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1. Greenbox Looking to Raise Series A Round
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2. EU to Obama: Catch Us, If You Can — and Bring Your Entrepreneurs
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3. Propel Launches California Alt-Fuel Stations
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4. With Electric Cars Still in the Works, Makers Seek Extra Cash in Batteries
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5. Web-based Tools Can Help Cut Vehicle Emissions by 10%
Greenbox Looking to Raise Series A Round
Jennifer Kho - dashboard
Greenbox Technology, a startup with a web-based platform that monitors home energy use, told us recently it hopes to close its first round of funding by June. Matthew Smith, the company's vice president of marketing, said the company is talking to potential investors now. The round could be as high as $20 million, he said, but suggested the amount will most likely fall between $3 million and $5 million.
"We aren't announcing [the amount] publicly, but we're looking at a pretty typical, standard A round," he said, adding that the company has several alternate plans, depending on its investors and "how aggressive we want to get." Most of the money will go toward hiring, he said.
Founded in 2007 by the creators and designers of Flash, Greenbox has developed software that monitors and analyzes a home's energy use and displays the data –- including information about the time of day, usage by appliances, and comparisons to other homes in the community and different electricity-rate plans –- in the form of charts and graphs on a web dashboard.
The company has partnered with utilities, including Oklahoma Gas and Electric and an as-yet-unnamed New York utility, to provide the dashboard for the utilities' smart-metering customers. It licenses the software to utilities, which pay an undisclosed price per user, per month, and provides related services, such as sending weekly emails to utilities' customers with the amount of energy they used in the last week and tips for reducing that amount.
Greenbox is also working with device manufacturers, including smart thermostat makers Energate and Golden Power Manufacturing, to enable the devices to communicate with the Greenbox system. Customers using those devices can monitor their heating and cooling systems on their web dashboards, and also can control their thermostats remotely.
The company has fewer than 100 end users now, but Smith says many of Greenbox' partners plan to soon expand their trials to tens of thousands of meters. It’s submitted proposals in partnership with Siemens, Smith said, and has also submitted some proposals for million-meter programs.
The company is working to simplify its user interface, and next plans to move from just monitoring energy use to also reducing it, he said. By the end of this year, it plans to start beta testing features that will analyze households' data and recommend steps they can take to lower their energy use. Greenbox hopes to expand those capabilities next year.
The company also plans to add more devices to its compatibility list, including plug sensors that monitor the energy use of individual devices, as well as smart refrigerators and even electric cars, he said.
Smith said it's hard to say when Greenbox will turn a profit, as part of that will depend on how much money it decides to spend on expansion. But he expects that the next two years will still be investment years, and said the company could be ready to get to scale -– and profitability -– by year three.
"It's very easy to see how we could turn a profit very quickly…then we’ll put money into expanding," he said. "We have the opportunity to scale very fast with utilities, so it's partly dependent on how much of the pie you want to eat." Of course, while deciding how much of the pie it wants, Greenbox will also need to be careful to avoid biting off more than it can chew.
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EU to Obama: Catch Us, If You Can — and Bring Your Entrepreneurs
Josie Garthwaite - Policy
The new president has convinced the governor of Texas that his administration will crack down on greenhouse gas emissions. But political leaders overseas want to be sure. EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas has published an open letter to President Barack Obama, calling for the U.S. to take an ambitious lead, post haste. “If Europe’s efforts are to make a real difference,” Dimas writes, “then we need America to join us shoulder to shoulder in the battle against climate change.”
I am convinced that many of the new ideas that will move us away from our carbon addiction will come from America. What is more, your country has the proven ability to translate research into results.
Today — when the European Commission is expected to reveal its strategy for increasing climate-related investments to $231 billion per year by 2020 — we’ll get a better idea of how Dimas and his fellow commissioners plan to push those results with the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, to be negotiated in Copenhagen in March. But a draft of the outline leaked out yesterday, and it describes several strategies for financing low-carbon development, including new state investment in energy efficiency and the use of carbon-credit auction revenue for “clean investments” in the EU and abroad.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco experts at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Propel Launches California Alt-Fuel Stations
Katie Fehrenbacher - Biofuels
The new stations are located in Northern California in the Sacramento area and on Wednesday the company will host a kickoff event at one of them in Rocklin, Calif. (It starts 10AM for those interested in stopping by.) The Propel Clean Fuel Point-branded stations were largely in the Washington state area up until recently, and all of its stations currently sell E85 (ethanol blended to 85 percent) and biodiesel. Propel CEO Rob Elam says eventually they will charge electric and hydrogen vehicles, too.
While Elam wouldn’t disclose how much each station cost to build, he said Propel used some grant money from the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The stations can’t be that expensive as Propel has only raised a Series A round of $4.75 million from @Ventures and Nth Power, and the company owns and operates the stations itself, and also doesn’t plan on raising more money anytime soon, says Elam.
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With Electric Cars Still in the Works, Makers Seek Extra Cash in...
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
When Toyota Prius sales sank more than 40 percent last May compared with the same month a year earlier, the automaker blamed it on a global battery shortage. But while the 7 percent drop in fiscal 2009 sales Toyota forecast this week has less to do with batteries and more to do with the global economy, part of Toyota and other automakers’ recovery could have everything to do with supplying parts and technology for all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Most electric vehicles now in the works remain at least a year away from production, and further still from profitability. But a growing number of automakers in Europe, Japan and the U.S. are betting that the energy storage component — whether lithium-ion or nickel-hydride — will become a lucrative sideline in a next-generation automotive industry. Moves by companies including Toyota, Daimler, Nissan and Tesla Motors, which aim to supply third-party automakers with battery packs and chargers, may represent some of the first signs of real revenue in the high-tech vehicle market.
Competition for a piece of the next-gen auto supply pie is not limited to big industry players — not least of all because the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing incentives program has made grants and direct loans available for making batteries and other components for electric, hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors, maker of the luxury electric Roadster sports car, has drummed up business with Daimler AG for its battery packs and chargers. Under an agreement revealed at this year’s Detroit Auto Show, Tesla will supply the German automaker with components for a 1,000-vehicle test fleet of electric Smart cars scheduled to hit U.S. roads in 2010 — the startup’s first such deal with a third-party manufacturer.
By way of contrast, rival startup Fisker Automotive plans to stay out of the supply business at least until it secures a market foothold. The company has not reached production for its plug-in hybrid Fisker Karma, and it sees the model’s exclusive powertrain and battery pack from Quantum Technologies as a competitive advantage – and key to getting the vehicle to market fast. “Once we get this to market in numbers,” said Fisker spokesperson Russell Datz in an interview, “plans may change.”
Daimler, which plans to launch an electric version of not only the subcompact Smart, but also a Mercedes sedan, has other pots brewing. The company sources nickel-metal hydride battery packs from Cobasys and lithium-ion packs from Continental AG for its hybrids. But Daimler also owns 90 percent of a joint venture launched two months ago with Germany’s Evonik Industries AG to develop lithium-ion batteries — for its own vehicles and, eventually, third-party manufacturers.
To be sure, components sidelines offer nothing close to a silver bullet for today’s automakers. Many parts manufacturers have come to the brink of bankruptcy as automakers cut production and lenders refuse credit to those doing business with Detroit’s beleaguered Big Three.
At least one of the Big Three could have had a hefty piece of the now-hot battery market. A first-mover in the sector, GM started building sideline nickel-metal hydride business (similar to the one envisioned by Daimler) 15 years ago. But GM ended up selling its stake in a battery venture to Texaco (later acquired by Chevron). Called GM Ovonic, the joint venture with a subsidiary of Michigan’s Energy Conversion Devices launched in 1994 to commercialize nickel-metal hydride batteries for electric vehicles.
Toyota entered the picture two years later with the joint venture Panasonic EV Energy. The company now gets about 70 percent of all hybrid battery sales (most of them nickel-metal hydride batteries for Toyota’s Prius), which customers including Ford, Nissan, and GM itself. GM failed to parlay battery technology licensing and sales into significant revenue, and gave up on its energy storage sideline after a few short years — handing the market to Toyota. In a few years, Daimler, Tesla or Nissan may be ready to give it a run for its money.
Photo of Toyota Prius battery courtesy of Toyota.
This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.
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Web-based Tools Can Help Cut Vehicle Emissions by 10%
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Slated to conclude in March, the pilot program got funding from the Denver subsidiary of EnCana Corp.. The Canadian oil and gas company said last year that it would spend about $400,000 on the “Driving Change” program, and it turned to California-based Enviance Inc. for measuring emissions. Communication equipment — an accelerometer and a modem for communicating data to drivers’ online dashboards — came from Denver’s Cartasite Inc., which makes GPS systems for the oil and gas industry.
All three companies have touted the test as a great success, although the results fall short of original goals: EnCana said last year that it hoped to see emissions drop by twice as much, since aggressive driving decreases fuel efficiency by about 20 percent. While not insignificant — the reported reductions could deliver annual fuel savings of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for large fleets — the results could prove even more disappointing after Denver’s cold winter months, when drivers are more inclined to idle vehicles.
Even so, Denver’s program has important implications for the future of information technology in the auto industry. Just as the digital interface of the Prius encourages drivers to seek more efficient habits (many report one-person competitions for maximum fuel economy), digital trackers like the one devised for Driving Change can provide drivers with information to help them make better choices. It’s not rocket science. But it is the underlying tenant of the information technology industry, as well as the growing market for in-home energy management software: provide the tools, and people will use them.
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