Michael Kanellos
Green Light Interview: Fred Wang, Trinity Ventures August 13, 2008 at 4:10 PM
To Trinity Ventures, green technology largely revolves around networking. Rather than place investments on biofuels or solar panels, the firm is largely focusing its green efforts on companies that hope to cut power and water consumption with IT technologies, according to Fred Wang, general partner. (ed note: It’s a strategy that’s similar to one that’s led to pretty good results for Foundation Capital.)
Trinity, for instance, is currently investigating companies specializing in devices and services for controlling thermostats and appliances remotely. Tendril and others in this space largely rely on the Zigbee protocol. Standards are great, but they can also mean margin compression. Start-ups, however, can differentiate themselves through cost and implementation, said Wang.
Granted, building automation is a decades-old field, but incumbents like Johnson Controls and Honeywell tend to move slow. “They have a closed systems mentality,” he said.
Water also lends itself to networking, he said. WeatherTrak in Northern California (now called Hydropoint), combines soil sensors with online weather prediction data to control sprinkler systems at large commercial buildings. Some competitors just rely on sensor data. WeatherTrak sells the equipment and a service. Trinity does not have an investment but Wang said he liked the value proposition.
Another interesting one: Modius, a software vendor with an application that measures the power consumption of servers by the applications they run. In effect, it gives corporations a way to rate software by energy efficiency.
Naturally, though, there are issues. “Few of them (customers) want to put money into specialized systems,” he said. “Data centers don’t have budgets and many of them feel it (power-saving technology) will come from big vendors.” The technology can also be tough. A group of Sun engineers had been working on a smart power strip that could throttle power to servers, but the company may have faded away, he said.
Trinity has made one solar investment—in solar concentrator company Soliant Energy—but doesn’t seem to have a lot of interest otherwise, in part because of the capital requirements and valuations have climbed too high. “There will be several large craters” in thin film solar in about 18 months, he said.
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People interested in Hydropoint should also check out Cyber-Rain. Our system also taps into weather conditions (from online sources) to control the amount of water that gets used to water landscapes, gardens, lawns, etc. and is reasonably enough priced (often approaching free if your water district gives rebates to conserve water) that it’s most commonly used in residential installations.