But there are still over a dozen tools out there trying to tackle this difficult market, from direct-to-consumer gadgets to more high-end services bundled with security, broadband, and solar systems. Will the startups, entrepreneurs, tech firms and investors behind these energy services succeed in a market that already has a good deal of collateral damage? Well, many more will struggle, but there could be a few breakout hits out there if they position themselves in the right way. Here are a dozen companies still vying for this market:

Home automation, security, broadband partners

Control4. Control4, founded in 2003 to provide home automation services, moved into the energy management space in summer 2009. In the energy space, the company sells wireless devices and services to utilities for home energy management, and counts customers like Nevada utility NV Energy. Utilities can use Control4′s tools to do residential demand response, which is basically asking customers to turn down their energy in various ways when the utility wants to more tightly manage the grid’s power use. Control4 has raised close to $75 million in funding from Frazier Technology Ventures’ Partner, vSpring Capitals, and Thomas Weisel Venture Partners.

iControl. iControl is the company behind Comcast’s new home security and energy management service, and has raised over $100 million from investors including Comcast Ventures (the VC arm of Comcast), Cisco, Intel’s VC arm Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, and the parent company of security firm ADT. iControl says its latest round of $50 million will help the company expand its energy-based software and services, which enable home owners and utilities to be able to remotely manage lights, connected thermostats and smart appliances.

4Home. In December, telco gear giant Motorola  announced it was buying home automation and energy monitoring startup 4Home via its communications subsidiary Motorola Mobility. 4Home’s software enables home owners to access information — from digital media to energy info, home security and health data — across devices, and remotely. Verizon is using the 4Home service for its first trial of home automation and energy management.

Xanboo. AT&T bought home automation and energy player Xanboo in December. Xanboo   is a decade-old firm that was one of the original home automation players and enables home owners to monitor security, energy consumption, and digital media across devices.

EcoFactor. EcoFactor sells a service to utilities and broadband service providers (and other channel partners) that automates turning down a connected thermostat. The company shaves off energy use without the customer feeling the difference and provides a lower bill for the customer. EcoFactor says it has reached 17 percent energy savings in its trials.

Utility-focused energy services

Tendril. Tendril is the poster child for a company that has aggressively focused on reaching the home energy management market via utilities. The company sells software and devices that monitor and manage the home energy consumption of consumers, and recently scored a deal with (and an investment from) energy gear provider Siemens. Tendril has raised at least $73 million from investors including VantagePoint Venture Partners, Good Energies, and RRE Ventures.

OPower. OPower isn’t yet really in the home energy gadget or service space. Instead, it uses its software to help utilities send aggregated, detailed bills. But OPower is considering adding an energy gadget to its portfolio, the company told us. That move could put it squarely in competition with other utility-focused home energy management players like Tendril.

Silver Spring Network’s home energy tool. Smart grid network player Silver Spring Networks bought Greenbox a few years ago to be able to offer its utility customers home energy tools. So far, its energy savings in trials have been impressive.

Direct-to-consumer energy tools (some of these work with utilities, too)

PowerCost Monitor. Canadian Blue Line Innovations has started selling a $99 energy management device called the PowerCost Monitor at big box retailer Fry’s Electronics. That’s one of the lowest-cost home energy management devices we’ve seen yet that’s widely available. The PowerCost Monitor comes in two parts: a sensor and radio device which fits onto any electricity meter, and a display, which picks up the wireless signal of the home’s electricity data emitted by the sensor/radio. Blue Line Innovations was founded back in 2003, and already has over 100,000 PowerCost Monitors in the field today, mostly through utility installations. But the company told me that it has been shifting its primary focus to the consumer.

WattVision. Wattvision is a two-year-old Y-Combinator-born company that sells a bare-bones, low-cost energy management tool that it says is a snap to install on your meter and can be monitored via the web. It costs about $250 on its website, which is higher than I expected when I interviewed the company a couple of years ago. When Google shut its PowerMeter tool down, WattVision offered a $50-off coupon for the coupon code: “byepowermeter”.

TED, The Energy Detective. The TED device is made by Energy Inc, which was founded back in 2001, before energy management was a hot topic anywhere. Energy Inc. President and CEO Dolph Rodenberg told me in an interview that about 40 percent of its sales come from utilities — though declined to name its utility customers — while the majority of its sales come from the direct-to-consumer market. TED was also the first company to work with PowerMeter. Energy Inc also has backing by 3M.

AlertMe. AlertMe is a startup based in the U.K. that makes a home automation, security and energy management service. I’ve played with the company’s kit, and it has a nice design and is pretty easy to set up. AlertMe is backed by Index Ventures, Good Energies, VantagePoint Venture Partners, SET Venture Partners, and British Gas.

Images courtesy of Blue Line, Silver Spring Networks, GigaOM Events, and EcoFactor.

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iControl says the new funds will be partly focused on expanding its energy-based software and services, which enable home owners and utilities to be able to remotely manage lights, connected thermostats and smart appliances. Smart energy tools have been a smaller piece of the overall package of home automation services, which also includes applications like connected video camera security, but are supposed to be a growing piece of the pie over the coming years.

As I wrote earlier this year (GigaOM Pro, subscription required) there’s been an emerging trend around broadband service providers and security companies looking to sell smart energy home tools, with Verizon and Comcast launching these services in recent months, AT&T and Motorola acquiring home automation and energy players, and startups like Consert, EcoFactor and OPower looking to develop innovation around the smart energy home. Pike Research predicts that globally there will be 63 million users of home energy management systems (in home displays, web sites, mobile apps) by 2020, up from about 1 million users this year.

Utilities are also an important market for home energy players, and iControl seems to want to work its way further into that smart grid home energy ecosystem, where it will compete with utility-focused companies like Tendril, OPower, Control4, Silver Spring Networks, and many others. Utilities are investing millions of dollars in installing smart meters, and will eventually roll out home energy dashboards and services to its customers in order to leverage these new digital assets.

At the same time, remember selling better ways to manage energy use is a difficult market. Consumers don’t necessarily care about reducing energy on its own, but they could be persuaded to use a service that reduces their energy bills, and could also be interested in turning off and on lights as a security feature. At the same time, utilities are notoriously very slow moving, and have taken years to do pilot tests of this type of technology.

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The two announcements aren’t linked in any way, at least not yet. The first was startup EcoFactor’s announcement that it’s been able to cut average household power bills by 17 percent with an Internet-connected smart thermostat. The second was the launch of Comcast’s Xfinity Home Security service with startup software partner iControl.

Wait a second, you’re saying, what does home security have to do with home energy management? Well, security-minded services, like turning lights on and off, can deliver direct energy savings, while networked door locks or video cameras can help home automation systems turn off light and heat in unoccupied rooms and perform other energy-related functions.

That’s important, because consumers have proven that they’ll pay something for home security but not necessarily for home energy tools. Even now, broadband providers like Comcast and rival Verizon are busy offering home security add-ons to lure more customers, usually with some kind of basic, smart thermostat–centered energy management freebie thrown in as well.

Thus there’s the potential for a company like EcoFactor to come in. EcoFactor’s cloud-based software uses masses of data — weather reports, home building permits, past energy use data and the like — to adjust each thermostat to save energy while keeping home temperatures in people’s comfort ranges. What’s more, it does it with little input from the homeowner, beyond the initial presets (for example, “home versus away”) as well as any manual overrides of the thermostat.

Automating thermostat-based energy saving could be a big improvement over most smart meter–style energy management concepts, which tend to rely on punishingly high peak power rates to pilot customers to encourage them to cut peak power use. But it’s not yet clear whether utility regulators will allow many utilities to price residential peak power so high, since some reports have raised the concern that doing so could hurt certain segments of the population, like the low income, the elderly and the unemployed.

EcoFactor’s hands-off, subtle thermostat-tweaking approach could be far more popular approach with homeowners and regulators alike. But because it relies on cloud computing, it may require broadband connections — rather than the lower-bandwidth, less-frequent communications permitted by smart meters — to get the job done on a mass scale.

Will broadband supplant smart meters as the route for linking homeowners and their energy use? It’s unclear whether broadband–home automation offerings will catch on en masse or whether energy management will ever become a focus of those customers who do invest in it. One interesting model might be for utilities to offer their broadband-enabled customers special rebates or other incentives to install an EcoFactor-like, automated energy-saving system and at the same time move forward with smart meter–enabled programs. And because broadband offers far faster and higher bandwidth digital connectivity than most smart meter systems, utilities might be able to get far more control and visibility into people’s homes using broadband than they ever hope to with smart meters.

Image courtesy of Tekneco via Creative Commons license

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Comcast rolled out the home surveillance and management service in six markets this week, and the product enables customers to monitor their home 24/7 with video, turn lights on and off and thermostats up and down, and get alerts via email or text when a window opens or something occurs. iControl Co-CEO Jim Johnson told me in an interview on Thursday that home security is first and foremost the purpose for the service, but that energy management is a secondary application for customers and is also available in all of the markets via Comcast.

Cable operators and telcos are increasingly beginning to offer home management services as a way to try to avoid becoming a dumb pipe, and also to reduce churn and add extra subscription revenues. Verizon launched a similar service on a trial basis in New Jersey in December, which included home security control and monitoring, as well as energy reading devices, smart thermostats, and smart appliance control devices, among other applications. Verizon worked with Motorola’s 4Home (a startup which it acquired in December), as well as Ingersoll-Rand for the security applications.

iControl will provide the software layer for the Xfinity-branded home service, while Comcast provides the broadband connection, a cellular company will provide a wireless link, and third-party hardware providers will make the dashboards and security gadgets. iControl has long had the strategy to white label its service and to avoid getting into the hardware market itself. Johnson says iControl also has other unannounced service provider customers in the works, too.

Over the past couple of years, broadband service providers have emerged as a potential distribution channel for home energy management products, beyond slow-moving utilities. While it’s taken these providers quite awhile to launch actual products, 2011 has emerged as a year when the companies are actually moving these services into customer’s homes. On Thursday a company called EcoFactor, which has long talked about working with broadband service providers, unveiled data about how it can save home owner customers 17 percent on their energy bills by using big data tools and hooking into connected thermostats.

The Comcast service starts at $39.95 a month and was first unveiled in Houston in mid 2010 and is now being rolled out in parts of Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; Jacksonville and Sarasota/Naples, Fla.; Chattanooga and Nashville, Tenn.

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Even so, a host of recent home automation announcements could put Z-Wave back in the running, according to Sigma Designs, which acquired Z-Wave chipmaker Zensys in 2008. In my weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required), I delve into some of the factors for and against such an outcome.

One thing working against Z-Wave is that it’s a proprietary technology with chips made by a single vendor. Sure, it may have members including ADT, Black & Decker, Danfoss, Leviton and Ingersoll Rand. But the ZigBee Alliance has all the big smart grid companies and utilities on board — as well as GE, which just recently named ZigBee its favorite wireless technology for its smart appliance and home energy networking plans.

Still, Michael Weissman, Sigma’s vice president of corporate marketing, laid out some interesting developments on the Z-Wave front to us. One of the most interesting comes from Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo, which said in October it planned a Z-Wave-based home energy management offering, featuring “smart tap” power sensing devices and home routers from Sumitomo.

Japan’s government requires home automation systems to run at frequencies of under 1 gigahertz, which fits Z-Wave in the 900 megahertz range but doesn’t match ZigBee at 2.4 gigahertz, Weissman noted. That could make Japan a big Z-Wave market — unless Wi-Fi in the home takes over that primary function for home networking.

Back in the U.S., Verizon has been rumored to be planning a FiOS-enabled home energy management offering for the past two years or so. But it’s also plotting home networks that runs on technologies like MoCA and Z-Wave, Ann Shaub, director of program management, said in September, with devices coming as early as the first quarter of 2011.

In early December, Motorola bought Z-Wave Alliance member 4Home, a startup that has worked with Verizon and other partners in a host of home energy management configurations. Could it be a preparatory move to work with Verizon’s Z-Wave home strategy?

Of course, just because a vendor is looking at Z-Wave as an option for home energy networking doesn’t mean it is ruling out ZigBee as well. Palo Alto, Calif.-based iControl, a home energy networking startup with backing from Kleiner Perkins, ADT, GE and Comcast, uses Z-Wave for its wireless sensor and management software platform as part of security giant ADT’s ADT Pulse program. But in November, iControl announced a merger with rival home automation provider uControl, which uses ZigBee.

Comparing ZigBee to Z-Wave does bring up an interesting contrasts. While ZigBee is king in the emerging field of energy management networking, Z-Wave has the lead in overall home automation products on the market, with about 250, compared to ZigBee’s 100 certified devices. In fact, behind its lead in home energy management, ZigBee’s second largest market is in industrial sensors — far from the home.

For more on this and other smart grid and energy-smart home technology coverage, check out my Green IT coverage at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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Image courtesy of Ytechblogs via Creative Commons license.

AT&T confirmed the deal with CEPro, and told them, “Xanboo’s monitoring services are a natural extension of our high-speed Internet, video and voice offerings and a good fit for our wireless services.” However, there’s no news yet on the financial terms of the deal. AT&T has been using Xanboo’s technology for years, and is listed as an investor on Xanboo’s investor page. Update: AT&T confirmed this deal with us.

Service providers, including telcos and cable operators, have discussed the potential of offering home automation for years, and in the past couple of years have added energy management into that mix. The idea is to leverage their communications networks that already provide video, voice and web service, to offer home security systems that use connected video cameras, and energy management services, which display the energy consumption of connected devices and appliances throughout the home.

Just how much of that money may be headed towards clean technology, Intel didn’t specify. Intel Capital has invested about $125 million in more than a dozen green startups to date, out of an estimated $6.2 billion invested it has invested in more than a thousand companies over the past two decades. But given that greentech outpaced IT and biotech to claim top spot for venture investment in the third quarter of 2009 — bringing the sector’s 2009 VC haul to some $4.85 billion — it seems likely that Intel and the other partners in this so-called “Invest in America Alliance” will be looking hard at green companies to help them gain returns on their investments.

A sampling of Intel’s green investments to date span the gamut from solar manufacturers and smart grid software and networking startups to companies making more efficient semiconductors and computing products. In January it participated in a $31 million round of funding for thin-film rechargeable battery maker Cymbet. In July it said it had invested $10 million in five startups — demand response aggregator CPower, WiMax-based smart grid networking software vendor Grid Net, home monitoring and energy management provider iControl, Irish electronics manufacturing efficiency specialist Powervation and “hybrid-core computing” developer Convey Computer.

The latter two investments highlight Intel’s ongoing interest in making computing more efficient, whether it be through advanced software or power-efficient semiconductor manufacturing — a task that shares technology with the making of solar cells. Intel led a $50 million round for its own solar spinout, SpectraWatt, in June 2008, and in July 2008 put $12.5 million into Voltaix, which makes chemicals and gases for the chip and solar cell fabrication industry, as well as €24 million (or $37.5 million) into German thin-film solar module maker Sulfurcell.

While Tuesday’s announcement was aimed squarely at the patriotic call of boosting domestic jobs and technology competitiveness, Intel hasn’t limited its greentech investments to America — the company has spread its wealth among green startups over four continents. In October 2008, it announced a $20 million investment into two Chinese companies — thin-film solar module maker Trony Solar and electricity storage maker NP Holdings Ltd. It has also invested in Taiwanese efficient display lighting maker Applied Green Light and Dubai-based home automation maker Pulse Technologies.

NIST is launching a new blog to open an industry dialogue around the “customer interface to the Smart Grid.” According to an opening post by George Arnold, NIST’s national coordinator for smart grid interoperability, one major question is whether the smart meter should be the primary gateway for home energy data, or whether the smart grid industry should be looking at a separate energy gateway for some or all of the home energy data that’s out there. Arnold dubs this the “Energy Services Interface,” but doesn’t get into more detail — though he does note that he’s interested in learning of “alternative architectures involving real-time (or near-real-time) electricity usage and price data” that could fit the bill.

Utilities are promising that the tens of millions of two-way communicating smart meters they’re installing across the country will eventually link up to home energy management systems, and the dozens of startups and corporate giants working on home energy interfaces are busy testing out these capabilities in pilot projects. But beyond those pilots, utilities aren’t turning on their smart meter-home communications just yet in any widespread way.

That slow pace is starting to get some pushback from regulators. California regulators have asked the state’s big investor-owned utilities to give all smart meter-enabled customers energy data by the end of 2010, and follow up with “near real-time” data by the end of 2011 — a timeline that could be challenging to meet. Questions of which standards will prevail in the so-called “home area network” field, as well as questions of smart meter data privacy and security, need to be solved to push these systems into the mainstream.

Of course, utilities are already transmitting data from smart meters back to their central offices in 15-minute to hourly increments, and that can be sent back to homeowners via Web interfaces or other means. But that data is being processed and delivered back to homeowners a day or more after the energy was actually consumed — useful for spotting wasteful behavior patterns, perhaps, but not for giving homeowners the real-time ability to spot and avert wasteful usage as it’s happening.

There are other ways to do that. Google’s PowerMeter energy interface is working with utilities and smart meter maker Itron, but is also partnering with in-home energy devices from Energy Inc. and AlertMe, which can be purchased and installed by homeowners. High-end home automation system maker Control4 makes a cheaper energy-specific product, available both through utilities and direct-to-consumer channels.

The problem with leaving the purchase of home energy tools to consumers, is cost — Energy Inc’s the Energy Detective costs about $200, while surveys indicate that most consumers are willing to pay little more than $50 or so to watch their energy use, if they’re willing to spend anything at all. There are less expensive ways for homeowners to energy-watch on their own dime — Blue Line Innovations has come out with its $99 PowerCost Monitor to beam signals from non-smart electricity meters into a home display unit, and is now selling it at Fry’s Electronics after years of selling through utilities. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show featured several new partnerships aimed at the consumer energy management market, including a General Electric partnership with digital home display maker OpenPeak. (For more on “Home Energy Management: Consumer Attitudes and Preferences,” check out GigaOM Pro).

One way to make energy management more affordable is to fold it into other home offerings, like smart appliances, home broadband services or home security systems. GE’s promised line of smart appliances — fridges, ovens and other household devices that can power down to meet homeowner or utility energy-saving needs — will be linked up with GE home energy management software and interface due sometime this year. Kleiner Perkins-backed startup iControl is working with broadband providers and home security firms to supply an energy management tool that could be bundled into the monthly fees that homeowners pay for those services. (See Broadband Service Providers Are About to Ride the Home Energy Wave, GigaOM Pro).

OpenPeak, beyond its GE partnership, is already supplying its home displays to telcos such as Verizon and Telefonica subsidiary O2, and OpenPeak CEO Dan Gittelman has hinted at a telco-linked energy monitoring offering to come (see Greentech Media). But, in a nod to the multiple pathways to home energy management, OpenPeak is also working with smart meter maker Itron.

In the meantime, emerging models for home energy management could add new options to the already bewildering array. Intel Labs has a concept gadget that could plug into a household outlet and monitor individual appliances’ energy use via their voltage signatures, and Apple has a patent for a home energy interface using Homeplug power line communications to carry energy data.

The NIST blog, hosted with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, will be open to all interested participants through Friday, March 12, with the discussion to be framed around three central questions: Architectural questions from Feb. 23 to March 1; questions concerning data access and ownership from March 2 to March 7, and questions on data communications standards for consumer appliances and other smart grid-enabled devices from March 8 to March 12. To participate, check out NIST’s smart grid collaboration site, or send emails to smartgrid@ostp.gov.

Image courtesy of numstead’s photostream Flickr Creative Commons.