Almost anyone would agree with the goal of Portland, Ore., startup GreenPrint: end wasteful printing. But as The New York Times points out in a profile this weekend on the company, which makes software to reduce unnecessary pages in a printing cycle, working out the business model and technical hurdles to sell a product that supports this goal is difficult. After four years of development, GreenPrint’s consumer-facing free software is being actively used on a daily basis by only around 25,000 people. The Times says companies have been reluctant to buy the startup’s corporate version “until GreenPrint worked out a host of technical issues,” like the fact that when the software encountered big documents it really slowed down the printing process.

But in addition to technical issues bogging down the plan, the business model actually leaves a lot to be desired. GreenPrint offers a free downloadable consumer version, a premium $30 consumer product, and a version for corporations that costs $70 per user. Free downloads from a company’s web site are generally a very difficult way to bring in revenues. GreenPrint is trying to bring in revenue by selling ads on the free version, but I can’t picture too many advertisers lining up for that. In addition, it can be hard to convince customers using something for free to upgrade to a $30 premium version.

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Are you ready to give Microsoft’s energy management tool Hohm a spin? On Monday morning at 6 a.m. (pacific time) Microsoft is opening up the doors on Hohm to the general public, about two weeks after the software giant revealed the idea behind its energy management tool. Hohm, which will enable home owners to track their energy consumption and potentially modify their energy behavior in a variety of ways, is in beta mode, and Microsoft told us it will be tweaking the software — making it smarter — according to user feedback. So here’s your first chance to give it a whirl and tell ‘em what you really think.

We checked out the tool this weekend pre-launch, and here are my first impressions. Hohm can use as little information as a ZIP code to start predicting your energy consumption, and then the more questions (up to 180) you answer about your residence (like the numbers of doors and windows and type of water heating technology), the more accurate the tool can be. Down the road, the goal is to have the tool link with your utility, integrating your real historical energy data, and then ultimately work with smart meters and other smart devices to provide closer to real-time energy data consumption data.

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Updated: We’ve heard from a couple of our sources that President Obama is forming an advisory council on energy and economic policy that would be staffed by cleantech leaders, including the CEOs of some buzz-worthy startups along with some high-profile investors. Someone high up on Obama’s “green team” was making phone calls this week to bring well-known cleantech execs out to D.C. for meetings this week and next — after which an announcement will likely be made, we’re being told. We’re not sure how formal the council will be but we’ll bring you more details as we get them. Update: After talking to more of the members of the meetings today, this sounds less of an official group, but more a group of cleantech leaders from which Obama wants to learn.

Update: The CEO of Kleiner Perkins-backed carbon software startup Hara, Amit Chatterjee, has confirmed with us that he was one of three CEOs that met with Obama this morning at the White House to discuss energy and environmental policy. We’ve also heard that execs from these firms also met with Obama this week: Standard Renewable Energy, Dow Corning, Positive Energy, FPL, Hycrete, Applied Materials and Cree Lighting. Cree just released a press release on the meeting and sent over this photo.

Given that Obama has had the support of cleantech leaders since his campaigning days, we’re thinking that anyone from that sector would jump at the chance to help inform a council. Obama also needs some sound advice now that the climate bill is rounding the Senate and the first U.S. cap and trade system is in sight.

We give a lot of props to the entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers and investors that are building the greentech tools of tomorrow. But we don’t often offer a lot of praise for the legislative process or the policy makers that have been driving clean energy and climate policy (OK, except for occasionally Obama and Reid). And while the climate bill, which has passed the House and is still being negotiated in the Senate, delivered enough concessions that even eager beavers like Tom Friedman say they hate it (but pass it!) the political jujitsu required to get the bill through the House was laudable.

Politico (h/t Business Insider and Climate Progress) posted a colorful and insightful article recently explaining the “arm-twisting” involved in getting the climate bill passed in the House, even with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (described as floating “in and out of the House cloakroom all day, impossible to miss in an arctic-white linen pantsuit”) as the chief ax-grinder. From Politico:

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Updated: More than any utility on the planet, Germany’s Yello Strom has embraced the intertwining of energy and home broadband connections. The company manages its smart meter service directly via its customers’ broadband connection; it’s the first European utility to offer its customers access to Google’s energy management tool PowerMeter; and it tells us this week that it has developed a prototype application that will enable its smart meters to tweet its customers’ energy consumption.

Compare that type of innovation to what your average utility is doing — just keeping the lights on — and it’s like night and day. “There’s close to a revolution happening,” when it comes to bringing the Internet and energy consumption together, says Martin Vesper, Yello Strom’s executive director. Think about it: The emergence of broadband connections in our homes has changed the way people consume media, communicate with each other, buy goods and work. And the hope, which Yello Strom is betting on and which could do wonders for fighting climate change, is that broadband will also fundamentally change both our energy consumption habits and what it means to be a utility.

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Among the utilities that have come forward lately to announce deals with energy management software makers — from San Diego Gas & Electric and TXU Energy (working with Google), to Xcel Energy and Sacramento Municipal Utility District (working with Microsoft) — one progressive utility has been notably missing from these early movers: PG&E. So we asked PG&E’s senior director of the Smart Energy Web, Andy Tang, this week what the company’s strategy is when it comes to home energy management software and working with third-party vendors. Tang tells us PG&E is waiting for the Open Smart Grid group to establish a single standard interface for energy management software before it starts working with third parties like Google and Microsoft and explains to us: “I don’t want to pick winners. I want to work on more of a neutral ground.”

From Tang’s perspective, with the influx of IT companies offering energy management tools, if there isn’t a very easy way for PG&E to seamlessly plug in the latest software tool using a standard method, it’s just gonna be too complicated and too much work for PG&E. PG&E can’t be in the business of IT development for third parties — there are only so many resources at the company, says Tang. He’s hoping that the Open Smart Grid group — which is made up by a diverse group of utilities and vendors — will help lay out enough standards so that most third parties will incorporate the standards into their software development.

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In the past couple of weeks startups and infotech giants have been racing to launch, or acquire, home energy management tools. Next will come, over the next year, a battle to see which companies can sign up the most utilities. Google, which already announced partnerships with eight utilities, has found its first European partner, Germany’s Yello Strom.

Yello Strom has 1.4 million customers and is in the process of rolling out the nicely designed bright yellow Sparzähler meter (or “savings meter”). Interestingly enough, according to Microsoft, Yello Strom has been working with Microsoft’s German subsidiary Microsoft Deutschland on the software and design side of Sparzähler and the actual communication module is built around Microsoft Windows CE. Microsoft and Yello Strom also made a big announcement at last year’s Cebit tech conference about working together on web-based energy management software.

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The fact that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, now a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, isn’t a big fan of the current energy bill that passed the House on Friday is hardly a shocker. A cap-and-trade system can be “easily abused,” particularly on an international level, she said Monday at the Silicon Valley Energy Summit at Stanford University, where Rice is also a professor of political science, and that her own preference would be for a carbon tax, because it’s straightforward and can be easily understood.

Rice isn’t the only one that thinks a carbon tax would be better than a cap-and-trade system. Climate scientist James Hansen, as well as Al Gore (who supports the energy bill), and business leaders like Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson and Ralph Nader have also advocated a carbon tax, citing similar reasons.

Rice, who was on the board of directors for Chevron before she became Secretary of State and played a major role in the U.S.’s Kyoto negotiations, said that the cap-and-trade provisions in the Kyoto Protocol, which created a cap-and-trade system for many developed nations, were “ridiculous” and created circumstances where companies could trade credits for factories that they were shutting down anyway. A cap-and-trade system can be easily abused on a domestic level, she said, but on an international level that abuse can be 100 times worse.

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A couple weeks ago, we profiled a secretive Canadian company called Lixar SRS whose energy management software had been impressing utilities and IT companies. While the company wouldn’t tell us about their technology or partners, we had heard that the company had been working with Cisco and signing up utility deals, including one with Duke Energy. Perhaps here’s the reason for the secrecy: This morning smart grid company GridPoint announced that it has bought up Lixar’s energy business.

GridPoint describes Lixar’s software as “energy management solutions that offer sophisticated user interfaces.” Customers can control real-time demand response events through tools like smartphones, and can learn conservation tips and energy efficiency advice via streaming video. For utilities, GridPoint says Lixar also has developed a transformer monitoring solution that monitors functions like temperature, voltage, power and current and can both alert the utility and disable the transformer if there’s a problem. GridPoint says the acquisition of Lixar will allow it to “enhance its enterprise-class software and establish a Canadian presence.”

The companies still haven’t confirmed what utilities Lixar is working with for its energy management tools and whether Lixar (now GridPoint) has a strong partnership with Cisco. Lixar’s managing partner, Richard Oh, would only tell me that we should expect some big announcements from the company soon — yeah, being bought while still in steath mode is a pretty big deal. The companies didn’t release the terms of the deal.