It wasn"t so long ago that the U.S. power industry was considered to be unimaginative in applying information technology to attack business problems.

But that has changed a lot since the threat of deregulation in the late 1990s. Although deregulation has fizzled in many states, it forced many utilities to consider new approaches to obtaining market share in what was expected to be a more competitive environment.

Computerworld"s Thomas Hoffman spoke Monday with Warren Weiss, a general partner at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Foundation Capital, about the types of energy management technology companies and products that the venture capital firm is investing in.

One of the companies you"ve invested in is Dust Networks [a Berkeley, Calif.-based provider of wireless networks]. What kind of work are they doing in the energy industry? They"re at the periphery at the energy side. Early applications have been around industrial automation. Some utilities are exploring the use of the technology to measure the temperature of a plant and lower the costs of doing so on a much more even basis, because you can put sensors in a lot of places in a plant where you can"t with wireline sensors.

Tell me about Silver Spring Networks [a San Mateo, Calif.-based maker of wireless equipment maker of two-way wireless networks for remote meter reading]. Think of it as the mechanical meter being changed into a computer with an OS. That meter also acts as the hub in the network for water and gas meters, having a distributed monitoring system in the network to gauge outages and read meters.

EnerNOC, another company you have invested in, provides an energy management system that rides on utilities" wireless networks to help manage electricity usage. How does that work? The big play is what they call demand response. Peak loads [on electric grids] only occurs 3 percent of the time around the country. So if a utility senses that it"s about to experience a brownout, it can send a signal to EnerNOC to take a customer off-line and then provide that customer with a rebate [provided the customer has signed up for the program].

What are some other emerging technologies in the energy industry? I funded a company called Novazone [in Livermore, Calif.,] that has a monitoring system which senses when there"s bacteria in the air for fruits and sprays ozone in the air and reduces produce waste by 70 percent. I believe it will displace chemicals. They have about 80 customers, like Procter & Gamble, Coke, Pepsi.

Oluma [in Carlsbad, Calif.,] originally started out as an optical company in the dot-com era. They"ve since transitioned to remote sensor devices for wells for oil and gas drilling. Their fiber-optic technology that"s put down into oil and gas wells for monitoring is 100 percent more efficient than electric sensors that can"t handle the heat and pressure, and it doesn"t decay.