Energy Aware Riding Wave of Innovation and Investment in Energy Efficiency

Energy Aware Neurio Sensor/Data Collection Technology

In October of 2013, I first met Energy Aware’s management team, led by UBC alumni founders Janice Cheam and VP of Software, Ali Kashani in their modest East Vancouver offices.  I had encountered Ali commenting on the Internet of Things (IoT) on LinkedIn, and I challenged his arguments, as the skeptic that I am. Ali very graciously invited me to meet with him to discuss it further. Home automation and its new iteration, IoT, has been around for at least twenty years and had been going absolutely nowhere. Added to that was what I termed “The Tower of Babble,” a term now also used by Qualcomm to describe the data communication hairball in the IoT space. Indeed, Energy Aware had struggled for quite awhile in this immature market.  What I learned in that first meeting with Ali and Janice turned this skeptic into a believer, and I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with Al and Janice since that time providing them with tidbits of advice here and there.  My gut told me that Energy Aware was on to something with significant potential, as IoT was finally achieving technological “convergence,” and the Big Dogs in Silicon Valley were now gearing up their own IoT efforts. There is a Tsunami coming, and Energy Aware is well-positioned to ride it.

Energy Aware’s Management Team: CEO Janice Cheam & VP Software Ali Kashani

Reblogged from the Seattle Times:

Energy efficiency becomes hot market for tech companies

Long overshadowed by wind turbines, solar panels and other fashionable machines of renewable power, energy efficiency is sparking innovation and interest from tech entrepreneurs, big-data enthusiasts and Wall Street speculators.

By Evan Halper

Originally published by Tribune Washington Bureau, July 6, 2014

WASHINGTON — As President Obama pushes ahead on a strategy to confront climate change that relies heavily on energy efficiency, some Americans may see flashbacks of Jimmy Carter trying to persuade them to wear an extra sweater and turn down the thermostat.

The technology world sees dollar signs.

Long overshadowed by wind turbines, solar panels and other fashionable machines of renewable power, energy efficiency has lately become a hot pursuit for tech entrepreneurs, big-data enthusiasts and Wall Street speculators.

They have leveraged multibillion-dollar programs in several states, led by California and Massachusetts, to cultivate a booming industry. This onetime realm of scolds, do-gooders and bureaucrats has become the stuff of TED talks, IPOs and spirited privacy debates.

“This is not about extra sweaters anymore,” said Jon Wellinghoff, a San Francisco lawyer who formerly chaired the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Power companies are tapping databases to profile intensely the energy use of their customers, the way that firms like Target track customer product choices.

 

Google spent $3.2 billion this year to buy Nest Labs, a company that makes thermostats that resemble iPhones and are designed to intuit the needs of their owners. Energy regulators are providing seed capital to startups building such things as waterless laundry machines.

“There was this notion that energy efficiency would never be sexy, never be something people wanted,” said Ben Bixby, director of energy products at Nest, which has attracted employees from Apple, Google and Tesla Motors to its base in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Nest has built this object of desire,” he said.

On hot days, Nest’s technology enables Southern California Edison to precool the homes of customers before the evening rush, helping the utility avoid the need to fire up extra power plants and netting cash rebates for homeowners.

Spending on efficiency technologies and programs soared to $250 billion worldwide last year, according to the International Energy Agency. The agency projects that amount will more than double by 2035.

U.S. power companies have tripled their investment in efficiency programs — funded mainly through ratepayer fees — since 2006, with California spending the most per customer.

Now the Obama administration has made energy efficiency a cornerstone of its plan to slash greenhouse-gas emissions by 2020. The plan, released in May by the Environmental Protection Agency, pushes states to boost efficiency by business and residential power users 1.5 percent each year.

“We are very excited about the EPA proposal,” said Richard Caperton, director of national policy at OPower, a data-mining firm that nudges homeowners to make better energy choices by alerting them when their neighbors are being more efficient. “We think it opens up more opportunities.”

Not long ago, OPower was a small pilot project partnered with the power company in Sacramento, Calif. Now it does business with 90 utilities, including Seattle City Light, and has gone public.

All the mining of data involved in such high-tech efficiency efforts has some privacy advocates concerned.

In California, utilities are required to report when they share consumer data with someone other than the customer and vendors. Records show that last year immigration authorities, drug-enforcement agents and state tax officials issued more than 1,110 subpoenas for records that track energy use of customers in the San Diego area as frequently as every 15 minutes.

Emerging privacy issues will be a focus of a fall conference sponsored by the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

“This is a big deal,” Associate Director Neal Elliott said. “But it is not a big deal unique to energy.”

Those behind the startups said data already collected by retailers and social-media firms create a much bigger potential intrusion. They express confidence that consumers are more likely to be charmed by their innovations than panicked.

So far, most of the efficiency focus has been devoted to what one innovator in the field, Swap Shah, chief executive of FirstFuel in Boston, calls “elephant hunting.”

Utilities seek out their biggest clients, a small group of corporations in energy-intensive industries, audit their operations exhaustively and work with them to cut use. Each audit requires a small army of staff, Shah said.

FirstFuel goes after millions of other commercial customers that don’t get the utilities’ attention. It mines the 36,000 data points of consumption a modern smart meter generates for a building each year and checks it against other data, such as weather histories and images of the building.

The result is a deep energy-use profile that reveals specific areas of waste, including lights left on all night, air conditioning running when workers are not in the building and poorly insulated windows.

The average customer can use the report to cut consumption more than 18 percent, FirstFuel estimates. No auditors need ever set foot on the property.

Entrepreneurs like Shah hope that their software will ultimately be used by big financiers contemplating whether to back retrofits on large commercial buildings. Investors have not always been eager to put money in such projects amid concern that the investments won’t pay for themselves.

A similar innovation includes one recently unveiled by computer engineers at Retroficiency in Boston. Its Building Genome Project gathered all the publicly available data on 30,000 buildings in New York City to show how huge amounts of energy could be saved with slight changes, said CEO Bennett Fisher.

“Millions and millions of dollars have been spent trying to figure out which buildings are inefficient,” Fisher said. “Doing it manually has created a bottleneck. We want to blow open that bottleneck.”

Entrepreneurs Can’t Fix What They Don’t Understand

Reblogged from PandoDaily

Francisco Dao is one of my favorite bloggers. Francisco focuses like a laser beam on the tough issues of entrepreneurship with unfailing logic, sometimes tough for some to hear.  In a previous post, Francisco spoke openly about the frothy enthusiasm and euphoria surrounding entrepreneurship, suggesting that there were too many entrepreneurs producing too many mediocre ideas.   In this post, Francisco explores the current shift in entrepreneurial profiles, bemoaning their ignorance of how businesses work, and the embarrassing consequences.  He makes the very interesting point that in the past entrepreneurs would gain experience working in an industry before striking out on their own. That was my experience. Today, too many entrepreneurs are dropouts, recent graduates, or have only startup experience. As he points out, this has become the Achilles Heel of entrepreneurship.

You can’t fix what you don’t understand by Francisco Dao When you look at Walmart, what do you see? A store? Dying brick and mortar commerce? Badly dressed poor people? If you’re an entrepreneur looking for massive opportunities, what you should see is a business empire with almost $500 billion in sales, 2.2 million employees, 8,500 stores, 25 percent of all grocery sales in the United States, and most importantly, a mastery of supply chain logistics that its competitors have been unable to match. How about UPS, a company much of the Valley is dependent on for its physical deliveries? Do you look at UPS and think of blue collar guys driving brown trucks and showing up late? Or do you see an unimaginably complicated coordination of moving parts that delivers 15 million packages per day? When you think of General Electric, do you picture an appliance and light bulb company or a conglomerate that makes everything from medical imaging equipment to railroad locomotives along with a financial arm that alone has nearly $600 billion in assets? One of the main reasons few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tackle big challenges is that most of them don’t really understand how things work. It used to be entrepreneurs would spend several years in industry before starting something on their own. During their time working, they got to see how companies operate, including how they approach large scale opportunities and deal with looming threats. They also likely worked on projects with real or potential profits of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars. Obviously a few years on the job doesn’t teach someone everything that a massive company like Walmart or GE does, but at least they received some real world experience and saw some things first hand that could be improved. These days many entrepreneurs are either college dropouts, recent graduates, or only have startup work experience. Having never spent time in a big company solving big problems or seeing complex business processes, they don’t have any experience or knowledge of how any of these things are handled. As programmers, they have the tools to build solutions but they don’t have the knowledge of what should be built or what solutions are even needed. It’s like giving someone a construction crew without any training in architecture or telling them what type of buildings the city needs. They’ll probably be able to piece together a house, and once they’ve done that they can copy it “like this for that,” but they don’t have the experience or architectural knowledge to build anything complex or useful. Even more damaging is the increasingly popular, and arrogant, belief that inexperienced entrepreneurs can solve everything. It’s one thing to be ignorant of how a complex business works, it’s another thing to assume everything is simple and the people running established companies are stupid. Just because Walmart and UPS are old school brick and mortar companies doesn’t mean their CEOs don’t know what they’re doing. Having the potential power of the Internet at your disposal doesn’t make you omniscient or all powerful. It certainly doesn’t reduce all complex problems down to a simple web solution. Perhaps it’s time for a new type of business school, one that teaches would be entrepreneurs about the large scale challenges in big business. I’m not suggesting everyone get an MBA or spend 10 years working a corporate job before becoming an entrepreneur. But a little exposure to how real companies doing big things actually operate would go a long way toward helping entrepreneurs address some legitimate needs. Instead of simply trying to crank out copycat startups as fast as possible, incubators could even take on this role of teaching entrepreneurs case studies of complex problems. What could Silicon Valley solve if entrepreneurs actually understood how Walmart’s supply chain worked, or UPS’s delivery logistics, or even why it’s so hard to provide a nutritious school lunch? What could we streamline if we had knowledge of the challenges and problems that currently plague these and other complex systems? The bottom line is that you can’t fix what you don’t understand, and with so little first hand experience working on big, real world problems, most young entrepreneurs don’t understand all that much. [Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

The Humble Thermostat: Another Strategic Web Battle

The Ecobee Smart Thermostat, fully Internet capable

For years thermostats have been ugly and downright stupid devices that sit neglected on our walls. But over the past 18 months the connected thermostat has morphed into a gadget that has been drawing the attention of some of the most cutting-edge software startups, which are looking to use it to connect with utilities and consumers.

Unbeknownst to many, a Canadian company in Ontario, Ecobee, has been at the forefront of the smart thermostat market for quite awhile. The Ecobee device is fully integrated with the Internet, and does all of the things you might expect an Internet connected thermostat to do, using your smart phone while away in Zanzibar to monitor your home.  I quite like Ecobee.  But it would be another Canadian innovation tragedy if Ecobee got run over in this growing global battle, as has happened with so many Canadian companies.  I would be happier to see Ecobee begin acting like the global market player it is, attracting  major capital and Big Dog strategic partners.

But the market has been heating up for some time and many major technology players and lots of big Silicon Valley money are now in the fray.  A BC Hydro trial of advanced Smart Grid, solar heating, and Smart Meter (called Advanced Meter Initiative or AMI in BC) technologies has been going on quietly for some time on Vancouver Island. Another FortisBC trial is due to begin in the Okanagan sometime in the near future.  Home energy management networks are set to grow from being in 2 percent of U.S. households in 2011 to 13 percent, or about 16.2 million households, by 2015.

Intel Intelligent Home Management Console, a reference design for OEM’s

Cisco Systems, General Electric, Google, Honeywell, Microsoft and Intel, along with a host of other companies are now focused on this home energy management market, developing new products and technologies that will be in our homes shortly.  Siemens spin-off startup, EnOcean, and the EnOcean Alliance are also part of this complex market mix.  EnOcean is the current leader in a related technology, “energy harvesting”, which will likely be one of the future major drivers in energy efficiency. Many home appliances are already “Internet ready.”  This is obviously an area of major global corporate competition.

So take another look at that ugly thermostat on your wall. Things are about to change.

For the record, I am not impressed with all of the Luddite hype opposed to smart meters.  One of BC’s environmental celebrities (not David Suzuki) is an opponent of wireless smart meters, citing anecdotal research on the health dangers of radio waves generally, but not on smart meters specifically.    On the one hand, this person decries climate change deniers who refuse to accept science, while he simultaneously denies science on radio signal propagation.  I follow this area of research fairly closely and have yet to see any convincing study that points to health problems with the radio signal propagation of smart meters.  I am a follower of Nikola Tesla, the recently resurrected “father of electrical energy generation and distribution”, who endeavored to dispel superstitions about electricity.  Unfortunately, many of those superstitions persist.

A Khosla Ventures-backed energy analytics startup called Bidgely is the latest to go after the next-gen smart thermostat, and it has told us that it has an agreement with thermostat maker Emerson to commercialize a thermostat in the coming months that syncs with Bidgely’s energy software. Bidgely’s algorithms can take home energy data and section out which appliances in the home are consuming what amount of power, without having extra hardware or sensors on each plug or appliance.

Consumers that can get that type of data can see, for example, if their pool pump is consuming too much energy in the winter time, or if their air conditioning unit is sucking down much more power than the average (see itemized bill). Utilities could offer such a smart thermostat to customers in their areas that want to be included in energy efficiency programs. Emerson’s thermostat wirelessly connects to smart meters or a home router with a Zigbee connection.

The deal between Emerson and Bidgely isn’t all that unique in the rapidly growing energy software sector. Emerson is also working with other software startups like EcoFactor, EnergyHub, and Calico Energy to have its thermostat sync with their software, too.

Next week at a major utility conference called Distributech, all of the energy software startups and large energy giants will be touting their smart, connected thermostats; including both new thermostat models and new services. The thermostat is a unique device. It’s an object that can provide demand response services for utilities, or the collective turning down of utility customers’ energy use during peak times (like a hot summer day in Texas). Software startups like EcoFactor can create algorithms that can do this, without making the climate of a home uncomfortable for the inhabitant.

The thermostat is also the latest device to become part of the growing world of the Internet of Things. In this always-on connected ecosystem, everything gets a connection, all devices are made smarter with software and data and these devices can make human lives easier, more interesting or more efficient.

Nest is one of the few that’s aggressively targeting consumers. Most of the energy startups are aiming for the utility market. One of the better known collaborations around a thermostat maker and an energy software company is between Opower and Honeywell. Honeywell is the giant in the thermostat maker market, and Opower is the leading energy software player.

Make sure to watch the buzz around smart thermostats and the entire market area defined by energy efficiency monitoring and management, in both commercial and home applications.