Seattle-based Verdiem is announcing today a new partnership with San Jose, CA-based Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO). Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will market and sell Verdiem’s energy management software for PCs and networked devices under Cisco’s “EnergyWise Orchestrator” brand, through its worldwide distribution network. Financial details weren’t given, but it’s an original equipment manufacturing deal, so Verdiem’s software will be built into Cisco’s products—which could make it a very promising sales strategy for Verdiem.

Verdiem makes software to help big companies, government agencies, and universities control and manage energy usage by PCs on their network. The software includes features like automatically turning off computers when they’re not in use, and turning them back on when they need to install software updates. It also includes sophisticated dashboards for monitoring energy use. The partnership with Cisco extends Verdiem’s reach to other networked devices such as Cisco IP phones, wireless access points, and edge switches.

“Extending the capabilities of Verdiem’s enterprise platform for PC power management, Cisco and Verdiem are delivering to market the first energy management solution for PCs and networked devices,” said Jeremy Jaech, Verdiem’s CEO, in a statement. Jaech added that the agreement will give businesses and organizations “a trusted, holistic solution to measure, manage and monitor both their energy consumption and carbon footprint.”

Verdiem was founded in 2001 and is venture backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and NCD Investors, among others. Jaech, the co-founder of Aldus, Visio, and Trumba, joined the company in late 2008. Last summer, Verdiem said more than 300 corporations, government agencies, and universities had used its software, and had slashed their PC energy costs by 30 to 60 percent.

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It’s another win for the Bay Area’s formidable social networking cluster. Brighter Planet, a provider of online and offline products that aim to help people and businesses reduce their carbon footprints, is downsizing its Vermont offices and expanding in San Francisco, company CEO Pattie Prairie says.

The startup, which was formed by students and a faculty member at Vermont’s prestigious Middlebury College in 2006, is moving out of its headquarters in Middlebury, VT, at the expiration of its office lease this month, Prairie says. The CEO and the company controller plan to stay in the Green Mountain state in a smaller office just south of Burlington, but more and more employees, many of whom are Middlebury College alumni, are moving to the firm’s San Francisco office. News about the firm’s move to San Francisco first appeared late last month in Middlebury’s Addison County Independent newspaper.

Brighter Planet has found that California has a more fertile business landscape than Vermont’s rolling green hills. The firm, which launched a social Web app for the environmentally conscious set last year, is following in the footsteps of other social Web firms—most notably Facebook and Twitter—that are based in the Golden State. California is also one of the most progressive states in taking measures to combat climate change, enacting some of the strictest rules in the U.S. on minimum gas mileage for automobiles and carbon dioxide emissions.

While living “green” in Vermont is more the norm than a lifestyle choice, it almost goes without saying that the small state cannot compete with the scale of sustainability-oriented business activity in California. For Brighter Planet, having a base of operations in San Francisco also brings it closer to a large number of potential customers. according to Prairie. The company started out by supporting Brighter Planet-branded Bank of America … Next Page »

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John Gilleland’s first day on the job was a little different from most people’s. The nuclear physicist showed up at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA, and sat down at the conference table with his new boss, CEO Nathan Myhrvold, and another, shall we say prominent, techie.

“The guy on my left looked familiar,” Gilleland says. “It was Bill Gates.”

Gilleland had been on the job for all of three minutes when Myhrvold said jokingly, “John, you’re late on your deliverables.”

That was back in December 2006. Gilleland is now CEO of TerraPower, the spinoff from Intellectual Ventures that is focused on creating a fundamentally new kind of nuclear reactor. It’s the invention firm’s biggest research project to date, spinning out as a separate entity in the fall of 2008 with 30-some staff and untold amounts of funding from Gates and other investors. It is a project that Intellectual Ventures likes to cite as a potentially transformative, homegrown invention.

The basic idea is to create a reactor that needs only a small amount of enriched uranium to get started, and then uses depleted uranium (spent fuel) or natural, unenriched uranium to produce the nuclear-fission reactions necessary to generate power for 60 years or more without refueling. The design is called a traveling wave reactor, and the idea dates back to the early 1990s. If it works, the key benefits would be cheaper power, much more plentiful fuel, more efficient nuclear waste disposal, and less risk of nuclear proliferation.

Gates has been gushing about the project as of late. He mentioned TerraPower prominently in his talk at the TED conference in California last month, calling out the proposed reactor design as a possible “miracle” innovation in the effort to provide clean energy to more of the world’s population without increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere. (Nuclear power provides about 20 percent of the electricity in the U.S.)

Gilleland (see photo, left) has been given the keys to Gates and Myhrvold’s nuclear kingdom for good reason. Previously, he co-founded and led Archimedes Technology Group, which developed improved techniques for cleaning up nuclear weapons waste, among other things. Before that, he was chief scientist and vice president of energy programs at Bechtel, and U.S. managing director of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program for fusion energy, and he spent 16 years at General Atomics doing fusion research.

The traveling wave reactor is certainly an intriguing idea, and one that could be a true breakthrough. But the question, skeptics say, is whether it can be made to really work—and how long that will take. The idea is that the reactor makes its own fuel and uses it as it goes along: the neutrons emitted by a small amount of enriched uranium convert depleted uranium into plutonium, which splits to produce energy and also emits more neutrons that continue to “breed” new fuel. There is no precedent for TerraPower’s particular design, and the project faces some major challenges—technical, business, and regulatory. So far the physics has only been tested in computer simulations, albeit using the most advanced supercomputers available. (It’s worth mentioning that only someone like Gates could afford to fund this and risk having it not work—which is exactly why Myhrvold sees the need for an “invention capital” industry.)

On the plus side, the environment for nuclear power development is more promising … Next Page »

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There’s no better way to kick off a Seattle visit than to have a two-hour meeting with Bill Gates. That was Arun Majumdar’s morning yesterday.

The director of ARPA-E, the new $400 million research agency within the U.S. Department of Energy, was on tour to promote novel energy R&D programs and get feedback from innovators across the country. He and Gates had an in-depth discussion about energy and climate change—some of the greatest problems facing humanity, and what Majumdar called “the challenge of our lifetime.” Earlier this week, Gates addressed these same points in his talk at the TED conference in California, calling for very fast-paced “miracle” innovations to increase energy efficiency and production while reducing carbon emissions.

It sounds like Gates and Majumdar are very much on the same page. Before being appointed to lead ARPA-E, where he reports to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Majumdar was a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at UC Berkeley, and also led research programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His expertise includes energy conversion, transport, and storage, from the nano-scale level to large energy systems.

After his meeting with Gates yesterday, Majumdar convened a group of about a dozen local energy entrepreneurs and investors, including Lars Johansson and Byron McCann of Northwest Energy Angels, Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners and the UW Center for Commercialization, Alla Weinstein of Principle Power, Rick Luebbe of EnerG2, Christina Lomasney of Modumetal, Jill Watz of Vulcan Capital, Niki Parekh of Bio Architecture Lab, Dan Rosen from Alliance of Angels, Chris Tagge of LivinGreen Materials, David Kaplan from V2Green (GridPoint), and Daniel Malarkey of the Washington State Department of Commerce.

Those I talked to after the meeting were very positive. They said Majumdar stressed the importance of risk-taking in R&D, and sought feedback from local leaders on things like who the customer will be for ARPA-E projects. This is a critical issue. The whole effort is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has the Department of Defense as its main customer, and falls under a centralized policy. In the case of ARPA-E, however, Majumdar is navigating a discontinuous set of customers—essentially the entire energy market.

One key takeaway from the entrepreneur meeting was that the U.S. government needs to create a technology “pull” as well as a push. Majumdar noted in the meeting—as he also did in a recent presentation to Congress—that government is one of the largest consumers of energy (think buildings, transportation, and so on). So ARPA-E needs to use that power to create adoption and purchasing standards, as local leaders discussed with Majumdar.

“The U.S. government can come back and say, ‘We’re going to create a buying policy,’ and only buy production processes that have [a higher] level of efficiency,” says Lomasney from Modumetal, a Seattle-based nanotech startup that hopes to reinvent the metals industry. “ARPA-E has to supply the technology, but it also has to be the first adopter.”

Majumdar also gave a public talk at the University of Washington yesterday, hosted by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. The theme was to address the “three Sputniks of … Next Page »

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Quite a few clean energy companies around Boston have a stake in the outcome of the international climate change talks that start this week in Copenhagen, Denmark. If nations set more aggressive goals for greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, after all, they’ll have a greater need for technologies to reduce their carbon emissions.

But only one local cleantech executive, as far as Xconomy can determine, is actually going to Scandinavia to participate in the discussions. It’s Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Boston-Power, which makes green, longer-lasting batteries for HP laptops and other devices.

As a member of a non-governmental initiative called The Road to Copenhagen, Lampe-Onnerud attended climate change discussions in Brussels, Belgium in two years ago and Oslo, Norway, last year. She’s now heading to her native Sweden to take part in the group’s final conference in Malmö, just across the Oresund Strait from Copenhagen, on December 8 and 9.

Boston-Power is one of 13 corporate sponsors of the Road to Copenhagen meeting, alongside much larger companies such as Cargill, Procter & Gamble, and Whirlpool. Lampe-Onnerud, who trained as a chemist, says her most important job at the Malmö meeting will be to “bring some honesty to the scientific debate” around different options for dealing with climate change. “I have made it one of my personal and professional commitments to be a citizen of the Earth, and this is something I know something about, so I think I should volunteer some time,” she says.

The Road to Copenhagen group—an initiative of the Club de Madrid, a group of former presidents and prime ministers—consists largely of politicians, business leaders, and scientists who are not part of the formal negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. (That meeting starts today in Copenhagen and continues through December 18.) The group plans to develop a communiqué that will be delivered to representatives at the UN meeting. Its last communiqué, issued just before the 2008 UN climate change meeting in Poznań, Poland, called for a halt to further increases in greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2020 and a 50 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2050—goals that are far more ambitious than the emissions caps set out by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Developing a more aggressive, legally binding treaty to take the place of the Kyoto accord—which expires in 2012—was the original goal for the Copenhagen conference. But the U.S. Congress’s failure to pass energy legislation this fall committing the United States to emissions reductions means that President Obama is going to Copenhagen largely empty-handed. Many other nations have also been dragging their feet on climate legislation. In recent days, both the U.S. and China, the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases, have set informal reductions targets, but it’s too late for Copenhagen: UN negotiators have already scaled back their goals for the meeting to achieving an interim pact, with more negotiations over a binding agreement to follow in 2010.

Still, Lampe-Onnerud is upbeat (as always—she is perhaps Boston’s most cheerful technology CEO). “I know that there is disappointment in the setup [for Copenhagen], but I am going because I still think the time is now,” she says. “We have to take action, because the climate change threat is more severe than many want to depict. I will go in with a sense of urgency, and with the discipline of a measurable, milestone-driven agenda.”

One item on Lampe-Onnerud’s agenda will be to try to quash schemes for large-scale climate modification to dampen or … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Verdiem has some encouraging news today from around the country—and its own backyard. The maker of energy-saving software for personal computers is announcing results from trials performed by the city governments of Seattle, Chicago, and Honolulu. These customers have been using Verdiem’s product over a period of months to a year, in an effort to make their PCs smarter about shutting down when they’re not being used, while also allowing the computers to do things like turn back on when software patches need to be installed.

Verdiem’s PC software package, called Surveyor, now includes a dashboard feature, also announced today, which lets corporate and government customers monitor PC energy costs and carbon emission savings more effectively through the use of charts and graphs.

Energy costs and emissions from PCs are surprisingly high, mainly because there are so many of them (about a billion worldwide). According to a 2008 report from the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, PCs account for more than 30 percent of all IT energy costs—more than servers, data centers, or printers. What’s more, companies, organizations, and individuals waste some $4 billion a year by leaving PCs, laptops, and monitors on when they’re not being used.

All three cities involved with the Verdiem announcement reported significant PC energy savings:

—The City of Seattle has deployed Verdiem’s software on more than 8,000 PCs across 30-plus city departments, and reduced PC energy consumption by some 35 percent. “The results we are achieving with Seattle-based Verdiem in reducing the City’s PC energy consumption demonstrate, in a very tangible way, how we can collectively save on energy costs and protect our planet,” said Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels in a statement.

—The City of Chicago started using Verdiem’s software in February of this year, and says it has reduced its PC energy consumption by 37 percent and has eliminated more than 350,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.

—The City of Honolulu deployed the software on 1,700 PCs starting in July 2008, and saved the city $30 per PC per year, reducing PC energy costs by more than 30 percent. Honolulu has the highest energy rates in the country (30 cents per kilowatt-hour), so its city government has extra incentive to reduce its electricity consumption.

Verdiem was founded in 2001 and is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and NCD Investors, among others. It appears to be moving full steam ahead under new leadership: the company announced its incoming CEO, Jeremy Jaech, six months ago. Jaech was the co-founder of software giants Aldus and Visio, and was also involved with Trumba, a Seattle startup. When he took the helm of Verdiem back in December, he told me that big companies and other organizations are where the real energy and emissions savings are—and where Verdiem’s biggest opportunities lie. “It’s a simple concept with a quick ROI,” Jaech said. “Companies are starting to get really interested.”

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There’s a saying in sports that if you don’t notice the referees, they’re doing a great job. The same goes for offensive linemen in football, tech support in big companies…and Kent, WA-based Naverus when you’re flying in an airplane. Sure, we in the media notice companies like Naverus when they raise $4 million in venture funding in a tough climate for follow-on financing (announced last Friday). But, truth be told, we’ve had our eye on this interesting aircraft-navigation tech company for a while now.

Naverus was founded in 2003 by a pair of Alaska Airlines pilots, Steve Fulton and Hal Andersen, and former Coinstar CEO Dan Gerrity. The idea was to commercialize an emerging technique known as “required navigation performance” (RNP), which harnesses advanced avionics and GPS technology to guide airplanes’ flight paths on approaches and departures in such a precise way as to do away with ground-based navigation—and what’s more, make flight paths faster and more fuel-efficient, and reduce carbon emissions to boot. The technique was originally developed to help planes take off and land at Juneau International Airport and other remote locations where pilots have to deal with dangerous weather conditions and mountains.

It’s all part of a broader shift in aviation practices called Performance-based Navigation, which uses cutting-edge sensors, communications equipment, and sophisticated flight computers, to work out airplanes’ flight paths—an area that Naverus contributes to across the board. The company has been part of a “fundamental transformation of how air navigation takes place,” says Dottie Hall, chief marketing officer at Naverus. Hall would know; she was a founding vice president of Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, NM, and has owned and managed touring operations of vintage airplanes, including her own 1950s-era Lockheed Constellation. And yes, she has her pilot’s license. (Hall was also a very early employee at Microsoft in the late 1970s, but that’s another story.)

To give some idea of the benefits of Naverus’s technology, Hall points out that Southwest Airlines, a flagship customer, saves on the order of one minute per flight using RNP—and that translates into about 155,000 tons of carbon dioxide saved per year. Fuel savings are in the ballpark of … Next Page »

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Kent, WA-based Naverus, a maker of novel navigation software for airlines, announced today it has raised $4 million in funding led by Foundation Capital and East Peak Partners. Naverus has developed a performance-based navigation system, which provides precise flight paths that are faster and more fuel-efficient and reduce carbon emissions. The company has airline customers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and China.

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Updated Dec. 3 with comments from Ed Lazowska (see below): Seattle-based Verdiem, a cleantech-meets-computing firm, announced its new chief executive today. He is Jeremy Jaech, the co-founder of software powerhouses Aldus and Visio, a University of Washington alum, and a certified tech-entrepreneur giant of the Northwest. I’ve had my eye on Verdiem as an interesting company to watch, and spoke with Jaech by phone this afternoon to get his thoughts on his new position (he’s in New York for customer meetings).

“I’m kind of an old guy in this business,” Jaech says. Earlier this year, he stepped down as CEO of the Seattle online startup Trumba, which he says was “downsized to profitability.” What got him excited about Verdiem was three things. First, the company’s concept—software to monitor energy consumption and turn off computers when they’re not being used—is simple and powerful. “This is a really easy [return on investment] argument with large organizations,” he says. “It’s a simple concept with a quick ROI.” Second, the technology is mature and based on a fair bit of research. “It’s a simple concept, but hard to do right,” he says. And third, he says, “the political winds are shifted. They’re at the company’s back now.” With the incoming Obama Administration, he says, companies are more concerned with going green, and in that regard will move more in the direction of European companies.

A quick snapshot of the problem, and the opportunity: something like 60 percent of personal computers are left on 24 hours a day. Companies could save $30 to $60 per PC and monitor per year, if they shut them down for the roughly two-thirds of the time they’re not in use, says Jaech. Meanwhile, the average computer puts out about 1000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year. What’s more, IT accounts for a sizeable and fast-growing chunk of total energy usage around the world—roughly 4 percent, based on a 2006 EPA report.

So what’s unique about Verdiem’s product? Jaech says it’s the only software out there completely focused on managing, measuring, and reporting the energy consumption of corporate IT. That includes dealing with “troublesome computers”—those that won’t turn off or won’t turn back on, which is a technical issue. Verdiem also provides free software to consumers for personal computers; that tool has about 175,000 users.

I asked Jaech about his goals as an incoming CEO in this field. “A lot of my focus right now is executing on what we already have,” he says. Verdiem’s product is “mature, it works, customers like it. Big companies—that’s where the energy savings are, and a lot of [carbon dioxide] emissions can be saved.” Most of Verdiem’s corporate customers have 10,000 computers or more, he says. As for Verdiem itself, it has about 55 employees and has had 300 percent revenue growth in the past year, Jaech says.

On selling Verdiem’s product to corporations, he says, “Oftentimes, IT doesn’t care that much about energy savings on their own. It’s pressure from a C-level executive, or it comes through facilities people who worry about the energy bill. You have to convince IT that this isn’t going to make their job harder, it makes it easier. The place to start is outside of the IT organization…It doesn’t require a change in user behavior. That’s pretty easy. We have something for them that’s a quick win, and relatively painless. As more things are connected to the network, the environment is very receptive to thinking about IT energy savings.”

On that note, I asked Jaech for some broader thoughts on the future of cleantech and IT. “The reception we get is quite remarkable,” he says. “Companies are starting to create C-level positions, like chief sustainability officer, that are responsible for the carbon footprint of the company…They want to be a step ahead of the government, and a lot of it starts with measurement.” He adds, “Companies are starting to get really interested.”

Reached for comment on Jaech’s appointment, Ed Lazowska of the UW’s computer science and engineering department writes, “Jeremy is arguably the most successful serial software entrepreneur in Seattle. He’s smart. He’s technical. He’s insightful. And he’s a genuinely good human being…He brings out the best in people.”

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Car Exhaust Could Be Turned Back to Power

Several cars companies, including General Motors, are looking for ways to turn the heat that comes out of a car’s tailpipe into electricity that can be used to power systems in the car and improve gas mileage. The Discovery Channel reports that researchers are working on thermoelectric technology, which converts heat to electricity, to meet a challenge from the U.S. Department of Energy. A Chevy Suburban produces 15 kilowatts of exhaust heat energy during city driving, enough to power three or four air conditioners.

21 Cities to Measure Carbon Footprints

In a step toward managing their emissions, 21 cities, including New York, Las Vegas, and Denver, will measure their carbon footprints using a system many corporations use. Reuters says the cities will gather data on municipal buildings, fire and police departments, and the like, to see how much carbon city government produces. They’ll also assess emissions for the whole city. The hope is that cleantech companies will use the data to sell carbon-cutting services in the cities.

Wireless Data Use on the Rise

The market for wireless data is growing, with a revenue increase of 40 percent between the second quarter of 2007 and that of 2008, says a report from Chetan Sharma Consulting. Spending reached $8.2 billion for the quarter, driven by flat-rate plans, increased 3G coverage, and the iPhone. According to GigaOm, the report shows that the U.S. is moving toward ubiquitous broadband but still has a way to go.

Motorola Pushes for Use of White Space

Motorola is hoping the Federal Communications Commission will soon approve the use of unused portions of the television broadcast spectrum – frequencies known as “white space” – to deliver high-speed broadband to mobile devices. The New York Times reports that the company has been working with the FCC to test a system that checks locations for portions of the airwaves that aren’t being used, then tunes a mobile device to those portions. Motorola argues that this technology virtually eliminates that chance of interference with broadcasters, one of the sticking points over the use of white space.

Robots Test Air Quality Over Beijing

A researcher from the University of California, San Diego, is using unmanned aerial vehicles to gather data on pollution during the Beijing Olympics. Atmospheric scientist V. Ram Ramanathan tells Wired that China’s efforts to curb pollution during the Olympics, by reducing the use of cars and curbing industrial activity by as much as 30 percent, provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study how a sudden drop in particulate emissions affects a large region of the atmosphere.

Passport Chips Not Secure, Hackers Warn

A number of governments are implanting radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into passports as a way of making them more secure. But a pair of researchers at last week’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas showed the Wall Street Journal’s Business Technology Blog that they could hack into the chips and change the data. One said it took about four hours to break the encryption key and get the data contained in a passport chip.

Anthrax Attack Spurred New Branch of Science

If Bruce Ivins, the scientist who killed himself last month as the FBI was closing in, was indeed the person who mailed deadly anthrax in 2001, he at least left a legacy that could help the nation in a future emergency, the Associated Press reports. The attacks spurred a new branch of science, microbial forensics. Investigators used it to identify the unique genetic signature of the spores from the attack and trace them back to a specific flask, which they then linked to Ivins.

Using the Sun to Stay Cool

The U.S. Navy and a McDonald’s restaurant are testing a new solar-powered air conditioner, the Environmental News Network reports. The air conditioner, made by GreenCore of Rancho Cucamonga, CA, runs on a 170-watt solar panel and can either heat or cool a 600-sq-ft. room. It runs on direct current from the panel, avoiding the losses of converting to alternating current, and has a battery to keep it going when there’s no sun.

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I’ll admit it. The planet would be better off if you stopped reading this and shut down your computer. That’s because your desktop or laptop PC wastes roughly half the energy it consumes and puts out 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. Multiply that by something like a billion PCs worldwide, and you get the idea.

Enter Seattle-based Verdiem, a maker of energy-management software for businesses, founded in 2001. Today the company announced its release of an energy-monitoring tool for consumers, called Edison. You can download it for free, and it helps you keep track of your computer’s energy usage and optimize it based on your work schedule, power and standby settings, and so forth. The user interface shows you in real-time how much you’re saving in energy costs and carbon dioxide emissions. (So maybe you can feel a little less guilty for reading us now.)

A lot of companies and organizations, including Google and the Environmental Protection Agency, are getting into the green-computing trend. Round Rock, TX-based Dell has just declared that its computer-making operations have become carbon neutral, ahead of schedule. And as for today’s consumer software release, Verdiem is partnering with Microsoft—Edison runs only on Windows-based operating systems—and the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

If 1 percent of all PCs used Edison, said Verdiem CEO Kevin Klustner in a statement, it could potentially reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 7 billion pounds, which is equivalent to taking more than half a million cars off the road. CNET has a nice piece today about taking Verdiem’s new tool for a spin. The writer tried it for four hours and reports that she would be on track to save $30.85 on her power bill and 472.52 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. Modest savings, to be sure, but every little bit helps.

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