PlotWatt, a Durham, North Carolina-based developer of home energy management software, was one of five winners of GE’s ecomagination Challenge on June 23, accepting a $100,000 grant.

Founded in 2008, PlotWatt offers a free application that features cloud-based algorithms to analyze home energy data and provide appliance-level insight, feedback, and recommendations to help save as much as 20 percent off electric bills. PlotWatt hopes to make its money from the service providers and vendors who would sell their wares to Energy Dashboard customers.

Although the product is free, the Energy Dashboard won't work with a conventional utility meter. It requires an upgrade so that the usage information can be transmitted to PlotWatt. That means that homeowners have to purchase an electronic cuff or gateway and install it at their meter. The cost: At least $200. Professional installation is recommended, entailing another extra expense.

The theme of the GE Ecomagination Challenge this year was powering your home, and five companies –selected by an independent panel of judges, including Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson – were awarded $100,000 each to advance their projects. PlotWatt said that it will use the grant money for infrastructure expansion in order to serve a “massive” number of customers. "

GE's panel of eight judges said PlotWatt’s Energy Dashboard stood out from 950 competitors as a technology with broad applications and market potential. "It's a very neat piece of technology," said Tore Land, GE's Director of the Ecomagination Challenge. "Looking at their data, we have been quite impressed.”

With this high-profile validation of the six-employee company's energy efficiency technology, PlotWatt is already billing itself as an alternative to the GoogleMeter site, which is shutting down at the end of the year.

PlotWatt's technology has received other help along the way, in a $40,000 grant from the N.C. Green Business Fund in 2009 and about $8,000 in 2008 from Duke University's Start-Up Challenge. The company also raised $1 million in a seed capital investment round in February of this year, which was led by Felicis Ventures of Palo Alto (News - Alert), California.

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