[Ict4devwg] News: Software Facilitates Energy, Water Management

[Vern Weitzel]

Subject: 	News: Software Facilitates Energy, Water Management
Date: 	Tue, 2 Jun 2009 04:57:26 -0700
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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-greentech1-2009jun01,0,4118426.story

*'Clean-tech' start-ups are pushing the green button
*     Hara, which launches today, is the latest IT effort to help firms
and the planet through software to manage water and energy use.

By Dan Fost
June 1, 2009

Reporting from San Francisco -- Amit Chatterjee worked for three Silicon
Valley start-ups and software company SAP, but he was growing
increasingly intrigued by global warming and climate change. The more he
delved into the issue, the more he became convinced that there was a way
to use software to help tackle the problem.

His idea -- to help companies track and manage their use of energy,
water and other resources -- drew the backing of the valley's most
prominent venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Today, thanks to Kleiner's $6-million investment, Chatterjee unveils his
latest start-up, Hara, which monitors and manages companies' water and
energy consumption, and helps them plan ways to mitigate their
environmental effects.

Hara's arrival, after operating quietly for the last year and a half,
shows how the tech wizards behind many Internet companies are now hard
at work building digital solutions to save water, money, energy and
maybe even the planet. Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ted Schlein, a
Hara board member, calls it "the greening of IT," saying that large
corporations are ready to use information technology to make their
businesses more eco-friendly because it's the right thing to do and it
can save them money.

Venture capitalists, big companies including Cisco Systems Inc. and
General Electric Co. and private equity firms have been pumping money
into a variety of green IT initiatives, said Ron Pernick, co-founder and
principal of Clean Edge Inc., an environmental research and consulting
firm. A major push includes an effort to make the nation's power grid
"smarter" by using sensors and networking technology so companies can
track their electricity use.

These initiatives look at the demand side -- figuring out how people are
using energy -- rather than the supply side, such as solar power, to
replace the type of energy being generated.

Hara's innovation, CEO Chatterjee said, is giving companies an
"organizational metabolism index," much like a fitness trainer gives
someone a body mass index. It measures the fossil fuels, water and waste
at a company and calculates how to save money.

In the absence of a good software program, companies have been trying to
get on top of this by manually entering data into Excel spreadsheets or
other systems, said Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst for
Enderle Group. Or they pay large fees to consulting companies to analyze
their carbon footprints.

For the last few years, venture capitalists have poured money into
so-called clean-tech companies, which use technology to solve
environmental problems, at a much faster rate than traditional
technology. The field appears particularly poised for growth as the
Obama administration begins to pump stimulus dollars into green energy
initiatives, and as governments around the world consider making
companies pay for the amount of carbon they generate.

"Clean-tech investment almost doubled every year for the past several
years," said Jessica Canning, research director for Dow Jones
VentureSource. Venture funding of clean-tech companies rose to $5
billion last year from $687 million in 2005.

That money has dropped in the last two quarters as the turmoil in the
financial markets has made investors reluctant to sink large sums into
projects that could take years to pay off. Pricewaterhousecoopers
reports that funding of clean-tech companies dropped 84% in the first
quarter of 2009 to $154 million, down from $971 million the fourth
quarter of 2008. Investing in solar shrank 97% and alternative fuels 69%.

"The capital-intensive companies like solar and biofuels, which were the
key drivers of the past few years, really fell in the first quarter,"
said Tim Carey, head of PricewaterhouseCoopers' U.S. clean-tech
division. "That was partly due to overall uncertainties in the economy.
Those companies require large amounts of capital."

But software firms can be started for far less. "If you have less money,
you have to be smart and invest in energy-efficiency technologies, and
IT and management systems start becoming more effective," said
Jacqueline Crespo, who leads the venture capital and technology practice
at New Energy Finance Ltd. in Palo Alto, a research provider for the
clean-energy industry. "You're going after the same market, but it's not
as capital-intensive."

That strategy has the added bonus of appealing more directly to the
folks who will ultimately buy the new technology. Solar panels could be
a hard sell if the return on investment is still years away, but a
software system that helps a company become more energy efficient may
pay for itself a lot sooner.

That's what Coca-Cola Co. found when it tried Hara's software in a pilot
test at 12 sites around the world.

"Most of the stuff that is energy-efficiency-related has real good
economics," said Bryan Jacob, director of energy management and climate
protection for Coca Cola. "When you get into some things like fuel
switching, or renewable fuels like solar or wind, you've crossed into a
realm where the cost associated with it is more than the straight
economic payback on it."

Coke used Hara in one of its subsidiaries that's building 15 power
plants in Eastern Europe and Africa, and has found it an effective way
to measure how much energy the plants are using, what the future
economics of that energy will be, and what the company could do to save
energy and money in the future.

In a way, said Schlein of Kleiner Perkins, it's the same concept from
other software fields. Much the way PeopleSoft Inc. provided companies a
new way to manage human resources, or Siebel Systems built a big
business in managing sales forces, clean-tech companies can help
businesses stay on top of energy uses.

_dan.fost at danfost.com

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