Brief post here to note a couple of deals announced today of potential interest to cleantech investors:

• Prenova, an energy management solutions provider, raised what looks to be approx. $2M in an inside round from existing investors Frontenac, River Cities Capital Funds, and Austin Ventures. The company helps customers monitor and manage energy use and pricing, as well as energy asset operations. The total invested to date in the company now totals more than $17.5M.
  

• Hot/Shot Radar Inspections raised an undisclosed amount from undisclosed investors. Hot/Shot has a radar-based system ("polSAR") which can be used to inspect powerline poles to better estimate when repairs are needed, and thus reduces over-replacement of such poles -- there are something like 167M utility poles in place throughout the U.S., according to some estimates, so extending their lives and reducing replacement can actually add up to a big deal. [Unfortunately, as of time of writing this post the company's website appears to be down. Will update with a link when available.]
  

Is wind energy at the inflection point?

According to the American Wind Energy Association, the industry is expected to add about 2,500MW in installed capacity in 2005, which would represent a 37% growth over 2004 according to this DOE site.

For venture investors, finding direct dealflow in wind energy now requires some work -- most of the turbines are now produced by large, integrated, publicly-traded players, and (as discussed before) a lot of the remaining investment opportunities are project finance-oriented.

However, the growth of wind capacity heightens the importance of electricity transmission technologies, and there remain some very interesting investment opportunities in wind power generation or facilitation.

Cnet's News.com had a nice little article on Friday on the emergence of energy efficiency service providers focused on freeing up electricity by taking occasional control of your thermostat.

By tweaking thermostats a bit on the highest-demand days, and aggregating the electricity saved within a particular utility's service area, these vendors provide "virtual peaking power" that allows the utility to avoid building a new power generation plant that wouldn't get much use, or to avoid purchasing spot power at exorbitant prices. It's a new spin on the old "negawatts" idea.

As the article points out, two of the bigger names in this emerging industry are Comverge and EnerNOC. Not coincidentally, both recently took in large infusions of venture funding:

• Comverge raised $13.6M in October in a Series B led by Rockport Capital
• EnerNOC raised $7.75M in January in a Series B led by Foundation Capital (here's a link to the pdf of the announcment)

Both Comverge and EnerNOC are basically outsourcers, managing these "virtual peaking power" supplies for their utility customers. Other utilities are tackling these activities by themselves, and the practice is growing quickly.

Such similar services can also be applied to lighting. One early company attempting to provide virtual peaking power by adjusting lighting (in office buildings, etc.) is Electric City.

The market potential for virtual peak power savings could be quite large -- between lighting, heating and air conditioning that covers a large portion of overall electricity consumption. Especially as natural gas prices remain high, avoiding the costs of purchasing spot power or building new gas-fired "peaker" plants is definitely a win for utilities, which explains the current interest.

Another technology winner in this market is the communications infrastructure that is needed to enable all the automated remote monitoring and control processes that drive these services. There are a lot of compelling investment opportunities generated by the emergence of virtual peaking power services.