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1. Electric Tata To Land In Norway In A Year
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2. Where the Presidential Candidates Stand on Plug-In Cars
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3. Cleantech Group Aims to Raise $1M for Obama
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4. Palin's Debut Focuses on Drilling & Domestic Oil, Gas
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5. The Daily Sprout
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6. Segetis Builds Up Green Chemical Cred With New CEO
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7. U.S. Now the World Leader in Wind Electricity Generation
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8. Algae-to-Kerosene Jet Fuel Snags $3M
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9. Facebook's Virtual Plants For Real Forests
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10. Want To Cut Storage Power? Turn Off Disks
Electric Tata To Land In Norway In A Year
Tony Borroz - Automotive
Tata Motors, will be launching the electric version of its Indica hatchback in Norway in a year, according to Reuters. Wait, why is the India company turning to Norway first before its local market?
Good question. “Because, you know, lot (sic) of infrastructure is required for electric vehicles and … in Norway, they are making arrangements for electric cars,” Tata Managing Director Ravi Kant told Reuters. While the Indian market will have to wait for its electric Indica, Norway has already begun work to establish some of the necessary infrastructure, like charging stations, that will make electric cars viable for everyday use.
Norway already has experience with the everyday use of EVs — Th!nk City and the Buddy are being produced there. The country has infrastructure to support their use. There are already 400 charging stations in Oslo alone.
The so-called Indica EV can run for 110 miles to 124 miles (175 km to 200 km) when fully charged according to S. Ravishankar, senior general manager at Tata Motors’ engineering research center. That mileage could vary depending on how the car is driven, and also the conditions under which it’s being used.
A country like Norway would be a perfect place to really torture-test an electric car. With brutal winters to sap the charge of batteries, intense cold to play havoc with electrical components like controllers and ICs, Norway would show Tata what is and isn't going to work with a full-scale production version of the Indica EV quicker than running test models on the streets of Mumbai.
Another interesting facet of Tata Motors’ electric car: It will be ‘left-hand drive,’ according to Ravi Kant. Indian home-market cars are all right-hand drive, meaning that Tata is presumably working ahead on being able to roll out the Indica EV for a worldwide market.
Tata has never been one to shy away from unconventional moves. The company is also nearing production of the Nano, the world’s cheapest car, and it recently bought Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford for $2.3 billion. Making moves to compete in the emerging EV market with the likes of Toyota, GM, Nissan Motor and Mitsubishi, fits in with Tata’s maverick approach. And they are going about it in very clever ways. The more the merrier.
Where the Presidential Candidates Stand on Plug-In Cars
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
Here’s Calcars.org’s lineup:
Obama:
- $7,000 consumer tax credit for purchase of new plug-in cars
- Some level of tax credits for conversions of cars
- $4 billion in loans and tax credits to carmakers for factory retooling
- White House fleet all-plug-in within a year (as security permits)
- 50 percent of cars purchased for the federal fleet will be plug-in by 2012
- 1 million plug-in cars on our roads by 2015
- Raise fleet fuel economy 4 percent per year
McCain:
- $5,000 consumer tax credit for purchase of new “zero-carbon vehicles”; near-zero PHEVs would get a percentage of that level
- $300 million prize for advanced battery technology that delivers a 70 percent improvement in batteries to get to 30 per cent of their current cost
- Specific support for the Chevy Volt: “the future of America and the world.”
Cleantech Group Aims to Raise $1M for Obama
Craig Rubens - CNN Green
While the Republicans threw punches at Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama at their convention in Saint Paul this evening, the cleantech community of the Bay Area gathered to praise Obama as the best hope to help solve our energy crisis with clean power. The Cleantech For Obama group (CT4O) kicked off what founding co-chair Jeff Anderson said will be a nationwide campaign to both get Barack Obama elected and “create a political brand and voice for the clean tech and green business community.” To achieve the former CT4O plans to raise at least $1 million from the cleantech community for Obama.
To help bring in this sizable sum before the election, CT4O promises big fund raising events. Anderson said venture capitalist and Nobel laureate Al Gore plans to come to the Bay Area for a CT4O gig in September or October, which alone could pull in $500,000 to $1 million. Former California State Comptroller and Managing Partner of the Westly Group Steve Westly was even more optimistic, saying he hopes Michelle Obama, Joe Biden and perhaps even Obama himself will attend CT4O events.
Beyond fund raising, CT4O is working with the Obama campaign on outreach and messaging. The organization is building a national database of 10,000 people employed in green collar jobs, focusing on 18 battleground states where CT4O has just launched efforts. This database will be used to facilitate the campaign’s message and media campaigns.
In a move similar to the Pickens Plan call for house parties, CT4O is planning a national house party day called “The New Energy Economy Made in America.” The plan calls for over 250 house parties, all linked via teleconference, potentially with a live video visit from Obama and/or Gore.
At the launch event in downtown San Francisco on Wednesday evening, the group featured a panel discussion, before a packed auditorium, that extolled Obama’s “integrated vision” on energy and derided McCain’s “few, cherry-picked programs.” The panelists included Google's Dan Reicher, UC Berkeley energy researcher Dan Kammen and Christensen Global Strategies Founder Aimee Christensen. (The lineup ended up not featuring former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, Van Jones or Heather Zichal, Energy and Environmental Policy Staff Adviser for the Obama Campaign, as previously planned.)
The group just launched its efforts, but members know they don’t have much time. "There's a lot to do. We have 61 days to do it,” Anderson said matter-of-factly in closing remarks.
Palin's Debut Focuses on Drilling & Domestic Oil, Gas
Katie Fehrenbacher - CNN Green
“Energy independence,” was the key term, and Palin stressed finding domestic resources so that the U.S. isn’t dependent on foreign nations for its fuel supply. Palin highlighted her work in Alaska to help build a $40 billion natural gas pipeline that could increase American domestic power supplies. On the subject of increasing both domestic natural gas and oil drilling, Palin was clear:
We Americans need to produce more of our own oil and gas. And take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: we’ve got lots of both. Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America’s energy problems - as if we all didn’t know that already. But the fact that drilling won’t solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all.
Drilling has been an issues that Republicans have championed, and during a speech by Rudy Giuliani the crowd chanted “drill, baby, drill.” Palin’s sentiments were similar to presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s but didn’t touch on McCain’s more cleantech-focused policies like a national cap and trade system, tax breaks for fuel-efficient cars and dropping the tariff on Brazilian ethanol.
Between the presidential and vice presidential nominees, Palin is the least aggressive on clean power, and she showed that clearly in her acceptance speech. No surprise then that the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman said that, with the nomination of Sarah Palin, McCain had “completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil.”
The Daily Sprout
Craig Rubens - Misc
Obama’s Science Test: Obama has responded to the group’s 14 question science exam. Clean energy research and development feature prominently in his take on where federal funds will help advance science - ScienceDebate08 via NYTimes.
Toyota Releases Sustainability Report 2008: The Japanese automaker released its annual sustainability report today, disclosing its emission and energy reduction goals. To save some trees, download the 91 page report - Toyota.
HP Strips Down Laptop Packaging for Wal-Mart: The retail giant named HP the winner of its Home Entertainment Design Challenge for slashing the packaging of the Pavilion laptop by 97 percent. Wal-Mart’s pressuring all of its vendors to reduce packaging to save space and fuel - Press Release.
eBay Goes Green with WorldofGood.com: Online auctioneer eBay launched a socially and environmentally responsible retail portal today called WorldofGood.com which will sell products that have a positive impact on the world - WorldofGood.
Stolen Solar Panels Selling on eBay: If your uncle comes home with some “new” solar panels that he says fell off the back of a truck, watch out. Solar panels are being stripped off schools, churches and homes and sold on Craigslist for $1000 a pop - CBS via Valleywag.
Segetis Builds Up Green Chemical Cred With New CEO
Craig Rubens - Startups
With a new CEO and $15 million raised last year from Khosla Ventures, the company is now looking to push its technology into commercialization. Segetis has been focused on research and development for the past year, but plans to move into a demonstration facility in 2009 or early 2010, Business VP Snehal Desai, also a NatureWorks vet, told us.
How does green chemistry work? “The liberation of that carbon from the biomass is ultimately what we’re all trying to get to,” Desai said. Once you get those precious carbons separated you can recombine them to build chemicals, materials and fuels, some with similar qualities to petrochemicals. Desai added that if other companies came up with a cheap and energy-efficient way to free up those carbons, Segetis would consider a partnership. Segetis’ actual IP resides in the company’s approach to manipulating those carbon molecules in the form of binary monomers, which can then be assembled into valuable and useful polymers.
It’s not entirely clear, however, when a Segetis bioplastic bottle would make it into consumers’ hands; Desai says the company’s technology remains in the early development stage and Segetis is still open to either manufacturing bioproducts itself or potentially licensing its green chemical processes to manufacturing partners.
U.S. Now the World Leader in Wind Electricity Generation
Katie Fehrenbacher - CNN Green
The wind-turbine manufacturing leader Vestas gave the the Democratic National Convention a gusty green-power presence. What do the Republicans have at their event? Wind energy bragging rights. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) announced this morning in Minneapolis at the RNC that the U.S. has installed over 20,000 MW of wind capacity, and is now the world leader in wind electricity generation, with enough to power 5.3 million American homes.
According to the AWEA the U.S. has surpassed Germany in wind-powered electricity generation, even though Germany has more installed wind capacity. While the U.S. has 20,152 MW, Germany has about 23,000 MW, but U.S. wind farms produce more electricity because of stronger winds. In the U.S. 20,000 MW is about 56 billion kilowatt hours every year. A fact like this must warm the heart (and wallets?) of investors like T. Boone Pickens, who is spending more than $10 billion building out one of the world’s largest wind plants in a Texas wind corridor. High fives, for our natural green power resources.
U.S. wind capacity has seen record growth in recent years. AWEA says the 10,000 MW wind power mark was hit in 2006 — that means it took just two years to double the entire previous U.S. capacity. At its current 20,152 MW, U.S. wind capacity now delivers the equivalent power that 28.7 million tons of coal or 90 million barrels of oil and displaces 34 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.
AWEA also says that crossing the 20,000 MW mark puts the U.S. “ahead of the curve for contributing 20 percent of the U.S. electric power supply by 2030 as envisioned by the U.S. Department of Energy.” But 20,000 MW is just slightly more than 1.5 percent of the nation's electricity, and reaching the goal of 20 percent will require between 266,000 MW and 300,000 MW of total wind capacity.
According to Emerging Energy Research (EER) total U.S. wind capacity is expected to cross the 150,000 MW mark by 2020. So between 2020 and 2030, we will need to double that figure to meet the DOE goal. The AWEA says we would need installations of new wind power capacity to increase to more than 16,000 MW per year by 2018, and continue at that rate through 2030.
Algae-to-Kerosene Jet Fuel Snags $3M
Craig Rubens - Startups
Led by Qiang Hu and Milton Sommerfeld, the research centers on specific algal strains that produce lots of fatty acids that, when de-oxygenated, are very similar to kerosene. The team says its process can produce kerosene cheaper from algae than from petroleum. With a few fuel additives, kerosene can be made into aviation fuel, and with this seed funding, the project will continue development of algal strains specifically for jet fuel at ASU’s new SkySong innovation center.
Heliae is contributing $1.5 million for further research and development and Science Foundation Arizona will match that; ASU will receive a total of $3 million for the project. Arizona Technology Enterprises, the technology venturing arm of ASU, will receive an equity stake in the company, including licensing fees and commercialization income.
The new venture joins a few other algae-to-biofuel startups taking aim at green jet fuel. Seattle-based Inventure Chemical, which closed its first round of funding mid-2007, told the Seattle PI that it has already created algae-based jet fuel in test batches and hopes to produce up to 15 million gallons of biofuel each year. Kiwi Aquaflow Binomics says it is working with Boeing on algae-to-bio-jetfuel using open-air environments to grow its plants.
Facebook's Virtual Plants For Real Forests
Wagner James Au - Misc
Damn! This (Lil) Green Patch thing has nearly 5.5 million monthly active users. (Making it among the very most popular Facebook apps.) What’s more, all those virtual plants have raised nearly $55,000 for the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt An Acre program.
Created by David King and Ashish Dixit, (Lil) Green Patch cleverly leverages roleplaying game mechanics for ecological good. Once you install the app, you find dozens of insanely adorable plants and creatures. To collect them, you need to first earn points by sending other plants to your friends. (Who in turn must install the app, to get them.) To keep you playing, there’s a leaderboard tracking how many square feet of rainforest you’ve personally saved, as well as which of your friends are playing and how much rainforest they’ve saved. Think World of Warcraft meets Friends of the Forest.
All this activity generates heavy pageviews — and revenue, which comes from the advertising panel the duo has installed on the app. The developers donate a portion of that money to the Conservancy, which to date has “adopted” more than 1,100 acres of Costa Rican rainforest. They make donations on the first of every month.
I asked Dixit ‘how much of the ad revenue is donated, after expenses?’ “Wish that was an easy question to answer,” Dixit wrote me. “All we can say is that what is promised to every user as their contribution is what is definitely donated. We try our best to juggle the rest to make this happen.”
Dixit told me they intend to release three new features in the coming weeks; he thinks both the gameplay and the rainforest cause make their app so popular. “Difficult to tear them apart,” he described it.
Want To Cut Storage Power? Turn Off Disks
Alistair Croll - Energy
If you're running a data center, energy costs are a top concern. It takes power to run computers, store data and keep the place cool. In 2007, the U.S. spent $1.3B to power and cool drives, according to IDC. "We estimate that 60 to 80 percent of power costs in data centers are related to storage," Suresh Panikar, director of worldwide marketing for storage controller maker Adaptec, says.
Most drives can shut down after a period of idleness to conserve power and reduce wear and tear. Unfortunately, many operating systems constantly write housekeeping data, such as registry information or timestamps, to attached drives. This keeps them spinning and, as a result, using power.
Adaptec is tackling the cost of storage with a line of RAID controllers that can reduce the power a drive uses by more than 70 percent, depending on the model, simply by powering it off. The new controllers — part of the company's Green Power initiative — are smart enough to identify this housekeeping data. They store it in a battery-backed cache and only write to the drive when really needed. The controller can also periodically spin up long-idle drives to check their health.
System administrators can define power policies for storage systems, configuring when drives are idle, within the controllers' configuration screens. Suresh believes the controllers may have other benefits, such as extending the lifespan of storage hardware and reducing the overall cooling of the data center.
There are limitations, of course. Only certain classes of applications, such as disk-to-disk backups, archival e-mail, and print servers will achieve the best power savings. And Suresh notes that many high-end storage systems already offer power management, so the new controllers are likely to primarily benefit OEMs and systems integrators.
But given the rising costs of data center operations, more efficient storage is a promising step in the right direction.
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