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1. Could your granite countertops be leaking radon gas?
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2. Vulcan Power Heats Up With $145M from Denham
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3. Green Computing Still Held Back By Costs
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4. AgileWaves Makes Proactive Smart Home
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5. Fabrik Releases Eco Bamboo [re]drive
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6. Agassi, Convince Pickens Electric Vehicles Are the Way
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7. Earth2Tech Week in Review
Could your granite countertops be leaking radon gas?
Ali Kriscenski - Air quality
A large part of the green building focus is on healthy indoor air quality – eliminating toxins, emissions and pollutants that can cause indoor air to be more polluted than outdoors. One common and potentially dangerous health risk inside buildings has recently been found in high levels in granite finishes. This highly popular countertop choice has become suspect as an emitter of radiation and an entry point for high levels of radon gas inside the home.
Vulcan Power Heats Up With $145M from Denham
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
Vulcan Power, a company with one of the larger geothermal project portfolios, says it has received an investment of $145 million from Boston-based private equity firm Denham Capital. The sizable funding has been planned for awhile, as last year Vulcan raised $45 million from Merrill Lynch Commodity Partners (a subsidiary of Merrill Lynch) in what the company said was part of a larger planned $150 million in financing.
Vulcan says in the release it will use the funds to build out geothermal sites it says could generate a whopping 900 MW to 2 GW of steam power. That could provide clean power for as much as 2 million people. Based in Bend, Ore., the 17-year-old company has geothermal projects on more than 160,000 acres of private and federal lands.
Compared to solar and wind, geothermal is a renewable energy source that gets a lot less attention and investment dollars. The process involves drilling down and tapping into heated water reserves and converting the steam into power. The drawback is that the technology can only be used on select geothermal sites, which are limited. But geothermal sites can provide a sizable amount of power, and Vulcan’s power plants can generate in the hundreds of megawatts.
Vulcan has already done several power purchase agreement with utilities in Western United States, including Southern California Edison for 120 MW and PG&E and Nevada Power Company for a total of 300 MW. Vulcan says it is also working on another 300 MW of geothermal power supply contracts with utilities.
Vulcan may be one of the bigger companies but there are several other geothermal site holders out there that have sizable plots. Calpine Corp. owns and operates 19 power plants in The Geysers site in Northern California that combined can generate 725 MW of clean power. Western GeoPower also owns considerable assets at The Geysers. AltaRock Energy is a Seattle-based startup that is building geothermal technology.
Green Computing Still Held Back By Costs
Alistair Croll - Energy
A recent study by computer retailer CDW shows that most IT decision makers believe in making their technology infrastructure greener and more energy efficient. But more than half of those surveyed cite cost as the main obstacle, and see the impact on the environment and on their company’s image as greater benefits than the cost savings from a reduced power bill.
Those results seem at odds with reports from analysts that suggest green, power-efficient computing is just around the corner and is being driven by spiraling energy costs. Most forecasts show computing power costs will have a real impact on companies soon: Gartner projects that by 2010, 75 percent of companies will consider the energy and CO2 footprint of hardware during purchasing.
Computing itself is a major energy-sucking culprit, and IT power consumption will only rise in the future. In August 2007, the EPA estimated that data centers consumed roughly 61 billion kWh in 2006. That’s about 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption, which cost $4.5 billion. And it’s expected to increase to 100 billion kWh by 2011 — 2.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption, which would cost approximately $7.4 billion.
Today, for every dollar the industry spends on data center hardware, it spends 50 cents on energy for things like power and cooling. And energy’s portion of that is growing. Computing power researcher (and a speaker at GigaOM’s Structure 08 conference) Jonathan Koomey estimates that total electricity used by servers by 2010 will be 76 percent higher than it was in 2005.
It’s not just the data centers, though. Monitors, printers and other technology systems need to be upgraded to support green standards like Energy Star. LCD screens, for example, consume roughly a third of the power of CRT monitors. And while CRTs are on their way out, it takes time to replace that aging technology.
Ultimately all the green computing upgrades will take a significant investment, and as the results of the survey show, more than half of the firms don’t yet perceive the importance of the long-term power cost savings, and they see initial green upgrade investment as an obstacle. How long will it take perceptions to line up with the forecasts?
We’re not sure, but the rate of green IT adoption will be different for different sectors. While most big businesses surveyed have already started greening their technology landscape, small businesses are much further behind. According to the survey, green initiatives within smaller firms are almost always driven by a senior executive.
Government buyers are also slower than corporate buyers to adopt green tech, despite the rising energy costs they face. That same EPA study estimated that federal servers and data centers consume 6 billion kWh of electricity, for a total electricity cost of about $450 million annually — roughly 10 percent of U.S. data center consumption.
As energy costs continue to climb and trends like cloud computing centralize power consumption, expect to see small businesses and government embrace green technology the way larger organizations have started to. They’ll have to, because the cost savings will deliver a real competitive advantage, and organizations that don’t step up will get left behind.
AgileWaves Makes Proactive Smart Home
Craig Rubens - Startups
The idea behind an energy dashboard for your house is that by displaying your home’s energy consumption you will change your behavior to save energy. But what if your home could change your behavior for you? AgileWaves, which makes the so-called Resource Monitor, has integrated its info dash with an active control system from Crestron, so the home can now dim lights, turn heating and cooling off and adjust smart appliances. "For the first time we're going to truly automate a smart home, which connects monitoring with actions and automated controls — which gets humans out of the loop,” CEO Peter Sharer says.
There are many startups working on home energy dashboards (check out our list of 5 Energy Monitoring Startups to Help You Cut Home Power). While they all have slick interfaces for the end user, it will be partnerships with other stakeholders in the smart-home business that start to add real value. Working with utilities, contractors and system integrators will provide opportunities for all parties to provide services to reduce energy consumption, like demand response and smart charging.
Integrating a monitoring system with active controls has opened up AgileWaves’ business for potential customers, Sharer says. “As opposed to thinking what we sell is just another widget, they are thinking of this as an annuity,” Sharer explains. “Where we're finding a lot of interest is the contractors who are being asked by the homeowners what they can do to be more energy efficient.”
Utilities are also potentially strong partners for energy dashboard startups. “The utilities are in the business is selling energy, metering it and sending bills,” Sharer explains. “What they aren't in the business of doing is recording all that data, organizing it and making it comprehensible to the customer."
Automating the management is important as energy is being consumed by an increasing variety of devices. “This is the first year consumer electronics has overtaken [heating and cooling] and large appliances,” Sharer says. It might be relatively easy for a human user to turn the thermostat down but much harder to unplug all energy-sucking wall-plugs. Vampiric or phantom loads, the energy used by your gizmos when you’re not using your gizmos, can account for 75 percent of their total energy use, Sharer says.
AgileWaves says it is installing about one system a month. All systems are custom-designed and cost around $7,500. The six-person, Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup is actively looking to raise a series A round of funding.
Fabrik Releases Eco Bamboo [re]drive
Chris Albrecht - Energy
How do you make computing eco-hip? Wrap it in bamboo. Back in April, Dell showed off its bamboo-clad PC that uses 70 percent less power than a standard computer. Today, storage company Fabrik announced the release of its new eco-friendly external storage drive dubbed the [re]drive, made from bamboo and aluminum.
The 500 GB [re]drive uses a combination of materials, power management and design to minimize its environmental footprint. The bamboo and aluminum case is 100 percent recyclable, and the specially-designed ridges on the casing act as heat sinks, cooling the drive without the use of a fan.
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As far as power consumption goes, the [re]drive has a Energy Star level 4-qualified power adapter, automatically shuts on or off with your computer and features a low-power hard drive that the company says saves up to 40 percent in power consumption.
The green of this storage machine also extends to the manufacturing and packaging. Waste aluminum from the manufacturing process is mixed in with the raw aluminum to make parts. The box it comes in contains no extraneous materials and is 100 percent recyclable.
Agassi, Convince Pickens Electric Vehicles Are the Way
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
Tom Friedman’s column in this Sunday’s New York Times advocates a meeting of the minds between two of the green energy revolution’s most well-known entrepreneurial leaders: Shai Agassi and T. Boone Pickens. As Earth2Tech readers likely know from through our endless coverage of these two innovators, Agassi is leading the electric vehicle infrastructure startup Project Better Place and Pickens is the former oil billionaire turned wind wildcatter who has launched his Pickens Plan to help get the United States off its oil addiction.
No doubt, as Agassi writes on his blog this weekend, the two would have more than enough to chew on over breakfast. Agassi says: “I never met him [Pickens], but I am now very intrigued by the thought of seeing what happens when the two of us get together and think.” So are we.
But while the two share the same goals of getting countries to become less reliant on foreign oil — Pickens focusing on the United States, and Agassi starting first with Israel and Denmark — we would suspect they would have a few major points of contention. Namely, Pickens’s call for natural gas vehicles to provide a third of the U.S. transportation is somewhat at odds with Agassi’s attempts to build the electrification of the world’s transportation. Though there is room for more than one form of alternative cleaner transportation, the massive investment needed to build out the natural gas infrastructure could draw investment away from efforts to encourage the proliferation of electric vehicles.
And since we think electric vehicles are a far better long term alternative transportation plan, here’s what we would want from a sit down between Agassi and Pickens: Agassi, can you convince Pickens that electric vehicles are a better plan? We laud Pickens’s work on the world’s largest wind farm and investment into clean-generated electricity. And I think we can all agree that kicking the foreign oil habit is the end game. But let’s build out an infrastructure that is already in place — the power grid — to drive our vehicles. Agassi would probably put it a lot more eloquently than that, and perhaps, with all his successes thus far, could really drive home the point.
Earth2Tech Week in Review
Craig Rubens - Misc
Another week another conference. This week saw the E2T team in San Jose to attend the Plug-In 2008 conference where a variety of electric car players, from Detroit heavyweights to Silicon Valley startups, bumped elbows and discussed the dilemma of electrifying our auto fleet. In case you were busy on the conference floor or distracted by Obama’s international media assault, we’ve collected this week’s important cleantech headlines for your here.
Plug-In 2008 News Roundup: Google.org made two electric car investments this week and GM announced a partnership with 30 utilities to prepare for their Chevy Volt. In case you missed any of this week’s plug-in news we’ve rounded it all up for you here, including interviews and videos.
OptiSolar Quietly Piling On Cash: OptiSolar, a thin-film solar startup with big plans, has quietly raised lots of funds and crossed the $200 million in financing. Perhaps it will use the money to fund it’s planned 550 megawatt farm in Southern California.
GT Solar IPO Prices Mid-Range, Raises $500M: After debuting on Nasdaq Thursday, GT Solar’s stock took a beating during its first two days of trading. But don’t worry, the company sent out a reassuring statement.
Biofuel Lobbying: Split Between First-Gen and Next-Gen: Though grain-based biofuels is getting bashed in the media, its beating cellulosic biofuels in the lobbying game. Corn and soy based biofuel lobbyists spent $7.03 million since 2007 to next-gen biofuel’s $3.08 million.
Cow Power Could Provide 3% of U.S. Electricity?: A new study from the University of Texas at Austin estimates that if all the manure from all the livestock in the U.S. was converted into biogas it could power 3 percent of the grid.
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