Cover Story
Riding Palo Alto’s clean-tech revolution P
Investment and innovation in green tech is soaring story by Gennady Sheyner photos by Veronica Weber
Page 16ÊUÊ «À Ê£È]ÊÓä£äÊUÊ*> Ê Ì Ê7ii Þ
alo Alto resident Gene Wang and his band of musicians piled into their “Unplug It” bus last week and took off for Washington, D.C., on a two-fold mission — to belt out “Happy Birthday Mother Earth” on the National Mall and to get the world to unplug its household appliances. Wang is a singer and serial entrepreneur who works out of his Lowell Avenue home. His company, People Power, focuses on the so-called “smart grid” and energy efficiency. Its products allow developers to wire up buildings so that residents can see exactly how much energy each appliance is using and how much is being wasted. “We love our gadgets: our TV, our mobile phone, our Wii and our Playstation,” Wang said. “We love our microwave ovens, but guess what? A microwave oven, when it’s just sitting there, consumes 6 watts doing absolutely nothing.” Energy efficiency is steadily emerging as one of the hottest sub-sectors in the expanding world of green technology. While local electric-car pioneers such as Better Place and Tesla Motors grab headlines and snag federal dollars, investors are increasingly eyeing green-building and energy-efficiency companies as the next big thing in clean-tech investment. A survey of venture capitalists conducted by the auditing firm KPMG earlier this year found that “energy storage and efficiency” is overtaking renewable power as the leading sub-sector in the growing green field, with 38 percent predicting it will receive the most investment in 2010, up from 33 percent in 2009 (renewable power came in next at 30 percent in the first quarter of 2010). The trend could spell great news for Silicon Valley, a region still reeling from the economic troubles of late 2008. Tesla notwithstanding, the Valley isn’t likely to transform into the electric Detroit or to bump China and Denmark out of the solar and wind markets. But experts say the region’s high concentration of engineers, entrepreneurs, investors and environmentalists makes it perfectly suited to transform how the world uses and saves its energy. Wang is optimistic about this trend. This month, People Power started selling its SuRF (Sensor Ultra Radio Frequency) kit, a software-development kit that allows engineers to create energy-efficiency programs for household appliances. These applications would be built on an open- The control room of Marc Porat’s source platform, which Wang “net-zero” house holds a waterhopes will foster more innova- filtration system and low-energy-use tion among the area’s software water heaters. developers and engineers. Wang’s company has also created a Facebook application, Unplug, which allows users to calculate electricity consumption within their households and encourages them to turn their appliances off. Wang founded the company in early 2009, several months after he visited his daughter’s class at Jordan Middle School and heard students read their essays about climate change. Wang said the exercise made him think of the Native-American saying, “We do not inherit our Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” “Some of the kids were getting pretty incensed about how their parents’ generation is destroying the planet and wondering how they’re supposed to live,” Wang recalled. Though relatively new to the clean-tech field, Wang was a full-fledged member of Silicon Valley’s I.T. revolution. He served as CEO of Computer Motion, a medical robotics company that he guided to an IPO (initial public offering) in 1997. He founded the company Photo Access, which made digital-camera chips and which was ultimately bought by Agilent