE’s Grid IQ Insight software can pull in disparate data from a variety of sources like grid sensors, utility databases and even social media sources on a per second interval basis, and utilities can use the software to peer into their grids, and combat blackouts, in real time.

GE tells me that their Grid IQ Insight product leverages the C3 platform stack as its underlying big data platform (SQL +Cassandra + Splunk + Tibco components). GE builds their own analytical apps on top of the C3 platform.

Siebel says C3 has three of these types of projects live with customers, that combine a big data layer, an analytics layer and a customer presentation layer. The company plans to launch another five projects in 2013 and another five in 2014. Other customers include Entergy, Northeast Utilities, Constellation Energy, NYSEG, Integrys Energy Group, Southern California Edison, ComEd, Rochester Gas & Electric, DTE Energy, as well as GE and McKinsey.

In addition to C3′s commercial and industrial platform it built for PG&E, the company also has developed a residential energy efficiency program, which launched last week, said Siebel. The service, which is in development with Detroit Edison and Entergy, is a loyalty program that gets customers to engage in energy efficiency behaviors in exchange for coupons and points at retailers like Amazon. I’m assuming that this platform has incorporated the technology from the startup Efficiency 2.0 that C3 acquired last Spring. Mailed marketing has long been considered the cutting edge in the utility sector, and “I don’t know if we even get mail at my house,” joked Siebel.

C3 has spent four years, and on the order of $100 million, building the software platform that it is now aggressively selling to utilities and energy vendors. At its core, the C3 platforms use Cassandra for database management system, and all of the applications store all of this data in the cloud, which is a relatively new phenomenon for many utilities to deal with. The company also has some big names as directors, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Senator and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.

Grid analytics is a sector that is growing 24 percent a year, said Siebel, and C3 intends to be the software layer that sits on top of the grid. He compared the opportunity to “the Internet in 1993.” Siebel, who sold Siebel Systems to Oracle in 2006 for close to $6 billion, is one of the few entrepreneurs in cleantech that would know what that looks like.

Lastly, Siebel said his latest startup endeavor isn’t about saving the world from climate change or reducing carbon emissions, despite the company’s three C’s moniker, and despite the fact that that’s important. Ultimately, he says, “It’s about making money.”

This story was updated with comment from GE at 7:25AM.

This story was updated at 10:45AM PST on April 4th 2013, to change that C3′s data for PG&E was loaded at 500 million records an hour, instead of 5 million records an hour.

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For the past few years I’ve been negative on home energy management. Sales were slow. And hundreds of companies were fighting for a piece of that tiny pie. (Yes, I said hundreds. Research firm Groom Energy has identified more than 300 companies in the energy management space.)

Today I’m going to reverse my stand and predict that the sector is about to turn the corner, starting now, accelerating in 2013 and becoming widely known in 2014. Sales are rising (albeit gradually). And at least four companies are starting to separate themselves from the pack. Opower and Aclara in the data presentment subsector. And Tendril and Silver Spring Networks in data presentment + device control.

In this article, I want to talk about Tendril and its prospects. As widely reported in the press, Tendril recently went through layoffs. Today it has 160 employees, with four offices in the U.S. and one in Australia.

Despite the layoffs, I think the company is positioned for a rebound. First, the sector is slowly ticking up. Pike Research says the category will grow at 38 percent per year to reach $2 billion by 2020. Groom Energy is even more optimistic. It says the energy management software category (which includes commercial and industrial as well) is already a $5.2 billion industry in North America alone and is growing at 40 percent per year.

Second, the company is positioning itself to be a leader in the next phase, which — as I’ll explain below — will be about automation.

Tendril’s beginnings

Tendril began by creating a platform to connect wireless sensors, with an emphasis on the ZigBee protocol. Once that had been accomplished, the company started to look for problems that its solution could solve – that is, to look for sectors that would soon have many wireless sensors on the network.

Tendril dabbled in building automation and parking automation and home health before stumbling upon the nascent smart metering market. The company reoriented itself to sell to utilities because “when we started, there were very few ZigBee-enabled devices except for smart meters,” explains Ivo Steklac, Chief Sales and Strategy Officer.

Tendril’s first order of business was to solve the connectivity piece – to learn to talk back and forth with all the meters and other devices. Once that was accomplished, it started to look for additional value it could provide from that connectivity. And from all the data it was collecting.

Tendril Products

That quest for added value led Tendril to purchase Grounded Power, a startup using behavioral science for customer engagement. It is that technology that forms the core of Tendril’s current differentiation. (But I predict it will NOT be the heart of the next phase, as we’ll discuss.)

Tendril’s current differentiator

When I asked Ivo Steklac how Tendril differs from the competition, he made this claim: “We are the only company that does both consumer engagement and consumer enablement.” Whether or not you agree that Tendril is unique in this regard, you should pay attention to the company’s dual goals. Eventually, every utility needs to achieve both.

The first piece is engagement – getting consumers to pay attention to and to sign up for utility programs. Utilities have several tools here, including paper reports, online portals and social media.

Tendril wants to see its utility clients move to an online presence as soon as possible “because that is where you can best accomplish the second piece – enablement,” says Steklac. Enablement means providing consumers tools that give them more control over their bills and their energy use. With the software provided by Tendril, for instance, utilities can give customers personalized energy-saving recommendations; or offer them new tools such as communicating thermostats; or sign them up to special programs. It is online that a utility can “recommend action and fulfill it at the same time,” he explains. “The software lets you have a dialogue with customers, not just deliver a speech.”

The power of variables

To make those customized recommendations, the Tendril software considers 600 to 700 energy variables, including but not limited to:

• Building envelope: age, size, number of levels, attic, basement, garage, aspect ratio, building orientation, age, internal mass, roof construction, roof reflectance, etc.
• HVAC: age, type, efficiency, zoning factor, cooling schedule, setback schedule, etc.
• Weather data:  temperature, humidity, wind speed, insolation etc.
• Pool/hot tub: size, heated, heating fuel, solar cover, etc.
• Lighting: types, quantity, hours of operation, home/work schedules, etc.
• Occupancy: number of occupants, ages, home/work schedules, etc.
• Kitchen: appliances, electric/gas, load, efficiency, appliance schedules
• Laundry: washer, dryer (electric/gas), loads, efficiency, water consumption, etc.
• Electronics: number and type (TVs, cable boxes, DVDs, audio, PC’s/laptops, tablets, cell phones, cable modems, gaming consoles, printers), schedules, etc.
• Water heater and use: age, fuel type, rated input (BTU/hr), water temp, delivery temp, energy factor efficiency, recovery efficiency, use hrs/gallons, etc.
• Solar electric: array tilt, azimuth, efficiency, temp coeff, inverter load curve, nominal power, etc.

The software can also use its behavioral model to make offers only to those customers most likely to sign up.

What comes after engagement and empowerment?

Tendril has been perfecting customer engagement and empowerment in concert with utility partners. (To learn more about Tendril’s utility partnerships, click the links below to review the slides and/or watch replays from two recent webinars.)

• Leveraging Behavioral Science for Persistent Customer Engagement featuring Kansas City Power & Light
• The Science of Customer Engagement featuring Duke Energy

The next step, Steklac tells me, will be to move toward automation, and I heartily agree. I’ve long argued that relying on consumers to change behavior is at best a stopgap. It will be far better and far easier to train devices to be smart about energy than to train every customer.

I’m talking here about automated demand response and automated energy efficiency. I’m talking about a future world of smart, connected appliances; of grid-connected HVAC systems; of grid-savvy electric vehicles; and of many other smart devices, all of them connected by an underlying control platform.

Tendril Insight

I think autoDR and autoEE are poised for growth because:

1. The autoDR spec is out
2. The SEP 2.0 profile is finally ready
3. Hardware prices are coming down
4. Utilities are realizing what a pain it is to rely on fickle consumers to change their behavior in order to meet your goals.

The upshot: Right now Tendril is battling with Opower to be the best at behavioral science. In the future, they’ll need to be the best at controlling devices. Certainly Aclara and Silver Spring see this future too. And I can only assume that Opower is working with Honeywell and other partners to bolster its device capabilities.

So Tendril wants to grow from its current behavioral emphasis to be the leader in the automation phase. And they have a reasonable shot at success, especially when you consider that this evolution actually takes them back to their roots as a control platform.

(What comes after automation? Optimization in near real time… but I will leave that to a future analysis.)

Challenges

I see at least eight challenges Tendril must overcome. (Most of them apply equally to Tendril’s rivals, by the way.)

1. Getting to scale. I believe 2013 will be the get-big-or-go-home year in home energy management. Or at least “get big enough to seem stable.” Utilities may do pilots with tiny startups. But when it comes to system-wide deployments, they want a partner who is sure to be around for the long haul. As we move out of the trial phase and into the deployment phase, utilities will want to know that companies are past the “valley of death” and close to cash-flow positive. I think the leaned-down Tendril is within striking distance.
2. Providing lots of energy management applications. Both utilities and consumers will want to know how many apps the company has in its “apps store.” Tendril is beginning to have a strong story in that regard, thanks to its long-term platform orientation and its Tendril application developer support program.
3. Overcoming consumer apathy. Only a small percentage of customers really care about managing their energy. For the rest, the effort is just not worth the $5-$10 per month in typical savings. Only when the industry finally gets to automated systems will utilities truly be able to tap into residential demand response. Which brings us to…
4. Automating demand response and energy efficiency. We are all coming to realize that relying on consumers to change their behavior is not a great long-term solution. Far better to automate as much as possible (while still allowing customers to set their preferred parameters, of course). Achieving that automation will be Tendril’s next big hill to climb – and the computational challenge will be even steeper than with its current behavioral approaches. Here companies like Tendril and Silver Spring may have an edge over companies focused primarily on behavior.
5. Overcoming regulatory hurdles. It’s not just that Tendril needs regulatory mandates and incentives to “persuade” utilities to adopt demand response and energy efficiency. It’s also that some PUCs are suspicious of targeted marketing. Tendril’s mantra is personalization, giving customers only what they are most likely to want. Some PUCs believe that anything offered to one customer set must be offered to all customers, at the same time and on the same terms.
6. Expanding past residential. Some utilities may prefer to deal with one partner for all customer programs, whether residential, commercial or industrial. Can Tendril grow beyond its residential roots? And should it? Or should it remain focused on consumers? The real action these days is in small- to mid-sized commercial. What’s more, many companies currently focused on commercial & industrial have residential in their sights next.
7. Competition from adjacent sectors. Yes, I believe the home energy management space will see some failures and some consolidation, reducing the confusion. On the other hand, dozens of companies from adjacent sectors are crowding into the residential space. All this noise makes it hard to get noticed no matter how good your offering.
   For example, here is a partial list of overlapping sectors. I’ve included an example for each, but in reality each category has many competitors: big box retailers (Lowe’s), cable companies (Comcast), home security companies (ADT), controls vendors (Schneider), demand response providers (Comverge), energy efficiency specialists (C3), metering companies (Aclara), smart device makers (Nest), unified operations centers (Calico Energy), utilities on their own (ConEd).
8. Venture capital overhang. Tendril has obtained roughly $90 million in venture funding and convertible debt. Some of it comes from industry sources such as Siemens Venture Capital and GE who can be presumed to have a long-term view. But some of it comes from independent VCs who may have a shorter horizon. VCs typically want their money back — plus a fat return — in a relatively short time frame. And some of those VCs can get pushy if a successful exit fails to materialize on schedule. (Just ask GridPoint.) If they lose faith, they may press Tendril to accept a less-than-ideal buyout offer from a larger firm, or otherwise compromise Tendril’s options.

If you want evidence of Tendril’s progress, click to view a recent Tendril press release that documents some of the company’s recent milestones. And feel free to use the Comment form below to agree, disagree or expand on my commentary.

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From the SGN Research Marketplace…

Building the Technology Framework for Home Energy Management: This IDC

Energy Insights report provides analysis of the home energy management (HEM) technology stack based on our interviews with utility decision makers including chief information officers (CIOs) and solution providers. Many utilities are somewhere on the continuum of piloting programs such as demand response, load control, energy efficiency, and customer education; all of them could involve home energy management. Get details here.

Jesse Berst is the founder and chief analyst of Smart Grid News.com, the industry’s oldest and largest smart grid site. A frequent keynoter at industry events in the U.S. and abroad, he also serves on advisory committees for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Institute for Electric Efficiency. He often provides strategic consulting to large corporations and venture-backed startups. He is a member of the advisory boards of GridGlo and Calico Energy Services.

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9to5Mac cites “trusted sources” who say that iOS 6, the next version of the software to power the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, will ditch Google Maps as the source for the Maps app in favor of an Apple-built solution: a maps app whose technology is derived from several companies Apple has acquired over the past few years. It too will be called Maps:

The application design is said to be fairly similar to the current Google Maps program on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, but it is described as a much cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience.

According to the report, the app icon itself is also getting a slightly new look. It will still be a map view of Apple headquarters in Cupertino, but will have “a new color scheme.”

One of the features that Apple plans to highlight is its own version of Google’s Street View, a 3D-mapping mode. Here’s how it’s described:

The 3D mode does not come enabled by default, but users simply need to click a 3D button that is conveniently and visibly stored in the app. Perhaps under the fold like the current traffic, pin, and map view buttons. This 3D mode is said to essentially be technology straight from C3 Technologies: beautiful, realisitic graphics based on de-classified missile target algorithms.

Here’s why this report isn’t at all implausible:

• Apple did quietly buy up a bunch of mapping technology companies several years ago: PlaceBase in July 2009, Poly 9 in 2010 and C3 late last year. It’s reasonable to think that this would follow a similar pattern to what Apple did with Siri: buy an outside company for its technology and a few years down the line incorporate it into iOS.
• Apple always prefers not to be dependent on third-party technologies. It is at a place where it designs its own software and hardware, even down to the chips and battery and almost all of the key apps that come with iOS devices — with the exception of the Maps app and YouTube. In other words, moving from a third-party solution to an in-house one eventually would be very much in line with Apple’s philosophy and history.
• In particular, Apple probably would like to have as little to do with Google as possible. This is the same company that Steve Jobs promised to go “thermonuclear” on and accusing it of “grand theft” in designing Android. It makes sense not to incorporate product from one of your chief rivals in mobile into your most important product.

The report also claims that iOS 6 will be introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference scheduled for the second week of June. Be sure to head to 9to5Mac for videos and photos of what the 3D mapping product could look like.

Update: AllThingsD says it’s independently confirmed this news and hears that the new Maps app will “blow your head off.”

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To me this move connotes growing consolidation in the energy software and management industry. Tendril CEO Adrian Tuck told me back in January that he thought 2012 would be the year that the energy management players would have to “go big or go home.” Tendril earlier this year bought the assets of Recurve, which sold software to help energy auditors determine the most cost-efficient energy efficiency measures for their customers, and before that acquired Grounded Power for its behavioral analytics.

My other immediate thought on this deal: watch out Opower. Opower is a direct competitor with Efficiency 2.0, and now Efficiency 2.0′s residential and small business focused software have the backing of the well-funded C3.

C3 sells a variety of software-as-a-service products to help companies and organizations measure, mitigate and monetize carbon, energy and resources. C3 has a handful of announced customers including Dow Chemical, utilities PG&E and Constellation Energy and Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company Masdar. Both SAP and Hara compete in this space as well.

While C3 has focused on helping companies and organizations manage energy consumption with software, Efficiency 2.0 has aimed at developing algorithms around energy efficiency recommendations for utility customers. Think about how Netflix and Amazon use your demographic and purchase information to recommend books and movies that you’ll actually like and possibly buy — Efficiency 2.0 developed software and websites that in work in similar ways to get home owners to reduce their energy consumption.

This move by C3, is the company’s way to tackle utility customers. Indeed in C3′s announcement of the deal on Tuesday, it quoted Saul Zambrano, Sr. Director, Products Group, Customer Energy Solutions, at PG&E, as saying that the combo product would create “a single source” for energy efficiency software for residential, small business, corporate and industrial customers.

C3 is well funded. Last year Siebel explained the way he raised money for the company as: “After a year of meetings, we sent an email on a Friday and raised $200 million by Sunday.”

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Energy Points uses public and private data to create resource maps that calculate all of the relevant sustainability metrics for a region or industry vertical. Then when Energy Points signs up a customer, the customer gives Energy Points its own resource data, and the Energy Points software can then tell the customer what sustainability decisions will be the best ones to make.

The business intelligence is delivered in an MPG form to the customer, which Energy Points calls “the first universal metric for measuring sustainability.” The Energy Points software translates all the different sustainability metrics into this MPG equivalent.

The value proposition behind Energy Points is that many companies have a set aside budget to spend on making their company more sustainable, but they don’t know what decisions to make, said Zik in an interview. Energy Points is targeting Fortune 500 companies, government organizations and environmental service providers.

Energy Points is a really young company, founded half a year ago, and the tech has been under development for about two years. Zik said the company has pilot customers, but he wouldn’t disclose any names of customers. And the startup is still building out its software-as-a-service platform so that the companies can input their data and get automatic feedback.

In addition, the corporate sustainability space has gotten increasingly crowded over the past few years. Startups like Hara and C3 have raised tens of millions of dollars and have signed up large corporate customers like Coca-Cola and utilities like PG&E. Other companies, like Opower, work with utilities on delivering energy efficiency reports and tools.

Energy Points recently closed its own funding: $3 million led by Plan B Ventures.

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But now Abraham is solidly in the private sector, as the CEO and Chairman of The Abraham Group, which advises energy-related companies on policy matters and even fund raising. He also sits on the boards of lithium ion battery company International Battery, and carbon software company C3, and is the non-executive Chairman of nuclear power company Areva. Here’s 10 questions with Abraham on his thoughts on the future of energy innovation, nuclear power in the U.S., the energy moves of the current administration:

1). Why did you choose to join International Battery’s board, as opposed to all of the other lithium ion battery makers out there?

A). Well, I have a relationship with the Chairman of the Board, which dates back quite a long time, so I have some confidence in him and the teams that he builds. I also have familiarity with their investors. I know them to be people who are willing to make the type of commitments you need for these type of startups. So those were two attractive propositions from my point of view.

2). International Battery is selling batteries for electric cars, among other applications. Are you bullish on electric cars?

A). They are certainly part of the future. I always tell people to never lose sight of the fact that if you’re going to move in this direction, you’re going to need a lot of electricity and therefore even if you reduce the consumption of petroleum products, you’ll be increasing the consumption of electricity. That’s not a bad thing per se as long as people are prepared to meet the challenge.

3). You’ve joined the board of other energy tech startups like carbon software company C3. How big of a role do you think energy technology startups will play when it comes to solving our energy problems?

A). It’s an exciting area and with any period of development like this, you’re going to have some successes and I’m trying to identify companies I thought have great models and great ideas. We saw this happen for information technology and we’re going to see it in a decade ahead with cleantech. The areas I’ve looked at are ones that I think are particularly promising. I am a strong believer in energy efficiency, and I’m a conservative, so conservation is an important thing to me.

I’m excited to see this all going on. When I was energy secretary, this was just getting started, and it wasn’t at the level that we see today. On one hand I regret that we didn’t have all this activity in the level that it is today. On the hand, I’m kind of excited to take a more direct role in the private sector.

4). When you look at the moves by Steven Chu and the DOE, do you think the DOE and the Energy Secretary’s role has changed?

A). Well, Steven Chu was my appointee to head the Berkeley Lab when I was secretary and he is a very talented and intelligent individual. And I wish him all the best in this job. I’m envious of some of the budget increases that he’s been able to enjoy. It would have been nice to have some of those research dollars when I was there. But each era had its own priorities and I’m sure he’ll do his best to take advantage of the focus on clean energy and new energy technologies.

5). So you think he’s doing a good job?

A). I certainly agree with a lot of the things that they are doing. I don’t agree with every policy position, and there are areas where I might have taken it in a different direction, but the focus on cleantech initiatives, and some of the loan guarantee programs they have up and running, I applaud them for their efforts to do those things and I think it will have a very positive impact.

6). What about outside of cleantech, and specifically pulling back on the subsidies for oil and gas. Is your thinking along the same lines as the current administration?

A). I think that’s a political tactic to try to shift some of the focus from the high gasoline prices. This happens every time gas prices spike, politicians run for cover and they point fingers to find scape goats. It’s political theater and should be understood as such.

If you burden oil companies with billions of dollars of additional tax there are a few things that are going to happen: 1). The gas costs are going to be passed along to people that are already paying too much for gas, 2). Some will result in cut backs of operations of oil companies, which means that less oil development and lost jobs; 3).Some of it will be felt on the lines of the oil companies, and we always act like that will come out of the hide of corporate leaders, but the truth is the shareholders in oil companies are pension funds and others whose members are average Americans.

I don’t think it will pass. The President and people who are pushing for it are just getting nervous because of the high price of gasoline. And rather than say the truth, which is that there is not a whole lot that governments can do in the short run, they want to claim they are doing something. And that’s why they are having the hearings and so on. But the truth is that it is political theater.

7). In terms of the Obama administration, what would you like to see him do for energy policy for the remainder of the term or next term? What are the most important things?

A). I stick to my proposal for how we should proceed with energy development. I think we’re going to need a lot of it. I would hope that this administration would do a little more education in its approach to our energy challenges. Instead of acting like overnight we could transition to a green energy world, acknowledge that it will take decades to make significant changes. And we still need oil, gas and nuclear and so on going forward.

Second, I would urge them to not to take actions which make it very difficult and expensive to access the shale gas that the U.S. now enjoys. The amount of reserves we have right now is formidable and by tapping into them we’ll be able to avoid having to import natural gas. We have so much that the price will be low and it will help consumers and it will help industries that need it as a feedstock. That is all good for the U.S. It will decrease, rather than increase, our dependency on foreign energy. And if we are ever going to get electric cars going, we need more power generation and natural gas will be part of the solution.

8). As the non-exective chairman of Areva, what are your thought on nuclear energy industry in the U.S.?

A). I think everybody’s going to take a deep breath before they address power plants in the U.S. But as far as the rest of the world, as far as I can tell, projects are moving forward. What we outta understand is that we need to learn from this. We can’t say we’re going to bury our head in the sand. We have to say OK, we’ve learned some additional things that need to be addressed for nuclear plants.

The other thing we need to understand is that there is a whole generation of safer nuclear power plants, that we could be building right now. All this has demonstrated the greater need for the next generation of nuclear power plants, and a safe path way for nuclear wate for American power plants. The answer should be let’s build safer nuclear plants and do it soon.

9). When you look back at your time as Secretary, was there an indication that natural gas would become such an important part of the U.S. energy equation?

A). First of all, it was not foreseen even when I left office in 2005. We were still concerned that we were probably going to have to import natural gas. Happily things have changed, and I do believe it affects the landscape because if we don’t derail it – and now there are people who want to derail it – it means lower cost of natural gas, which helps consumers use it for home heating etc, and it helps the cost of power, which is particularly important if we go toward electric vehicles. And it effects our manufacturing sector because chemical plants and ammonia plants can be built in the US. When the price of gas was so much higher they were moving offshore. All of that is good for our economy.

10). Do you as part of the Abraham Group make investments, and have you thought about doing so?

A). We’re not an investment firm, but we have a number of clients in this space. We have helped them develop strategies for seeking private investment. It would be great to be more involved with that. Our firm has thought about it, but we haven’t come up with the right strategy to get into that work. But we’ve given consideration to that. It’s very exciting and I would love to have more of a role.

Image courtesy of The Abraham Group.

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That’s always been my issue with C3 (and was also the subject of an audience question at the event) — how is it going to be different from the carbon software firms already out there? But Siebel, who is forever famous for selling Siebel Systems to Oracle for billions of dollars, actually for the first time offered some real customer examples and explanations for what he wants to do with C3 at the conference.

The exercise of building C3 began back in 2008, said Siebel, when we got around 50 executives together to think about information technology and energy (also the subject of our Green:Net event on April 21 in San Francisco). Out of that process, today C3 — which offers a family of enterprise applications to measure, mitigate and monetize carbon — is a group of 130 software professionals, with a growing partner ecosystem, said Siebel. “We are bringing to market a $150 million software engineering effort that will take a decade to fulfill,” and will accurately, in real-time measuring the energy dynamics of an organization, said Siebel.

Some of the customers that Siebel named for the first time included Dow Chemical, which Siebel said C3 has a deal to operate in 2,000 of Dow’s facilities around the globe. We are helping them save around $1 billion, said Siebel, which is “a substantial value proposition.” Pella Windows is another company in the industrial space that C3 is working with.

Two power customers are PG&E and Constellation Energy, said Siebel. We’re working with PG&E to bring the software to 3,100 of their customers, and with Constellation Energy, we’re talking to 30,000 of their customers in the U.S., said Siebel. Siebel said back in January that it had “10 giant corporate clients,” at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E event, but this is the first I’ve heard of who they are.

Siebel also addressed the architecture of the product, which could actually be a solid differentiator for how C3 could scale big, fast. Siebel said C3 uses a software as a service (SAAS) design, available virtually in the cloud, and that uses a licensing subscription model. Pretty standard fare for big enterprise software plays, but given he’s built a software empire before, I figure he’s designed it to be able to scale for a distributed massive company like Dow. Competitors SAP and Hara are also using SAAS and cloud tools for their carbon software offerings.

On the pricing of the product, Siebel would only cryptically say: It “costs more than a spread and less then a nuclear reactor,” but also added that it’s a “value based pricing model.”

And finally we come to possibly C3′s biggest differentiator: Its funding and board members. Siebel explained the way he raised money for the company as: “After a year of meetings, we sent an email on a Friday and raised $200 million by Sunday. And that’s how we got financed.”

According to filings C3 has been looking to raise close to $50 million in funding in recent months, and closed $30 million last year. C3 counts former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Senator and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham as directors.

At the end of the day the thing that’s driving C3′s buzz the most is Siebel himself. In the talk at the Fortune Brainstorm Green event, Siebel said that Siebel Systems was the fastest growing software company in history, and said he believes that “C3 is growing at a much more rapid rate than Siebel Systems grew. The demand for this is large.”

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The resource management industry is filled with companies selling these tools. Here’s a Top 10 carbon management list from earlier this year and another 22 companies you should know about. HP has the advantage of selling consulting and software services to its long list of current customers.

Hara has clearly been winning over its own customers since it launched in mid-2009, with backing from Kleiner Perkins, Nth Power, and JAFCO Ventures. Groom Energy listed Hara in its Top 10 carbon software companies list (one of the only startups on the list) and Hara has won over deals like utility Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Authority (ADWEA) and News Corp.

C3, on the other hand, is a company with well-known advisors and a founder, but which doesn’t talk much (or at all) about its customers or industry progress. Founded by Thomas Siebel — the guy who sold Siebel Systems to Oracle for billions of dollars — C3 counts former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former Senator and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham as directors.

C3 has been looking to raise close to $50 million in funding in recent months, and at the ARPA-E summit Siebel said publicly that C3 had 10 corporate clients.

According to Groom Energy, the resource software market is maturing and has seen fewer acquisitions and venture fundings in recent months. That’s probably a good thing, as the last thing the market needs is more new carbon software firms emerging. A lot of these companies appeared, or beefed up, in 2009, anticipating U.S. federal carbon legislation which never came (and doesn’t look likely to come in 2011). But the weak economy has led to companies looking to cut energy for economic reasons.

Despite the lack of federal carbon legislation, the market for energy and carbon software grew 400 percent throughout 2010 and is predicted to grow 300 percent in 2011, says Groom Energy.

Image courtesy of GigaOM events, taken at the carbon software panel at GreenNet 2010. GreenNet 2011 will be held on April 21, 2011 in San Francisco.

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