21st Century Regenerative Technology

1. Agassi, Convince Pickens Electric Vehicles Are the Way
2. Earth2Tech Week in Review
3. Data Centers Will Follow the Sun and Chase the Wind
4. GT Solar Shares Get Battered After Nasdaq Debut
5. SunPower Snaps Up Solar Sales From Down Under
6. Plug-In 2008 News Roundup

Agassi, Convince Pickens Electric Vehicles Are the Way

2008-07-28 01:00

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.

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Earth2Tech Week in Review

2008-07-26 19:30

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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Data Centers Will Follow the Sun and Chase the Wind

2008-07-25 22:00

Stacey Higginbotham - Energy

Data centers’ ability to suck up inordinate amounts of electricity is turning them into the Hummers of the computing world. And much like Hummers, their power-guzzling ways means they are becoming increasingly costly to run. We’ve already covered the efforts of companies to reduce heat, increase server utilization and build green data centers. Now Andrew Hopper, head of the Cambridge University Computing Lab, is working on a solution that could help reduce the demand data centers place on the grid.

Hopper’s vision combines cloud computing and renewable energy: He wants to take electrical transmissions costs out of the equation by placing a data center directly at the site of a renewable energy source and use fiber optic cable to link it to the entity that uses it. Hopper is also the co-founder of Level 5 Networks, which was bought by 10 Gigabit chip maker SolarFlare.

Virtualization and fast Ethernet, which enable services such as Amazon’s EC2, will make Hopper’s idea feasible. The ability to separate the hardware from software through virtualization is what enables computing clouds to exist. Those clouds allow companies, developers or anyone with the ability to tap into that resource, to ship its computing jobs over to Amazon’s servers, no matter where they are located in the world.

The challenge is figuring out how to build software that can monitor electrical generation, prioritize compute jobs and then figure out when and where to send those jobs based on whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Hopper believes it would make sense to attach data centers, possibly in a container (as shown in the image), directly to a renewable energy source. The source could be located in the middle of a desert, on a platform attached to an ocean wind turbine, or anywhere else where power could be easily generated.

One of the issues with renewable sources of energy, is that the places where it’s most abundant, such as winds blowing across the ocean or solar power in the desert, are inaccessible and thus, expensive to attach to the electrical grid. An example is Texas’ $4.9 billion plan to bring wind energy generated in the barren, western part of the state to the more populous center. Bringing the data center to the power solves that problem as long as the area can be reached via a cheaper fiber optic cable. There are still issues of servicing such remote data centers, but the plan to have multiple ones around the world offers redundancy.

But there are still computing tasks that need to be worked out if this vision is to materialize in the next decade or so. “If it turns out you’re chasing the energy and copying a lot of data, then that’s less attractive,” says Hopper. “But with good caching, and if you’re only moving the data once or twice it, might work. You could design software similar to old-fashioned job scheduling on a mainframe. Back then the scarcity was the computing and today it’s energy.”

As data centers take up more and more energy, Hopper’s ideas may help the computing industry solve one of its fastest-growing problems.

image of a theoretical modular data center installation courtesy of Sun Microsystems

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GT Solar Shares Get Battered After Nasdaq Debut

2008-07-25 20:23

Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green

Man, silicon solar gear maker GT Solar has been having a rough couple of days. Shares of the company, which priced at $16.50 for their stock market debut yesterday, closed down almost 12 percent. But the stock lost even more ground today, slumping as much as 36 percent to change hands for $9.30 after it was revealed that one of its customers had signed a deal with a competitor.

Chinese solar wafer maker LDK Solar said it inked an agreement to buy equipment from GT Solar competitor JYT Corp., also of China. It’s a big deal because as Reuters notes, LDK represented 62 percent of GT Solar’s revenue in fiscal year 2008.

In an effort to deflect investor concern, GT Solar issued a statement , with CFO Bob Woodbury saying:

“This announcement by LDK does not in any way impact GT Solar’s backlog, nor do we believe it will have any effect on our internal targets or projections. In fact, LDK Solar’s total orders represent less than 20 percent of our current backlog. Moreover, LDK’s furnace orders represent less than eight percent of our current backlog…Additionally, GT Solar has and will continue to diversify its customer base. LDK Solar remains an important customer, and we continue to negotiate with them for future equipment needs related to multicrystalline furnaces and silicon reactors.”

Perhaps the quick PR response did a small bit of damage control. GT Solar’s shares rebounded somewhat from their intraday low to end the session at $12.59.

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SunPower Snaps Up Solar Sales From Down Under

2008-07-25 17:06

Craig Rubens - Big Green

SunPower is headed to the land of freshly minted carbon regulation, didgeridoos and wombats with its acquisition of Australian Solar Sales, announced late yesterday. Solar Sales, a solar systems integrator and distributor, has been a customer of the Silicon Valley-based maker of high efficiency solar cells for several years.

The acquisition gives SunPower access to a distribution network of 30 dealers throughout Australia. Solar Sales has been installing residential and utility-scale solar systems for 25 years, with many of their projects powering off-grid projects scattered across the outback. Solar Sales sells inverters as well as panels for off-grid power systems that mix solar and wind generation, which require different inverters.

Australia, with its expansive, sun-baked outback, could have as much as 22,000 megawatts of solar capacity by 2020, with the right incentives. But recently the Australian solar industry, which has produced startups like Ausra, has seen its prospects threatened by political fiddling of its rebates, a problem SunPower and the U.S. solar industry faces as well.

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Plug-In 2008 News Roundup

2008-07-25 16:16

Katie Fehrenbacher - Startups

Utilities are about to become the gas stations of the future, the Electric Power Research Institute’s Mark Duvall, said at a GM-sponsored dinner event Monday night that kicked off this week’s first annual plug-in vehicle conference in San Jose, Calif. The image stuck in my head throughout the week as the conference hosted speeches and panel sessions that featured automakers, utilities, startups, the high tech industry, academia and politicians.

Everyone’s trying to figure out what it will take for plug-in hybrids to go mainstream: free electricity, tax incentives, a more mature plug-in conversion industry, aggressive automakers, or more innovative startup tech. Likely a combo of all of those. Whatever it needs the industry’s players had more than enough news to talk about at the show: