The Arizona-based thin film solar giant announced the pending acquisition on Tuesday during its analyst day — its first since 2009 — in which it laid out a persuasive technology and business development plan for the next five years. Investors liked what they heard and pushed the company’s stock up by nearly 50 percent during trading.

Courtesy of Southern California Edison

The announcement also came after the company’s top executives spent the entire day taking shots at silicon solar technology, which they said hasn’t been able to make a big leap in its sunlight-to-electricity conversion rate for years and is approaching the theoretical limit of its efficiency. First Solar’s bread and butter cadmium telluride, on the other hand, has a higher theoretical efficiency limit, and First Solar has shifted its businesses focus from building large factories to make panels with cadmium-telluride cells to developing more efficient panels, said CEO Jim Hughes during the event.

Who is TetraSun?

So why TetraSun? Apparently Silicon Valley-based TetraSun has some disruptive silicon cell designs that set it apart from the rest of the silicon solar companies. Its designs require fewer manufacturing steps to produce conventional silicon cells, and eliminates the need for silver and transparent conductive oxide. Silver is used to transport electricity produced by the cells, while the oxide is a coating that protects the cells and helps the semiconductor material (such as silicon or cadmium telluride) to grab the light more effectively to produce electricity.

First Solar claims that TetraSun’s cells also can perform better in hot climates than conventional silicon cells. That feature will make solar panels with TetraSun’s cells more desirable in places like the Middle East and India, two markets with a lot of potentials for growth. First Solar says it plans to start making TetraSun’s cells in the second half of 2014.

First Solar believes TetraSun’s technology could produce cells at an over 21 percent efficiency at a cost that is comparable to the expense of making conventional — yet less efficient– silicon solar cells. Most silicon cells today have efficiencies in the mid-teens. SunPower stands out in its ability to make silicon cells at nearly 23 percent, but the company uses a more expensive type of silicon and has its own special cell designs to achieve that high efficiency. First Solar didn’t specify what type of silicon TetraSun has used.

TetraSun has been quiet about its technology development, and its website is just a landing page. Its name did show up as a recipient of a U.S. Department of Energy grant, announced back in January 2010.

First Solar is buying TetraSun from JX Nippon Oil & Energy Corp. and other investors, and it expects to complete the acquisition in the second quarter of 2013. It’s not disclosing the price for the acquisition.

First Solar also talking to JX Nippon about selling solar panels with TetraSun’s cells in Japan, which has become a hot market since the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March 2011 prompted the government to offer generous subsidies for renewable energy generation.

An efficiency play

First Solar previously used its manufacturing scale and efficient production process to roll out solar panels more quickly than its competitors. That enabled First Solar to sell its panels at a much lower price even though the panels weren’t as efficient. But the plummeting prices for silicon, which is used in the majority of the solar panels made today, has eroded that pricing advantage for First Solar and prompted the company to focus on improving its solar panels’ efficiency. More efficient solar panels could fetch higher prices because they allow developers to build a same-size power plant with less land.

But First Solar apparently doesn’t want to rely on just one semiconductor material for its solar panels. It once worked on developing solar panels with copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), but it scrapped that program over a year ago. Supposedly the decision to ditch that effort came partly because First Solar was posting losses and looking for ways to cut costs. The company’s chief technology officer, Raffi Garabedian, told analysts on Tuesday that CIGS technology has taken the most private and public funding, yet it still isn’t likely be able to deliver the big efficiency improvements that cadmium telluride can over time.

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Those problems included:

1. Handing out funds for a couple projects for estimated costs instead of actual costs of projects, which resulted in over payments.
2. Funding a project that also received a grant from another DOE program, the ARPA-E program, for the exact same project.
3. Funding a project that had not handed in proper documents, and had not begun making the energy storage units that it claimed for the award.

The audit looked at just 11 projects, with a total of $279 million in awards, out of the $700 million smart grid demonstration program. Out of that section alone they found $12.3 million in questioned costs, and they have now recovered $6.6 million of those misspent costs, and plan to recover another $5 million. It’s probably safe to assume there’s similar levels of mismanagement throughout the entire $4.5 billion.

The report says:

The Department had not always managed the Program effectively and efficiently. . . .In the absence of significant improvements, the Program is at risk of not meeting its objectives and has an increased risk of fraud, waste and abuse.

As a result the report recommends that the program:

• Ensure adequate review of payments made to recipients
• Provide training to recipients on proper submission of reimbursement packages
• Ensure that recipients contribute their required cost-share from allowable sources
• Ensure the elimination of any potential overlapping funding among awards authorized by various Department programs
• Contracting officers should resolve the questioned amounts in our report.

The stimulus funds delivered an unprecedented, and game-changing amount of federal support for the next generation of power grid technology. It’s natural that with such a large amount of money allocated that mismanagement would happen.

One of the things not addressed in the report is how effective — or not — this type of stimulus program for smart grid projects actually was. Many in the industry back in 2010 complained that the funds actually had a sort of chilling effect on the sector, because the funds took awhile to actually get delivered, which meant utilities waited on these projects and didn’t put money into other new ones.

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The announcement is interesting for at least two reasons. About a year ago Google announced that it would be shutting down its clean power research projects through Google.org, called RE<C. I didn’t think it was all that big of a deal at the time, given Google has invested close to a billion dollars into clean power projects, but the move was widely seen as Google cutting some philanthropic research that was outside of its basic territory.

But with Majumdar joining Google.org, clearly Google will be launching some new projects, or investing some new resources, into energy innovation and research. That’s exciting. Despite the fact that Google is not an energy company, it has been one of the bright spots in the private sector by funding new energy technologies through investment in startups, through brainstorming ways to buy clean power to run its data centers, and by being a test case for new energy technologies like Bloom Energy’s fuel cells.

Majumdar oversaw the DOE’s ARPA-E program, which puts small grants — from hundreds of thousands to several million dollars — into early stage, “moonshot” research that could deliver a breakthrough, but is too early for private investment. The ARPA-E program has been one of the most successful and least controversial projects under the DOE and has delivered dozens of projects that have found follow-on private financing.

It’s also worth noting that Majumdar will now be joining the private sector, so will be able to use Google’s balance sheet to fund energy innovation. ARPA-E’s budget ever year is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Majumdar hails from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and the University of California at Berkeley.

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Today Wessells is the CEO and co-founder of a half-year-old startup called Alveo Energy, which is looking to develop and commercialize a battery made out of water, Prussian blue dye — which is used to color things like blue jeans, crayons and paint — iron and copper. The battery is meant to be ultra low cost and long lasting, and if successful, could help deliver breakthrough energy storage technology for the power grid.

Start of the journey

For now, the company is just getting started. Wessells co-founder is Stanford Professor Robert Huggins, and the small team works out of office space in Palo Alto, Calif. They plan to round out the team to just four people over the next couple of months, and perhaps double that over the next three years. So, yeah, they plan to stay lean.

Alveo Energy is one of just a few early stage battery startups that’s emerged from the Valley in 2012. I came across the company last week because they managed to snag a $4 million grant from the Department of Energy’s high risk early stage program called ARPA-E. They won one of the largest grants out of the 66 projects that were funded.

Wessells, a first time CEO, called the grant “a validation of their technology,” and an incredibly important milestone for them. The company will probably bring on another investor to round out the seed round in the coming months, but the ARPA-E grant will make up most of the company’s planned seed round.

The funding environment on Sand Hill Road has been really challenged this year for cleantech companies, said Wessells. Investors that might have done a promising battery deal out of Stanford two years ago, today are being dissuaded by their limited partners to fund early stage cleantech firms. They see the risk as just too high.

And perhaps VCs are smart to be more risk averse this time around. Alveo Energy is still in the protoype and R&D phases. They’ve created version one of their prototype, and they published data on that technology about a month ago. Version two of the battery is what they’re working on now and hoping to scale up in size and performance. Currently generation two can provide battery power without degradation (batteries degrade over time) for between one and two calender years — the team hopes that the eventual commercialized battery will provide closer to five to ten years of battery life.

Power grid applications

Unlike some lithium ion batteries that are being used in the next-generation of electric cars, Alveo Energy’s batteries aren’t meant to provide intense bursts of power to move large objects. They have a lower voltage and deliver a smaller charge than typical lithium ion batteries — about one tenth the energy, one third the voltage, and one third the charge, said Wessells.

That’s because only one sixth of the ions in the Alveo batteries’ structure are electrochemically active. Alveo’s battery is made by taking Prussian blue dye and adding in some iron and copper to optimize a battery structure that can use a water-based electrolyte — the optimal structure just chemically works out that way.

Wessells says Huggins first raised the idea of using Prussian blue dye, which is electrochromic, back around the Christmas of 2009 — before that Wessells was working on trying to use lithium. The next two years were spent on devising the structure of Prussian blue dye, iron and copper. Alveo itself is a word that is related to the Latin for something like channels or honeycomb.

The structure also meant that Alveo’s batteries are relatively large and meant, mostly, to be stationary. They’ll be about three to four times bigger than a standard car battery, said Wessells, and will eventually be developed into a 1 kilowatt, 50 kilogram, prototype.

The potential low cost of such a battery is the real breakthrough for Alveo, and the reason why they’re willing to concede on voltage and charge. Wessells says that they’ll be able to make the battery for below $100 per kilowatt hour. Lead acid batteries, which are far cheaper than lithium ion batteries, are being made for around $150 to $200 per kilowatt hour. Lithium ion batteries are far, far more expensive.

Holy grail for clean power

Wessells says that such a low cost battery could be used for a variety of applications for the power grid, including providing storage for variable clean energy like solar and wind. Big battery farms could be built right onto solar and wind farms, to bank power during the night, and when the wind dies down.

A growing amount of companies, large and small, are working on this clean power problem, using both chemistry and software as a solution. One of the more well known startups is Ambri (formerly Liquid Metal Battery), which is also looking to use dirt cheap materials to make power grid batteries, and which is backed by Khosla Ventures and Bill Gates. Other startups like GELI, are looking to create a battery operating system that can better utilize batteries for the power grid.

Alveo Energy has a long road ahead of it. Even though it’s got an ambitious road map, don’t expect a commercialized version for at least three years from now, if not longer. And at that point Alveo also has a lot of options for how it can make its batteries at scale. It can raise money to just build out a factory, which is in the model of a company like A123 Systems — though, A123 Systems went bankrupt this year and is a cautionary tale. Alveo could also license, or straight out sell, its technology to one of the world’s massive battery makers. That would be a safer, less risky, way to go.

Eventually one of these startups or battery conglomerates — whether its backed by venture capitalists or not — will deliver a breakthrough in battery technology that cracks that fundamental problem with clean power. The future of making clean power low cost and mainstream, depends on it.

Image courtesy of Jurvetson, stevendamron, First Solar.

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California lawmakers passed a bill in late 2010 that fell short of requiring utilities to invest in energy storage but did  give the California Public Utilities Commission the task of looking into whether a mandate is a good idea and what that mandate should be. The commission on Thursday approved a proposal that identified 20 ways that electricity storage could benefit the grid and consumers. That decision then kicked off a new round of discussion that could eventually lead to an energy storage mandate and turn California into a prime market for many types of battery and other storage technologies.

Similar to the existing state mandate that requires investor-owned utilities to buy or produce more and more renewable energy over time, an energy storage mandate could very well require the same utilities to put money into technologies that could store electricity for short and long-term use. For example, utilities could build their own energy storage systems or buy services from owners of energy storage farms. Ultimately, the costs of investing and using energy storage will be passed on to consumers.

The idea is to use energy storage to complement the growing amount of solar and wind electricity that is flowing into the grid. Solar and wind energy production can be intermittent because it depends heavily on weather conditions. That intermittency worries utilities and grid operators because an electric grid runs smoothly only when there is a balance of supply and demand — it’s something that is easily achieved with fossil fuel power plants because they can produce electricity around the clock. The grid now is not well equipped to handle big surges or quick declines of solar and wind energy.

Electricity from an energy storage system can help to maintain that supply-demand balance in minutes at a time, become a go-to power source when demand is particularly high (such a hot summer day), or serve as a backup power supply during blackouts (see the 20 uses identified by the commission).

The energy storage bill signed by then Govt. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010 was apparently the first legislation in the country to look at how energy storage might be necessary for meeting a state’s goals to increase its use of renewable electricity. The new law (PDF) was a watered-down version of an initial effort to require the state’s investor-owned utilities to use energy storage. Instead, the law requires the commission to start the process of determining whether energy storage is necessary for the investor-owned utilities by March 1, 2012. The commission has until Oct. 1, 2013 to adopt an energy storage procurement target if it deems storage necessary. If that happens, utilities will have until the end of Dec. 2015 to meet the first target, and the end of 2020 for the second target. Municipal utilities and public utility districts, which aren’t regulated by the commission, also have to follow similar deadlines.

Understandably, the state’s three biggest utilities – Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric – oppose setting energy storage targets. And so does the Division of Ratepayer Advocates within the commission.

The utilities argue that public subsidies can actually slow down the development of better and cheaper technologies. The Division of Ratepayer Advocates noted that “Picking arbitrary procurement levels, such as a MW [megawatt] level or a percentage level would most likely result in sub-optimal market solutions and increase costs to ratepayers without yielding commensurate benefits.”

You can be sure to hear a lot more debates about whether a mandate will help or hurt storage technology development and deployment. A lot of federal and private money has gone into energy storage technologies, particularly in the field of rechargeable batteries, because they are betting that electric cars and renewable energy storage will become big business. Just earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a new round of battery technology funding.

The commission plans to hold a workshop on energy storage on Aug. 20, and another meeting is scheduled for Sept. 4.

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Primus Power’s flow battery

The Department of Energy’s program that gives grants to early-stage energy projects — called ARPA-E — has allocated another $43 million for 19 battery projects, including grants for futuristic batteries made of new chemical mixes, using brand new architectures and utilizing nanotechnology. The ARPA-E program has been aggressively funding next-generation battery technologies over the years, and though these are small grants, the amount of innovation happening is substantial.

The funds go to projects that are very early stage, and are supposed to help bring disruptive R&D closer to commercialization. While Japanese and Korean conglomerates dominate the industry of producing small format lithium ion batteries for laptops and cell phones, these next-gen batteries are mostly targeted for electric cars and the power grid. Some of these projects also aren’t strictly traditional batteries, and a couple are flow batteries, which are large tanks of chemicals that flow into a containerized system and provide energy storage for the power grid (see Primus Power’s flow battery pictured).

Notable winners of the funds include big companies like Ford, GE, and Eaton, small startups like Khosla Ventures-backed Pellion, and projects out of the labs of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Here’s some of the winners (for the full list of 19 go here):

• Ford: $3.13 million for a very precise battery testing device that can improve forecasting of battery-life.
• GE Global Research: $3.13 million for sensors thin-film sensors that can detect and monitor temperature and surface pressure for each cell within a battery pack.
• Eaton: $2.50 million for a system that optimizes the power and operation of hybrid electric vehicles.
• Pellion Technologies: $2.50 million for the startup’s long range battery for electric vehicles.
• Sila Nanotechnologies: $1.73 million for the startup’s lithium ion electric car battery that it says has double the capacity of current lithium ion batteries.
• Xilectric: $1.73 million to “reinvent Thomas Edison’s battery chemistries for today’s electric vehicles.”
• Energy Storage Systems: $1.73 million for a flow battery for the grid, with an electrolyte made of low cost iron, and using a next-gen cell design.
• Battelle Memorial Institute: $600K for a sensor to monitor the internal environment of a lithium-ion battery in real-time.

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Electric rates are the basis for calculating a home or business owner’s utility bill and figuring out whether investing in solar will save them money by reducing their need for power from the utility. It also enables installers to put together better marketing and sales pitches.

But consider this: there are about 3,000 utilities in the U.S. with tens of thousands of electric rates devised for various classes of residential and commercial customers. And those rates fluctuate – about 3,500 rate updates occur every month, said John Tucker, the startup’s product manager, during an interview at the company’s office across from the Gap headquarters.

“It takes so much to keep up with it,” Tucker said. “It’s a real pain point for everybody we talk to.”

By assembling the electric rates, developing data-crunching tools, and offering the data to customers via a website, Genability is taking on a task that many solar service providers would rather avoid. The startup charges monthly subscription fees, which range from $89 to $1,000, depending on the number of users with each company and amount of data used.

Many solar companies don’t have the resources to maintain accurate electric pricing data to better calculate energy savings, Tucker said. So they use averages and maybe spreadsheets to do the math, and those methods could lead to estimates that are wildly off. Some installers may have good data for the local territory they serve, but they will find it expensive and time-consuming to do it again and again if they want to expand out of their home state.

The idea

Jason Riley founded Genability after realizing that having accurate electric pricing data is critical for running energy delivery services. He co-founded an enterprise software company called Entessa that was bought by Energy Solutions International, which offers software to manage oil and gas pipelines, in June 2010.

Genability, whose name is a mash up of “generation” and “ability,” amassed the electric pricing data by combing through regulatory filings from utilities and outsourcing the data input work to offshore contractors. It’s got 10 full time employees. Riley, now Genability’s CEO, has been funding the startup with his own money and is now looking to raise a venture capital round of $1 million to $3 million.

Last month, Genability won a $500,000 grant from the federal SunShot program to develop new features and expand the use of the database in order to boost solar installations. SunShot’s goal is to lower the price of solar electricity to levels comparable to power from fossil fuel power plants.  The startup has one year to complete its SunShot project, for which it’s providing a 40 percent matching fund.

The company currently offers the web portal and software tools for its customers to draw on the electric pricing data to do number crunching on their own computers. The SunShot funding will allow Genability to expand its database and add features that will eliminate that step of moving data from one computer system to another and allow its customers to get the results they want by using only Genability’s system.

The startup plans to incorporate a calculator called PV Watts from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that provides hourly estimates of solar power production by using factors such as the size of a solar energy system and its location. The SunShot project also will make it easier for Genability’s customers to make use of different electric rates to design better projects and offer services beyond solar. For example, building energy management firms could look for the best rates to make power buying decisions or shift energy use to save money or get paybacks from utilities for lowering energy consumption when demand for electricity is particularly high.

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The Colorado company already appeared to be in serious trouble when it was laying off a few hundred full- and temporary workers earlier this year. At the time, the company said it needed to switch production equipment to produce a new line of better performing solar panels. The plan was to restart mass production by the end of this year, the company said.

The startup, founded in 2007, was also hurting for money but failed to line up an investor to prevent it from going out of business, according to Greentech Media, which first reported Abound’s plan to close.

Update: In a statement, Abound said it plans to file for bankruptcy next week, and it’s ceasing operations and laying off 125 employees.

“Abound believes that, at scale, its USA-made (cadmium-telluride) panel technology has the ability to achieve lower cost per watt than competing crystalline silicon technology made in China.  However, aggressive pricing actions from Chinese solar panel companies have made it very difficult for an early stage startup company like Abound to scale in current market conditions,” according to the company statement.

Abound was hoping to become a major player like First Solar when it opened its first factory in 2009 to make solar panels lined with an ultra thin layer of cadmium-telluride to convert sunlight into electricity. At the time, Abound’s CEO, Pascal Noronha, had expected his company to make solar panels cheaply right away, at under $1 per watt like First Solar was doing, never mind that it took First Solar four years of commercial production and multiple factories to reach that level of production cost. Abound didn’t hit that initial goal.

The startup then lined up a $400 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2010 to expand its production. The loan guarantee allowed the Abound to borrow money from the Federal Financing Bank. But Abound used up $68 million of the promised loan before the DOE stopped doling out additional money last September because Abound was having trouble meeting certain goals, said a DOE spokesman.

Abound joins a long list of solar panel makers that crumbled in the last year and a half because solar panel supply has just far exceeded demand in the global solar market. Meanwhile, government subsidies for solar power projects, particularly in Europe, the largest solar market, have been shrinking fast. This oversupply problem will likely persist beyond 2012 as more factories are set to open, partly because some companies believe the glut wouldn’t last long or they need to expand manufacturing to reduce costs or else they will never be competitive.

Abound is the second solar manufacturer and DOE loan guarantee recipient who didn’t make it. Solyndra was the first one, and its demise drew a big debate over the wisdom of the loan guarantee program and gave the Republicans ammunition to attack the Obama administration.

The Colorado company has lined up money from investors including Invus Group, Bohemian Companies, BP Alternative Energy and West Hill Investors, DCM (Doll Capital Management) and Technology Partners. Abound had received over $300 million in private funding as of December 2011, the DOE said.

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Through CalCharge, battery tech developers will be able to enlist the help of researchers and use equipment at Berkeley Lab and other research institutions, participate in seminars and forums, recruit engineers and other employees and network with each other to trade information. Companies can do all this on their own, of course, but they might find better results when they go through an organization that pools resources to serve a larger community.

“What I’ve been hearing for a while is that in the Silicon Valley and the software industry, there is an ecosystem to bring everybody together,” said Venkat Srinivasan, head of energy storage and distributed resources department at Berkeley Lab. “We recognize that battery companies want an ecosystem to work together.”

Battery companies generally target three markets: consumer electronics, electric cars and grid energy storage. While Srinivasan declined to divulge which startups plan to be members, there’s quite a few in the Bay Area (see our list of 25 battery makers).

Battery technology development has generated interest from prominent venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in recent years because of federal and local policies that mandate lower tailpipe and industrial emissions and a greater use of renewable energy. The federal government has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars for engineering and manufacturing lithium-ion batteries for electric cars since 2009. Grid energy storage is a promising market because the technology complements wind and solar farms by taking in electricity from these intermittent sources and releasing it to the grid as a steady source of energy. Delivering wind and solar at a steady pace helps utilities to balance their supply with demand.

Building an innovative battery company is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. A123 Systems, for example, raised around $240 million in venture capital before its 2009 IPO, from which it raised $371 million. The company also won a 2009 federal grant of about $249 million to expand manufacturing, though it hasn’t used up all the money.

“We see that young companies are always under-resourced and need venture capital and other types of financing. They need to bridge multiple valleys of death,” said Paul Frankel, managing director of CalCEF’s innovations group.

For now, CalCharge is part of CalCEF, which is working on eventually launching it as an independent nonprofit, Frankel said.

Work is underway to recruit founding members who would provide the funds to let CalCharge start offering programs to battery companies. It will be a membership-supported organization, and how much help a company gets will depend on its membership level. There will be three levels of annual fees at $10,000, $25,000 and $50,000, Srinivasan said.

Some of the services Berkeley Lab is keen on providing include testing and performance verification of cells and systems, Srinivasan said. Essentially, Berkeley Lab aims to develop a reputation for setting the standards for quantifying battery performances in the same way that the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) has become in the solar industry. Verifications of cell or panel efficiencies by NREL carry more weight than results from lesser established labs.

Photos courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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GridNavigator, founded in 2009 and based in Redmond, Wash., developed the beta version of the forecasting tool at the end of last year, and a few of its customers have been using it since February, said CEO Al Cabrini.

Forecasting software, whether it’s used to predict a building’s energy use or a solar or wind farm’s power output, provides a good way to help control costs or determine revenues and profits. It also can help utilities and electric grid operators to integrate the more intermittent sources of power and balance their supply and demand. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $9 million fund to improve power generation forecasts at solar power plants.

Companies are increasingly looking to reduce their carbon footprints, which is making them more conscious of their energy consumption and the sources of their electricity and fuels. But cutting expenses can be a more powerful incentive for a company to act. Some utilities in the country reward conservation measures or charge businesses more for drawing electricity at faster rates. Aside from GridNavigator, other companies that develop energy forecasting software for commercial building owners include Itron.

Energy data

GridNavigator’s new software makes energy use predictions based on more recent and useful data, Cabrini said. Other forecasting software would provides far less frequent forecasts and use day-old data that may not reflect the weather conditions or the energy use patterns of a building during the following day. While building managers can simply look at real- or near-real time data to adjust their power use (instead of using consumption forecasts), they typically can’t dial up and down the power use as quickly or smoothly, Cabrini said.

“If you ever want to budget or cap your demand at a certain level, the only tool you have is by looking at what your current real time consumption is, and that’s a lot of manual work,” Cabrini said. “If you have a forecast for what could happen in the next few hours, then you have time to proactively react to that spike.”

Each day at 1 a.m., GridNavigator’s software takes historical energy consumption data and weather data from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create a forecast for that day. Then it recalibrates the forecast every hour from 5:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. using actual energy use data from that day. Each forecast shows how much power and how fast a building is drawing that power from the electric grid. Energy management software that controls a building’s energy use can then use each forecast to reduce or maintain the amount of electricity that is being consumed.

Making accurate predictions is hard to do, and it may not justify the cost for some building owners. Cabrini said his software can be over 97 percent accurate in predicting the actual energy use. The startup makes money by licensing the software and collecting an annual maintenance fee.

Edmonds Community College in Washington and Trane Corp., a air conditioning and heating system seller are two firms that are using GridNavigator’s forecasting tool. Trane is also a partner of GridNavigator in marketing and selling a variety of building energy and efficiency equipment and services.

GridNavigator previously raised a seed round, and Cabrini declined to disclose the amount or the investors’ name. He’s looking at raising another round in 2013.

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