Seattle-based 3Tier Group, which has developed a map of the world’s best places for wind and solar power, has named Craig Husa as its new chief executive. Founder Kenneth Westrick, who previously served as CEO, remains with the company as chairman. The company announced in December that Westrick was moving away from day-to-day duties.

Husa is an experienced businessman who previously served as CEO of NeuralIQ, General Software, and Healia, and founded CourtLink Corporation, 3Tier said in a statement. Westrick said Husa has a record of guiding “similarly sized companies through aggressive expansion.” Husa also holds an MBA from Harvard and is a former Navy officer who trained in nuclear engineering and served on submarines, 3Tier said.

We last checked in with 3Tier more than a year ago, when the company had just reported $3 million in additional equity financing and was fresh from completing its map of promising solar-power sites. The map of wind currents was completed in late 2008, and the company raised $10 million to finish the project around that time.

The recession hit alternative energy companies hard, though, and 3Tier was forced to lay off an unspecified number of people in 2009. 3Tier is privately held and backed by venture investors, with Switzerland-based Good Energies as lead investor.

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There’s a hidden tax when you pay your electricity bill, says Umesh Mishra, a professor in the college of engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It’s the energy lost when power is converted from the alternating current coming out of a wall socket to the direct current needed by computers, TVs, and other appliances, or from one voltage or frequency to another. By some measures, 11 to 12 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S. dissipates into the air as heat thanks to inefficient power conversion.

If we could get that power back, it would contribute more to the economy than solar, wind, and every other form alternative energy put together. It would make electric vehicles more economical, improve the output of rooftop solar modules, cap energy waste in buildings, and reduce the huge energy bills paid by Internet companies like Google that run vast data centers. (These companies are, in a sense, taxed doubly: they’re forced to buy even more electricity to run the cooling systems that carry away the heat leaked by their thousands of servers.)

The silicon-based transistors inside most power converter modules hit a physical limit years ago—there’s simply no way to make them any more efficient. But there’s a company in Goleta, CA, outside Santa Barbara, that’s spent the last three and a half years perfecting a next-generation power conversion technology based on gallium nitride, a semiconductor commonly used in light-emitted diodes (LEDs). Called Transphorm, the company was co-founded by Mishra and his former student Primit Parikh, and it has been working behind a thick, almost NSA-worthy wall of stealth—if you’d Googled it before today, you’d have found speculation that it’s working on “hydrogen generating technology,” among other misinformation.

But the company decloaked in a big way at a press conference today in Mountain View, CA, where Google Ventures, the search giant’s venture investing wing, revealed that it was the lead investor in a $20.2 million Series C financing round completed last year for Transphorm. Foundation Capital also participated in the Series C round, joining previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lux Capital. The company has raised about $38 million in total.

Transphorm’s financing round was actually disclosed in an SEC filing in May 2010, but the documents escaped the notice of journalists; they show that Google Ventures partner Wesley Chan, Kleiner partner Randy Komisar, and Foundation partner Richard Redelfs are all board directors at the company.

It’s the first publicly disclosed energy investment for Google Ventures—but it’s not hard to understand why the fund would be interested, despite the green energy industry’s reputation for being capital-intensive and slow to yield returns. ”One thing that attracted us to Transphorm is that we have an intimate undersanding of this problem, with a global network of data centers,” Bill Maris, managing partner at Google Ventures, said today. “Having an understanding of the problem made it a natural fit.”

“Google Ventures is highly tuned to the need for improved energy efficiency, especially when it applies to servers,” Mishra said in an advance interview with Xconomy on Tuesday. “When we made our presentation to Google Ventures, there was an appreciation of the scope and importance of the problem.”

Transphorm will sell its custom-designed power modules directly to power equipment manfucturers, who are expected to embed them in everything from consumer electronics devices to industrial motor drives. If the products win widespread adoption, it wouldn’t just benefit data center operators, says Mishra. “Imagine taking the whole West Coast off the grid—the impact would be huge. Transphorm’s impact could be that big, and saving this kind of energy is a huge business opportunity,” he said at the press conference. “It’s good for the planet and good for business.”

“It’s a real pleasure to finally share what this venture has been able to accomplish,” Komisar said at the event. Transphorm “has met or exceeded expectations at every juncture, which is really unusual.” Kleiner Perkins invested in the company, Komisar said, in part because of the scale of the problem—he said the energy savings from better power converters could be three times greater than that from other much-heralded technologies such as digital lighting. “The opportunity is to take 300 coal-fired plants off-grid, effectively, with more efficient power conversion modules,” said Komisar.

In power converter modules based on gallium nitride rather than silicon, waste heat is reduced by up to 90 percent, according to Peter Hébert, a board observer at Transphorm and a managing partner at Lux Capital, which invested in Transphorm’s Series A round. “This is absolutely transformative,” Hébert says. “One of the biggest and most important applications would be HVAC, building systems, elevators—buildings consume something like 40 percent of all electricity produced. Also, … Next Page »

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Fremont, CA-based Redwood Systems, which makes networks for powering and controlling LED lighting systems in large buildings, said yesterday that it has closed a $15 million Series B financing round. Index Ventures led the round, which was joined by existing backers Battery Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners. Index Venture co-founder and partner Neil Rimer has joined Redwood’s board. The company says it will use the funds to improve its technology and expand in key markets, including internationally.

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[Updated: 4:40pm Pacific] It’s somewhat surprising to me how long the cleantech industry—no matter how innovative—has been somewhat eclipsed by other up-and-coming tech sectors. In the ’90s the tech industry was dominated by the software and dotcom bubble. In the 2000s, the rising stars were wireless and mobile. Today, it’s cloud computing and social media. But the environment and energy is a topic with staying power in politics and the media—with the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf, and continuing global pressure to curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels—the stage is set for the cleantech sector to shine.

Here in the Pacific Northwest we’ve seen dozens of clean energy startups pop up to meet the growing demand for alternative fuels and energy conservation strategies. In 2009, the Palo Alto, CA-based Clean Tech Open expanded to include entrepreneurs in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. And so far this year we’ve seen some encouraging signs of efforts to foster even more innovation in cleantech: Seattle-based construction, consulting, and energy-efficiency firm McKinstry opened up its Innovation Center, which is already serving as an accelerator for three clean energy companies; and The Washington Clean Technology Alliance (WCTA) hired on Tom Ranken as its first full time CEO. He has come in with high hopes of helping the cleantech trade organization reach its full potential.

So much seems to be happening on the cleantech scene here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s been hard to keep up with emerging trends. But energy retrofitting is clearly one of the early sectors emerging within the cleantech industry. Why? Because one of the best ways to decrease unnecessary energy use is by improving on existing infrastructure—homes, buildings, transportation, etc.—to be more energy efficient. It’s a lot easier than reinventing the wheel with new fuels, and doesn’t cost consumers a fortune to adopt as a new technology.

It sounds simple enough, but in fact energy retrofitting isn’t as easy as it seems. The problem most consumers face when considering investing in, say, an energy retrofit for their home, is where to start. That’s where Seattle-based EnergySavvy steps in. The young startup was born out of an idea shared by its three co-founders Aaron Goldfeder, Leo Shklovskii, and Karl Siebrecht, a year and a half ago. Their idea was to make a wealth of information on retrofitting options and services readily available to anyone online.

Leo Shklovskii

“The initial sort of impetus for the company was looking at cleantech, and looking specifically at energy efficiency stuff, and saying, hey, there’s a ton of information here, and it’s really poorly organized,” says EnergySavvy chief technology officer Shklovskii, formerly a developer at Amazon, Redfin, and D.E. Shaw. “It’s valuable. It’s clear there’s money here. It’s clear that if people can save energy, people can make the world a better place.”

What wasn’t as clear for homeowners was where to find information on what retrofits their house may need, and where those services are offered. EnergySavvy, according to Shklovskii, aims to address that problem, by coming into the retrofitting space, and organizing the mess of information that’s already available online.

The young company, which rolled out its initial site in October, followed by a full version February, sees itself as a comprehensive resource to help homeowners figure out the “miles per gallon” of their homes. On the site consumers can take a free energy survey (also called an “energy model” and “energy estimator”) that will determine the efficiency score of their home, suggest specific areas where improvements can be made, and the subsequent costs associated. The short survey, which takes only a couple of minutes to complete, uses intellectual property developed by energy consultant Michael Blasnik, who Shklovskii calls “the wizard of energy efficiency.”

“When Obama needs to know some sort of energy efficiency stats, he tells his people, and those people go and hire Michael to crunch those numbers,” Shklovskii says. [Updated comment from Shklovskii] “We started with his algorithms then we expanded, extended and simplified them in certain places to cover more situations and a wider variety of homes and then built a very easy to use interface to make the whole system easily accessible to most homeowners.”

Rather than dishing out a hefty expense to have an energy auditor come to your home, Shklovskii says the online energy model gives consumers the opportunity to calculate and estimate of their energy use, and find places where they can cut back, invest in improvement, and take advantage of energy … Next Page »

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Dave McClure is a dynamic guy. I had the pleasure of hearing him speak to a small audience of tech startup founders in Seattle earlier this week. His impassioned message to entrepreneurs was, first of all, to take risks and be ambitious, and second, to build something that people really, really care about.

That sounds obvious, but when you’re a developer slaving over a piece of code, or a designer tinkering with a new look for a website, or a CEO trying to make money to pay your employees, it can be easy to forget that most people visiting your site (or otherwise perusing your services) won’t care about whatever new feature you’re working on.

Of course, every tech company from Amazon to Apple says it focuses heavily on its customers—and always has. But what McClure is talking about is something deeper, something primal.

McClure, a self-professed Silicon Valley geek, angel investor, fund manager, and startup advisor, has amassed a large following among techies and entrepreneurs. He has advised or invested in more than 60 companies in the past six years, including Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), KissMetrics, TeachStreet, Twilio, and WePay (which my colleague Wade just wrote about yesterday). Back in 2001-2004, McClure was director of marketing for PayPal. He has expertise in microfinance, social networks, consumer Internet strategies, and other areas.

There was some overlap in his Seattle talk with what he has said elsewhere—including at Dogpatch Labs in the Boston area in March—about the kinds of metrics that Web startups should pay attention to. But I pulled out a few more nuggets that I think all business leaders interested in innovation on the Web should listen to, even if they might disagree. (These are just my takeaways, they’re not representative of McClure’s whole talk or philosophy.)

First, McClure stressed the importance of building something meaningful, and getting the big picture right. There’s no sense in iterating small things about a product and testing different versions with consumers if you’re not in the right ballpark to start with. And that’s something that can be tested out by gauging just a few people’s reactions to your idea. If no one seems interested, look for a different concept.

Once you’re on what he calls a “meaningful hill,” you can start testing out different looks and features with a small number of consumers (say, 10-20 to start), to gauge whether what you’re doing really matters to them. Ideally, he says, you should talk to potential customers before you even start coding. This is related to “driving usage before trying to acquire users,” he says—a crucial distinction that means, basically, make your product matter before you try to sell it too hard.

And to make a product really matter, McClure says, entrepreneurs need to “tap into the reptilian psyche” of consumers. Make your service—and the visual elements on your website, if it’s Web-based—appeal directly to people’s primal need for things like sex, power, money, fight-or-flight response, protecting loved ones, and so forth. Simplify the interface and focus on one or two aspects, making use of people’s natural visual affinity for things like faces, buttons, and edges. (McClure didn’t give the following as examples, but I think of the “gamification” trend of services like Foursquare as appealing to power; companies like PayPal, Mint.com, and WePay as appealing to money; and some news media sites and porn sites, obviously, as appealing to sex.)

Lastly, as a developer or founder, when do you know you’re done with a given product cycle? It’s when you have a meaningful offering that’s “easy to find and better than the alternatives,” McClure says. “You’re done, market it!…Stop building [stuff]!”

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Last week, we reported that Microsoft is moving Windows Azure, its cloud computing platform, into a new business unit called the Server and Cloud Division, as the company gears up to offer a paid cloud service early next year. Azure now falls under the authority of Bob Muglia, president of the company’s Server and Tools Business. By Friday, though, I was hearing deeper rumblings around town about this reorganization: namely, whether it signifies the end of Ray Ozzie at Microsoft.

Here’s why people are talking. Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, has been the public face of Azure (and its main driving force) for the past year or so. Moving the development team to a product group in Muglia’s domain makes some observers think Ozzie has lost influence over the cloud platform, which has been a big part of his mission at the company. One former Microsoft executive told me that this re-org comes on the heels of Ozzie losing a power struggle over Windows Live to Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows Division, earlier this year. And multiple sources say Ozzie continues to commute between the Seattle and Boston areas.

“People keep waiting. ‘When is Ray going to have impact?’ Unless you’re here full-time and have Bill and Steve’s ear, it’s tough to be successful,” the former Microsoft exec said, referring to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. This source went on to say that Ozzie’s “power and influence is gone. At Microsoft, it all comes down to power politics…If you don’t have product groups working for you, what power do you have?”

Ozzie joined Microsoft in 2005 when his company, Beverly, MA-based Groove Networks, was acquired for a rumored price of around $200 million. (One person in the know told me that Bill Gates “overpaid” just to get Ozzie on board.) He was thought to be Gates’s successor. When Microsoft acquired Groove, Gates was quoted as saying, on a conference call, “I thought about ‘Could we ever hire Ray and his team?’ for a long, long time. So it’s a big, big day for me that this is finally taking place.”

Let’s be clear about one thing: Ozzie is a software developer’s God. He worked on VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet) and helped create Lotus Notes and Groove Virtual Office (collaborative software), among many other technologies. He is widely respected in the computing world, and nobody I’ve talked to is questioning his skills or smarts.

But some, including Mark Anderson from Strategic News Service, are saying (or implying) that the aggressive and argumentative culture of Microsoft executive life has been a poor fit for Ozzie’s talents, and that he might leave. This seems plausible, given what I know about the dog-eat-dog nature of Microsoft VP turf wars, and how they often turn out.

A Microsoft spokesperson did not reply to my request for information last week about Ozzie’s broader role at the company and his direct reports. But a PR firm did respond to a Redmond Channel Partner blog post which raised some similar questions about the Azure re-org. Here’s what the PR firm said, on behalf of Microsoft:

“In short, as chief software architect at Microsoft, Ray is responsible for oversight of the company’s technical strategy and product architecture. Ray’s role isn’t affected by this change. Ray will continue to be very involved with Windows Azure; however, as Microsoft prepares to begin billing customers for the service in February, it makes sense that Windows Azure would move from an advanced development project under Ray’s oversight into a mainstream business in a product group at the company (with full marketing, sales, etc., support).”

Whether or not this is the full story—and we have no indication from Microsoft that it isn’t—it seems unlikely that Ozzie will leave the company anytime soon. It’s still fairly early in his tenure. Perhaps he will continue to oversee the deployment of Azure at a different level. Or perhaps he will transition to another role that Microsoft isn’t talking about yet.

Just last May, Ozzie spoke at a Technology Alliance luncheon about his mission at Microsoft. “Craig [Mundie] and I have interesting roles in that we took on most of what Bill did. Everything I do is through influence and partnerships. I am more inwardly focused, and I work with the product teams,” Ozzie said. “I’m trying to drive alignment and synergy based on what will happen in this product cycle and the next one.”

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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 every one 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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