21st Century Regenerative Technology

1. Earth2Tech Week In Review
2. MIT Startup RawSolar Heading to Cali
3. U.S. Suspends New Solar Projects on Public Land, Reactions Mixed

Earth2Tech Week In Review

2008-06-28 13:00

Katie Fehrenbacher - Misc

3 Out Of 4 U.S. Ethanol Plants At Risk Of Shutting Down: Close to three quarters of U.S. ethanol plants, or 123 of America's 160 operating ethanol plants, are at risk of being shuttered in the coming months, according to Citigroup analyst David Driscoll.

10 Questions for eSolar's CEO Asif Ansari: The CEO of solar thermal startup eSolar explains what all the fuss is about over the company’s modular solar power technology.

Cleantech Terror Alert: Hacking the Grid: Egads, just what we needed to worry about — Chinese hackers bringing down the power grid. CIA Director-turned-venture-capitalist James Woolsey is concerned (in this video clip we shot) so shouldn’t we be too?

EarthTronics: Wind-In-A-Box: Modular green tech is all the rage. Why not wind-in-a-box? Where’s Timberlake when you need him.

Israeli Solar Tech to Power Server Farms: Accidental do-gooders can sometimes look to make money by making greener choices. The CEO of Israeli telecom Telcos incubated a solar startup called Distributed Solar Power or (DISP) and now that company’s solar tech is running his servers.

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MIT Startup RawSolar Heading to Cali

2008-06-27 21:38

Katie Fehrenbacher - Startups

Now that the U.S. has frozen the building of new solar projects on public land, interest in smaller solar systems that can be more easily built on private lands could see a boost. One such system comes from a young startup incubated at MIT called RawSolar. Earlier this month the company said its solar-concentrating dish prototype had passed some initial tests; this week the company said it’s moving to Berkeley, Calif., to start on its commercialization business plan.

RawSolar claims its dish technology could be the most cost-efficient solar system in the world because it will use simple, standard materials and components, which can be ordered from local distributors anywhere in the U.S. The company’s manufacturing processes are simple enough to be accomplished at any functional machine shop, according to RawSolar co-founder Matt Ritter (pictured in the shots below), who says he helped build the MIT prototype with a standard drill press.

Solar inventor Doug Wood created the original technology in his backyard in Washington State. Ritter says that, “Like for the Model T, this standardization of parts, and elimination of the bottlenecks that form around exotic materials or high-powered precision machining, gives the conventional-looking design truly revolutionary potential.” RawSolar is in the process of buying the patent for the technology from Wood.

Each dish itself has a 10 kW capacity, which is tiny in the solar thermal world, but the company could jack that up by stringing the dishes together. The dish design can concentrate sunlight 1,000 times to produce steam that can be used to either heat buildings or be applied in different manufacturing processes.

While many solar thermal startups use the steam that is generated by solar systems to produce electricity, RawSolar, for now, thinks there is a big enough market to focus on selling steam power. Ritter says any company that uses natural gas for power is a potential customer, and RawSolar plans to sell its steam power in power purchase agreements for 10 percent less than the price of natural gas, before subsidies.

And now RawSolar is moving to Berkeley. Ritter says that’s because the company believes more of its customers are going to on the other coast, in the sunny Southwest. There’s also a good crop of engineers in the area (the company is hiring). Two of the four founding team members were UC Berkeley undergrads.

Relocating could also give RawSolar easier access to Sand Hill Road, as Ritter tells us the company is looking to raise its first round of funding. The startup would use it to build its first pilot installation with a customer, hopefully by the end of the year, Ritter says.

Photos courtesy of RawSolar.

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U.S. Suspends New Solar Projects on Public Land, Reactions Mixed

2008-06-27 17:00

Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy

The hoard of companies rushing to build solar power plants in the U.S. deserts has one big hang-up — there’s just too many of them. This has led the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to put a freeze on new solar plants on public lands until a proper environmental assessment can be done, reports the New York Times this morning.

Such an environmental analysis could take a good two years, which means new applications for solar projects on public lands could be out of luck for that period of time. While this would not effect the more than 130 solar proposals that have been filed with the Bureau since 2005, it could put a damper on startups and entrepreneurs that have been late on getting their paperwork in. The Times report quotes execs from Ausra and Solel on how the freeze is a disturbing setback.

On the other hand, other solar companies say that the moratorium on new applications will actually be a good way to streamline an inundated application process. Charles Ricker, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Oakland-based solar thermal company BrightSource, says that the “process is getting clogged,” and “there are just too many applications” filed right now.

BrightSource is in favor of the freeze in order to develop a better way to sort through the applications, Ricker says. The company is building plants on public lands and the freeze won’t jeopardize those plans, according to Ricker. BrightSource is one of the solar thermal industry’s leaders and has raised over $115 million from a long list of well known investors like Google.org, BP Alternative Energy, StatoilHydro Venture and Black River, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley, DBL Investors, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Chevron Technology Ventures.

So it looks like solar companies’ perspective on the moratorium depends on how early and aggressive the company has already been with its application process. A rush of companies looking to capitalize on a booming market isn’t uncommon, just most of the time it’s market conditions that determine which companies will succeed and fail.

The Bureau’s decision would not only affect solar thermal projects on public lands, but also large solar photovoltaic plants on public lands. Martin Roscheisen, the CEO of thin-film solar company Nanosolar, says the public land freeze is an example of why his company favors a multitude of 1 to 10MW-sized municipal solar farms that blend more easily into the existing landscape and electric infrastructure and can be built on private lands.

Rocheisen says his company’s thin-film solar technology can enable such smaller plants on private lands like landfills, which could directly feed into municipal electric distribution as opposed to using transmission lines. Rocheisen contends that because solar thermal technology requires a huge amount of land, “not generally available in the U.S. other than through the government,” as well as transmission infrastructure and water resources, the technology might not be digestible to communities.

While both technologies will likely make up the future of the solar landscape, neither type of new solar project will get consideration until the U.S. Bureau of Land Management takes a thorough look at the eco-consequences.