town at any given time, SolarAnywhere is aimed mainly at utility companies building new solar power plants who want to get the most beams for their buck, Ressler said. You wouldn’t want to build an expensive plant in the Sonoran Desert if it turned out there was slightly more sunshine in the Mojave Desert, for example.
Clean Power also sells an application called PowerClerk that government agencies or utility companies can use to calculate incentives for renewable energy. Many states, including Washington, have incentives for homeowners and businesses to install solar panels, and this software automates the rebate process. It’s currently the most widely used online solar power incentive program, Ressler said, with utility company clients in New York, California, Massachusetts, and other states.
Ressler says his firm has software in the pipeline to make cost and output calculations for other kinds of renewable energy as well, such as solar thermal power—using the sun’s warmth to heat a household’s water. Those products should come out later this year.
Clean Power Research seems to be weathering the economic storm so far. Ressler thinks the renewable technology industry will continue to grow in part because there’s a wide range of motivations for interest in cleantech. One of the big ones, of course, is that individuals and companies want to be able to control energy costs on their own, relying less on market fluctuations.
As for those passionate local software folks, Ressler is one of them. The founder of Clean Power Research, Tom Hoff, is a long-time friend of Ressler’s. Hoff talked him into leaving a product management position at Microsoft last year to head up Clean Power’s software side. They decided that Seattle was a better place for software developers than Napa, so Ressler started the local office that he’s looking to expand in the coming months.
“We recognize the uniqueness of being a small company in a position of hiring as aggressively as we are,” he said. “There’s a broad and widely held view that these investments in renewable technology are good investments to be making now.”