Venture capitalists at the GoingGreen East conference in Boston this week are high on energy efficiency companies, as also reported in a recent survey. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a ton of money will flow into companies producing energy efficient technologies in the home.

“There are massive opportunities for technologies to drive efficiency,” said Joe Dews, director and head of CleanTech Banking at ThinkEquity.

“There are tons of low-hanging fruit,” concurred Samuel Newell, principal of the Brattle Group, financial and economic consultancy.

Great news for green home technologies? Er … not so fast, say some other speakers at the conference. The real low-hanging fruit is in the commercial and industrial sectors.

Residences in the United States use about 40 percent of our electricity, while the commercial and industrial sectors collectively uses 60 percent, reminded Tim Healy, CEO, EnerNOC, in a panel discussion on the smart grid.

The residential market is going to be more difficult to tap for energy efficiency, especially from the utility side, because of legacy equipment like old meters and other factors such as customers living in outlying areas that are hard to reach, said Stephen Doroff, director of Smart Grid Initiatives at the large financial advisor KPMG. “And how do we get residential customers to look at the data and know what to do with that?”

“We’re expecting the [smart meter] story is about sending price signals, and we expect people’s behavior to change,” says Healy. “Yet I think we have to temper our expectations.”

“I don’t think residential customers will want to interact [with smart grid initiatives] on a regular basis,” adds Doroff. “We’re going to have to be smart in how we set it up and work with them on it.”

We agree on that last point. Setting up an energy monitoring system in the home should not be as simple as tapping into the electrical panel or receiving a radio frequency signal from an electric meter. The tools we provide homeowners and the way we show them to interact with the systems can help them save more energy and save more money.

Jeff Ross, in Business Development with smart grid technology developer GridPoint, cited a partnership between his company and Xcel Energy, in which some Xcel customers are provided with a home energy management tool that allows them to see their energy consumption, analytics on what that means, and suggestions on how they can save energy in their homes.

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Steven Castle - Contributing Writer

Steven Castle is Electronic House's managing editor. he has been writing about consumer electronics, homes and energy efficiency topics for two decades. He is also the co-founder of GreenTech Advocates.