Lexington, MA-based FirstFuel Software is among a crop of experimental energy projects picked to help the Department of Defense curb its energy output across military installations, the company announced yesterday. The startup was one of 27 teams selected as part of the DoD’s Installation Energy Test Bed initiative, a program designed to help emerging energy technologies get to market quicker while also slicing the roughly $4 billion a year the department spends on energy across its 300,000 sites.

FirstFuel’s software enables customers to measure building energy output—and target effective efficiency upgrades—without ever setting foot on site. The technology uses a building’s address, a year’s worth of energy meter readings, satellite imaging, and weather patterns to conduct the audit remotely. CEO Swapnil Shah has previously stated that his company is targeting utilities and government agencies as customers because of their massive reach and their need to cut the costs of pricey on-site audits, which can run between $5,000 and $30,000 a pop. In this case, the FirstFuel technology will be tested out in a pilot of about 100 DoD buildings and then evaluated for use in more sites, said Shah.

The Installation Energy Test Bed program, founded in 2009 as part of the DoD’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program, has selected other technologies in the building management, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and energy storage arenas. Through the program, the government aims to take on some of the risk as one of the first users to validate the new technology, and “for those technologies that prove effective, DoD can go on to serve as an early customer, thereby helping create a market, as it did with aircraft, electronics, and the internet,” the Installation Energy Test Bed’s website explains. FirstFuel seems to be alongside some heavy hitters for the 2012 pool, which includes projects from 3M, Raytheon, Autodesk, and Honeywell.

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A Boston cleantech-software startup is making some noise today in a burgeoning market. Retroficiency announced it has raised $3.32 million in new financing led by Point Judith Capital. As part of the deal, the startup has acquired the energy efficiency division of Nexamp, a North Andover, MA-based solar power producer that is also backed by Point Judith.

Retroficiency appears to be growing, with several new hires also being announced today, including Hugh Gaasch, Paul Gagne, and Richard Huntley at the vice president level, and Karim Bibawi (from Nexamp) as chief operating officer.

The company started in 2009 and provides software as a service that helps real estate firms, energy service companies, and commercial property owners gauge the energy-cost impact of upgrading things like lighting systems and insulation. This is an alternative to site visits and energy audits, which can be expensive and slow. Retroficiency previously raised an $800,000 seed round from energy management firm World Energy (NASDAQ: XWES) and angel investors.

Retroficiency CEO and co-founder Bennett Fisher told me back in March that the market for commercial building retrofits was growing, and that this year and next would be important for the startup to gain traction with big customers.

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“Utilities have a big problem,” says Swapnil Shah, CEO and co-founder of Waltham, MA-based FirstFuel Software.

“They have a big pile of money they have to spend to achieve certain goals,” he continues. “If they don’t achieve it, they get penalized by the state.”

The goal is to increase home and commercial energy efficiency so that they don’t have to spend huge money building new power plants. And the “big pile of money” comes from a tax portion of utility bills that’s put aside to provide incentives to increase energy efficiency, says Shah. (That budget—across the roughly 30 states that participate—was $6.6 billion in 2010, more than double the $3.1 million pool from 2007.) About 40 percent of that budget on average goes to improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings, he says.

Utilities have been sending auditors to buildings to analyze the structure and energy use and recommend improvements, but that method is expensive, inconsistent, and not scalable across thousands of properties. It’s a particular problem for commercial buildings, which can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 to audit, compared to the $200 or so it takes to perform a residential energy audit, Shah says.

That’s where FirstFuel’s software comes in. The analytics engine just needs utilities to supply a building’s address and a year’s worth of energy consumption data, culled from the hourly meter readings at the buildings. FirstFuel pulls in hourly weather patterns from outside sources and uses GIS mapping and satellite imaging to determine a building’s physical attributes.

Using this information, the software creates detailed reports that show where exactly energy is going in a building, and can offer detailed recommendations on how to reduce energy consumption—either through changing behavior patterns in the buildings or retrofitting. All this is done without an auditor stepping foot in the building or installing any devices, which other energy monitoring technologies often rely on.

“It can analyze hundreds to thousands of buildings in the time it takes to do one on-site visit,” says Shah. “It makes it a very scalable service.”

FirstFuel’s data is reported via a portal that utilities and building managers log into, as a white label solution that is branded as the particular utility’s own. Utilities can see … Next Page »

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In her work at the University of Washington, Yoky Matsuoka spends time figuring out how to make the brain work directly with machines. In her startup work, she’s targeting something a lot less fancy-sounding: the home thermostat.

Matsuoka is vice president of technology at Nest, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup aiming to tackle energy efficiency by giving the ubiquitous wall-mounted thermostat a major overhaul. Nest’s device, detailed in these stories from The New York Times, Wired, and Forbes, adapts to its owners’ habits by tracking how they adjust their heat. It also uses motion sensors to detect whether anyone’s home, and gives owners data to track their energy use over time.

One passage from the Wired piece sheds some light on interesting adjustments that Matsuoka had to make to the device’s algorithms after testing with users.

It turned out that the Nest thermostat was actually being too aggressive in controlling the temperature for energy efficiency when nobody was home, making people feel like they were being forced into greener behavior rather than nudged.

“We’re actually trying to change the culture,” Matsuoka says. “If we just put a machine-learning device in people’s homes that changes the temperature without people understanding how it works, it’s never going to take off. We really had to understand how humans learn to live with a brand-new system.”

Nest’s co-founders led crucial work on the iPod and iPhone before starting Nest. Matsuoka, who was a 2007 MacArthur genius grant winner, also is a former head of innovation at Google. She’s on leave from the UW while working at Nest.

The startup is backed by top venture firms, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, and Lightspeed Ventures. Today’s reports say the company has raised in the neighborhood of $50 million.

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Worcester, MA-based World Energy Solutions (NASDAQ: XWES) said today it has acquired Northeast Energy Solutions, an energy efficiency firm based in Cromwell, CT. The purchase price is about $4.75 million in cash, stock, a promissory note, and potential earn-outs.

This is the second acquisition in as many months for World Energy, which has been moving strongly into the energy efficiency market. In September, the company bought the energy procurement business of Co-eXprise, an enterprise software firm. Back in March, World Energy said it had invested in a seed financing round for Retroficiency, a Boston-based energy-efficiency software startup.

World Energy specializes in energy management services, such as the demand response market, in which utilities pay factories, stores, and municipalities to curtail their energy use during peak demand times. The company is led by CEO Richard Domaleski.

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FirstFuel Software, a developer of energy auditing analytics technology for commercial buildings, announced today that it has nabbed $2.4 million in first round funding, led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power. The money will go to scaling and fueling customer adoption of FirstFuel’s software, which can profile the energy performance of buildings using data on electric consumption and building characteristics, without the need for an on-site audit.

Boston-based FirstFuel, formerly named iblogix, is led by serial entrepreneur Swapnil Shah, a founder of three IT companies that either went public or were acquired. The FirstFuel software offers recommendations to building managers to adjust their energy consumption practices for immediate savings, and suggests building retrofits to be performed by utilities. The company fits into Boston’s cluster of IT startups developing software geared at lowering energy consumption.

Recently, the Cambridge, MA-based Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (which I profiled last week) conducted an independent study of the accuracy of FirstFuel’s auditing technology, and found that it “has the potential to be a valuable engine for the large scale benchmarking of buildings and to identify energy-saving opportunities without on-site audits,” according to FirstFuel’s announcement today.

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Building owners and managers are often reluctant to adopt new energy efficiency technology because they doubt it will be worth the cost in the long run.

Nolan Browne, managing director of the Cambridge, MA-based (for now) Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, is on the same page.

“I fundamentally agree with them,” he says. “If we don’t prove it, why would they want to buy it? We need to prove that it will work or last 20 to 30 years and that the occupant in that building is going to be happy and productive. If not, then it’s a problem.”

His organization is in the process of retrofitting an old building in the South Boston waterfront section known as the Innovation District. The facility will serve as the center’s offices and a “living lab” for demonstrating and validating energy efficient building technologies.

“Our goal is to become recognized as premier global leader in sustainable energy field,” says Browne. And it hopes to promote economic development through the technology it commercializes, he says.

The Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE) is connected to the Munich-based Fraunhofer Society, an organization formed in 1949 and funded in part by the Marshall Plan to help spur economic recovery in post World War II through research projects that could benefit industry across the country.

Globally, Fraunhofer centers now perform research in a variety of arenas and have about 18,000 scientists and engineers, and a 1.66 billion euro annual research budget. They’re credited with having a role in the invention of things like MP3s and fat-free sausage, to name a few, says Browne. CSE was first formed in 2008 to collaborate with MIT on research in building technology and solar. It is part of a smattering of U.S.-based research centers known as Fraunhofer USA, an independent American 501c3 nonprofit focused on growing the U.S. economy through technology research and commercialization. The USA centers have different structures and non-profit charters than the German group, Browne says.

CSE—which launched with funding from National Grid and Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s the Renewable Energy Trust (now part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center)—works in a few different ways with industry partners. The CSE can be commissioned by companies who are in need new technology or modifications to their existing products, but don’t have the needed internal R&D capabilities. And CSE scientists can come up with an idea and develop the project in house and bring it to potential industry partners. Some of CSE’s projects are publicly funded, focusing on cleantech areas the government has deemed promising. It has attracted research funding from private donors and foundations.

For its South Boston project—dubbed the Building Technology Showcase—CSE will be installing materials and systems from a host of energy efficiency players (Browne wouldn’t name names) and collecting real-time data on how the products are working. The project is costing more than $20 million, and has the support from groups such as the U.S. Department of Commerce’s economic development agency, the city of Boston, MassCEC, the Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Economic Development, and Commonwealth Ventures, Browne says.

And it’s not just typical efficiency tools you might think of—like solar panels or energy use monitoring software that the CSE will be

… Next Page »

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Waltham, MA-based Tantaline, a developer of corrosion-resistant surface alloy technology, announced yesterday that it had pulled in $3.6 million in Series B financing, led by Harvard, MA-based Berwind Private Equity, and Danish firms Vaekstfonden and CC Holdings. Tantaline’s technology enables materials to achieve greater energy efficiency in high chemical, pressure, and temperature environments—for applications in the oil and gas, chemical processing, energy, pharmaceuticals, and mining industries. The company said the new investment will help it expand its markets and technical capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.

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Dangling a carrot in front of a stubborn mule might get it to prance, but energy customers can be tougher to motivate. Armed with an incentive program to encourage conservation, Efficiency 2.0 in New York thinks it has the right kind of lure to curb energy waste.

Our reliance on appliances, mobile gadgets, and computers continues to put pressure on the power grid. Creating motivation to change energy habits is central to Efficiency 2.0′s plan. With discount deals from retailers available to be earned, the company brings the appeal of credit card and air travel reward programs to the energy sector.

Founder Tom Scaramellino launched Efficiency 2.0′s personal energy efficiency rewards (PEER) program in 2009 as a way for utilities to coax residential and small business customers to reduce their energy usage. “We do a lot of the same stuff that American Express does with their loyalty program,” he says.

The PEER program asks customers to commit to energy saving habits such as turning off lights in unoccupied rooms, purchasing showerheads that reduce water flow, and installing solar panels to help power the home.

Scaramellino says PEER operates like a white-label Mint.com—a money management service, but for energy bills. Customers receive e-mail and direct-mail reports that are branded as materials from their utility providers, suggesting ways to better manage their energy usage. “We put folks on an energy savings plan,” he says. The program runs under the auspices … Next Page »

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Fairfield, CT-based GE (NYSE: GE) and four venture capital partners said today they plan to invest a total of $63 million in 10 cleantech companies developing energy-related concepts in solar, communications and software, and building efficiency.

The funding represents the second phase of a crowd-sourcing challenge, this time focused on “Powering Your Home,” that GE launched in January with four venture capital firms, Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Rockport Capital. With today’s announcement, the partners funding a $200 million pool for the “GE ecoimagination Challenge” have so far committed to invest $134 million in companies developing advances in home energy and power grid technologies

The recepients include cleantech companies in three Xconomy cities: Boston, San Francisco and San Diego. GE says its challenge has resulted in a total of 22 new commercial partnerships, as well as the acquisition of FMC-Tech, a smart grid technology company in Shannon, Ireland, that was among 12 companies that received funding in the first-round awards announced last year.

The amount of funding invested in individual companies was not disclosed. The companies are:

Ember, Boston, MA (Communications and software)

GMZ Energy, Waltham, MA (solar systems and services; co-investment with KPCB)

Hara, San Mateo, CA (Communications and software; co-investment with KPCB)

Nuventix, Austin, TX (Building efficiency)

On-Ramp Wireless, San Diego, CA (Communications and software)

Project Frog, San Francisco, CA (Building efficiency; co-investment with RockPort Capital)

SunRun, San Francisco, CA (Residential solar systems and services; co-investment with Foundation Capital)

Viridity Energy, Conshohocken, PA (Communications and software)

VPhase, Manchester, UK (Building efficiency)

WiTricity, Watertown, MA (Communications and software)

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Votes are in for the second class of Pivotal Leaders—the peer-selected group of cleantech business leaders in the Pacific Northwest, created by Portland, OR-based venture firm Pivotal Investments. This year’s honors were whittled from a field of more than 700 nominations for leaders from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and British Columbia.
One interesting thing about the criteria for the Pivotal Leaders is that they reach beyond just the world of business to include notable people from higher education, government, and the nonprofit sector. As we discussed when the program was launched, the founding idea is to formalize a network of top people who can build connections and grow the regional cleantech industry.
This year’s honorees include folks from outfits like Microsoft, McKinstry, Nike, Climate Solutions, SeQuential Biofuels, and much more. Go check out the list of nearly 50 people identified by the regional the cleantech community as poised to make a big impact in the next few years.

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Boston-based cleantech startup Next Step Living has brought in $1.5 million of an equity offering that could total $2.8 million, according to an SEC filing. The company, which helps consumers audit their home for energy inefficiencies and retrofit them to prevent heated or cooled air from escaping, raised $2.6 million in Series B funding last summer, led by Triumvirate Environmental president and CEO John McQuillan, with participation from previous investors Black Coral Capital and the Clean Energy Venture Group. The newest funding comes from nine investors, according to the SEC document.

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Groom Energy, a Salem, MA-based company focused on corporate sustainability and energy assessments, said today it has pinned down $2.6 million in funding from a group of angel investors, led by Eyk Van Otterloo, founder of the investment management firm GMO. The money will fund its shared-savings agreements with corporations, where it installs products like solar panels and LED lighting for companies and outsources energy maintenance and monitoring. Groom, whose customers include General Electric and Thermo Fisher Scientific, also plans to add to its engineering team and open up new offices.

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Worcester, MA-based World Energy Solutions (NASDAQ: XWES) said yesterday it is raising $5.5 million in a sale of 1.5 million shares of common stock ($3.60 per share) to several institutional investors. The company says the money will be used for new investments and acquisitions in energy management, among other strategic initiatives. World Energy is known for operating online auctions where energy suppliers compete to win contracts with big customers; early last year it moved into the “demand response” market, in which utilities pay factories, stores, and municipalities to curtail their energy use during peak demand times. The company, which is led by CEO Richard Domaleski, recently invested in a seed financing round for Retroficiency, an energy efficiency and retrofitting startup based in Boston.

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Recently I attended the Boston Smart Grid Forum, where some of the leading “smart grid” minds met to discuss the challenges and opportunities that currently exist. Ontario has been one of the investment leaders in smart grid technology, much of which is being developed through the University of Waterloo. There are a number of similarities between Ontario and the Boston-area energy ecosystem, as new technology developments come from close relationships between the universities and entrepreneurs to develop great technology in emerging markets. Here are some thoughts about the pilot programs currently running in Ontario and the opportunities that exist for similar programs in New England.

Through pilot programs and tests in communities in the Northeast U.S. and Canada, individual efficiency and renewable energy technologies continue to evolve, becoming more efficient and effective every day. Photovoltaic cells are getting more efficient, improving the value of solar panels. Wind turbines are transferring more energy from the blades to the electrical grid.

While significant investment has been focused in these areas, insufficient attention is being paid to the ways in which they can be operated to maximize the benefits across a broader “energy system.” For example, a lot of effort is being exerted in order to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells beyond the current levels. There is a big opportunity to increase the value of this existing technology if it were coupled with an energy storage technology so that energy could be stored now and discharged later, during peak demand times, reducing the strain on the overall system. In response to this need, the Province of Ontario, in conjunction with Energent, Hydro One, Ontario Power Authority, Milton Hydro, and the University of Waterloo, are developing the Energy Hub Management System (EHMS).

Energent has been working with utilities in Canada and the U.S. developing smart grid technology for consumers since 2007. In creating the backbone of EHMS, Energent has defined a “hub” as a single, static location, such as a home, manufacturing facility, farm, etc. The management system consists of three key elements. First, there are two-way controls on all energy-consuming and producing devices within the energy hub. These controls will have the capacity to record energy consumption/production, and to direct the operation of the individual device, such as a motor, compressor, or dishwasher.

The second element will be a central core module that consolidates the information from the devices, the external environment (weather, energy prices, etc.), and user-defined models to effectively manage energy.

Finally, the third element is a Web-based portal, which is the user-friendly interface between the energy hub’s managers and the core module technology. This information will also be available on mobile devices for the three major smartphone platforms. Using a local home network to connect the home to the grid, the EHMS provides an effective, integrated interface for both the energy consuming/producing devices within a single, static location. It will also receive, analyze, and act on system-wide information, not seen in most in-home technologies.

The transformational change that comes from this program is the … Next Page »

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[Updated March 21 with comment from Jaech, see below] Longtime Northwest tech entrepreneur Jeremy Jaech has left the chief executive post at Seattle-based Verdiem, Xconomy has learned. Experienced tech entrepreneur and executive John Scumniotales, now heading the company as president and CEO, says the change was amicable and will allow Verdiem to move more aggressively as it seeks to broaden its footprint in the IT energy management market.

Verdiem blends cleantech and computing by making software to monitor energy consumption and turn off computers when they’re not being used. We covered Jaech’s hiring at Verdiem in late 2008. Jaech was the co-founder of software powerhouses Aldus and Visio. More recently, he’d worked as CEO of Trumba and a director at RealNetworks.

Scumniotales’ resume includes a stint as a vice president at Pacific Edge Software, which was acquired by Serena Software. Scumniotales says he’d been working with Jaech for the past year and a half on company direction and strategy, and the board, company and Jaech agreed it was time to make the change.

The decision was tied in part to Jaech’s wide array of commitments outside his day-to-day work, including service with company boards and other organizations, Scumniotales says.

“There’s no real fundamental change to the direction of the company, to the mission and vision around IT energy management,” Scumniotales says. “If anything, you’ll see kind of more rapid innovation and product delivery under my leadership.”

Scumniotales says one of his main areas of focus will be delivering a Verdiem-branded product that expands the company’s energy management focus beyond individual computers and into other types of IT hardware, such as switches and routers. It’s already been available from Verdiem partner Cisco, but Scumniotales says Verdiem built the underlying technology and is excited to offer the expanded service under its own label.

That’s a big move for Verdiem, allowing it to branch out horizontally within IT networks. “It really broadens the business out from a PC power management-focused company to really an IT energy management-focused company,” he says.

Scumniotales says he also continues to see opportunities for overall growth in the field, with the expansion of  IT energy use outpacing even the latest gains in efficiency improvements. Verdiem currently serves about 600 customers, totaling about 1.6 million individual computers, Scumniotales says.

[Update] I spoke with Jaech about a week later for another story and asked about his immediate plans. Ed Lazowska and the folks at the University of Washington computer science department were happy to welcome the UW alum back to campus and have set Jaech up with an office while he figures out what he’d like to focus on. Jaech says he’s planning on taking some of his past lessons from successful businesses and seek out areas where emerging technological platforms present innovation opportunities. An example might be the work on low-power sensors that professor Shwetak Patel and others have done at UW. It’s not a job, necessarily—I said it sounded something like “thinker in residence” and Jaech said he liked that description, so we’ll go with that for a title.

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With a name like Retroficiency, you pretty much know what you’re getting. That’s saying a lot, given the obscurity of most startup names these days.

You might gather that this company has to do with retrofitting and energy efficiency—and you’d be right. Boston-based Retroficiency provides software-as-a-service to help energy service companies, facility management firms, and commercial property owners evaluate energy-efficiency measures for their buildings. In other words, the software tells them what the energy impact will be if they upgrade the lighting systems, change set points, use new insulation, and so forth.

The company is announcing today it has raised $800,000 in seed financing led by Worcester, MA-based World Energy (NASDAQ: XWES), with angel investors including Jean Hammond and Jill Preotle also participating. (My colleague Wade has previously profiled World Energy, an energy management services firm.)

Retroficiency is part of a growing mini-cluster around Boston that’s focused on using information technology to improve energy efficiency, as my colleague Erin wrote about last month. Other companies such as Next Step Living, Practically Green, and Powerhouse Dynamics tackle different aspects of energy retrofitting and monitoring.

Chief executive Bennett Fisher co-founded Retroficiency in 2009. Fisher is an MIT Sloan School grad who previously worked in real estate investment and management. After finding a pain point in the energy market, Fisher and his team bootstrapped the company for a year before they raised money last summer. The firm now has a half-dozen full-time employees and a total team of about 10.

The number-one lesson so far, Fisher says, was “getting in bed with customers very early” and “letting them help shape the product.”

Take commercial real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, an early customer of Retroficiency. If Bank of America, say, wants to know how much it could save on energy across 100 buildings, Retroficiency’s software lets JLL enter high-level information about each building—things like square footage, age, and type of heating—and then creates a detailed computational model that predicts what the payback is for various upgrades or retrofits.

Of course, the software is only as good as the data it’s based on. But the data comes from tens of thousands of energy audits in the industry, Fisher says, and that’s a key differentiator for Retroficiency. In any case, the software is more effective and systematic than sending out auditors to inspect buildings on foot, he says.

Meanwhile, the market is growing for commercial building retrofits, with New York City, Washington DC, and San Francisco mandating large-scale audits, Fisher says. He adds that typical buildings can see 20 to 30 percent energy savings with simple equipment upgrades.

The coming year will be a telling one for Retroficiency, to see if it can gain some real traction. “We hope to have a bunch of big names jumping in with us,” Fisher says. “We’re talking to some very large companies.”

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Seattle-based Powerit Solutions, which provides energy management and conservation for industry clients, is trumpeting a new boss and a fresh round of investment. Matthew Schiltz is Powerit’s new group CEO, handling both the North America and Northern Europe divisions. Schiltz was chief executive at Seattle-based DocuSign from 2007 to 2010. The company’s $5 million financing round was led by new investor Black Coral Capital and joined by four repeat investors. The Swedish part of the company has been around since 1994, and the Seattle division since 2002.

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OK, this deal wins the award for clunkiest company names—but it’s an important exit for a Boston-area startup in a tough market. CHiL Semiconductor, based in Tewksbury, MA, confirmed today it is being acquired by International Rectifier (NYSE: IRF), based in the Los Angeles area, for $75 million in cash. The deal is expected to close before the end of March.

CHiL Semiconductor, which was founded in 2006, designs computer chips for power management in servers, PCs, and high-performance computing systems. The technology’s main applications are in graphics, gaming, and other high-volume industries.

In a statement, CHiL’s CEO, Ram Sudireddy, said International Rectifier is “an ideal partner for our customers and employees.” He added that the merger could help “create a higher performance and lower cost” technology that would enable end users to create more energy-efficient products.

The sale seems like a decent exit for CHiL’s investors, which include Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, IdSoft Capital, and Panorama Capital. CHiL has raised a little more than $30 million since its founding. The most recent financing was a $16.7 million Series C round, led by Panorama, in 2008.

International Rectifier was founded in 1947. The venerable power-management firm has manufacturing facilities in Leominster, MA, among other places.

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Foreign competition is rising, and U.S. consumers haven’t departed from their penny-pinching mentality of The Great Recession, and behind this double whammy the cleantech industry is feeling the squeeze. That’s one of the big impressions I came away with after polling a crop of cleantech experts from Xconomy’s network of advisors and op-ed contributors for their predictions for 2011. But take heart; there’s plenty of room for optimism, especially in the fields of energy efficiency and monitoring, where the U.S. may be leading the way to a greener future that’s much more achievable—at least in the short term—than through any form of alternative energy.

One sub-theme was pretty overwhelming among the responses I received: the actual materials manufacturing side of cleantech (i.e. the production of components for generating solar and wind energy, efficient batteries, and LED chips) is struggling, but energy-focused software and services are rising to the occasion. A number of Xconomists and contributors have pointed out that the U.S. cleantech manufacturing base is weakening due to competition from countries like China, which offer cheaper production and strong government incentives (or mandates) for adopting the new technology.

“It’s a rapidly commoditizing good,” Ray Demeo, VP of worldwide sales at Marlborough, MA-based Coolcentric, says of solar equipment. “The price that China can produce the product at is lower than U.S. manufacturers.”

Additionally, consumers and investors are nervous about spending upfront on things like efficient appliances, electric vehicles, or solar power, to get cleaner sources of energy into their homes (or cars), and would rather find ways to save. Makes enough sense. That’s actually the silver lining for the cleantech space, though, several experts say.

“The fundamental business proposition is we will go in and evaluate some aspect of your energy utilization and we will cut your cost—-I won’t be surprised to see those kinds of business models continue to thrive,” says Tom Ranken, president and CEO of the Washington Clean Technology Alliance. “Ten to 15 years from now, people might be slapping themselves upside the head saying, ‘how did I miss that?’”

Here’s a roundup of some specific predictions we gathered from our network of cities:

—Stephen Mayfield, director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology and a professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Molecular Biology, said we can expect to see a slew of biofuels advances this year:

• The first synthetic algal genome.
• The first significant scale-up of

… Next Page »

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