SciWatch advertisement sporting the company pig sprite reminding people not to let their buildings become energy hogs.

Scientific Conservation, a company that specializes in energy consumption forecasting, has received $15.65 million in Series B funding, the start-up announced Tuesday.

The company is just one example of the way traditional IT is now intersecting with green tech.

Scientific Conservation offers software as a service (SaaS) that allows the company to monitor a building's energy consumption in real-time, apply that data to energy management diagnostics and analytics, and then use that created knowledge to predict the building's energy consumption in the future.

The result is a customized energy plan for a building that is always being fine-tuned based on new data, as well as the ability to implement changes in anticipation of fluctuations. The company's SCIwatch product offers data collection, warehousing, and diagnostics, while its SCIenergy product offers building energy use modeling. SCIenergy can work in conjunction with existing automated energy management systems like those from Johnson Controls, Siemens, and Honeywell, according to Scientific Conservation.

The service is geared toward large commercial buildings, which often see big returns on modest investments in energy efficiency improvements and monitoring. One recent study asserted that if all existing commercial buildings were retrofitted for energy efficiency, they would collectively save over $41.1 billion a year in energy bills.

Scientific Conservation may also become part of a predicted trend. The optimization software and analytics industry for building energy efficiency will grow to $2.4 billion annually by 2016, according to a recent report from Pike Research.

Barry Schuler, managing director of the DFJ Growth Fund and former CEO of AOL, is the lead investor of the Series B round of funding, and will now sit on the company's board.

"This funding underscores a strong year of milestones for SCI and global momentum for clean energy technologies that save money and protect the environment," Schuler said in a statement.

Other investors in this round of funding include DFJ Ventures and The Westly Group.