21st Century Regenerative Technology

1. Clean Tech Business Competition Heading to Colorado
2. GE, Landon Invest $350M In Spanish Solar Firm Fotowatio
3. 13 Startups Working on Solar-Concentrating PV
4. The Daily Sprout
5. EEStor: The Story So Far

Clean Tech Business Competition Heading to Colorado

2008-07-31 17:00

Craig Rubens - Startups

The California Clean Tech Open is broadening its horizons and will be taking its clean tech business plan competition to the mountains to accept submissions for the first Colorado Clean Tech Open in Spring of 2009, CCTO Programs Director Brian Prayer announced last night. Members of the Denver Chamber of Commerce were on hand at the CCTO’s Energy Efficiency Symposium at PG&E’s headquarters in San Francisco. Katie Roberts of the CCTO tells us the competition is also looking elsewhere in the country but isn’t ready to announce any other programs just yet.

The greater Denver-Boulder area should prove to be fertile grounds for a clean tech competition. The state already has a renewable portfolio standard in place. It’s also home to the University of Colorado and several federal institutions, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which have been researching energy efficiency.

Particularly smart grid tech is making strides in the state. Earlier this year Xcel Energy announced that it intends to make Boulder, Colo., the nation’s first fully integrated smart grid city.

But utilities aren’t the only ones in Colorado working to smarten up our electricity use. This week, Boulder-based Tendril unveiled its suite of energy management devices to allow for real-time control of your home’s energy use. And the startup is rumored to be looking to raise $50 million.

Top

GE, Landon Invest $350M In Spanish Solar Firm Fotowatio

2008-07-31 16:00

Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy

GE Energy Financial Services and Spanish holding company Landon Corporate Group say they will invest a combined $350 million into Spanish solar developer Fotowatio. GE will invest $235 million to acquire 32 percent of Fotowatio and the Landon Corporate Group will invest $118 million to obtain 17.5 percent of a newly formed holding company Fotowatio SL.

The deal is potentially more than just cash flow for Fotowatio. In the release, the CEO of the four-year-old, Madrid-based company, Rafael Benjumea, says the deal could give the company access to GE’s solar modules and steam turbines. Solar developers say that the backlog of steam turbine can hold up solar projects for years at a time, so access to GE’s supplies is actually a pretty big deal.

While not a well-known firm in the United States, Fotowatio says it has 960 megawatts of solar projects installed or in development in Spain, Italy and the United States. The company uses both solar photovoltaics and solar thermal for its plants.

Top

13 Startups Working on Solar-Concentrating PV

2008-07-31 07:00

Katie Fehrenbacher - Startups

We’re all familiar with standard photovoltaic solar panels, and many of us are starting to become acquainted with solar thermal tech that uses the sun’s heat to generate power, but there’s also a third option. Over a dozen startups are working on ways to use mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight hundreds of times onto tiny highly-efficient solar cells. Called concentrating photovoltaic technology (CPV) the systems are meant to cut back on one of the most expensive parts of traditional PV: the silicon-based solar panel.

CPV startups say the latest tech can provide solar systems at a lower cost per watt by producing as much or more power from the same amount of silicon. Though many companies are just starting to bring products to market, and the systems seem to require a lot of moving parts, these 13 companies are working out the details:

SolFocus: The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is only a little over two years old, but has been amassing significant funds from well-known Valley firms to deploy its CPV systems. The startup already raised $95 million from New Enterprise Associates, Moser Baer India, David Gelbaum, Metasystem Group, NGEN Partners and Yellowstone Capital, and it’s reported to be looking to add between $60 million and $80 million in a Series C round.

The company also has a serious presence in Spain. Its sister company SolFocus Europe has offices in Madrid, Spain, and this week the company said it had completed the first 200 kW installation of a 3 MW concentrating solar PV plant owned by Spain’s Institute of Concentration Photovoltaic Systems (ISFOC).

Cyrium Technologies: Cyrium makes the multi-junction solar cells for concentrating PV systems — these cells have to be highly efficient and robust. Just this week the company says it has closed a Series B round of $15 million in funding led by David Gelbaum’s Quercus Trust, and including BDC Venture Capital, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, and Pangaea Ventures.

Solar Systems Tech: Founded in 1991 by John Lasich, Hawthorne, Victoria, Australia-based Solar Systems has developed the “CS500 dish concentrator PV unit,” which stands 14 meters high, has 112 curved mirrors (each 1.2 square meters) and tracks the sun on a mounted steel frame. The company only sells solar power plants with a minimum of 8 dishes, and it says the CS500 produces up to 30 percent more electricity per installed watt and is cheaper per installed watt than traditional PV.

GreenVolts: GreenVolts is a three-year-old, San Francisco-based solar startup that sells a sun-tracking concentrating PV system called the CarouSol that can concentrate sunlight up to 625 times. GreenVolts says the system can produce energy at less than half the cost of traditional PV.

In 2006 the company won the California Clean Tech Open business competition, and a year later raised a $10 million Series A round led by Greenlight Energy Resources and included Avista and other investors. The company said earlier this month it was looking to raise funding of "less than $100 million" later this year.

Concentrix Solar: The Freiburg, Germany-based company was spun out of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in 2005. The company sells concentrating PV plants called Flatcon, which the company says produce electricity 10 to 20 percent cheaper than standard PV.

For about two years the company has been operating a pilot production line and by the end of the summer plans to have started up another 25 MW production line. Concentrix is backed by Good Energies and Abengoa Solar and has a joint venture with Abengoa, called Concentrix Iberia, for the Spanish markets.

Silicon Valley Solar: The two year old company was founded by Patrick Callinan and backed by a $10.2 million Series A round from Bessemer Venture Partners. The company’s Sol-X concentrator is a flat plate internal concentrator, which is low cost and delivers two times the concentration and reduces silicon by 50 percent. The system also doesn’t rely on a tracking system, so there are fewer moving parts (which cuts the cost and complexity of the system).

Energy Innovations: “EI” is a startup that makes a variety of solar photovoltaic products, including the Sunflower, which the company claims is “the world’s first high-concentration PV system for both commercial rooftop and ground-mounted applications.” Energy Innovations is backed by Bill Gross (dotcom entrepreneur turned cleantech investor) and his Idealab incubator, as well as Mohr Davidow.

Soliant Energy: Soliant’s rooftop concentrating solar panels are the same dimension and weight as conventional PV panels, so are much easier to install than many of the other CPV systems out there. The systems use triple junction cells that can deliver 40 percent efficiency, and the lenses concentrate the sunlight by 500 times.

Amonix: Torrance, Calif.-based Amonix is almost 2 decades old, which has given them a chance to go through 6 generations of improvements on their high concentration PV systems. The lenses concentrate the sunlight over 500 times and the company says it manufactures its high efficiency solar cells “at existing microelectronic chip manufacturing foundries,” which can deliver significant cost savings.

Green & Gold Energy: This Australian startup was formed in 2005 with $250K in seed funding from the founder. The company has now grown large enough that it says it has already committed to sell 400 MW per year of its SunCube concentrating solar PV systems. The company only officially launched its SunCube technology in February of this year but says it intends to sell 1 GW of SunCube manufacturing facilities around the world. G&GE also claims it has “placed the largest CPV industry order to date for 105 MWs of Emcore’s world leading 1,000 sun concentrator cells.”

Pyron solar: We first heard about Pyron Solar when the company raised Series A financing from New Energies Invest for its concentrating solar PV systems. The company, which is headquartered in San Diego, Calif., has a working 6.6 kW prototype of its unusual solar system that floats in water, which helps to cool the system and can prevent damage. The solar setup uses three 15-meter-diameter arrays on a two-axis tracker with multi-junction PV cells from Spectrolab.

Sol3g: Like SolFocus solar concentrating PV system maker Sol3g is building out a part of the 3 MW solar system that belongs to the Institute of Concentration Photovoltaic Systems in Castilla La Mancha. Founded in 2004, the company is based in Cerdanyola, Spain, and says the PV surface of its system is 400 times smaller than that of a traditional PV system, “with the consequent cost saving.”

Cool Earth Solar: You might have seen pictures of this one across the web; the solar system that looks like a oversized foil baloon. Cool Earth Solar makes inflated mirror concentrators, half made of reflective mylar and half clear film. Inside the bubble is a high-efficiency PV receiver. The system is supposedly designed to be lightweight and easy enough to string up but rugged enough to withstand 100 mph winds. In February the company said it had raised $21 million.

Top

The Daily Sprout

2008-07-31 02:30

Craig Rubens - Misc

Green Chemistry Startup Segetis Grabs ex-Dow Exec: Khosla-backed Segetis has hired industrial bio-products expert Jim Stoppert, a former Cargill and Dow executive. The stealthy Segetis intends to use agricultural products to make materials traditionally made from petroleum - CNet.

Researchers Develop Feedstock Pretreatment to Boost Ethanol Yield: Researchers at the University of Georgia have developed a fast, acid-free pretreatment wash for cellulosic feedstocks that could boost ethanol yields by 10 times - TreeHugger.

Spain to Put 1M Electric Cars on the Road by 2014: The Spanish government has put forward a plan to put 1 million electric cars on the road by 2014 through a set of incentives. The plan is expected to gain approval from the Council of Ministers on Friday - Triple Pundit.

Dell’s Bamboo PC on Sale: Dell’s bamboo-clad Studio Hybrid PC is now on sale; that was the greenie PC we took those exclusive photos of back in April — EcoGeek.

Top

EEStor: The Story So Far

2008-07-31 00:23

Craig Rubens - Startups

Energy storage startup EEStor has been very quiet about its technology, so when CEO Richard Weir told us back in January that the company’s high-tech battery could do “a helluva lot,” we considered ourselves lucky to accrue such detailed intel. We got a little more yesterday when EEStor said its equipment, procedures and techniques had been verified by independent third parties — in other words, researchers from outside the company have decided that the special sauce of chemicals in EEStor’s energy storage tech are of a quality and purity that should allow it to achieve EEStor’s bold claims. But while this development is exciting for energy geeks, the super battery tech remains far from operable.

The Cedar Park, Texas-based startup previously had its energy storage unit labeled as a potentially “disruptive technology” by The Economist. Potential markets for disruption include automotive batteries, grid energy storage and even battlefield power supplies.

But the very nature of EEStor’s ambiguously named Electrical Energy Storage Unit (EESU) is very cloudy. The company describes its device as follows: “Using revolutionary ultra capacitor architecture and environmentally friendly materials the EEStor, Inc. EESU will have the capability to compete against all existing battery and capacitor technologies.” The company says its technology can provide 10 times the energy of lead-acid batteries at one tenth the weight and half the price. No wonder people are paying attention.

Founded in 2001 by disk-storage vets Richard D. Weir, Carl Nelson, and Richard S. Weir, EEStor reportedly received $3 million in backing from Kleiner Perkins in 2005, though the startup is not listed in Kleiner’s portfolio.

Electric car maker ZENN Motor Cars invested $2.5 million in EEStor in 2007 for a 3.8 percent stake in the company, putting EEStor’s estimated equity valuation at the time at some $66 million. ZENN has the exclusive rights to use EEStor’s technology in new vehicles weighing up to 1,400 kilos, as well as for retrofits. In the wake of EEStor’s recent technical verification, ZENN has the option to invest an additional $5 million. ZENN says that depending on the investments of EEStor’s other backers, its potential total investment of $7.5 million would give it a stake of between 6.2 percent and 10.5 percent, putting EEStor’s valuation at somewhere between $71.4 million and $121 million.

Early this year EEStor got a huge credibility boost when it signed an exclusive agreement with defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which plans to use EEStor’s EESU for military and homeland security applications. Lockheed hopes EEStor’s units can help lighten the load of today’s high-tech war fighter. While delays have already pushed back estimated production start dates, we hope excited EEStor customers will show off the devices once they are finally delivered.

Previous EEStor and other battery tech coverage: