Each year, a handful of greentech companies become the talk of the town. Some engage in a competitive and oversubscribed fundraising round. Others announce a development partner that makes competitors take notice. Still others grow sales or flop in a make-or-break year.

I have seen the future of home energy management—and it is completely automated. Or as automated as we can make it. Though maybe not in the “traditional” sense of tying together a bunch of disparate systems—heating and cooling, water heating, lighting, appliances and electronics. But in a smart sense—with at least some of the smarts coming from the cloud.

EcoFactor Inc. , a clean technology startup, is hoping to convince broadband service providers that one easy path into the energy management business is to white label a product that helps consumers not just monitor energy usage in the home but control it.

nergy efficiency is incredibly important and really, really boring. There are always going to be that small minority of people who just love to maximize their energy use, who know exactly how much air should be in their tires to improve gas mileage, who can calculate the most efficient thermostat setting. But those people are few and far between—and you'd probably want to avoid them anyway.

EnergyHub added another dimension to its home energy management offerings on Monday with Mercury, a new software-as-a-service platform. The new product is an evolution from the Brooklyn-based company’s dashboard and software offerings. It is a white label service that is being offered to television and cable providers, home security companies and utilities that can ride on top of any wireless thermostat.

EnergyHub is making smart thermostats smarter by hitching them to a large database. The residential energy company today announced a software system that works with connected thermostats in people's homes to optimize settings for energy savings. Called Mercury, the software is aimed at broadband providers, utilities, and thermostat manufacturers, which will offer the service to consumers.

Is the answer to helping integrate solar and wind into the power grid the humble home hot water heater? That’s one of the things that startup GridMobility is looking to find out, and the company has built software and connected hardware to enable utilities to use hot water heaters (and other energy-consuming appliances) as on-demand grid storage in conjunction with local clean power when it’s available.

When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg held his regular radio show live from City Hall on Friday, he urged New Yorkers to keep their air conditioning no cooler than 79 degrees during the day and throughout the weekend. If you hadn’t been listening, you might have missed it. Most New Yorkers did. Consolidated Edison also asked its customers to curb electricity demand via a press release. Again, not very effective.

When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg held his regular radio show live from City Hall on Friday, he urged New Yorkers to keep their air conditioning no cooler than 79 degrees during the day and throughout the weekend. If you hadn’t been listening, you might have missed it. Most New Yorkers did. Consolidated Edison also asked its customers to curb electricity demand via a press release. Again, not very effective.

One of the reasons energy storage for the power grid isn’t widely used is that many of the technologies, like batteries, are still far too expensive to be used at grid scale. But what if you could use something that costs a fraction of a battery to deploy for grid storage … like Software-as-a-Service? On Thursday, a startup called Clean Urban Energy (CUE) launched its SaaS product, which uses commercial buildings essentially as thermal batteries, and announced a $7 million investment from VCs Battery Ventures and Rho Ventures.

Methinks you have all read about the recent decisions of Google and Microsoft to back off investments in cloud-based services designed to help consumers managed their home electricity consumption. Google blinked first, then Microsoft. Both cited poor consumer adoption in their decisions. I just think they are impatient. That doesn’t meant that home energy management services and solutions are going away, though.

Internet giants Google and Microsoft have officially given their web-based energy management tools the Donald Trump (as in, “You’re Fired!”), and last week, announced they would be closing them down in the near future. I’ve already dug into a few reasons why I think Google’s PowerMeter tool and Microsoft’s Hohm app didn’t make the cut.

They’re dropping like flies: the big Internet companies’ online energy tools. Last week, it was Google pulling the plug on PowerMeter , and this week, it’s RIP for Microsoft and its Hohm energy tool . So what happened with Hohm? Some of the reasons are the same ones that led to the demise of PowerMeter, but some issues seem specific for Hohm. Here’s my assessment of 5 reasons why Microsoft Hohm didn’t take off: 1. Limited initial use...

Microsoft just killed off its Home Energy Management product, Hohm, because of less-than-overwhelming response. The software giant had signaled that Hohm was dead in March and we covered it here. This comes a week after Google killed its version of same, the Powermeter, once touted by Google's astronaut-in-residence.

This month saw the first billion plus acquisition of a pure Smart Grid company with Toshiba’s purchase of Landis+Gyr for $2.3 billion .The owners of Landis+Gyr, the Australian investment group Bayard Capital announced over a year ago that they would go for an IPO within 2 years. It was therefore no surprise when rumours started in April that strategic buys were being considered from a number of suitors including GE. With the exception of GE all the other traditional electrical giants do not have a smart meter business so the odds were always in favour of one of them finding this buy irresistible.

NV Energy, through EcoFactor, today released the results of a 2010 pilot that deployed EcoFactor energy management technology. The deployment in homes in the Las Vegas metropolitan area delivered a 36 percent increase in demand response (DR) yield as compared to conventional residential DR. Due to the pilot's success, NV Energy will expand its deployment of the technology this summer increasing its presence in Las Vegas and expanding to Reno.

A California energy management firm says it has made a deal to expand its role with NV Energy in helping keep homes cool without overloading the grid. EcoFactor said Monday that the expanded deal comes after a pilot test last year showed strong results using its system compared with conventional methods of conserving energy during peak times. Officials say the program anticipates times when demand could get high, like storms or heat waves, and adjusts thermostats to get homes to proper temperatures before demand gets too high.

IBM’s Smarter Planet division released a new solution recently that can make buildings energy efficient— even if they are huge and 100 years old like the company itself. Vice president of the Smarter Buildings division at IBM, Dave Bartlett, visited TechCrunch TV to talk about the stupid ways that people waste energy in medium to large buildings, and how the company’s new Intelligent Building Management solution can change that.

It has accomplished its goals, the search giant says. Now it’s off the Land of the Misfit Toys. Google Kills PowerMeter PowerMeter has gone to the vet. Google said in a blog today that after tremendous successes in trials and great feedback from customers it is discontinuing the software/service for managing and monitoring home energy consumption. The service will formally die on September 16.

On the heels of Silion Valley startup iControl securing a deal to provide its software for Comcast’s new home security and energy management service, iControl announced Monday that it has raised another $50 million in a Series D round from its long list of high profile investors. With this funding, seven-year-old iControl has now raised over $100 million from investors including Comcast Ventures (the VC arm of Comcast), Cisco, Intel’s VC arm Intel Capital, Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, and the parent company of security firm ADT.

At GigaOM we closely cover the next generation of technology that will be able to manage, analyze and make use of the massive amounts of data that have emerged across industries thanks to the Internet. We even have an annual conference — Big Data — that digs into the issue. But to me, big data tools are also an incredibly important way to help better manage the world’s resources, like energy consumption, food production and fuel use.

In green tech, there are a few markets — solar and efficiency come to mind — where startups stand a halfway decent chance of becoming a going concern or a ripe acquisition target. Efficiency revolves around hardware and software, while solar seems to give birth to new sub-niches all the time. You're not going to start a crystalline silicon solar module company in the U.S. today, but a company that can produce thin, inexpensive crystalline wafers for Chinese module makers could enjoy a bright future.

EcoFactor's EcoFactor energy management solution has won the Utility Technology Challenge hosted by the Clean Technology & Sustainable Industries Organization (CTSI). The technology was chosen, in part, for the automated benefits it delivers to consumers. "Many solutions only provide feedback on energy use and then require the consumer to act upon the information in order to optimize energy use.

A “hands-off” heating and cooling strategy, an improved method for electronic power conversion and a system that “fingerprints” energy on the power grid have all been named the most promising clean-technology solutions focused on utilities. EcoFactor, Ideal Power Converters and Power Tagging were chosen as the top three technologies from a field of 15 semifinalists in the Clean Technology and Sustainable Industries (CTSI) Utility Technology Challenge. The winners were selected by a program committee that included Austin Energy, National Grid, Northeast Utilities and Lockheed Martin.

EcoFactor, an energy efficiency startup based in Redwood City, Calif. was named a winner at the Utility Technology Challenge today in Boston. The other two winners were Ideal Power Converters and Power Tagging, according to a press release from the event.
EcoFactor’s flagship software as a service (SaaS) helps electricity consumers and utilities to diagnose and curb energy waste related to heating and cooling.

Homes using EcoFactor for controlling their heating and cooling have seen on average a 17 percent reduction in energy use, the company announced Thursday. In conjunction with local utilities and home service providers, Silicon Valley-based EcoFactor collected data from homes in both pilot and commercial programs using two-way thermostats connected to the company's software platform.

EcoFactor -- the home energy management company that says it can cut your power bills by operating your thermostat for you -- says it can cut utility bills by 17 percent a month compared to a programmable thermostat left for you to control.

If you have had the misfortune to sit through one of my keynote speeches, then you may have heard me say that "it will be much easier to make devices smart about energy than to make people smart about energy."
Given my (admittedly cynical) attitude, I was delighted to see today's announcement from EcoFactor about the success of its automated approach to home energy management.

EcoFactor is a company that you may begin to hear about in your neck of the woods. Today, they announced the results of several pilots and deployments of a personalized, SaaS-based solution for managing residential energy use. The results: households using EcoFactor saved an average of about 17% per month on energy and up to $56 per month in energy costs.

EcoFactor, a startup that uses big data tools to act as a new brain for connected thermostats, has some stellar results from ten different trials where it automated the process of turning up and down consumer’s thermostats. The company, which launched at the end of 2009, says that on average its services can reduce a person’s home energy use by 17 percent compared to a programmable but non-optimized thermostat.

Several big players are vying for a piece of the home energy management market – a growing market estimated to be worth over 3 billion by 2015, according to Parks Associates. This market will continue to shake out, with utilities, service providers and energy management vendors all trying to find the right scalable model. And the entrepreneurs and investors who choose the winning horse will be riding a huge wave as home energy management rolls out across the planet.

Cable operator Comcast has turned to a Silicon Valley startup for the software behind its home security and energy management product unveiled on Wednesday: iControl. Seven-year-old, Palo Alto, Calif-based iControl is backed by Comcast itself, as well as Kleiner Perkins, Charles River Ventures, Intel Capital, Cisco, GE, and security firm ADT — so the company has a long history and lots of friends in high places that led up to this deal.

The Clean Technology and Sustainable Industries Organization (CTSI) and its committee of utility and system integrator technologists from Lockheed Martin, Austin Energy, National Grid, Northeast Utilities and the City of Anaheim would like to recognize the 2011 Top 15 Utility Solutions.

Thermostats running EcoFactor software can shave up to 30 percent off heating and cooling costs. The service, sold through utility, Internet and cable providers, uses the Web to access your usage history and weather data to adjust the temperature.

EcoFactor is an energy management software start-up that recently won a Cleantech Open award. It aggregates data abut your home's energy use and gives a grade for each zone of the house. The grade reflects how sealed a building is and its energy efficiency levels. While the grade is based on the home, it of course reflects on the owner and we know there are some people who just have to be straight A students. Luckily, EcoFactor also likes straight A students.

Home energy software business EcoFactor raised $3.5 million to complete a $5.9 million first round of venture funding.

RockPort Capital Partners led this part of the round, while Claremont Creek Ventures led the first bit, back in December.

A sampling of the players jockeying for position in a nascent market

Opower - The company compares neigh-boring households' energy use and provides reports that 25-plus utilities send free to consumers.
EcoFactor - Using a communicating thermostat, EcoFactor manages HVAC. Customers of Texas utility Oncor, which will subsidize the program, can sign up now.

Greentech Media announces the top 50 startups in greentech

Venture capital firms have invested almost $20 billion into hundreds of greentech startups since 2005. All of these firms are looking to launch a disruptive force into their target markets, scale rapidly and grow quickly.

SAN FRANCISCO (Private Equity Week) - As an entrepreneur, Gary Kremen knows something about growth industries.

In the early 1990s, he had enough foresight about the porn industry's online potential to register the domain Sex.com. Later, he moved into online dating, founding dating site Match.com.