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1. The Daily Sprout
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2. Kovio to Print Greener Silicon in the Valley
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3. Lieberman-Warner Climate Change Bill: Just a Warm-up
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4. First Solar CEO, Major Shareholder, Sells Mucho Shares
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5. BT to Cut Carbon Emissions 80% By 2020
The Daily Sprout
Craig Rubens - Misc
Bosch Makes €546.4 Bid for ersol Solar: German industrial conglomerate Bosch is offering 101 euros per share, a 68 per cent premium, in a takeover bid for ersol Solar Energy AG, which makes wafer-based silicon solar cells and is moving into the manufacture of thin-film modules - Cleantech Media.
Matt Damon Tests a Tesla: Matt Damon was spotted taking a Tesla prototype for a spin and even chatted about how much he loves the car, going into the problems of the first gen transmission but said “the 30-60 acceleration is like nothing else" - Autofiends (with pics).
Israeli Green Vision Raises €3.5M For Contaminants Detection: The money is from from the state-run Gabriel Lippmann Institute in Luxembourg and is for Green Vision’s technology which can detect contaminants in the air, water and ground - alarm:clock.
USPS Gets Rid of Gas Hungry FlexFuel Trucks: The U.S. Postal Service had been testing felxfuel vehicles in its larger ongoing experiment to save fuel and has found a 29 percent decrease in mileage with the flexfuel vehicles. The problem was they couldn’t find E85 and had to feed the hungry engines gasoline - Autoblog Green.
Is Going “Off the Grid” the New Black? Paul Kedrosky seems to think so and is glad that it is acceptable for people other than “nutter[s] in rural Montana” to join the trend. He maps “off the grid” in Google Trends to chart the movement - Paul Kedroksy’s Blog.
Kovio to Print Greener Silicon in the Valley
Craig Rubens - Startups
While Silicon Valley semiconductor manufacturers have been offshoring their fabrication lines, Kovio, a startup in the silicon circuit printing business, has just moved into a 95,000-square-foot facility in Milpitas, Calif., and says it’s now set to start printing, with products due to be delivered later this year. Their process uses a mere quarter of the energy traditional semiconductor fabrication requires and eliminates the vast majority of the toxic chemicals needed, Kovio says. Developed at MIT and spun into a company in 2001, Kovio has taken in funding totaling $34 million.
The money comes from all over the world, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bessemer Venture Partners, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Flagship Venture Partners, Duff Ackerman and Goodrich, Harris and Harris, DEA Capital, NCD Investors and Pinnacle Ventures. But Kovio has especially piqued the interest of Japanese investors eager to find cheaper and cleaner silicon fab processes for their huge electronics businesses. Across the Pacific, Kovio’s investors include Panasonic Ventures, Mitsui Venture, Yasuda Enterprise and Toppan Forms.
Kovio’s technology combines silicon ink with inkjet-style fabrication. The process allows the company to print low-cost, albeit low-intelligence, silicon circuits directly onto cheap, and potentially flexible, substrates. This means RFID and item-level intelligence can be built directly into products and labeling. Consumers will be seeing these circuits far more frequently and demanding green processes, Vik Pavate, VP of Business Development, tells Earth2Tech.
There’s a reason chip makers wear those full-body Tyvek suits: Silicon semiconductor fabrication is a dirty business. “The dirtiest room in the world is actually the clean room in silicon fab,” Pavate says. By his estimates, it takes 62 million liters of chemicals, 17 million liters of hazardous gases and 2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity to make 100 billion RFID tags using traditional fab methods.
Kovio, he claims, can produce the same 100 billion tags using 5 percent of those chemicals, 0.05 percent of those gases and between 10 percent and 25 percent of that electricity. But perhaps the most important efficiency is the saved silicon. In traditional fab, silicon wafers are usually ground down to the needed thinness, wasting precious material. With printing, it’s an additive process, depositing only the needed silicon where it needs to be.
Kovio is not the only one working in printed electronics. Thin-film solar companies like Nanosolar print thin layers of non-silicon photovoltaic materials onto flexible substrates. Also, organic LED fabrication, which GE recently demonstrated, uses printing technology to create illuminating circuits. But Kovio says they’re sticking with silicon. “We really like the idea of leveraging silicon as much as we can,” Pavate explains.
The company has about 45 employees currently, but will likely ramp up as production begins over the next three years. Pavate says they’re going after a market opportunity of “a few billion dollars” as RFID tags could immediately be integrated into access control, toll booths and livestock management. Once tags start rolling off the presses Kovio hopes to be rolling in the money; it isn’t currently look for investment.
Image of printed circuits courtesy of Kovio.
Lieberman-Warner Climate Change Bill: Just a Warm-up
Craig Rubens - Policy
Wonks are in a tizzy today in preparation for the debate of the Lierberman-Warner bill, which will bring climate change and carbon cap-and-trade to the Senate floor. But while the debate will highlight the obstacles to climate legislation, it’s unlikely that this bill will get out of the Senate and even less likely that it will be passed by the House — in fact it’s almost guaranteed to get a veto from the White House. But America’s Climate Security Act of 2007, as bill S.2191 is officially known, will be a landmark in America’s carbon constrained future.
It’s not clear if any of the three major presidential candidates will take time out of their busy schedules to cast votes, even though it’s widely expected that it will be under the next administration that climate change legislation like this gets passed. Regardless, don’t expect anyone to vote along traditional party lines. Dems and Reps will likely be making alliances across the aisle as senators jockey for carbon allowances under the bill’s proposed cap-and-trade system. Indeed, the blue vs. red battle lines are being redrawn as the green debate takes shape.
The bill’s overarching emissions reduction targets include an 18 percent cut below 2005 levels by 2020 and a 70 percent cut by 2050. To achieve these cuts, the bill proposes using a cap-and-trade system, under which carbon emitters would be issued federal emission credits, allowing them to pollute, while those who reduce their emissions can sell their leftover credits on the open market.
It will likely be the specifics of this proposed carbon cap-and-trade system that will raise the greatest debate. This bill lays out in great detail the functioning of that trade system, how credits would be issued, and what activities would qualify for offsets. However, debating all the particulars, especially the meticulous specifics of auctioned vs. free emissions permits, will boil down to regional interests as senators try to get their constituents the biggest slice of the pie.
The White House has already voiced its opposition to the legislation, warning that it could hurt GDP to the tune of 7 percent by 2050. This makes the moves of the presidential contenders, all of whom support a cap-and-trade approach, all the more important. The Washington Post reports that while he may not be voting, McCain has made his opposition to the bill clear over it’s lack of support for nuclear power, his “alternative” power of choice. Meanwhile, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton both support the bill but may not leave the campaign trail to cast their votes.
We’ll keep an eye on this dress rehearsal this week, but don’t expect any big movement. Cleantech startups, entrepreneurs and VCs should be paying attention to the language used in debating this legislation, but there are far more near-term policy battles to be had — like the renewable energy tax credits — that will affect their business plans much sooner.
First Solar CEO, Major Shareholder, Sells Mucho Shares
Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green
While analysts are busy haggling over First Solar’s price — is it heading up or down? — the company got a potentially nasty sign that it could soon be heading south. Bloomberg reports that First Solar CEO Michael Ahearn, the company’s second largest shareholder, sold half his shares in May. The report says Ahearn cut his stake to 3.07 million shares, or 3.85 percent of the company, still worth $822 million, down from 6.1 million shares at the time of the company’s IPO in 2006.
Though Ahearn could be selling for any number of personal reasons, the CEO gave no explanation and declined to be interviewed for Bloomberg’s story. That’s no PR strategy. This morning, the company’s shares dropped almost 4 percent to around $257 — earlier this month shares sold for as high as $311.14.
Analysts have long said that the material that the company uses, cadmium telluride, could be a potential weak point. While the company was one of the first thin-film solar companies to market, cadmium can be toxic and could be banned by concerned European countries for use in solar cells. And companies are quickly starting to mass produce the next generation of thin-film solar material made from copper indium gallium selenide or CIGS.
First Solar has been solidly bringing in revenues since its IPO; it reported healthy earnings growth in April and a sunny forecast of $1 billion-plus revenue for this year. First Solar reported net earnings of $46.6 million, or 57 cents a share, for the three-month period ended March 29, a more than nine-fold increase from its profit of $5.03 million, or 7 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier. That shot the company’s stock up 8 percent.
But just the day after its earnings, First Solar's stock not only gave up those gains, but fell to $263.35, which is 7.5 percent below its price before it announced its earnings. That was in response to two critical research reports from analysts at Oppenheimer and ThinkPanmure, both of which downgraded their ratings on the stock. ThinkPanmure's Jonathan Hoopes cut his rating to accumulate from buy because of stiffer competition in the solar industry, especially among new technologies.
BT to Cut Carbon Emissions 80% By 2020
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
British Telecom (BT) said today it plans to reduce its carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. The UK-based incumbent telecom operator is already on its way to meeting that aggressive target, and last October said it would invest close to half a billion dollars in wind farms that could supply close to 25 percent of the company's power needs by 2016. That was the largest investment in renewable power by a non-power company in the UK.
As telecom operators start to use more and more power to run increasingly complex networks, the companies are becoming responsible for rising carbon emissions. BT is one of the few telcos that has actively started to work on reducing its corporate footprint through a variety of methods (like installing renewable energy systems). In February BT switched on a 500-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system for its North American HQ. While it’s a small system, every little bit of clean power helps.
BT’s U.S. counterparts have been relatively silent compared to the British company when it comes to carbon reducing strategies. That’s not too surprising as the U.S. telcos often move slower on new initiatives, and the U.K. market is generally ahead of the U.S. on carbon reduction.
BT also says the company has created a new tool called the Climate Stabilisation Intensity (CSI) Target to measure and track carbon emissions. Developed by Dr Chris Tuppen, BT's director of sustainable development, says the system “links a company's financial and environmental performance to the necessary CO2 reductions.” We’re not sure how the details of the system works, and we are waiting to hear more on that from BT.
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