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1. LDK Shares Heat Up After Hours on Bright Earnings
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2. Duke and AEP to Power Up $1B for Transmission Lines
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3. U.S. Cities Join Carbon Disclosure Project
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4. Gordon Murray to Design New Green(ish) Supercar
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5. GE Invests $141M Into Acciona's Dakotan Wind Farm
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6. T. Boone Pickens and Perseus Investing $160M in Natural Gas Vehicle
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7. Semiconductors & Fuel Injectors to Cleanup Olympic Motorcycles
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8. Simbol Mines First Round to Extract Lithium from Geothermal
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9. Clinton Backing World's Largest Solar Project in India, Report Says
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10. Earth2Tech Week in Review
LDK Shares Heat Up After Hours on Bright Earnings
Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green
Solar stocks haven’t caught a break in recent weeks, depressed by fears of an uncertain investment tax credit, a cut in Spanish subsidies and an overall economic slump. But here’s an exception: Chinese solar wafer maker LDK reported earnings on Monday above expectations and saw its shares jump almost 20 percent in after hours trading.
For the second quarter ended June 30 2008 LDK reported revenues of $441.7 million, up almost 350 percent from the second quarter of 2007 when the company reported $99.1 million. Net income was equally impressive — the company reported $149.5 million, or $1.29 per diluted ADS. As Marketwatch points out analysts were expecting earnings of 40 cents an ADS on revenue of $287 million. Chairman and CEO Xiaofeng Peng said in the release that the strong quarter resulted from the fact that expansion of the company’s wafer capacity exceeded expectations.
For the third quarter of this year LDK had more good news to share — the company said it is expecting revenues in the range of $486 million to $496 million; full year revenue is projected to be in the range of $1.65 billion to $1.75 billion. If you remember, LDK was also in the news last week, but with a decidedly more negative effect. GT Solar can thank LDK for helping the crash and burn of its IPO, after LDK said it had ditched GT Solar for a competitor.
Duke and AEP to Power Up $1B for Transmission Lines
Craig Rubens - Big Green
The proposed project, called Pioneer Transmission, would run 240 miles of extra-high-voltage 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines from Duke Energy's Greentown Station (near Kokomo, Ind.) to AEP's Rockport Station (east of Evansville, Ind.).
The project, which won’t be completed before 2014, is estimated to cost about $1 billion. The utilities hope to pass the cost of this sizable infrastructure project along to their customers across over a dozen states, which will require regulatory approval from the local overseeing body, the Midwestern Independent System Operator and PJM Interconnection. The joint venture says it will also seek approval from the Federal Energy and Regulatory Commission to operate as a transmission utility in Indiana. Electricity customers generally back the idea of green power, but depending on how much rates will rise, this could cause some customer alarm.
U.S. Cities Join Carbon Disclosure Project
Craig Rubens - Policy
What gets measured gets managed, and for too long the processes that emit carbon into the atmosphere have gone unmanaged. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit consortium of some 385 global institutional investors with a combined asset base of more than $57 trillion, is trying to change that. The CDP said yesterday that 21 American cities have agreed to report their greenhouse gas emissions and other climate change-relevant data through the project’s transparent tracking system.
The cities, including New York, Denver, Las Vegas, Saint Paul and Portland, will report the carbon emissions of all activities under their budgetary oversight, including emergency services, municipal buildings and waste management. The cities will use ICLEI's (formerly the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) Local Government Operations Protocol and software tools to track and profile the information, which will be published in the first CDP Cities Report and ICLEI Local Action Network Report in January 2009.
Founded in 2000, the CPD has big goals and big name signatories. As of 2008, the CPD had gotten 3,000 of the world’s largest companies to respond to its carbon risks and opportunities questionnaire, and it hopes to get all S&P 500 companies to participate. Its web site represents the largest repository of corporate greenhouse gas emissions data in the world, according to the group. Much of the information is made publicly available, allowing policymakers to see the carbon costs of business to inform the regulatory process.
But it’s also good for private sector players to track the carbon risks associated with their investments. Merrill Lynch, who helps fund the CPD, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG Investments, Barclays and HSBC are all “signatory investors” in the CPD, have access to information not publicly available. These huge investors are already dealing with carbon regulation in the European market and expect America will soon follow suit; when that happens, they’ll need baseline info on their existing investments to start gauging carbon-related risk. Many of these companies are also tracking carbon credits and cleantech indices.
Gordon Murray to Design New Green(ish) Supercar
Tony Borroz - Startups
Gordon Murray, famous for knocking the Formula One racing world on its collective ear on more than one occasion (with such notable designs as the Brabham F1 fan car and McLaren's almost all conquering MP4/4) has been turning his fertile imagination towards personal transportation of a greener, if no less fun, stripe. After peaking interest with his highly secretive compact T25 City Car earlier this year, Murray is supposedly planning to use the same manufacturing and construction methods for an as-yet unnamed supercar that will also feature a heavy green slant.
According to Autocar UK Murray wants to build a T25 inspired supercar that will be compact, lightweight and powered by a high-output, small-capacity engine, combining strong performance with low CO2 emissions. The "compact and lightweight" part is easy to understand, since those were two of the basic parts of a performance car design since day one. But what is particularly noticeable is the "powered by a high-output, small-capacity engine, combining strong performance with low CO2 emissions" part. This represents the way forward for performance cars of a greener future.
The standard practice for performance cars is to make the car as small as practical and stuff the biggest engine you can find into the engine bay. Most top of the line offerings from companies such as Ferrari and Aston Martin and Bugatti feature engines in the 6-liter range. There's no hard data from Murray yet on engine size for the T25, but keep this in mind: in the mid-80s, Honda was making 1.5 liter racing engines that cranked out well in excess of 1000 horse power (coincidentally enough, these Honda engines sat in Gordon Murray designed McLaren chassis); big power from small engines is imminently feasible.
Lowering CO2 emissions is the next big hurdle facing European car manufacturers, with more stringent standards that will phase in over the next decade. For Murray to get a jump on this aspect of performance car design is a very positive sign.
Although still in the very early stages of design and development, Gordon Murray Design is supposedly considering putting the supercar into production themselves. And Gordon tells Autocar UK: "We wouldn't necessarily sell on the supercar for someone else to make."
GE Invests $141M Into Acciona's Dakotan Wind Farm
Craig Rubens - Big Green
The move to invest in a competitor’s wind farm shows GE knows there’s lots of space in this market. It’s not like GE is hurting for wind turbine buyers — the company had $12 billion in backlog orders earlier this year. And foreign energy players like Acciona Energy, which is part of the Spanish corporate giant Acciona Group, are scrambling to get a slice of America’s wind energy pie. The Tatanka wind farm is Acciona’s first wholly built wind farm in North America; the Spanish firm opened a turbine production plant in Iowa earlier this year to fuel the expansion of its North American Energy business.
And America’s wind has huge potential. The American Wind Energy Association estimates that North Dakota has the greatest wind energy potential in the States. But don’t worry, Texas, where former oilman T. Boone Pickens is building what he says will be the biggest wind farm in the world, is a close second.
T. Boone Pickens and Perseus Investing $160M in Natural Gas Vehicle
Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green
The green-tinged former oil baron T. Boone Pickens is such a fan of his plan to have natural gas power a third of U.S. vehicles, he’s joining with a fund to build and launch a new natural gas vehicle for U.S. roads. Pickens and the natural gas distribution company he founded, Clean Energy Fuels, say this morning they have joined with the investment group Perseus to support the creation of a natural gas vehicle to the tune of $160 million. Clean Energy Fuels and Pickens will each commit $10 million, and Perseus is leading the investment; the Vehicle Production Group (VPG) will build the vehicle.
The group says the four-passenger vehicle will be used for taxi and paratransit and will be available in both gasoline and natural gas versions as soon as 2010. There aren’t many more details on the price or specs of the vehicle, but when we learn more we’ll add it. Update: On VPG’s website it says it is working on a vehicle called “The Standard Taxi,” and a Clean Energy spokesperson confirms that this is the vehicle that the company has invested in.
Currently there are very few natural gas vehicles on U.S. roads, though we think city fleets, transit vehicles and taxis are a good place to start. The most well-known natural gas vehicle around is the consumer Honda Civic GX, which costs $24,590 and is sold in California and New York.
There’s a reason there aren’t many of these natural gas vehicles out there yet — the technology has a few hurdles to jump. First off, natural gas vehicles commonly have a shorter range than their gas counterparts; the Honda Civic GX has a fuel mile range of 170 miles. Secondly, there’s a lack of natural gas distribution; according to the natural gas vehicle trade group the Natural Gas Vehicles for America (NGVA) there are more than 1,100 U.S. stations. While Pickens looks ready to invest in building out this infrastructure (he’s the country’s largest private owner of natural-gas fueling stations through Clean Energy Group according to this Newsweek article), it will need a lot more investment than the funds of a green-leaning former oil guy.
Semiconductors & Fuel Injectors to Cleanup Olympic Motorcycles
Craig Rubens - Startups
An unlikley partnership between an Austin-based semiconductor maker, a Michigan-based engineering firm and a Chinese motorcycle maker is working together to reduce the air pollution coming from Beijing’s many motorcycles. Electrojet is using Freescale’s advanced microcontroller technology in a new fuel injection system that will be put into motorcycles made by Guangzhou Dayang (maker of the official motorcycle of the Beijing Olympics), the companies said today. The system will reduce emissions 65 percent while boosting fuel efficiency 12 percent, the companies claim.
The bicycle is on the decline in China, and commuters are increasingly opting for a motorized ride. Motorcycles are booming along Chinese streets; the market is growing 13.9 percent annually and it’s expected to reach 44.4 million units by 2011, according to a study by market-researcher Freedonia Group Inc. But very often the two- or four-stoke engines of the little two-wheeled bikes have very poor emissions performance. That’s where Electrojet comes in.
Electrojet is targeting Chinese and Indian OEMs with its system, which is compatible with existing carburetors on four-stroke engines. According to the company, the system generates 65 percent less carbon monoxide, 35 percent less hydrocarbon and 35 percent less nitrogen oxide compared to a carburetor system. Not only that, Electrojet says it provides a 5 percent boost in horsepower.
An undisclosed number Beijing police and medical service motorbikes from Guangzhou Dayang will be equipped with the fuel injection system. Electrojet says it’s actively marketing its product in the Asian markets but has yet to announce a deal with any Indian or Chinese motorbike makers.
Using Freescale’s 16-bit S12XE microcontroller, ElectroJet has reduced the total number of sensors used in the fuel injection system, driving down cost to around $50 per unit. The company estimates that at current gas prices the product can pay for itself in as few as nine months, though it’s not clear which nation’s gas prices it’s using.
The effect this will have on Beijing’s air quality is questionable. Even though the city has shut down coal-power plants and construction and pulled cars off the road, pollution still blows in from nearby industrial centers. However, with motorbikes on the rise, reducing the emissions of small engines could do a lot for low-level smog and, Electrojet hopes, provide big business all across Asia.
Simbol Mines First Round to Extract Lithium from Geothermal
Katie Fehrenbacher - Startups
We first heard of Simbol Mining when the company won the “most promising technology” award from the Cleantech Forum earlier this year. That’s when MDV partner Josh Green also noticed the company, too, and started working on the funding soon afterward. (Green is also one of the large number of cleantech investors we previously noted have backed Obama.) Green says he funded the company because Simbol not only has the cheapest way to produce lithium carbonate used for electric vehicle batteries, but also because it offers a cleaner approach to extraction than the methods traditionally used.
Lithium is typically mined in large salt ponds and extracted from the soil in a lengthy process that can use large amounts of local drinking water. South American countries like Chile have some of the largest lithium sites, followed by China, Russia and the United States. But Simbol plans to focus on mining lithium from the brine streams of natural and artificial geothermal hotspots.
Why is there lithium in geothermal hotspots? As Simbol Mining co-founder William Bourcier co-writes in this paper from several years ago:
geothermal waters have had intimate and lengthy contact with the layers of the earth's crust that they flow through, resulting in dissolution of minerals and metals from the rocks, and solution into the hot water.
Those metals, such as lithium, zinc and iron, can be extracted through a variety of processes and turned into valuable resources. In the United States, companies like CalEnergy are already working on extracting zinc from geothermal streams at the Salton Sea site in southern California.
Tapping geothermal for lithium doesn’t require the high energy use that evaporating salt water ponds does, but suitable sites need to have a high concentration of lithium in the brine stream, which could limit the selection. Green says he’s confident that there are a lot of U.S. sites with “high salinity brine streams” and that Simbol’s technology could also help revive the U.S. lithium extraction industry, which has been dialed back due to cheaper processes and sites overseas.
Clinton Backing World's Largest Solar Project in India, Report Says
Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green
The Clinton Foundation has done some impressive work promoting clean technologies, but if a report out of India is true, former President Bill Clinton’s philanthropic organization could be taking its climate change work to a whole new level. According to the Business Standard, the Clinton Foundation is helping set up a 5-gigawatt solar project that could cost almost $5 billion (Rs 20,000 crore).
The project, coined the Integrated Solar City, is supposed to be built in the state of Gujarat in western India in collaboration with the government. It will both provide solar power and manufacture solar materials. The Gujarat government is reportedly considering the Kutch and Banaskantha districts for the location and plans to bring on John Byrne, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning working group within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to manage the project.
A project of that size could help bring down the cost of producing solar power to be competitive with the price of cheap fossil fuel-based electricity. We’re not sure if the Integrated Solar City will be based on a series of centralized solar thermal plants or many distributed PV rooftop projects — perhaps a combination of both? While we’ve talked with solar thermal companies that are planning to build 1 gigawatt projects in California’s Mojave desert, we doubt a single plant could produce the full 5 gigawatts.
The report pegs the Clinton Foundation’s available assets for green energy at $12 billion. In 2006 at the second annual meeting of the CGI there were 215 commitments from organizations valued at more than $7.3 billion, according to the Foundation. For the year ended December 31, 2006, the Foundation had $109.73 million in contributions.
Earth2Tech Week in Review
Craig Rubens - Misc
The Beijing Olympics, the supposed “Green Olympics,” kicked off yesterday and America watched on tape-delay as China made its first move at its coming out party. In case you were distracted by the amazing synchronicity of the opening ceremonies, we’ve gathered all the big cleantech headlines of the week for you here.
10 Cleantech Companies Greening the Olympics: The smoggy skies of Beijing might not clear up, but plenty of clean technologies have been deployed in preparation for the Olympic games.
What Obama's Energy Speech Means for Cleantech: Obama unveiled a slightly reoriented energy plan that prioritizes getting energy costs down but still means lots of federal supports for the cleantech industry.
EEStor Joining Other Energy Storage Startups on the Grid: MIT Technology review sat down with stealthy EEStor’s CEO. He says EEStor’s capacitor-like "electrical energy storage unit" could soon be attached to the grid to boost the total amount of available energy by 45 percent by solving the intermittent problem of renewable energy sources of when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
Abengoa Rakes in $426M for 4 Solar Power Plants: The solar arm of Spanish renewable energy and engineering giant Abengoa says it has raised over €280 million ($426.33 million) for four new solar power installations it plans to build across Spain. This will fund more construction at Abengoa’s site in Seville where it’s developing parabolic trough, Stirling dish and photovoltaic solar energy systems.
Battery Maker A123 Systems Files to Raise Up to $175M in IPO: Lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems has filed to go public. A123 plans to have it shares trade on the NASDAQ under the symbol AONE; Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are co-leading the underwriting. The startup stands to raise up to $175 million.
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