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1. The Daily Sprout
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2. Applied Materials Gaining Traction in Solar Sector
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3. DOE Funds Carbon Capture With $340M & Solar $24M, Sigh
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4. Lotus Builds "Omnivore" Engine For Biofuels Research
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5. ThermaSource Drills Into $41.5M for Geothermal
The Daily Sprout
Craig Rubens - Misc
Sam’s Club Selling Solar Panels: Nine Sam’s Club (as in Wal-Mart) stores in southern California will be promoting rooftop solar installations in the stores and offer $500 discounts. Deals will be offered through residential installers Borrego Solar and BP Solar - CNet.
Johnson Controls-Saft Gets $8.2M for Hybrid Batteries: The joint venture between Johnson Controls and France’s Saft received a $8.2 million contract from the DOE-funded Advanced Battery Consortium. Over two years Johnson Controls-Saft will work on validating their lithium-ion battery technology for plug-in hybrid applications - Cleantech Group.
Chinese Solar Firm Aims for $1B U.S. IPO: Silicon wafer maker Jiangsu Shunda Group plans to IPO in the first half of 2009 on the New York Stock Exchange and hopes to raise $1 billion. The company says it plans to build a new polysilicon plant and will solidify its plan to IPO in October if its silicon meets international standards - Reuters.
Making Cement From Flue Gas: Khosla-backed Calera says it can make cement using flue gas from industrial facilities. Founder Brent Constantz claims: “We probably have the best carbon capture and storage technique there is by a long shot.” Too bad that’s not saying much - Scientific American.
Applied Materials Gaining Traction in Solar Sector
Kevin Kelleher - Big Green
The results so far have been mixed but encouraging. This afternoon, Applied Materials reported its earnings for the quarter ended July 27, 2008. Overall revenue dropped 14 percent in the quarter from the previous one, thanks to a 40 percent slide in revenue for its silicon segment, the company’s largest business division. Slack demand for memory and flash chips caused the decline.
Solar revenue, however, was up 105 percent, helped by Applied’s recent acquisitions, including solar equipment maker Baccini. But solar only made up 9 percent of total sales, and the $30 million in M&A charges related to Baccini and other deals led to an operating loss of $85 million in the solar division and erased two cents a share from the company’s overall per-share net profit of 91 cents.
On a conference call, the company said that without the M&A charges, the solar division would have posted a slight profit in the quarter. Asked when the unit would be expected to turn fully profitable, executives would only reiterate a previous forecast of operating margins for solar equipment coming in between 25 percent and 30 percent in 2010.
The chart above, taken from a slide prepared from Applied’s earnings call, shows the company’s revenue and operating loss from its solar business over the past three quarters. Both are growing, but revenue is accelerating a lot faster.
All told, investors liked the news. AMAT’s stock was up 4.7 percent to $19.33 in after-hours trading Tuesday; this also after the CEO said the dismal quarter represented a “trough” in the semiconductor business and that solar equipment remains an ace up the company’s sleeve.
Solar equipment may one day rival semiconductors as a contributor to the company’s profits, although by then the boom-and-bust semiconductor cycle may be heading into another boom period.
DOE Funds Carbon Capture With $340M & Solar $24M, Sigh
Craig Rubens - Policy
In the last two days, the Department of Energy has announced $24 million worth of new investments in solar energy while also revealing it’s putting a whopping $340 million into yet more clean coal research. In conjunction with the funding announcements, the DOE says it’s “committed to…developing the technologies that will ensure coal can be used,” but at the same time describes solar as “an important component of our comprehensive strategy to commercialize and deploy advanced, clean, alternative technologies.”
Parsing the language indicates this administration’s bias toward clean coal, but the numbers speak even louder. Since 2001 the DOE has put more than $2.5 billion into clean coal, including millions sunk into the scuttled FutureGen project. This week’s $340 million is part of President Bush’s $2 billion, 10-Year Clean Coal Initiative, but is separate from the $1.3 billion announced with the “restructuring” of the FutureGen project.
The DOE was not able to immediately provide us with the total amount of federal funding that solar projects have received, but we do know that the agency announced $60 million earlier this year and $168 million last year for solar projects. We’re sure that’s not the entire amount, but seems to come in significantly under its clean coal budget.
Still, some solar investment is better than none at all. Of the potential $24 million for solar, $2.9 million has been approved for the 2008 fiscal year and will be divvied up among a dozen projects with industry partners, including startups Enphase Energy, developer of web-based solar analytics and inverter management networks, and SmartSpark, a solar inverter maker. The remaining funds are subject to Congressional approval but the DOE says the total federal funds could leverage $16 million in additional private investment.
Lotus Builds "Omnivore" Engine For Biofuels Research
Tony Borroz - Energy
There's a whole bunch of fiddling and futzing that has to go on when it comes to working through the details of using alcohol-based fuels. My understanding (usually from watching engines blow up at drag strips and road courses) is that the more alcohol in the fuel, the more compression and displacement you want. That means the possibility of better performance — better higher compression and more torque lower in the rev range.
But the variables in Lotus’ announcement beg numerous questions: What kind of “bioalcohols” will it be optimized for? Mixed with what other base constituents? In what kind of combustion chamber? You could, if you were a lesser company, just do it by guess and by golly, but Lotus ain't that kind of shop. Hence the name OMNIVORE, which will likely be flexible and can be reconfigured to suit the specific needs of specific fuels.
Beyond the unknowns, two things in the release stand out.
The first is: "The OMNIVORE will be a two-stroke engine with direct injection and a variable compression ratio." Direct injection and variable compression ratio is just a given, that's to be expected, but it's going to be a two-stroke? That’s curious, since two strokes offer many potential advantages concerning efficiency but are notoriously dirty in their emissions.
The other is this: “Jaguar Cars Ltd a consultative partner at all stages of development.”
Jaguar? Jaguar, who was recently bought by India's Tata (Tata who just got a lot of press with their Nano ultra-cheap micro car). Hmmm…could Jag be interested in using OMNIVORE-derived tech in their big, heavy luxo-boats, or could the tech just be filtered back to parent company Tata for use in smaller, more eco-friendly cars?
ThermaSource Drills Into $41.5M for Geothermal
Craig Rubens - Energy
The company plans to spend some of that cash doubling its workforce from 210 to 420 employees by the end of the year. It will also use the new capital to acquire more geothermal drilling rigs as it expands its business domestically and internationally. With oil and gas prices still close to record highs, much of the world’s drilling equipment is indefinitely tied up looking for precious hydrocarbons making drills available for geothermal development that much more valuable, or so ThermaSource hopes.
Geothermal is still a largely untapped resource. In the United States, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, geothermal energy is being exploited in all 50 states but only accounts for half a percent of our total energy consumption.
But geothermal is picking up steam, especially in the Western United States, and 103 projects are either under construction or on the drawing board. ThermaSource’s investment follows on the heels of news that Vulcan Power received $145 million from Denham Capital in July on top of $45 million from Merrill Lynch Commodity Partners last year. And AltaRock Energy, a smaller, stealthier Seattle-based geothermal startup, raised $4 million in Series A funding last year from A-list investors including Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Khosla Ventures, Aaron Mandell of GreatPoint Energy, and an investment group affiliated with Dundee Securities.
Still, startups certainly don’t dominate the space. Oil giant Chevron claims to be the world’s largest developer of geothermal energy with 1,273 megawatts of energy coming from projects on the Pacific Rim.
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