University of Washington professor Shwetak Patel, best known for his work on developing sensor networks that can be used to monitor power use in buildings, has been named a MacArthur Fellow—the award commonly known as the “genius grant,” which comes with a $500,000 cash prize that recipients can use however they want.

Patel, 29, is well-known around the Pacific Northwest innovation community as a researcher, teacher, and entrepreneur—last year, his company Zensi was purchased by Belkin for undisclosed terms. Now, a lot more folks are going to learn about his work.

There’s a bit of theater involved in the MacArthur Fellow awards. Winners are nominated without their knowledge by someone who is asked to serve as one of the award’s rotating board of nominators. If all goes as planned, winners don’t know they’re even up for consideration until someone from the foundation calls to deliver the news. (Patel was nominated by Henry Levy, chairman of the UW’s computer science and engineering department.) The money is paid out quarterly over five years.

In July, Patel was also named a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, after being nominated by the university. That honor noted that Patel’s sensor research was being used not just for energy efficiency, but also in “elder care, home safety, and the creation of new approaches for natural user interfaces.”

Patel was traveling as the awards were announced and couldn’t be reached for any comment. Ed Lazowska, the UW’s Bill and Melinda Gates chairman of computer science and engineering, called Patel “an incredibly creative young person” and “the sweetest guy in the world.” Patel works jointly for the computer science and electrical engineering departments, and leads the school’s Ubiquitous Computing Lab.

“The ‘sustainability sensing’ that Shwetak is doing will have huge impact. You can determine exactly how much power each device in your home is consuming, from a single inexpensive device that you plug into any wall outlet,” Lazowska wrote in an email tonight. “He also has extremely low power sensors whose batteries can last for decades—you can toss a few under your refrigerator and it alerts you if your ice maker starts leaking on your hardwood floor, before damage is done.”

As Jeremy Jaech recently wrote in an Xconomy guest column, “Patel’s sensors are hidden inside a wall or under a water heater to detect and alert a homeowner, or an insurance company, when a sensor detects water leaks, fire or carbon monoxide. These sensors will be able to save the lives of many homeowners, and save insurers hundreds of millions of dollars; water damage claims now surpass fire claims and natural disasters and are very expensive to settle.”

This is the second MacArthur Fellow connected to the UW’s computer science and engineering department—Lazowska notes that Yoky Matsuoka was named a fellow in 2007 for her work in neurorobotics.

Here’s a video from the MacArthur Foundation about Patel, which is from this profile page about him.

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Conservation is a big deal in California. While per capita energy usage has climbed approximately 50 percent from 1975 to 2005, according to presentations by former California Energy Commissioner Arthur Rosenfeld, California managed to keep the growth of energy consumption at about  2 percent per capita over the same period—largely by requiring aggressive energy conservation measures.

As part of that overall conservation push, San Diego Gas & Electric convened its fifth annual SDG&E Energy Showcase to recognize their customers’ biggest success stories at reducing energy waste. For example, by installing LED lighting, sophisticated refrigeration controls, and taking other conservation measures, Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) cut its electricity consumption by 5,200,000 kilowatt hours a year—or about 28 percent—and estimates it will save about $4 million in reduced energy costs over five years. And it won’t take forever to recoup its upfront investment in energy savings. The company, which provides laboratory equipment and supplies for biotech labs, also got $724,526 in rebates and incentives from SDG&E to do the energy efficiency work.

As part of its showcase, SDG&E also holds an exhibition for the companies that provide the products and services that help SDG&E customers reduce their energy costs.

“We want to make sure [energy conservation successes] are visible to our customers,” says Mark Gaines, director of energy efficiency and demand-response programs at SDG&E, one of two utilities that are owned and operated (and generate about half the revenue) by San Diego-based Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE). Gaines says SDG&E doesn’t certify the individual companies that provide energy efficiency services. Rather, he says, “We certify the technology, so we have a list of technologies that are available for rebates.”

More than 70 companies registered as exhibitors, and there was a strong showing by companies that specialize in … Next Page »

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Zensi, an energy monitoring startup co-founded by University of Washington assistant professor Shwetak Patel, has been acquired by Belkin, the computer hardware and wireless company based in the Los Angeles area. Financial terms of the cash deal weren’t given. The news was reported earlier today by CNET.

Patel co-founded Zensi in 2008 while he was in graduate school at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, but he has continued to develop the technology at UW as a faculty member in computer science & engineering and electrical engineering. The company’s technology includes sensors that you plug into a wall outlet to measure the amount of electricity used by each appliance or device in a home. Zensi’s similar systems for water, gas, and ventilation—and software to run it all—could help people keep better track of their home energy and resource use, and ultimately reduce it.

Zensi was based in Atlanta and Boston, but the technology was licensed from UW and Georgia Tech. To hear Patel talk, this is just the beginning for using software help consumers better conserve energy. “This puts UW on the map as a premier place for energy work in the residential space,” says Patel. He adds that Zensi is one of the first examples of a residential energy monitoring company getting acquired for cash. The acquisition should speed up the process of making Zensi’s technology widely available to consumers. Zensi was looking to close a round of venture capital earlier this year, but decided to go the acquisition route when multiple bidders appeared, Patel says.

Indeed, the residential energy monitoring sector seems to be heating up all around, with big companies like Intel, Microsoft, Google, and even Apple unveiling new products in the past year. (Intel’s most recent offering looks a lot like Zensi’s, in fact.)

Patel’s fellow co-founders include Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech, Matt Reynolds of Duke University, and CEO Kevin Ashton, who was based in Boston and has joined Belkin as general manager of the company’s new Conserve business unit. Belkin says to expect some new energy management products later this year.

As for Patel (who’s in his late 20s), now that he’s made his “big splash” in energy, he says he’s working in other areas, such as health-monitoring technologies. An example might be a mobile phone that can do X-rays in the field, he says. Will he work on another startup? “I imagine I will again,” he says.

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It may be one of the great untold success stories of the Seattle technology scene. For the past decade, R.W. Beck, an engineering and business consulting firm, has been quietly making a name for itself in key technical areas like energy and water management.

Now the Seattle-based firm with 550 employees is becoming part of the closely guarded empire of SAIC (NYSE: SAI), the government contractor also known as Science Applications International Corporation. The companies did not disclose financial terms under the agreement they announced two weeks ago. But Xconomy has learned from a source familiar with the deal that the price was $155 million.

That amounts to 1.5 percent of SAIC’s $10.1 billion in annual revenue, and it seems unlikely SAIC will interpret R.W. Beck’s price tag as a “material event” requiring disclosure. Still, at $155 million, the deal represents one of the biggest acquisitions—if not the biggest—of a Seattle-area firm since Bellevue, WA-based SnapIn Software was bought by Nuance for $180 million last summer.

Even though SAIC’s core business is contract research and engineering, R.W. Beck’s focus on energy and water infrastructure represents a somewhat unusual foray into civil engineering for the San Diego conglomerate, which generates most of its revenue from defense and intelligence contracts. (A more characteristic deal for SAIC was last week’s acquisition of Atlan, a cybersecurity product testing firm based in McLean, VA, that specializes in validating cryptographic modules, including software and hardware components, to meet federal standards.)

If nothing else, though, SAIC has been extraordinarily adept at catching the big waves in government contracting—and right now, energy is huge. One of the biggest clues to SAIC’s plans for R.W. Beck was a contract that my colleague Bruce Bigelow noted in February, which basically pre-qualifies SAIC to compete for energy conservation contracts throughout the federal government.

Another noteworthy energy-related deal that SAIC landed was a $14.9 million contract to develop economical methods for making JP-8 grade jet fuel from algae. It turns out the Pentagon is interested in developing alternative sources for all that jet fuel that U.S. military aircraft use.

When I reached R.W. Beck president and CEO Russ Stepp last week, he said the deal with SAIC is expected to close on August 1. He had no comment on its size, but did speak freely about what the deal means to both sides.

First of all, the acquisition does not mean R.W. Beck employees will be relocating en masse to San Diego, nor will there be downsizing of the firm’s business operations, Stepp says. Most employees … Next Page »

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Most of us want to help curb global warming, but the tricky part can be how to do our part without splurging on a shiny new Prius or some other expensive measure. Vermont’s Brighter Planet has spent the last few years building a business around providing products and services that help people and businesses cut down on their carbon emissions without breaking the bank. The startup is now close to launching a social Web application aimed at those of us who want to take steps to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we’re responsible for emitting into the atmosphere.

I got an early look at the new app while visiting the home office of Brighter Planet in Middlebury, VT (an idyllic New England town that is home to Middlebury College and, less prominently, yours truly during weeks while I’m not working in the Boston area.) Patti Prairie, the company’s CEO, tells me that her technical team led by chief technology officer Adam Rubin has been working late nights in order to introduce a closed beta version of the app sometime next week. After the firm gets feedback from initial users, Rubin says, a public version will likely be launched in the next three or four weeks.

Brighter Planet is known mostly for its green credit and check cards issued by Bank of America. The Brighter Planet Visa cards enable consumers to apply the points they accumulate through everyday use of their cards toward the purchase of carbon offsets that fund renewable energy projects. The new Web app could vastly expand Brighter Planet’s business, which generates revenue by acquiring carbon offsets at wholesale prices and selling the offsets to consumers and businesses at a retail rate, Prairie says. The Web app could encourage more people to conserve, buy the firm’s carbon offsets, and drive up the number of people who use its credit and check cards. There are now tens of thousands of Brighter Planet cardholders.

“One of the things that we had talked about is that our goal is to make everyone an environmentalist,” Prairie says. “We already have 100,000 customers that have done something about their carbon footprint through our products and services, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility through this [new Web] capability to reach millions of Americans.”

From what I can tell through a little test-driving, Brighter Planet’s Web app enables people to calculate their annual carbon emissions and measure their progress to reduce that footprint more thoroughly than other apps and carbon-footprint calculators online. That level of customization may set the firm’s app apart from what’s offered on green social networking sites such as Carbonrally.com, Edenbee.com, and others that are cultivating online communities and motivating them to live green.

With Brighter Planet’s new Web app, users can … Next Page »

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Lots of creative entrepreneurs are popping up in the Northwest cleantech business, so we invited three of them to explain their ideas at our upcoming Xconomy Forum, The Rise of Cleantech in the Northwest, on March 26. These new special guests will offer up expertise in biofuels, energy storage, and conservation—some of the region’s key strengths we identified last week in our lists of alternative energy players here in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia.

The forum will still feature the stimulating panel discussion that we announced previously with Michael Butler, Jeremy Jaech, Jesse Berst, Mark Aggar, and Linden Rhoads. The added trio of speakers will come immediately after the panel, introducing the audience to their business ideas in quick 2-minute bursts just before the networking portion of the evening. The new special guests are:

—Kirt Montague, CEO of Mercer Island-based Prometheus Energy. This company uses proprietary technology to take methane gas from municipal landfills, cow manure, and coalbeds, and turn it into liquid natural gas fuel.

—Chris Wheaton, chief operating officer of Seattle-based EnerG2. This University of Washington spinout company is developing novel materials to help increase the efficiency of storing energy from hydrogen and solar cells, and even to make “ultracapacitors.” Greg got the exclusive story for Xconomy in November when this company raised $8.5 million from OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital Management.

—David Grieger, CEO of Seattle-based Vu1. Grieger, the former chief marketing officer for Russell Investments in Tacoma, joined his current company in January. Vu1, pronounced like View One, aims to make a new type of light bulb that has the energy efficiency of a fluorescent bulb without containing mercury that can contaminate landfills.

The forum will start at 6:30 pm (doors open at 6 pm) on March 26, at the offices of K&L Gates at 925 Fourth Avenue, Suite 2900, in downtown Seatle. As a reminder, the discounted early-bird registration price of $95 expires this Thursday, March 12. We look forward to seeing many of the regular Xconomy readers there, as well as plenty of new faces.

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Boston-based EnerNOC, which pays organizations to join “demand response” pools whose members agree to cut back on power usage during times of peak electrical demand, said today that it has added a major new partner: the State of Rhode Island. Under a five-year contract, EnerNOC will add city, town, and government-related buildings in Rhode Island to its demand response pool for the New England region. “As Rhode Island is facing skyrocketing energy costs and consumers are being asked to pay more for electricity, reducing non-essential consumption is an important component of our commitment to support reliable, cost-effective and environmentally sustainable energy solutions,” Rhode Island Governor Donald L. Carcieiri said in a statement about the agreement.

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