21st Century Regenerative Technology

1. Monsanto to Double Crop Yields with Hybrids
2. SunPower CEO: No U.S. Solar Incentives? No Solar For You

Monsanto to Double Crop Yields with Hybrids

2008-06-05 17:00

Craig Rubens - Big Green

While the attention of the world’s food crisis critics was focused on the UN’s summit in Rome, Monsanto, the agro-biotech behemoth, publicized its plans to double corn, cotton and soy bean crop yields by 2030 while cutting water, land and energy needs 30 percent. The St. Louis, Mo.-based company’s three-point plan also stipulates it will work to help farmers, including an ill-defined “5 million people in resource-poor farm families.”

Conspicuously absent from the announcement was any mention of biofuels and how doubling the yields of corn and soy, the two largest biofuels feedstock in the U.S., might change the market economics of grain-based ethanol. All of these efficiency and yield boosts could greatly help corn and soy ethanol makers, who are getting slammed by slimming margins, and slow the switch to non-food biofuel feedstocks.

Monsanto, one of the world’s largest providers of seed, has seen its year-over-year profits triple recently amid the biofuel boom and food price hike. Critics say this just is posturing from Monsanto and it is taking advantage of the current food crisis to gain approval of its controversial technologies. Monsanto says it will put $10 million over five years into research for wheat and rice, two crops Monsanto doesn’t particularly focus on, to help food production in developing countries. But this is a pittance compared the to $2 million Monsanto spends on research and development every single day.

Monsanto shied away from pushing its controversial genetically modified products, saying its yield goals can be achieved by using “marker-assisted selection.” The method uses genetic testing to identify desirable genetic traits that can then be exploited through traditional hybrid breeding and doesn’t include laboratory genetic manipulation.

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SunPower CEO: No U.S. Solar Incentives? No Solar For You

2008-06-05 16:13

Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy

The CEO of SunPower Tom Werner said this week that if the U.S. federal government doesn’t renew the investment tax credit (ITC) that provides 30 percent on the investment of solar, the company will be forced to move its business “elsewhere” to make up for that. Every company in the solar industry is worrying over this subsidy that is set to expire by the end of the year, but if you’re as big and seemingly global as SunPower, you can make up for a potentially lost subsidy by focusing on markets outside of the U.S.

At the Jefferies 5th Global Clean Tech Conference this morning Werner said “If the ITC doesn't happen, we can move our business elsewhere and make up for that. Is that a preferred solution? No. Does America lose jobs with that? Yes. But can we as a company hit ‘08 and ‘09 without the ITC? Yes.” When a solar industry leader says the company could be forced to potentially ignore its own domestic market, that’s a depressing thought for the entire solar ecosystem.

Werner repeated the sentiments earlier this week in an interview with Reuters stating: “We control our own destiny, (and) we’ll be able to enter other new markets rapidly.” He specified that a lost ITC would affect the company’s business and commercial markets more than residential, and said it could easily focus more on Italy, Greece, France and Australia.

SunPower isn’t the only company concerned. Back in January at the Concentrated Solar Power's U.S. summit in San Francisco the President and CEO of solar thermal company Solel Avi Brenmiller said that if there is no ITC, the company won’t be able to build a planned 553 MW solar project. At the same summit Donna Flynn, Washington Council for Ernst & Young, made a more dire pronouncement for the solar industry: "We need something before July 1st or we're going to die.”