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1. Riverwired.com: Quick Tip for Water Savings
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2. Earth2Tech Week in Review
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3. New Surfboards For A New Eco Age
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4. Green Campaign Watch: Exxon John, T. Boone & An Energy Vote No-Show
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5. Synfuels Converts Natural Gas to Gasoline to Cash
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6. SunPower Soaring on Huge PG&E Solar Deal
Riverwired.com: Quick Tip for Water Savings
jchait - Home & Garden
Showers and baths use an insane amount of water. To conserve more water, cut five minutes off your daily shower. To double your efforts, try placing a small plastic bin in the tub as you shower. Use that water to water plants, wash the car, or mop the floors. The two easy steps above can save upwards of 375 gallons of water a month!
Earth2Tech Week in Review
Craig Rubens - Misc
Congress is on vacation and the price of oil is slipping, but the energy debate in America continues to boil. Cleantech startups are still making moves and, in case the Olympics had you distracted, here are the big headlines from this week’s cleantech news.
PG&E Signs Massive 800 MW PV Solar Deals With OptiSolar, SunPower: The Northern California utility said it has inked an agreement with OptiSolar unit Topaz Solar Farms to purchase electricity from the 550 MW San Luis Obispo County, Calif., farm once it's operational in 2011, as well as 250 MW from High Plains Ranch II, a subsidiary of SunPower — a total of 800 MW of clean, solar energy.
U.S. Wind Poised to Hit 150GW by 2020: The booming U.S. wind market is set to cross the 150 gigawatt mark by 2020, according to a report from market research firm Emerging Energy Research. But it will take actually double that if we want to get 20 percent of our electricity from wind like the DOE and T. Boone Pickens think we can.
The Finer Points of the Chevy Volt: Chevy's upcoming electric vehicle, the Volt — highly anticipated, and crucial to GM's future — has gotten a lot of press for its fully integrated hybrid drivetrain, but relatively little attention has been paid to the car's aerodynamics.
RoofRay Launches Online Solar Clearinghouse: How much will it cost; how long until it pays off; who's the best local installer? A new site that launched this week, is looking to help answer all of those queries using satellite data and a hands-on web site — RoofRay.com.
Kevin Rose's Next Startup to be Green Focused?: Kevin Rose, Silicon Valley wunderkind and founder of Digg, proposed an idea he calls “iPower” that would manage the power consumption of your home electronics and turn them off when you left the house. Although he says he’s too busy to take on the idea, several cleantech startups are working on similar ideas.
New Surfboards For A New Eco Age
Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green
It wasn't all that long ago that Clark Foam and its founder, surf pioneer Grubby Clark, finally surrendered in a long-running battle with the EPA and shuttered its doors in a hail of bad words, pronouncements that the end of surfing was upon us, accusations of big government interference and surfboard blanks piled out back of Grubby's SoCal factory.
The event, however, seemed to be a tipping point that started an eco-wave in the surfing world and led to a new, greener way of making surfboards. The use of a new soy-based material called Biofoam (developed by HomeBlown US) is slowly becoming more prevalent, as well as more accepted. In place of fiberglass cloth, woven bamboo and industrial hemp are being used; bamboo is being used to construct fins as well.
And while they’re just as light and strong as their space-age counterparts, new, more environmentally friendly boards face two main challenges. The first is being accepted by the surfing community at large. Although they have the reputation of being free-thinking, outside the mainstream sorts, surfers can be a very traditional and conservative lot. Mention words like "new" in relation to surfboards, and they tend to avoid it and stay with what they know.
The second challenge is one of cost. At the moment, an all-natural soy resin core and hemp-weave board costs about 50 to 75 percent more than the traditional polyurethane foam and fiberglass model. And, when it comes to costs, surfers are a cheap bunch. Their whole existence revolves around a lifestyle where possessions are few and far between. The most expensive, and cherished, of those possessions is the board; keeping the cost of that down is always a concern. This will of course change over time as economies of scale and acceptance drive the cost down, but still, that’s a major hurdle.
But there’s hope that greener boards could catch a wave of popularity: Surfers can be near-militant environmentalists. When a recent toll road project was proposed for the famous Southern California surf spot known as Trestles, droves of surfers descended on a state public hearing to argue the case against the project, which would have had negative environmental effects.
Green Campaign Watch: Exxon John, T. Boone & An Energy Vote No-Show
Craig Rubens - Policy
This week, Democrats are simultaneously edging closer to the middle on domestic oil exploration and trying to coat McCain in Big Oil’s ill-gotten profits. Meanwhile McCain met with one of the biggest former oilmen, T. Boone Pickens. But McCain hasn’t put in the effort to renew the tax credits vital to Pickens’ wind energy plan. Thomas Friedman points out that the Senator has missed every energy tax credit vote this year.
DNC Launches Attack on “Exxon John”: The Democratic National Committee has put out a new ad attacking McCain, charging, in rhyme, that the Senator is on Big Oil’s payroll. The ad parodies a widely ridiculed spot from Senator “Big” John Cornyn (R-Texas) with a similar baritone cowboy narrator who intones: “The future in energy is alternatives they say, but that’s not Exxon John’s way.” California Rep. Hilda L. Solis and California Democratic Party Chairman Sen. Art Torres held a conference call today to promote the video and blasted McCain for his oily connections in preparation for the presidential-hopeful’s scheduled to visit to the Golden State.
McCain Sits down with T. Boone Pickens: T. Boone Pickens had the opportunity to give his famous whiteboard presentation to McCain this morning in Aspen, Colo. Following the meeting Pickens issued a statement saying that McCain was “interested and encouraged” by the proposed plan. Pickens says he stressed that an energy plan “must reduce our foreign dependence on foreign oil by at least 30 percent in the next 10 years.” In the pursuit of a truly bipartisan effort, Pickens reiterated his intentions to meet with Democratic nominee Obama as well.
Friedman Blasts McCain’s No-Show Energy Record: It hurts when you realize that the U.S. Senate has already voted eight times this year on renewing the renewable energy tax credits — and has yet to get enough votes to pass them. What’s worse is that Sen. John McCain has missed all eight votes. Between campaigning for offshore drilling and sitting in his office, he hasn’t cast a vote either way for the production and investment tax credits. Obama’s record is a bit better — he’s voted for to renew the tax credits all three of the times he was there.
Synfuels Converts Natural Gas to Gasoline to Cash
Craig Rubens - Startups
The idea isn’t new — the Fischer-Tropsch process has been used widely for decades to convert coal and methane into syngas and fuel. And earlier this month Rentech said it had started producing an “ultra clean synthetic fuel,” from natural gas (coal will also be a feedstock) at a demonstration unit in Colorado using an advanced version of fischer tropsch. But Synfuel says it can do it better and cheaper than competitors.
Where the Fischer-Tropsch process can make a barrel of gasoline for about $35, Synfuels claims it can produce the same barrel for $25. The secret is a very efficient process that first “cracks” the natural gas into acetylene which is later converted into ethylene using a proprietary catalyst at an efficiency rate of 98 percent, the company claims.
Founded in 1999, Synfuels licenses its technology from Texas A&M University and has been fine tuning its process at a $50 million test facility in Texas since 2005. But the startup tells Technology Review’s Tyler Hamilton that it’s close to signing a deal for its first commercial plant, potentially near Kuwait City. The company estimates there are nearly 15,000 gas fields outside North America that could be served by plants using its process.
SunPower Soaring on Huge PG&E Solar Deal
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
PG&E’s solar power contracts suggest that solar photovoltaics are finally becoming a viable utility-scale option, and the cost of solar PV is creeping that much closer to grid parity (the cost of fossil fuel power electricity). American Technology research analyst John Hardy notes that the deal has “monumental implications” for SunPower; it’s equivalent to about 70 percent of the total installations the company has done to date, he says.
Hardy estimates that SunPower is selling the 250 MW system for around $6 per watt — that’s still relatively high compared to $1 per watt grid parity. But assuming SunPower is providing all of the modules, that could deliver SunPower $1.5 billion in revenues and around 33 percent blended gross margins. No wonder the street is shining on SunPower.
The project is contingent on renewal of the investment tax credit, so for the solar industry in general, the deal could act as a valuable pressure point to extend the 30 percent tax credit. PG&E now has more of an incentive to help get the credit renewed, and the stakes just got a lot bigger — financially and in terms of public perception. If the tax incentives fail it will be a public disaster, with an evaporation of so much funding and potential clean power.
And for all you number crunchers, Hardy offers these handy points of reference on the scale of PG&E’s solar PV plans:
- 800 MW is about 30 percent of the total worldwide installations in 2007.
- 800 MW is 3.6 times the total amount of PV installed in the U.S. in 2007.
- 800 MW is about 80 percent of the installations expected to be completed in Spain in 2008, which has been the cause of much multiple compression.
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