Any company that owns or manages a data center, even a small one, knows how power-hungry they can be. It’s not unusual for operators of large data centers—say, 50,000 square feet—to pay $10 million a year or more for electricity. Under those circumstances, companies have every incentive to look to virtualization and other technologies that help them be more efficient. But data center energy management, it turns out, isn’t exactly a science: there’s no precise way to predict how much consolidating a few servers, for example, will reduce a company’s energy bills.

That’s the problem Viridity Software, a Burlington, MA, startup coming out of stealth mode today, hopes to solve. “We want to be able to tell a customer exactly what to do to optimize the life of their data center and decrease their energy footprint, or increase the amount of work they can do on the same energy and capital footprint,” says Mike Rowan, the company’s founder and chief technology officer.

To pursue that vision, Viridity has raised $7 million in Series A funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Battery Ventures, and has 22 employees working to ship a series of software products starting in the first quarter of 2010. The first product, Rowan says, will be a planning aid that helps data center managers see how adding or moving servers will change overall electrical load. Next will come a control module that provides a real-time picture of power utilization, not just by IT equipment, but by a data center’s heating and cooling systems. Finally, building on the data provided by the control module will be an optimization tool that studies a data center’s historical power use patterns and recommends the changes system administrators and facilities engineers should make to reduce power consumption.

“The cost of power in data centers is approaching the cost of the capital equipment,” says Rowan. Reducing power consumption, he says, is mainly a matter of understanding how power needs change under various computing workloads, and balancing those workloads more intelligently.

While Viridity is striking a mildly green pose—the company logo features a little green leaf sprouting from the “V”—Rowan thinks it’s the high cost of electricity, rather than concern about carbon emissions or climate change, that will ultimately send customers his way.

“You can put a business case around everyone of these decisions,” he says. “Why overtly talk about how it’s the right thing for the planet, when there’s a business case around it? You will get more done with less cost and less power.”

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Boston, MA-based First Wind said today that Harvard University has contracted to purchase half of the power generated by its Stetson II wind project in Maine. First Wind is expected to break ground on the project, an extension of its existing wind farm in Stetson Hill near Danforth, ME, this month. The 15-year contract could supply Harvard’s Cambridge and Allston campuses, which consume nearly 250 million kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, with up to 10 percent of their power needs, the company said, making it the biggest wind-power consumer of any New England university or college.

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Seattle-based Powerit Solutions, a maker of energy management and energy efficiency technology for commercial and industrial facilities, announced today it has raised $6 million in new funding. The round was led by new investors Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal’s Clean Technology Fund, and included existing investors @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners.

Powerit (pronounced “Power I.T.”) says the funds will be used to speed up its growth into industrial markets, as well as solidify its position in energy management and expand product development and sales efforts. The company makes a comprehensive hardware and software system (including wireless sensors) that monitors facilities’ power usage, predicts the timing and severity of energy demand peaks, and automatically reduces the energy load where possible, to provide savings on utility bills.

Energy efficiency for businesses is a big deal these days. Claes Olsson, the chief executive of Powerit, touted in a statement “the impact our Spara technology can have on the way that commercial and industrial facility operators will address power and data management.” He added that his investors “continue to be excited by Powerit’s performance and market strength.” (ArcelorMittal is the world’s biggest steel company, so that would seem to bode well for the prospects of Powerit being used in new construction facilities.)

Powerit was formed here in 2002, but its original technology dates back to engineers at Sweden’s Lund University in 1994. The company’s first customers were in Scandinavia. Much more recently, in 2008, Powerit’s U.S. and European operations officially merged to create one company, with technology installed in more than 2,500 sites worldwide. Its customers include Ikea, Paul Masson Winery, Benton Foundry, Stockholm Airport, and the San Jose Mercury News.

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If you work in a commercial building, you’re probably familiar with the vagaries of large-scale heating and cooling systems. Hear that whir click on and cold air suddenly gusting through the vents? That’s the sound of your building hemorrhaging money and energy.

Seattle cleantech software company Optimum Energy wants to stanch the energy drain of the U.S. commercial sector, one building at a time—and soon, hundreds of buildings at a time—by slowing down the motors that power those buildings’ heating and cooling systems.

I traveled down to Optimum’s Georgetown office, which houses 22 of the three-year-old company’s 30 employees, to find out from founder and CEO Nathan Rothman how Optimum plans to save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars every year with a simple software program.

The company’s software products have the potential to halve the heating and cooling bills of about 110,000 large buildings in the U.S., Rothman said. That’s no small potatoes, when you consider that commercial buildings use 18 to 20 percent of the country’s energy, and that in hot climates like California or Texas, air conditioning accounts for more than half of their energy bill.

“If we implemented our technology just in Manhattan, we’d save enough electricity to light the other four boroughs all the time,” Rothman said. “And that doesn’t include the CO2 and greenhouse gases you’re saving.”

Large buildings maintain temperature control (or HVAC, for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) using a massive network of cold water that courses through the building, absorbing heat and venting it through steam. That cold water is generally kept at a chilly 44 degrees Fahrenheit by a large machine aptly dubbed the “chiller.” High-powered motors and pumps drive the water around the building.

So what happens when a hot building cools down to, say, 70 degrees? The motors shut off, but then power back on the second it bumps up to 71—an incredibly inefficient process, Rothman said, as powering down and up uses a lot of energy.

That process starts to sound even more inefficient when you take into account …Next Page »

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Wilmington, MA-based Lilliputian Systems, which is developing fuel cells small enough to power mobile phones and laptops, has raised an additional $25 million in venture funding from a group of new and existing investors, according to a report today in Mass High Tech. The new investors are Stata Venture Partners of Needham, MA, and Altira Group of Denver. The round also included existing backers Atlas Venture, Fairhaven Capital, Rockport Capital, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, according to MHT. The eight-year-old company has raised some $90 million all told.

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Bellevue, WA-based Puget Energy announced the completion of its $7.4 billion acquisition by Puget Holdings, a syndicate of Macquarie Infrastructure Partners, Macquarie Capital Group, CPP Investment Board, British Columbia Investment Management, Alberta Investment Management, and Macquarie-FSS Infrastructure Trust. Puget Energy has been de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange.

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Lowell, MA-based Konarka, which is developing a process for making solar photovoltaic cells on flexible plastic, said today that it has secured a $45 million investment from Total, a Paris-based international oil and gas conglomerate. Konarka also said it has signed a bilateral R&D agreement with Total, which will become its single largest shareholder (owning 20 percent of the startup). Coincidentally, $45 million is the same amount Konarka raised from a group of private investors for its “Power Plastic” product one year ago.

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After raising $70 million in venture funding and spending more than three years on the development of next-generation lithium-ion batteries, Westborough, MA-based Boston-Power has won its first big customer: It’s the supplier behind a new line of replacement laptop batteries from Hewlett-Packard. Branded as the “HP Enviro Series” but based entirely on Boston-Power’s Sonata technology, the batteries incorporate advances in design and chemistry that will allow them to be recharged much faster than conventional laptop batteries—and that will keep them from losing their capacity to store power over time, the way older lithium-ion cells do.

The Enviro batteries be available from HP early next year, and will have the same form factor as current HP laptop batteries, meaning they can be slipped directly into existing HP laptops. That will make Boston-Power the first U.S.-based company ever to enter the laptop battery market, a space wholly dominated up to now by Japanese and South Korean companies such as Sony, Sanyo, LG, Samsung, and Panasonic.

Boston-Power—which is funded by Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, GGV Capital, and Gabriel Venture Partners—has long been promoting its battery technology as a smarter alternative to conventional lithium-ion cells. Most lithium-ion batteries suffer from chemical buildups that cut their capacity in half after only one year of use, meaning that they usually have to be replaced several times over a typical laptop’s three-year lifespan. That’s not only an expensive proposition for consumers, since replacement packs usually cost $80 to $120, but also uses up precious resources during manufacturing and leads to greater shipping costs and carbon emissions.

A single Enviro replacement battery, by contrast, is designed to retain 80 percent of its charging capacity over three years—meaning, in theory, that the replacement will never have to be replaced. Christina Lampe-Onnerud, a research chemist and Swedish native who founded Boston-Power in 2005, calls the company’s deal with HP “a celebration of cleantech” and of innovation in general. “The number-one laptop and notebook computer maker has prioritized the environment and created a whole new brand to give consumers a choice,” says Lampe-Onnerud (who participated in an Xconomy panel discussion on energy innovation last week). “I’m very proud that Boston-Power is the enabling technology for their first offering, and I’m extremely happy that we can be part of the solution for climate change instead of the problem.”

But if the Enviro batteries are so great, why aren’t they being included in new HP laptops, rather than sold only as replacements? That will probably happen down the road, Lampe-Onnerud suggests. Offering the Enviro as a replacement battery first “was the quickest, best way, in HP’s mind, to deploy this battery to as many people as possible,” she says. “I think you should expect to see other opportunities for collaboration [between Boston-Power and HP] in 2009.”

In fact, the market for laptop batteries is so commoditized—with no particular product standing out from any other—that it’s hard to imagine that HP would not eventually put the new Enviro batteries directly into its Presario and Pavilion laptops and turn them into a sales point (or at least market them as an option, the same way it offers buyers of new laptops a choice of graphics cards or hard drives).

“We will see during a 2009 a very interesting opportunity for our early adopters to get rewarded for working with us, because …Next Page »

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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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Stella Karavas, CEO of Voltree Power, sounded a little tired of talking about trees when I reached her last week. Seems the Canton, MA, company has been inundated by press inquiries since CNN ran a spot on its tree-powered forest fire monitors last year—a flood that started all over again after MIT’s official news site featured the company on September 23. “Normally I’d say it was a great thing, but we just can’t seem to get a lot done,” Karavas says. “CNN wants to do a follow-up, and we said no. We just can’t handle any more press right now.”

Karavas did, however, spend enough time on the phone with me to fill in the whole story on Voltree, which is funded by her other company, Canton-based MagCap Engineering, a maker of custom transformers and power supplies for radar and microwave equipment. The way some media outlets have told the story, readers might get the impression that the idea of tapping trees for power sprang from students and professors at MIT, who then secured MagCap as commercial sponsor. In fact, says Karavas, it’s the other way around.

The tale is as twisted as a path through an old-growth forest. Back in 2005, Karavas explains, MagCap was “approached by an individual to design a circuit. The power source was not disclosed. The agreement on disclosing the power source was that we had to sign an NDA, and we would be 50 percent owners of the technology, however far we decided to take it.” Karavas didn’t mention the individual’s name to me, but previous press stories and patent documents identify him as Gordon Wadle, an Illinois-based inventor.

Intrigued, the company took the offer. When Wadle then disclosed that the power source was a tree, “it didn’t get a real warm reception from the engineers,” Karavas says. “But we said, ‘Here’s an outside-the-box thinker; why not test it. We have nothing to lose.’”

So MagCap’s engineers tried sticking an aluminum electrode from one end of their circuit into various trees, and a copper electrode into the ground on the other end. Lo and behold: they found that the apparatus produced a small but measurable direct current. That was potentially intriguing, since it suggested the possibility of building small electronic devices such as temperature and humidity sensors that could be attached to trees and powered by them, rather than running on batteries, which must often be replaced.

There was just one problem: The engineers had no idea how the trees were generating a current. In fact, the first stories about Wadle’s technology, back in 2006, were full of incredulity. “I’m wildly skeptical,” Jim Manwell, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Renewable Energy Resource Laboratory, told Mass High Tech in a January 2006 article. “It strikes me as pretty questionable for a number of reasons.”

But Karavas thought it was real enough to keep going. “I thought the only way to figure this out would be to sponsor some more research,” she says. Pretty soon Karavas ran into Andreas Mershin, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Center for Biomedical Engineering, at a networking event. Mershin told her about a project at the center to build a photosynthetic solar cell from spinach chloroplasts. “He said they were getting power from spinach, and I told him I was getting power from trees,” says Karavas. “And he said, ‘Why don’t we do a demo.’”

Mershin was able to replicate MagCap’s results—but he still didn’t know why or how. “That’s when he said, ‘Let’s do an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program [UROP] project on this,’ and we said, ‘Find a person and we’ll sponsor them,’” says Karavas. MagCap and Mershin chose an undergrad named Christopher Love, and put up $10,000 to cover his stipend.

Starting in the summer of 2006, Love began laboratory testing of small trees like potted Ficus plants, trying to figure out through a process of elimination where the voltage difference between trees and soil, consistently measured at 50 to 200 millivolts, was coming from. Was it a redox reaction involving dissimilar metals, like the reaction that occurs with a Galvanic “potato battery” or “lemon battery”? Was the flow of ion-charged sap creating the potential difference? Or was MagCap’s apparatus simply picking up extraneous electromagnetic fields?

Love used identical platinum electrodes to test the redox-reaction theory. He interrupted sap flow by placing razor blades in the wood above and below the tree electrode. He put the Ficus plants inside a Faraday cage to block out electromagnetic fields. But in the end—as Love, Mershin, and collaborator Shuguang Zhang finally reported in an August 2008 article in PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed online journal published by the non-profit Public Library of Science—it became clear that …Next Page »

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At SmartGridNews.com, we expect the Obama Administration to announce two things that will converge to give this already growing sector an additional boost. The first is a Clean Energy program to stimulate five million new jobs. The second is a “New Deal” stimulus package based on rejuvenating essential infrastructure.

In both case, the Smart Grid will be a centerpiece. We cannot achieve clean energy without a Smart Grid to transport it where needed. And we are increasingly reliant on the electric power system as the critical infrastructure that makes our way of life—and our global competitiveness—possible.

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Boston-Power, which makes advanced lithium-ion battery packs for notebook computers, is planning a ribbon-cutting ceremony today for its newly expanded research and development facilities in Westborough, MA. I caught up with CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud by phone this morning as she prepared for the event, where a number of local business leaders and state officials plan to join the company as it unveils a state-of-the-art facility focused on improving the quality of the company’s existing notebook batteries and exploring new applications for lithium ion technology.

Already, Boston-Power’s Sonata notebook batteries are known for lasting longer and recharging faster than battery packs from competing manufacturers. Lampe-Onnerud—who will be one of the expert panelists at an upcoming Xconomy Forum on energy innovation, planned for December 2—says the company hopes to extend that advantage into other types of consumer electronics and, eventually, into hybrid and electric vehicles.

A few outtakes from our conversation:

Xconomy: We last talked when you collected a $45 million Series C investment round back in January. Can you say a little about what Boston-Power has been up to since then, and why you needed additional research and development space?

Christina Lampe-Onnerud: The company is three and a half years old now, and it feels quite wonderful—it seems that we have arrived in the market at a time when consumer awareness is pretty high around what next-generation electronics technology should look like, and it’s all about having a battery you can depend on. Our batteries are green, they’re the fastest to charge on the market, and it’s really fun for us today to be opening our new development facility, where we’re expanding both our chemistry laboratories and our electronics laboratory, as well as our testing capabilities and our quality-control production support. We’re also officially opening a whole new division around transportation batteries.

It’s particularly inspiring for me and my colleagues, at a time when we’re reading a lot about the horrific evens in the financial markets all over the world, to be able to promise a glimmer of hope. We are stepping to markets that will not only create new opportunities for us but will actually solve major problems in the clean tech space.

X: What kind of work will go on in these new facilities?

CL-O: We now have close to 100 employees here in Massachusetts, and through our consultants, part-time people, and factory workers we have 500 people engaged in the company. The old facility was in the same building as the new one, but it was only part of a floor. We now have a whole floor, which means we’re able to house the whole team in one place, which is great. We have a dedicated customer support team for every OEM [original equipment manufacturer] that we work with, and now they, as well as the core expert groups in mechanical engineering and chemical engineering and material science, are all in the same space. That helps them make progress really quickly.

We are also fortunate to have many people who want to collaborate with us, so [the new facilities are] an opportunity to take in and partner with other organizations and truly come up with the best solutions.

X: Can you say more about the transportation applications for lithium ion batteries? That’s not something you’ve talked about a lot in the past.

CL-O: I think we have two really big opportunities for Boston-Power. We have all embraced mobile electronics in the last 10 years, and consumers are still hungry for better technology, and batteries have a big part in that. Now our company has the opportunity to leverage our experience with the [lithium ion] chemistry and apply it to the emerging market of transportation. That is a market that is still coming, no question. But it will probably be the biggest market in my lifetime. We really need people to come together to think this through from many different disciplines.

There are a number of new opportunities that will present themselves. Today we are showcasing battery modules for power-assisted bikes and scooters. And later we will be showcasing systems for larger systems like trucks and hybrid cars. In my opinion, it will be quite a few years before that becomes a real market, but I’m absolutely convinced that it will happen.

X: Right now the batteries in most hybrid cars, like the Toyota Prius, are nickel-metal-hydride batteries. Are you saying that you think you can displace that technology, or are you thinking about experimenting with other chemistries?

CL-O: I believe that we have only scratched the surface of lithium ion technology. If you look at the history of battery technologies, they typically stay around for 30, 50, or even 150 years. Lithium ion was only commercialized starting in 1991. You can think of a battery as a chemical factory where everything has to run exactly on time—and it takes a long time to refine a technology to that point. Lithium ion has had remarkable success in mobile electronics, where it is deployed in basically 100 percent of devices. The energy density is so much higher than for nickel metal hydride that there is basically no question that lithium ion will be the dominant technology.

But I have to be somewhat humble, because it takes a long time to commercialize these opportunities—longer than people sometimes might think. It just takes a very long time to scale up and trouble-shoot new batteries. It’s lovely to have an early demonstration in the lab, but it’s a whole new game to take it into mass adoption.

I think it’s quite likely that lithium ion is the only battery technology I will work on for my entire life. It’s going to stay around for another 50 years, at least.

X: Lastly—you’re talking today about Boston-Power’s lithium ion batteries as a “clean” technology. How so?

CL-O: Lithium ion is intrinsically environmentally friendly because it doesn’t have any heavy metals in it. Boston-Power is the only company in the world that carries “green” government accreditation from both the EU and China. It also has to do with the longevity of the battery packs. You are only going to need one Sonata battery for the lifetime of your notebook. The debate about whether batteries are recyclable misses the point. If you have a battery that can power-cycle 1,000 times as opposed to 400 times, you don’t have to recycle nearly as many batteries, which costs a lot of money, effort, and energy.

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Want wireless power? Better network privacy? Automated elder care? You’ve come to the right place.

That place is the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, which I had the opportunity to attend yesterday afternoon. I had gotten a sneak preview the day before from lab director David Wetherall, and just before hitting the demos, I also sat down with Intel’s vice president and director of research, Andrew Chien, for an overview. For the open house, Wetherall noted that Abel Weinrib, Intel’s vice president and director of the corporate technology group, was in attendance, along with representatives from Intel’s business units, and many Seattle-area researchers and industry types.

Then it was time for the fun stuff. Wandering around the sixth floor of Intel’s building near the University of Washington campus, I got a technology-packed tour from the lab’s associate director and principal engineer, Anthony LaMarca. I’ll give just a few of the highlights here. (All photos courtesy of Cheryl Miller at Intel.)

—First, I took in the latest progress in home-monitoring systems for elder care. These include sensors like radio-frequency identification tags on kitchen utensils, which then communicate with a computer to infer when a person is eating, drinking, taking proper medications, and so forth. I covered this area several years ago, and wondered just how far the tech implementation has come. “It’s gone from a vision to something much closer to reality,” said Wetherall. “We’re doing real trials, and sorting out the business value proposition too. We find many parties stand to gain if you do it the right way…Families like it, organizations like it, insurance companies like it. It helps with auditing, as well as providing appropriate care.”

The lab is working with the Veterans Administration on home tests. Home monitoring is related to a broader theme within Intel Research—what it calls “richly communicative” everyday sensing and perception. “Our insight was it was practically impossible to get the deployment right,” says Chien. “And to translate it to a business model was not going to fly.” Chien says the researchers set a “90-90″ goal: it should work for 90 percent of activities, for 90 percent of your day. “It’s a coverage goal, and it is really central to achieving large-scale commercialization of the technology,” Chien adds. “This is a second generation of sensing and perception…It’s one of our largest efforts.”

—James Landay, a professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and the previous director of Intel Research Seattle, showed me another example: a monitoring device to help you keep track of your exercise and activity levels, and even what kind of transportation you’re using on a daily basis (walking, biking, driving). An accelerometer and other sensors in the device connect to a processor, which uses your cell phone as a display. Landay says his team is in the process of porting the technology over to the iPhone (which has an onboard accelerometer), and possibly to phones that will run Google’s Android system, because the latter might be a more open platform.

—Intel research scientist Ben Greenstein showed me the “trustworthy wireless” project, which is about improving privacy for users of wireless devices. On a monitor was a map of Seattle showing all the locations his laptop had been broadcasting signals that anyone could use to figure out his identity and where he lives (with software available on the Internet). Another monitor showed exactly what information is sent out when his laptop tries to find a wireless network, or when he opens an e-mail while connected to a network. Greenstein pointed out one nefarious use I hadn’t thought of: a corporate spy might be able to figure out connections between companies and anticipate certain deals just by hanging out in their vicinity. “They might work out if something’s going down,” he says. To defend against this, Greenstein’s software goes in and limits the information being sent out by a device, by working at different levels of the wireless device and network.

—Who knew that Intel works this much on robots? Principal engineer Josh Smith, who did his Ph.D. at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld, showed me a few “personal robotics” projects, including a robotic arm and hand with springy actuators to make it softer, safer, and more adaptive to manipulating objects in its environment (see top photo). Electric-field sensors and a video camera allow it to recognize objects and tell when it is gripping a cup or an apple, say. “Manipulation is the big, hard problem for robotics now,” Smith says. If home helper robots ever take off, I’m thinking Intel wants to be the one to supply their brains.

—Lastly, the most visually striking (and technically speculative) demo was one on “wireless power.” This is the idea that you could potentially charge your phone or laptop without plugging it into a wall socket. Wouldn’t that be something? I didn’t believe it when I first heard about the research at MIT last summer, which was published in the journal Science. (Doing power transfer via electromagnetic radiation has efficiency and safety issues.) But the new idea, which is based on magnetic fields, has held up so far. Alanson Sample, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the UW, showed a demo of a light bulb being turned on by 60 watts of power transferred from one magnetic coil to another, about two feet away (see photo, left). It works by setting up a resonance between the powering coil and the remote coil connected to the light bulb, which gives you an energy efficiency of about 75 percent. Alanson said he’s working on setting up magnetic loops to fit on a laptop. A visitor from laptop-maker Lenovo seemed very interested.

All in all, Intel seems convinced it is getting its money’s worth from its UW research collaborators. “We are the eyes and ears in the community,” says Intel’s LaMarca, who adds that if there’s an interesting idea in the innovation community, the lab makes sure Intel hears about it. On the UW side, the partnership seems to be going well, too. “We’re very excited about the lab being here, and having our faculty members run it,” says Hank Levy, chairman of the department of computer science and engineering at UW. “The lab changes focus every couple of years, but it also keeps some continuity.”

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Bessemer Venture Partners, which has offices in Wellesley Hills, MA, is the leader in a $30 million Series D financing round announced today for PowerGenix. The San Diego company makes rechargeable nickel-zinc batteries, which are lighter, smaller, and less toxic than batteries using competing chemistries, such as lithium ion and nickel-metal-hydride. Existing investors Advent International, Angeleno Group, Braemar Energy Ventures, Granite Ventures, OnPoint Technologies and Technology Partners also participated in the round, which will help the battery maker expand into markets such power tools, lawn and garden tools, military vehicles, light electric vehicles such as golf carts, and consumer AA batteries.

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Geothermal is one of those energy sources that you know is there, but you don’t hear about much. Until it comes rushing to the surface, as it did with this week’s announcement that AltaRock Energy has closed a second round of financing worth $26.25 million, bringing the geothermal firm’s total venture funding to about $30 million. The new investors are Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Google.org, and Massachusetts-based Advanced Technology Ventures, which joined existing heavy hitters Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

I caught up with AltaRock CEO Don O’Shei yesterday to get his take on the deal. (Vulcan declined to comment for this story.) AltaRock “could not be more excited about what this financing, being made by such a knowledgeable group of investors, means for us and for the future of renewable energy,” said O’Shei. As he explains, “It’s about the transformative nature of engineered geothermal systems. Google, ATV, and Vulcan are very savvy investors, pretty good at sorting out what are smart bets and what are unattractive bets. It confirms what we think about the market…and it shows a general acceptance of the need for renewables by the broader financial markets.”

AltaRock is based in Sausalito, CA, but was founded in Seattle last year and has its technology development office here. The startup focuses on engineered geothermal systems, which differ from conventional geothermal in that the reservoirs of hot, subterranean water are created artificially instead of having to be discovered. Cold water is pumped down two or three miles below the surface of the earth, fracturing the rock and creating fissures into which the water flows and gets heated under intense pressure. As the hot water rises to the surface, its heat is extracted as steam, which turns a turbine and produces electricity.

Geothermal is still a small piece of the energy pie, but that could change. A 2007 study led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimated that engineered geothermal could provide up to 10 percent of the United States’ electricity needs within 50 years, at costs that are competitive with fossil-fuel plants—provided there is enough investment and improvements in the technology. The latest investment in AltaRock seems to be a solid step in that direction.

For instance, to bring down the cost of geothermal power, O’Shei says, companies like AltaRock will try to increase the volume of rock they can fracture to increase their energy yield, as well as make the electricity-generating equipment on the surface more efficient—if and when geothermal becomes a large-scale market. What’s more, AltaRock got an exclusive license this year from Los Alamos National Laboratory for geothermal technology that uses liquid carbon dioxide instead of water. That might help sequester carbon, as well as save water—important factors for down the road.

But some challenges of geothermal energy production remain. Besides water becoming scarcer, there are the high costs of construction and drilling, and chemical emissions from geothermal plants. O’Shei addressed each of these points. “We require water upfront to do the fracturing, but that lasts for a week or 10 days.” Once the plant is operating, he says, 98 to 99 percent of the water in the reservoirs is recycled—which should work out to less water used per unit of power than a typical fossil-fuel facility. As for costs, O’Shei says, “[Engineered geothermal] is capital intensive, but you’re buying upfront the lifetime cost of your plant. Geothermal is considered non-cost-volatile, so utilities are very positive and receptive to it.” Lastly, he explains that although minerals and gases tend to be emitted from the geothermal energy-extraction process, the water in systems like AltaRock’s has not been in the earth accumulating chemicals for thousands of years, as is the case with conventional geothermal plants. “We’re putting basically potable water in the ground,” he says.

The latest funding round should last AltaRock through the end of next year, says O’Shei. Before then, the company plans to test its engineered geothermal system at an undisclosed site in the western U.S. There, O’Shei says, AltaRock will drill a pair of wells in the earth, fracture the rock between them, and aim to produce steam at the well heads. The engineering team will try to demonstrate that a given amount of fracturing can produce around 3 Megawatts of electricity—and it will look to develop technologies to create multiple fractures over a larger volume of rock, to raise the power output.

All of this is ultimately necessary, O’Shei says, “to make geothermal the ubiquitous problem solver it can be, to become the approach of choice for baseload power.” And that, ultimately, is what some smart investors are betting on.

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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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Within five minutes of sitting down to lunch, Jesse Berst has burst my bubble. “I’m not sanguine about Seattle as a big leader in the area,” he says. “I don’t know if we’ll have a cluster here.”

He’s talking about smart energy and cleantech, and he knows a thing or two about the space. As managing director of Redmond-based GlobalSmartEnergy, Berst provides strategic consulting on energy technologies (and market opportunities) to corporations, investors, and government agencies. He is also the executive director of energy and environment prizes for the X PRIZE Foundation, based in Santa Monica, CA (more on that shortly).

Berst, who’s also an Xconomist, made his name in the 1980s and 90s as a technology analyst, and co-founded three successful high-tech publishing companies. Around six years ago, he decided to work full-time on energy and the environment—something closer to his heart. “I got bored with [information technology], plus it was so obvious that energy was going to be the next big industry,” he says.

Most recently, he’s been focused on the “smart grid.” This is an envisioned upgrade to the existing electricity network, and it involves the use of various technologies—smart monitors and sensors, communications, and advanced software and hardware to control the network, which in the United States is run from 130-odd control centers around the country. The goal is to more efficiently and reliably regulate power usage, and Berst says the smart-energy industry is following roughly the same evolution as telecommunications. Now, because of the growing amount of data to be managed, corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have entered the arena. And the main hurdles to adoption are bureaucratic, not technical.

“Most of our projects are in places like Hawaii and New Mexico, places that are more progressive and aggressive about energy,” Berst says. (This was surprising—I had thought the Northwest was pretty progressive in terms of energy.) In his research consultancy duties, Berst says the key question is, where is the money in cleantech? Corporations, banks, and agencies want to know, should we get into the sector? He is currently advising several startup companies, still in stealth mode; the most recent (”today was our first day,” he says) is looking into building smart-energy infrastructure at the community level, in places like resorts.

The other big thing I wanted to talk with Berst about was the X Prizes. Starting last fall, he began consulting for the X PRIZE Foundation, which sets up ambitious innovation awards to advance the state of the art in space, genomics, transportation, and other fields. Recently, Berst’s team submitted recommendations for energy prizes; the areas being investigated include alternative energy generation, efficiency, storage, sustainable housing, and carbon sequestration. The X PRIZE board is reviewing them, but it may be a while before we can tell you any more (watch this space). Berst did say that any eventual prize(s) should be worth more than $10 million, and should “stretch people farther than a venture-based company would.”

A few more take-aways from our discussion:

—Don’t forget the role of mid-size companies in energy and cleantech. We often look at startups and big players, but Berst points out that “real, permanent job growth comes from small-to-mid-size companies that grow up.” Case in point: Areva T&D, a French smart-grid company that has operations in the Northwest and is looking to hire for its global R&D center. (Its parent company Areva has roughly 150,000 employees worldwide, but the point is to follow the Arevas-in-the-making.)

—Large organizations like Boeing and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have some hidden gems of energy-related projects, but they often struggle with commercializing such technologies. Nevertheless, says Berst, “they’re a warehouse of breakthrough concepts.” (Berst serves on the advisory council of PNNL.)

—In smart energy, there is a manpower shortage in the Northwest. “We have to import power engineers,” says Berst, because of a dearth of engineering training programs, which were phased out over the past few decades.

My bottom line? Anyone in the area with a serious interest in energy and cleantech can look to Berst’s group as a tremendous resource in their back yard. If they take advantage, perhaps they can help make Seattle a more energy-progressive place.

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While New England boasts a home-grown cluster of cleantech and green energy startups, the region is also becoming a major supplier of infrastructure and equipment for green energy projects around the world. In April, Merrimack, NH-based GT Solar won a $91 million contract to supply Dutch photovoltaic manufacturer The Silicon Mine with reactors needed to make solar panels. And today American Superconductor of Devens, MA, announced an even bigger win—a $450 million contract to make power converters that Beijing-based Sinovel Wind Corporation will use to build wind farms that will almost double China’s wind power capacity by 2011.

American Superconductor (NASDAQ: AMSC) is mainly known for building high-temperature superconductor cables, which conduct electricity with zero resistance and are being used in locations like New York City to supplement overburdened copper wires and create more reliable interconnections between sections of the power grid. But the company has also developed software-controlled power converters that can be used to regulate the voltage of power from generating sources such as wind turbines so that they can be safely connected to the larger power grid. The converters can also control the pitch of wind turbine blades to maximize efficiency in different wind conditions.

Starting in January, American Semiconductor will ship power converters to Sinovel for installation in hundreds of 1.5-megawatt wind turbines that will be erected around China. “The core electrical components covered under this contract will be used to support more than 10 gigawatts of wind power capacity, nearly double China’s total wind power installed base at the end of 2007,” Greg Yurek, American Semiconductor’s founder and CEO, said in a statement about the contract. “It is invigorating to see Sinovel’s success in bringing much needed electrical generation capacity to the Chinese power market at a crucial time in that country’s expansion.”

Greenpeace, the Global Wind Energy Council, and the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association issued a report last year predicting that China will have an installed wind-power base exceeding 120 gigawatts by 2020. For comparison, the United States has a total installed generating capacity—from all power sources—-of just over 1,000 gigawatts.

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Point Carbon, a leading cleantech analysis and consulting firm based in Oslo, Norway, has announced it is opening an office in downtown Boston. With U.S. operations already in Washington DC, the company aims to expand its network of experts and tap into the local energy and cleantech industry.

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UTC Power, a renewable energy company based in South Windsor, CT, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to lead a two-year, $22 million project to develop cheap, modular fuel cell systems. This is the latest in a flurry of fuel-cell activity this week, with Westwood, MA-based Acumentrics having received a $15.6 million DOE grant.

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