PROJECT EASY GREEN

To improve efficiency in a 10,000-square-foot datacenter managed by NTT in San Jose, Vigilent shut off nine of the 14 air conditioners.

Power consumption went down dramatically. But so did the ambient temperature.

The counterintuitive effect — you’d think the temperature would rise at least a few degrees with fewer AC units — derives from the way that air flow changes for the worse as the number of AC units rises.

“An air conditioner is a heater in a crowded environment,” said president and founder Clifford Federspiel.

Diagnostics and analytics will likely be the two most popular buzzwords in the rapidly growing building management market over the next few years. Although building management systems have been around for years, it has only been in the last several that we've started to see more sophisticated software for mining all the disparate data that will also automatically tweak machinery to conserve power consumption.

Vigilent (formerly Federspiel Controls) applies artificial intelligence and predictive analysis — the same sort of algorithms behind search engines — to air conditioners. Its software crunches information about the temperature, humidity, power consumption and other factors and then creates a dynamic model for efficient cooling.

“We extract an ability to predict the future from current data,” Federspiel said. “The software knows the impact of what will happen if you change a temperature setting or a flow control.”

There are two things to note about this trend. First, this new wave of hyper-intelligent control and diagnostic systems can achieve pretty impressive results. SkyFoundry, one of the faster growing companies in this space, is deploying its technology platform into two major retail chains. One these chains has 1,100 stores.

In the first 250 stores, the software saved $2 million in four months, said president John Petze, noting that this approach is fairly cheap compared to the usual army of consultants required for efficiency retrofits.

“You can get started [with SkyFoundry] with thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars," Petze said. SkyFoundry was founded in 2009 and only started shipping products in 2011.

Second, everyone’s business model sports a slightly different shade.

Vigilent concentrates on managing air conditioners, with a primary focus on AC units in data centers. It does not touch lights or control computing loads and modes. Data centers occupy only 2 percent of the total square footage of corporate real estate, but consume 20 percent of all energy purchased, says Vigilent CEO Mark Housley.

In a data center owned by the Franchise Tax Board, Vigilent eliminated 60 percent of the power consumed by circulating cold air. Overall, the company’s technology has been deployed in over 50 data centers containing 1,000 air conditioning units. So far, 400 of these AC units have been shut off, saving 75 million kilowatt-hours of energy per year.

By contrast, Scientific Conservation Inc. concentrates mostly on commercial office space and industrial sites rather than data centers. While it focuses primarily on HVAC data today, the company hopes to analyze data from lights and other appliances in the future. The underlying secret sauce derives from neural networks, a programming concept developed in the '80s. SCI creates an ideal model of how the building should function, compares it to real data, and draws conclusions on what needs to be fixed.

SCI, however, won’t control devices directly. The company’s software sits on top of a building management system and provides it with information, so it’s more like a persistent Accenture consultant for office parks.

Serious Materials, meanwhile, mines data coming off of plug loads to determine what is working properly and what isn’t. The system then assumes “supervisory control” over an existing building management system. In other words, the software lets you take fairly direct action and doesn't just provide advice, Serious execs argue.

Instead of selling software licenses on a per-square-foot basis like some companies, Serious sells it as service. The rack rate is ten cents per square foot a year — and the company claims it can achieve energy reductions of 20 percent. If a company spends $2 a square foot on energy each year, Serious saves 40 cents per square foot, keeps ten cents and delivers a 30-cent-per-square-foot savings to the owner or tenant. (Serious used to concentrate on building materials like green drywall, but shifted into controls when it purchased Valence Energy last September.)

Petze, meanwhile, chafes if you call SkyFoundry’s technology an application. It’s an analytics platform, he emphasizes. It can take in a wide variety of data — old utility bills from a spreadsheet, meter data, weather data, energy consumption from the HVAC — and create energy conservation plans.

Ideally, however, customers and partners will create customized applications that will refine SkyFoundry’s capabilities, similar to how developers at publishing firms customize apps for particular websites. Every building is different. A meat locker and an ad agency might exist next door to each other in the same city, but their needs will be different.

Like Serious, SkyFoundry is looking at ways to “white label” its technology through channel partners.

In some cases, the similarities are greater than the differences. But, as in solar electronics, we’re living in an era where these concepts and business models will be honed and refined on an ongoing basis.

Who is responsible for the greenhouse gases wreaking havoc on our environment?

Whales. And Thomas Edison.

When Edison was inventing the light bulb, he chose components and design conventions that would allow the incandescent light bulb to mimic the color and quality of existing lights, said Don Peifer, the co-founder of LED fixture maker Lunera. (Before Lunera, he served as a lighting designer for Annie Leibovitz, among others.)

“It harkens back to the primordial flame,” he said in a meeting at the company’s offices.

Edison’s bulb changed the world, but the incandescent bulb is also somewhat inefficient: 95 percent of its power goes to heat, not light. The color of incandescent light, though, remains highly popular with consumers and is one of the reasons solid state lighting has yet to fully take off.

You’ll be hearing a lot about solid state lighting and Edison this week. LightFair, the industry’s annual confab, is taking place in Philadelphia. A few years ago, the show was mostly populated by lighting contractors, distributors and the eccentrics that the lighting industry seems to attract.

Now, it’s dominated by contractors, distributors and eccentrics being chased by investors and REITs trying to find out what the next big thing is. So what’s on tap?

–The Looming War in  Lighting Networks. In the past few years, we’ve touted companies like Redwood, Daintree Networks, Adura and Lumenergi because they make technology that can let facilities managers dim lights remotely and harvest daylight.

But technological changes may make add-on networking obsolete, particularly in standard commercial buildings or homes. Some companies have begun to produce fixtures with localized motion and light sensors. If you leave your desk, the light dims. If the sun starts to go down, it turns itself up. The light does everything a networked light does but it doesn’t have to communicate with anyone else. Less overhead means less cost. (Francis Rubenstein at Lawrence Berkeley Lab is currently conducting on a demonstration pilot with the DOE on autonomous lights.)

Some companies will also show off fixtures with workable, but less robust, networking than the communications capabilities based around things like the 0-to-10 standard. Although not as granular, these other technologies have the advantage of being free.

Lighting Science is working with Google to integrate networking into a bulb that communicates with Android phones. Who needs third-party products at that point? If autonomy and inexpensive integrated networking take hold, this trend could end before it begins.

–Demand Response Links to Lights. But there is one thing you can’t get with “good enough” networking and autonomous lights: money and rebates for curbing your lights. Without a network, you can’t measure savings.

Digital Lumens, which makes a networked LED light for warehouses, has joined the OpenADR Alliance. Here’s a video of Lumens’ light at work. We predicted last year that light makers would begin to forge tighter links with demand response companies: well, fancy that!

The conflicts between the network workarounds and the ability of networking companies to bake value into their products — like Redwood using its tech to monitor consumer behavior in grocery stores — have just started to emerge. However, this will become a big issue over the next two years.

–DC Power. LEDs run on DC power, just like computers and electric motors. Because power coming from the grid is AC, it has to be converted (via a power supply) into DC in order for the lights to go on. While some companies put power supplies on every LED light fixture, many are trying to get customers to adopt centralized DC converters to save money.

Redwood Systems is a big advocate of this approach. So is the E-Merge Alliance, which counts Armstrong World Industries, Johnson Controls and Nextek Power Systems among its members. E-Merge has already rigged a Whole Foods in Berkeley to run directly off solar panels, which produce DC power. No inverter or power converter required. E-Merge will soon make an announcement.

–The Battle for the Office. Cree will focus on the Cree CR series at the show, a set of LED ceiling lights that will replace fluorescents. Commercial indoor lighting is a $6.4 billion business, says Cree VP Gary Trott.

The LEDs do not point down. Instead, Cree points them up. The light bounces off a surface and washes the room with soft light. The light design and heat sink are somewhat novel.

Meanwhile, General Electric will license technology from Rambus to make ceiling lights that rely on what you could call plastic optics. LEDs are directed into a sheet of plastic carved up with waveguides. These waveguides in turn precisely dole out light. The underlying technology comes from telecom. Lunera, which counts Google and Apple as customers, exploits similar concepts. 

–Plasma Is Not Dead. Plasma lights are tiny glass capsules about the size of a breath mint that put out as much light as a street lamp. Luxim has promoted them for years. Eden Park has tried to bring plasmas to homes. Still, they remain a niche product.

Topanga Technologies, which has a Luxim-like light, though, has just raised another $15 million. This third round was lead by an unnamed strategic investor from Asia. Khosla Ventures and Nth Power kicked in more, too.

–OLED Kicking Too. Acuity allegedly will unfurl an OLED for home. Stay tuned.

–Illumitex will show off new versions of its freakishly interesting bulb that gives off a square beam. It will come in colors too, for that retro Swingin' '60s look.

–Liquids. Switch will have its liquid bulb on display. Lighting Science will show off a bulb cooled with liquid too. Filling the dome with liquid allows heat to dissipate more evenly, and thereby eliminates costly components.

–The Forever Retrofit. Here's one more great thing about LEDs. Once you retrofit a building to accommodate them, you can just replace the light units as they improve over time without undergoing a major overhaul. Bridgelux pioneered the snap-in concept. Expect more to follow.

And one last thing: below is a video of Tom Quinn, who runs marketing at Lunera, talking about his company’s products.

Five years ago, the residential energy management arena was a lonely place for Tendril Networks. Today, there is stiff competition from every angle, including General Electric down to the other startups coming up every day.

Adrian Tuck, CEO of Tendril Networks, said he welcomes the competition in the nascent market. On a panel about home energy management at The Networked Grid in San Francisco, Tuck said that their systems will start to be inserted into a few million homes by the end of the year — a colossal jump, since most trials involve a few thousand homes at most.

The shift shows an evolution of the market. Ogi Kavazovic, the  VP of Marketing and Strategy for OPower, was also on the panel and spoke about the information his company is getting from the 10 million homes they provide information to. Although it is still unclear whether utilities will be the broker between homeowners and energy efficiency services, the suite of products available is going to continue infiltrating the market. The key word there is 'suite.' There is no one consumer; there is no one solution. It seems obvious, but until recently there have been surprisingly few products that offer differentiated solutions to individuals.

“This industry has suffered from the perception that everyone is the same,” said Tuck. “Some people want the smart refrigerators, but there are others who will maybe just look at their bill for more information.”

OPower, which has a low-cost product (read: no home hardware) to deliver information through web portals, mailings and other readily available channels, embraces the personalization of information. Today, Kavazovic spoke of programs where they might see a trend where one house uses the same amount of electricity as its neighbors, but uses far more air conditioning. Not only will they suggest a very energy-efficient (and more expensive) EnergySTAR AC unit, but they might also provide a coupon for that product. Obviously, that’s not something you throw at everyone — but for the person who will see the payback in one summer, it’s a value-added solution. He acknowledges that this low-tech option is just the first wave of this market. OPower delivers an average of 4 percent savings — not much in terms of cold, hard cash for the average household, but a huge aggregate gain for utilities.

The OPower model seems to suggest that tailored information only gets you so far, something that Kavazovic acknowledges.  At Oklahoma Gas & Electric, a pilot is coupling smart thermostats and web portals with dynamic pricing for an average savings of 18 percent during peak days. Matthew Smith of Silver Spring Networks, which is providing the systems, said that although the price point to put hardware in people’s homes is expensive, OG&E is looking to offset building new generation — so the price tag is worth it. The project is still in pilot, but Smith said that the utility is anticipating a full deployment afterwards.

The three companies are all playing in the utility space right now because that’s where the opportunities are. Best Buy is not lining their shelves with home energy management systems and next-generation smart thermostats — yet. People are not signing up for energy efficiency portals the way they are for Groupon. But they will turn to big box stores in the future — especially when there are standards in place for these devices to communicate back to utility systems. Best Buy is already planning on selling electric vehicle chargers, and that’s a miniscule market compared to home energy efficiency products. And if you already run your life from your iGoogle homepage, adding in an energy widget might be a natural fit in the future.

Consumers are already willing to go to the stores or other third-party providers, according to Greg Guthridge, Global Managing Director of Retail and Business Services for Accenture. He pointed to a recent study by Accenture that found that 50 percent of people said they would opt in to programs that will share their utility information.

For utilities, keeping the customer close will become a question not only of what they want to achieve — from peak shaving to overall efficiency — but of survival. The word 'trust' popped up more than once at The Networked Grid this year. People don’t trust their utilities. At best, there’s usually apathy; at worst, outright hatred. On the other side, most utilities aren’t all that interested in being consumer-facing companies, said Kavazovic, but they should be. “A future where the utility is just running the wires is a bleak one for the utilities.”

In deregulated markets like Texas, there are still very few differentiators between the different retailers, but that is likely going to change. And with OPower contracts coming in with millions of homes at a time, like with their wins at Pacific Gas & Electric — or Tendril installing its product in millions of homes by the end of the year — some utilities are finding business cases to tap into the residential market.

As the market matures beyond just providing basic, useful information in web portals and on paper, the panel said there will be winners and losers on the utility side (and, surely, on the commercial side of this already overstuffed market). “We’ll see much more aggressive industry convergence,” said Guthridge. “All the non-traditional players — they’re all going to enter the home.”  In deregulated markets, utilities will have to compete or partner when it comes to household applications — or perish.