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Lighting continues its hot streak

Josh Gould
by | April 13th 2011
Posted in Cleantech Investment Insight, Sector Insights, Venture Capital
Tags: ,

In a recent blog after our San Francisco forum, I discussed how cleantech needs to move forward with more action (verbs) and less idle chatter.

With that in mind, I’ll keep this post short and point out what is becoming increasingly obvious: lighting is hot.  Just a few quick anecdotes to support this point:

  • It’s a huge, international market (easily in the $000′s of billions – see our recent lighting report for more about our estimates of market size)
  • It has VCs interested.  In 2010, lighting companies raised $350M in venture funding, up from $230M in 2009 (yes, you read that correctly, it was a $120M or 52% annual increase)
  • The hot streak continues in 2011 with companies like Digital Lumens recently raising another fundraising round (note: we rececntly profiled the company as part of our subscriber-only research)

Since last year we here at Cleantech Group have been saying that lighting is a big, big deal in cleantech.  But it’s nice to see that the rest of the world is taking notice.  Stay tuned to our research and blog as we continue to cover this important cleantech sector.…

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Powergetics and the rise of the business case

Josh Gould
by | February 2nd 2011
Posted in Cleantech Investment Insight, Companies, Energy Efficiency, Energy Storage, Pitch of the Week, Sector Insights
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One of the key trends we’ve seen in cleantech recently is what we call, colloquially, “the rise of the business case.”  When large companies and startups have been able to quantify the benefits of a given investment to customers – providing some sort of financial metric like an IRR, ROI or simple payback period – they have weathered the headwinds of a tough economy.  Examples include large energy services businesses like Johnson Controls, Honeywell, and Schneider Electric.  Startup examples include efficiency-related companies who can quantify their value propositions – names like Scientific Conservation and BuildingIQ in the building, and Lumenergi, Daintree, and Digital Lumens in lighting.

But in energy storage, making a business case can be very hard.  Not only is the data sometimes ambiguous/flawed/non-existent, building that data into a business case is difficult. Energy storage company Ice Energy, for instance, has a link to a 65 page guide for modeling the value proposition for distributed storage on their website.  Grid storage may be even more difficult; to make economic sense a deployment must (almost always) address multiple benefits.  But addressing certain benefits involves the opportunity cost of operating the device in a …

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Another win for lighting controls as Redwood closes $15M round

Emma Ritch
by | October 13th 2010
Posted in Cleantech Investment Insight, Energy Efficiency, Venture Capital
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Fremont, Calif.-based startup Redwood Systems revealed today it closed a $15 million Series B round for its LED lighting control system, coming on the heels of a $12.7 million Series B for Lumenergi, a lighting controls startup based in nearby Newark, California.

The two companies are illustrative of a fast-growing sub-sector within lighting that’s gaining investor support and market adoption. Lighting controls companies secured 16% of VC investment within lighting from 2005 to 2010, but that’s jumped to 21% in 2009 and 2010 to-date.

Source: Cleantech Group analysis

Why all the interest? Lighting is considered the low-hanging fruit for energy efficiency retrofits, as illumination accounts for  44% of electricity in U.S. office buildings and a quarter of the energy in residential buildings–roughly the same energy consumed by cooling. Lighting controls–including software, sensors, drivers, fixtures, and intelligent ballasts–can maximize energy efficiency of multiple lighting sources, with some vendors claiming up to 75% reduction in energy use due to controls technology.

Redwood offers a unique lighting control system that combines power and control of LEDs over the same low-voltage data cable for office buildings and data centers. While adoption of LEDs is projected to increase to about 80% of the …

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Big promises, but can lighting control systems deliver?

Emma Ritch
by | September 22nd 2010
Posted in Energy Efficiency
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Lighting control systems are a hot sector within cleantech. The technology holds the promise of up to 75% reduction in energy use with little, if any, change in occupant behavior. Lighting accounts for about 20% of electricity use in the U.S., for example, so adoption of LCS can have a significant impact on worldwide energy consumption and emissions.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy Buildings Energy Data Book, Sept. 2008

There is significant buzz around the four startups that have come out of stealth in the past year—Adura Technologies, Redwood Systems, Daintree Networks and Cavet Technologies—as well as startups with slightly longer track records, Encelium Technologies and Starfield Controls. There are numerous other startups we’re tracking with complementary and tangential technology solutions, including Lumenergi, Digital Lumens, Juice Technology, Octus Energy and Echoflex.

ESCOs and major lighting corporations are amongst those in trials with LCS startups, and many LCS solutions are near commercial deployment thanks to the overlap in expertise with the IT sector.

Yet for all this attention, the LCS sector is still very early. Estimates are that fewer than 1% of buildings have advanced LCS installed. And there has been little …

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Digital Lumens lifts veil on new lighting technology

Emma Ritch
by | March 16th 2010
Posted in Energy Efficiency
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Boston, Mass.-based Digital Lumens emerged from stealth today with a new lighting control technology aimed at reducing energy use in warehouses and industrial facilities.

Digital Lumens calls its technology the Intelligent Lighting System, combining light-emitting diodes (LEDs), networking and software for a whole systems approach—unlike lighting technology companies that aim to make a single component, such as a bulb, more efficient.

Key to Digital Lumens’ technology is new LED-based fixtures that have built-in computing, sensing and intelligence to improve integration and central control.

Lighting is an important element of energy efficiency projects, with the U.S. Department of Energy estimating that lighting accounts for up to 30 percent of energy use in commercial buildings.

Energy efficiency is one of the fastest growing cleantech sectors for VC investment, with companies pulling in $1 billion in 2009, up 39 percent from the prior year, according to Cleantech Group data. Of that $1 billion, lighting raked in $299 million in 34 deals, accounting for 5.26 percent of all venture money to cleantech.

Digital Lumens raised $11.3 million in two rounds in 2009 from investors including Flybridge Capital Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Black Coral Capital (see Energy efficiency rules week’s cleantech roost).

The …

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