Evolution of the home energy market

That Nest and Opower have emerged as the leading companies fighting over this business says something about the small and slow-moving industry. Over the years the market for devices, websites and services that attempt to get consumers to reduce their energy use — a largely unsexy and unappreciated task — has been riddled with struggling startups and failed clunky product launches.

Home energy dashboards never made a dent with consumers. Various startups from Tendril to EnergyHub realized early on that high-end energy dasboards were not the way to go. People don’t care enough about energy and didn’t want to spend money on an energy-specific device.

At the same time, residential-focused energy efficiency services from utilities have taken years to roll out in any meaningful way. Utilities are notoriously slow moving and cautious. Companies that tried to work in these markets got frustrated, too. Google and Microsoft both shut down their energy efficiency web tools after failing to gain much interest or develop any partnerships.

Opower’s entrance

When Opower launched almost six years ago, it found early success with an energy efficiency product that provided immediate value to utilities: mailed energy reports. While Opower has always been an energy software and data company, it were these mailed reports that were initially valuable to utilities that (particularly back then) had unsophisticated digital presences.

Honeywell & Opower’s iPad smart thermostat app

The Opower reports came in envelopes that looked like bills (so were almost always opened) and they used behavioral techniques (smiley faces, peer competition) to gently convince the utility customer to reduce consumption. The mailed reports were also relatively inexpensive compared to home energy devices and dashboards.

But over the years Opower has had to morph into a company that largely sells digital energy data products to utilities. There’s only so much business — and so much effect on consumer behavior — that paper reports can have.

Opower now largely interacts with utility customers through email, text messages, and websites. Its newer digital products include a Facebook app and more recently software for connected thermostats, in partnership with thermostat giant Honeywell.

Opower’s work with Honeywell and its connected thermostat product was one of the first indicators of how competitive Opower and Nest could become. The thermostat has emerged as the great hope for creating a gateway into home energy efficiency following the demise of the energy dashboard. In addition, Honeywell saw Nest as a pretty direct threat, having previously sued Nest over patent infringement around the learning thermostat.

It’s unclear how much success the Honeywell/Opower thermostat is having, given that it’s such a new product. PG&E was the first utility that piloted it and some early results suggested that customers liked using the smart thermostats and particularly liked being able to remotely control the thermostat using their iPhone.

But one of the key differences between Opower and Nest’s business models is clear through that partnership. Opower’s utility products are almost always white-labelled for utilities, so, for example, if it creates a website and system of emails and texts for PG&E customers, then Opower’s alerts are branded with PG&E’s logo. In contrast, Nest has long been focused on selling directly to consumers and building a consumer brand.

Nest emerges

Nest was officially launched toward the end of 2011, though the company had been building its technology for a year and half before that. Its core business philosophy involves the production of a well-designed thermostat that users would covet and that could also collect data about the user and learn their behavior. The thermostat can use that knowledge to shave off between 20 and 30 percent of the user’s monthly heating and cooling, and Nest has mostly focused on selling the thermostat directly to consumers.

But Nest has more recently started to move into offering utilities and energy service providers energy efficiency services. Last month Nest launched a variety of energy services, including demand response, and also this week acquired a startup, MyEnergy, that aggregates and analyzes utility data. It’s clear that one of the most important aspects of the Nest thermostat is the services that can be run based on both the consumer’s individual and the collective Nest users’ data.

Nest appears to want to maintain its brand and its ability to connect directly with customers. When it launched its energy services last month, the company told me that its services sit between the consumer and the utility. It also approves eligible customers and monitors how the services are performing and how the customers are reacting.

This direct-to-consumer approach could also prove useful if (and when) Nest launched any more connected home products in the future.

Power in the data

Essentially, both Nest and Opower are cloud-based data analytics companies that are using various — and increasingly competitive — ways to access home energy data. Nest calls its cloud-based big data algorithms Auto-Tune, and the data that is collected is from its increasingly large amount of thermostats being installed throughout the world.

Opower has built out its big data platform, Opower 4, which collects data from at least 75 utilities, processes data from more than 50 million homes, and has 15 million homes fully connected into the Opower platform. Opower is analyzing 16 percent of all of the smart meters in the U.S.

Each company’s approach has unique benefits and hurdles. Opower has been widely successful with utilities using the approach of starting out with a basic data analytics service, and adding on more complexity and control over time. Utilities are hard customers to win over, so the benefits of winning their business early is invaluable. Nest, with its direct to consumer approach, could be slightly threatening to some of the more conservative utilities.

Nest, on the other hand, has the capacity to build a consumer brand that can make money from direct consumer electronics sales as well as working with energy service providers. Opower has little consumer brand presence and mostly subverts its brand to its utility customers.

Which method will prove more successful over time? It’ll be interesting to see, but in reality there will be room for both. It’s also refreshing to see different types of innovation and execution in the home energy efficiency space — an industry that has been neglected for quite a long time.

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Remote control of the smart thermostat could prove to be one of the first smart grid applications that is a clear benefit to consumers. One of the major problems with smart meters is that consumers haven’t really seen the direct benefits (beyond savings) of having the smart meter installed at their homes — a lot of the benefits of smart meters are actually for the utility. But remote control of a thermostat is a service that even companies like Comcast and Verizon are looking to sell to their customers.

Honeywell & Opower smart thermostat website

For the PG&E trial it’s still early days. So far the pilot program is pretty small, and PG&E is still recruiting customers to it. According to a report issued last week, there are currently 888 customers involved in the smart thermostat trial, but only 276 of those actually had one of the thermostats installed. 421 of the group were chosen to get a smart thermostat installed (the rest were in the control group that didn’t get thermostats), but 145 of those homes didn’t have a successful installation for whatever reason.

The main reason that the thermostat installation didn’t work even for customers that had been chosen, was that the homes were actually found to be ineligible for the program (say, because of a faulty or incompatible HVAC system, or lack of a broadband connection). But often times that ineligibility wasn’t determined until the installer was at the home, which is inefficient. The report says:

The number of treatment group customers without a thermostat installed is a problem that could compromise the precision of energy savings estimates when the impact evaluation is conducted once the trial is fully enrolled.

So for future recruitment the program needs to be tweaked to evaluate if the home is eligible before the installer gets there.

PG&E is looking for more pilot participants for the trial and eventually wants to have 500 homes with the thermostats installed. Future participants need to own their homes, have central heating and cooling, not move for at least a year, have a broadband connection, and live in certain zip codes like in Fresno and Bakersfield.

Honeywell’s thermostat with Opower software

PG&E isn’t the only utility trialling smart thermostats. Texas energy service provider Reliant is offering smart thermostat services from two Silicon Valley startups Nest and EcoFactor. Startup EnergyHub is also working with cooperative utilities Gibson Electric Membership Corporation and Mid-South Synergy — the EnergyHub service, called Mercury, reduces customers’ heating and cooling consumption at times of peak demand.

One of the earliest utilities to tap smart thermostats for energy management was Nevada utility NV Energy. NV Energy is providing 50,000 customers with a home energy dashboard from Control4 and a programmable thermostat. Another 50,000 are supposed to be signed up down the road.

Utilities can use smart thermostats to collectively and remotely manage home energy consumption at peak times. They can also just use the thermostats for energy efficiency, and for having customers cut their energy bills. Earlier this year I wrote a report on the battle for the smart thermostat, GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Increasingly energy software startups like Opower and Nest are competing over the home smart thermostat.

PG&E is expecting the smart thermostat service to lower its customers’ energy consumption by 5 percent, and potentially by more for customers that use gas for heating and cooling. Update: The Honeywell/Opower thermostat can specifically reduce a home’s heating and cooling by 15 to 25 percent. In comparison Nest says its thermostats can cut 20 to 30 percent of a homes’ heating and cooling energy consumption. So they are about the same in terms of their energy reduction potential. The software is a little bit different though, in that Opower’s thermostat software doesn’t use learning algorithms.

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But there were also quite a few things that excited me this year, which in honor of our upcoming day of thanks, I’ve decided to call out. Here are 10 things to be thankful for in cleantech.

1). Obama won: Thank goodness. The entire cleantech sector dodged a bullet — and breathed a sigh of relief — as the votes rolled in and President Obama was re-elected for a second term. Obama delivered an unprecedented amount of cleantech funding: billions in incentives for clean power, electric cars and energy efficiency through the stimulus package. While the incentives won’t likely be as high as they were when the stimulus package was determined, if Mitt Romney had won, it would have likely been a real blow for cleantech. Romney is a self-professed coal-lover, who used speeches to point out misspending for clean power companies, and made a now infamous joke (post Sandy) about climate change.

2). New solid customer: Internet infrastructure: A growing amount of Internet companies — and web infrastructure providers — are looking for ways to add more clean power to their data center energy consumption mix, and are also looking for ways to be less reliant on the power grid. Some of the leaders in this area include Google, eBay, Microsoft, and Apple, and many of these companies have invested in both solar systems, energy efficiency technology and even fuel cell farms. Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy has managed to find a niche and growing market here.

There’s also a growing trend of IT companies looking to utilize low power servers — servers built off of low power cell phone chips. AMD this year acquired startup SeaMicro, and weeks ago AMD launched its SeaMicro low power server. Calxeda just raised $55 million to move toward commercializing its own low power server product.

3). Digital green, or clean web: Cleantech — from a VC and entrepreneur perspective — is in a transitional state. But in the meantime, clean technologies that are based on IT — like mobile, big data, cloud computing, software — are still seeing a lot of innovation and investment. Examples of startups in this sector include Opower, Nest, Solar Mosaic and Sungevity. Investors are calling this sector different things — Greenstart calls it digital green, Spring Ventures calls it Clean Web, and MDV calls it where cleantech meets IT — but it all means the same thing to them: a way to make money that more closely mimics making VC investments in web and mobile companies.

4). Smart thermostats: A particularly interesting area to me in terms of the smart grid and cleantech startups is the growing use of thermostats that are connected to the internet and that can smartly cut building energy use. Nest says it’s sold in the mid-hundreds of thousands of its learning thermostats, which can learn the users behavior and shave off energy consumption overtime. EcoFactor’s service is being used in a commercial deployment in Las Vegas, and Opower’s software is being used in three utility trials with Honeywell’s thermostats. Startup EnergyHub is also working on providing the software for smart thermostats.

Connected thermostats could be the answer to what utilities call demand response, which is basically turning down the energy use of its customers during peak times of day. The customers agree to the programs and can see lower energy bills. If the system is automatic and non-intrusive — which can be done using smart thermostat analytics — customers are far more likely to join the programs, and the utility’s results are better.

5). Tesla: Electric car maker Tesla has one of the most ambitious ideas in cleantech, and has actually — mostly — delivered on its goals. Yes, it was slow to get its estimated volume of Model S cars out to owners in 2012, but it’s on track to deliver its new estimates over the coming months. The company is also one of the few cleantech ideas that have captured the imagination of the public, and recently won Motor Trends’s car of the year award — the first time in history that an electric car won it.

6). The learning curve: Like I said, cleantech is in a time of transition. And I think that’s a good thing. As Greenstart founding partner Mitch Lowe said on a recent panel I moderated, fewer companies are being funded, but that just means the bar is higher. While bubbles are fun — like the one that grew in cleantech between 2006 and early 2008 — bubbles mean a lot of stupid money is flowing. Hopefully the smarter money of the next 18 months will deliver some breakthrough cleantech startups.

7). Cheap solar panels: One of the most dramatic clean power economic factors to emerge in 2012 occurred via super cheap solar panels coming out of China. While rock bottom solar panels make a difficult market for competing solar manufacturers, that ecosystem has created a boom in solar panel installations. In the U.S. there are now 250,000 rooftop solar panel installations, and companies like SolarCity are seeing large growth.

8). Wish for big ideas: Outside of cleantech, in the general tech and IT markets, there’s been a growing drumbeat of entrepreneurs and investors calling for greater attention on “big ideas.” While there can be easy money in social media and mobile apps ($1 billion for Instagram), there’s an emerging discussion around technology being used for higher aims, like solving problems for resource constraints. Investor Peter Thiel has been a chief champion of this approach and recently created a growth fund that will tackle big problems — the fund has already backed firms like compressed air energy storage startup LightSail Energy. They’re not calling it cleantech, but it is under the hood.

9). Meat 2.0: When the population explodes to 9 billion people by 2050, livestock for consumption could become a constrained resource — particularly because the emerging middle class in developing countries are increasing their meat consumption. That’s one of the reasons that innovation is occurring around fake meat. As Greentech Media wrote, paraphrasing a VC: “having a “fake meat” company in one’s VC portfolio was becoming a must-have, like having a cloud computing firm or a failed thin-film solar company.” Beyond Meat is one startup and Sand Hill Foods seems to be another. Modern Meadow Meat is a startup working on meat manufacturing, with backing from Thiel.

10). Collaborative consumption: And another sector of cleantech that’s not really cleantech: sharing goods. The next-generation of young people are less interested in owning things, and more interested in gaining access, or using things as a service. That makes the use of goods more efficient and sustainable. You don’t need to buy a car, because you can pay for access via Zipcar. There’s tons of startups in this space from giants like Airbnb, to new comers like electric scooter rental startup Scoot Networks.

Image courtesy if Aine D, waywuwei,

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Opower has been able to do this by building out its big data infrastructure on Hadoop, and by constructing a sophisticated software engine, which it’s dubbed Opower 4. Opower 4 is its new platform that collects data from 75 utilities, including 96 billion meter reads, crunches that data and provides recommendations to utility customers that encourages them to reduce their energy consumption.

While Opower started its life mailing detailed paper utility bills to utilities’ customers, it now largely interacts with utility customers through digital means — email, text message, and via websites. It’s digital alerts say things like: you’re headed for a high bill this month. It’s newer digital products include a Facebook app and software for connected thermostats, working with thermostat giant Honeywell.

At the same time, paper reports still play a substantial role in its service — of the 15 million homes that are fully connected into the Opower platform, 7 million of those are getting paper reports. The combination of paper reports and digital recommendations deliver, on average, 1.5 to 3.5 percent reduction on an energy bill.

While a lot of startups are trying to do what Opower is doing, and big data energy tools are emerging with a growing frequency, Opower has quietly been able to amass a reach with its platform that puts it well ahead of competitors. Opower is analyzing 16 percent of all of the smart meters in the U.S.

Opower’s SVP Marketing Rod Morris tells me that he thinks Opower’s strategy of starting out with a basic data analytics service, and adding on more complexity and control over time, has made it the defacto choice for utilities. In contrast other competitors have had less success, after starting their businesses selling more complex systems like home energy dashboards, and then later moving into developing an Opower-style platform and software layer.

Honeywell & Opower’s iPad smart thermostat app

It will be interesting to see how Opower’s newer offerings, like its Facebook app and thermostat service, fare, following Opower’s success with its basic platform. Opower has its thermostat service deployed in pilot projects with three utilities, and Honeywell is providing the hardware. You can think of Opower’s thermostat service as Honeywell’s answer to Nest or other smart thermostat services like EcoFactor and EnergyHub.

Opower has raised $64 million in venture capital from NEA, Kleiner Perkins and Accel Partners over the years, and has been considering an IPO since at least last year. Opower is one of the few successful venture-backed cleantech startups out there.

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Nest launched its original learning thermostat back in October of 2011 to much fanfare and it was immediately sold out for months. The device was designed by Nest CEO Tony Fadell, who was head designer of the iPhone and iPod for Apple, and the connected thermostat has smart algorithms that learn your habits and help you shave off 20 to 30 percent off of your energy bill. Fadell will be talking about the power of design to disrupt industries at our RoadMap conference on November 5 in San Francisco.

The first thing you’ll notice about the new Nest is that it has one moveable ring on its circumference as the physical interface. The previous ring design only took up part of the real estate of the circumference, and the other part didn’t move (see below). Making the ring all one piece makes the device slimmer and more clean looking.

The new Nest:

The first generation Nest:

As you can see, Nest also did away with the grill on the bottom of the face of the thermostat. They needed the grill for the occupancy (motion) sensors that can detect when people are nearby. But for the new thermostat design, Nest was able to switch the grill out with transparent, black plastic that still enables the sensors to “see.”

In addition to the hardware on the front, the back of the Nest is completely redesigned. The team made the circuit design circular to add more space, and Nest used that extra space to add two important new connectors: a spot for a wire called the Y2, which controls a second stage of AC, and the star connector, which enables new wires to control options like emergency heating and a whole home humidifier.

With these new wires, version 2 of thermostat is compatible with most types of heating and cooling systems, including forced air systems, radiant systems and heat pumps. Nest has included all types of new software functions that enable owners of these systems to cut energy in different ways.

The new Nest contains version 3 of its software — version 2 of the software was upgraded in April of this year. The new mobile software also is compatible with Android tablets like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire (GigaOM’s Kevin Tofel will like that: His in-depth review here).

The new Nest will cost the same as the original Nest: $250. The original Nest will be on sale for another couple of weeks and is being discounted down to $229 until supplies last.

Nest also updated me on its lawsuit with Honeywell. Back in February Honeywell slapped Nest with a patent infringement lawsuit over seven aspects of Nest’s smart thermostat technology. Nest tells me that the case is currently on hold, and Nest requested, and was granted a stay in the case. Nest also requested a re-examination of the original Honeywell patents in question, and Nest says 5 of the 7 Honeywell patent claims were accepted for reexamination, and those 5 patent claims were rejected.

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In a summer of record-breaking heat, and following an industry-wide trend of the power grid becoming increasingly digitized, utilities are looking for ways to both connect with their customers as well as better manage their customer’s energy consumption. During hours of peak demand (like a hot summer day) a utility’s electric grid can become impacted by too much energy use (picture everyone’s air conditioner blasting). This can cause blackouts, or require expensive power from peaker plants.

The customers, on the other hand, can use the smart thermostats to reduce their energy consumption and save as much as 30 to 50 percent on their energy bills. Energy service providers like Reliant, which operates in a deregulated energy market in Texas, are also using these types of added services, like the Nest thermostat, to keep customers from signing up with competitors.

One of the earliest utilities to tap smart thermostats for energy management was Nevada utility NV Energy. NV Energy plans to provide 50,000 customers with a home energy dashboard from Control4 and a programmable thermostat. Another 50,000 are supposed to be signed up down the road. PG&E has also been piloting the smart thermostat service from Opower and thermostat maker Honeywell.

In EnergyHub’s deal, the cooperative utilities Gibson Electric Membership Corporation and Mid-South Synergy will use the EnergyHub service, called Mercury, to reduce customers’ heating and cooling consumption at times of peak demand. Utilities have long run services like this — called demand response — to reduce energy demand during high-impact hours, but the large majority of these programs have been run with commercial and industrial building owners and are also mostly done manually (instead of automatically via connected data networks).

Honeywell & Opower’s iPad smart thermostat app

Reliant, likewise, is using EcoFactor’s smart thermostat management service to offer a similar type of demand reduction service to its customers. Reliant isn’t using the Nest thermostat for demand response (yet).

All of these smart thermostat services — from EcoFactor, EnergyHub, Nest and Opower/Honeywell — enable utility customers to manage a wireless, connected thermostat using a cell phone or website. While EcoFactor and EnergyHub are focusing on the software side of the thermostat, Nest has created a well-designed thermostat that can learn from the user’s behavior over several weeks.

Service providers like cable companies and telecoms are also offering these types of connected energy home tools. Comcast is offering a connected thermostat service from EcoFactor.

This is still an emerging service, but energy is becoming part of the smart home via both utilities and the data network providers. EnergyHub says it already has 100,000 smart thermostats under management and the company plans to add another 100,000 this year.

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Gmail users on the other hand more often live in cities where dwellings are smaller. In addition Gmail users are also more willing to do energy audits than Yahoo email users, says Opower.

If you look at some of the demographics data taken over the years comparing Yahoo mail and Gmail users, this coincides with some interesting trends. Like according to this data from Hunch from last year, Gmail users skew younger, less often have kids, tend to be more educated and more often times consider themselves early tech adopters compared to Yahoo mail users. All those things you could speculate would coincide with less electricity used and a greater change of doing an energy analysis.

Opower used 2.8 million households to crunch that data and chose Yahoo and Gmail users because they made up the highest volume of users. Opower develops software and analytics to enable utilities to connect with their customers and get them to reduce their energy consumption by around two percent.

Opower has been growing rapidly this year, has been hiring at both its offices in Arlington and San Francisco, and introduced new products including its social app with Facebook and a connected thermostat with Honeywell.

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While the company doesn’t disclose sales volumes, a Nest spokesperson told me back in April that they’d done a survey of 10,000 of their customers (so they have at least that amount, and many more, the spokesperson said). The thermostat is also available at Lowe’s and through Nest’s online store.

There have been other digital thermostats out on the market for years, but Nest is looking to bring smart algorithms, nice design, and a cool brand to the normally boring world of thermostats. Nest’s learning thermostat learns your behavior over a couple weeks and starts helping you save energy by turning down heating and cooling when it isn’t necessary to your comfort (like when you leave the house, or during certain times of day).

Nest is attempting to turn the learning thermostat into a coveted device like Apple’s iPhone or iPad. Nest founder Tony Fadell was the former chief architect at Apple where he led the development of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone. He left Apple three years ago to start Nest.

Nest has — and will continue to have — battles to fight as a potentially disruptive startup in this space. For example thermostat giant Honeywell slapped Nest with a lawsuit for patent infringement, which Nest denies. Selling consumers thermostats — particularly a $250 thermostat — also might prove to be a difficult market, given a lot consumers currently don’t go out and buy (or even think about) thermostats.

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Not surprisingly Apple and Nest share a similar design sensibility, and the Nest thermostat can also be controlled via an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Mac. When Nest first launched its thermostat, I called it “a thermostat Steve Jobs would love.”

The Nest thermostat (in cooling mode).

Not to be too dramatic, but I think this is the most important move ever for a next-generation digital thermostat. Most consumers don’t care a lick about their thermostat and most thermostats are not ever programmed, which leads to major inefficiencies and wasted home energy. If Nest can make its learning thermostat a cool and coveted item (like the iPhone), it could change consumers’ relationships with thermostats and home energy and could lead to significant reductions in home energy consumption.

If you’ve been following Nest, then you probably know that thermostat giant Honeywell slapped it with a lawsuit earlier this year, alleging patent infringement. Nest responded to the lawsuit by bringing on Apple’s former Chief Intellectual Property Officer Richard “Chip” Lutton as its new vice president and general counsel.

Apple started selling Nest’s thermostat after the lawsuit was filed. The thermostat is also being sold via Best Buy and via Nest’s online store.

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