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1. Is Wind Cleantech's Next Ethanol Bubble? Not so Much
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2. Aquaflow Delivers Green Crude Samples
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3. The Daily Sprout
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4. GoodGuide Launches to Shine a Light on Products
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5. DOE and Santa Barbara Raise the Solar Roof
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6. Khosla Calls Picken's Natural Gas Vehicle Plan A Dead End
Is Wind Cleantech's Next Ethanol Bubble? Not so Much
Craig Rubens - Big Green
Although America recently became the world leader in wind electricity generation, can you really call our wind power growth a “boom” when it’s been spurred by government mandates and subsidies? That is the question The Atlantic asks as it compares the surge in wind energy investments to the bubble that occurred in the similarly regulated and subsidized biofuel industry — which was the darling of cleantech VCs, presidents and agronomists not too long ago.
The food-vs.-fuel debate was an unforeseen obstacle for biofuels but the hurdles for wind energy seem to be relatively well understood. Transmission shortcomings and inconsistent breezes are the two major challenges wind energy developers face as more and more wind capacity is added to the grid. So how much hot air is there around wind energy investments? Burned once, investors and regulators are already working to ensure the wind energy boom doesn’t go bust.
On the transmission side, investment is starting to pick up. The inimitable T. Boone Pickens plans on investing $2 billion in electrical transmission lines to pipe power from his remote $10 billion wind farm to market. Regulators are also working to smooth the process of connecting new wind capacity to the grid. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just approved the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator’s proposal to reform the generator interconnection queue process, making the administrivia of connecting to the grid more a bit less tedious.
The generally predictable fluctuations in wind energy generation can prove to be an opportunity for other cleantech sectors. Solar energy could help produce complementary power, balancing the load. Utility-scale energy storage has been getting more and more innovation and investment, too. Meanwhile, grid management solutions like demand response could also help in the event of suddenly still winds. EnerNOC inked a deal with the Texas Electric Reliability Council earlier this year in the state that leads the country in wind energy.
Though wind energy growth is certainly being helped by mandates and subsidies similar to those that over-inflated the biofuel bubble, the potential bubble poppers are entirely different. Wind is a pure energy play, with no messy food price stability issues likely to come out of the woodwork. While those mandates and subsidies are subject to the whims of constantly re-elected legislatures, investors should know what the variables are when getting into the wind energy business and no single hurdle is likely to lance the investments.
900 million PCs or 300 billion mobile handsets. Which is the bigger opportunity? Mobilize 08: GigaOM’s Next-Generation Mobile Conference
Aquaflow Delivers Green Crude Samples
Katie Fehrenbacher - Hitlines
The New Zealand company Aquaflow Binomics, which is looking to be the first company in the world to economically produce biofuel from wild algae harvested from open-air environments, said on Wednesday that it has produced the first samples of its “green crude.” The bio-crude can lead to fuels similar to diesel and jet fuel, that can “literally be 'dropped into' the existing petroleum fuels infrastructure," said Aquaflow chairman, Barrie Leay in a statement.
Unlike some of the algae-to-fuel companies that grow algae in bioreactors and closed controlled settings, Aquaflow is focusing on wild algae that can be grown in waste water, and local city waste streams, and thus doesn't need extra land space for food crops. And the algae not only produces fuel, it can clean the water waste stream, says Aquaflow, and ultimately deliver water “much cleaner than with existing treatment systems.”
Last year publicly held Aquaflow used its algae-based biodiesel to run a Land Rover driven by New Zealand's Minister of Climate Change. And it's been working with Boeing on algae-to-bio-based jet fuel. Now that it’s got the samples, let’s start seeing the commercialization of the fuel.
The Daily Sprout
Craig Rubens - Misc
Sex, Drugs and Oil Probes: According to three reports delivered to Congress today, “a culture of ethical failure" has permeated the Interior Department, which is in charge of oil and gas royalties. The reports found that government employees accepted gifts and engaged in illegal drug use and inappropriate sexual relations with energy reps. And you thought the Interior Department was boring - CNN.
“The Economics of Clean Water”: David Zetland, blogger at Aguanomics, explains why simply laying more pipe won’t necessarily help the UN reach it’s Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people without “sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation” - NYTimes Freakanomics Blog.
$100B Renewable Energy Investment Could Yield 2M Jobs: A new report estimates that if the government invested $100 billion over two years, some 2 million jobs in 6 sectors of cleantech would be created. Check out our post on this news and the greater roll the government could play in cleantech - Center for American Progress.
DOE Pays $4.4M to Send Biofuels to School: The Department of Energy will invest up to $4.4 million in six different university projects working on turning non-food feestocks into advanced biofuels - DOE.
Solel Opens Finnish $9M Solar Reflector Facility: Solar thermal startup Solel opened a $9 million solar reflector manufacturing facility in Finland today in partnership with glass processor Glaston. The facility will have the capacity to make enough reflective parabolic troughs for 50 megawatts of solar installations - Press Release.
900 million PCs or 300 billion mobile handsets. Which is the bigger opportunity? Mobilize 08: GigaOM’s Next-Generation Mobile Conference
GoodGuide Launches to Shine a Light on Products
Katie Fehrenbacher - Hitlines
Let’s face it, no matter how much you try to investigate where your products — be they shampoo, gadgets or processed food — come from, or what they’re made of, you never really know the whole story. While some web sites, like Jimmy Wale’s new Green Wikia, try to use crowd-sourcing to unearth the most accurate information, UC Berkeley professor Dara O’Rourke has decided to take a more academic and authoritative approach with GoodGuide, which launched today.
First at MIT and now at UC Berkeley, O’Rourke has spent the last decade developing ways to compile info on global supply chains, and investigating the building blocks of the goods that consumers purchase. GoodGuide rates products based on data that falls into three categories: social, environmental (including carbon footprint) and health. Each rating is based on more than 140 pieces of such information, such as whether or not a product has been tested on animals, what its ingredients are — even whether or not its parent company has women or minorities on its board. Hello granular information.
And those ratings are intended to influence a consumer’s perspective of the product, O’Rourke tells us. He even envisions consumers checking out the site on their mobile phones as they browse the shopping center aisles. In three weeks GoodGuide plans to launch an iPhone app, and they already have a text messaging application that will SMS you the rating. That’s a powerful goal — to be the de facto standard on how “good” a product is and whether or not someone will buy it.
It will also be a difficult to achieve. Trusted authority is something developed and earned over time, and to lay that much stake in a young startup company will take a lot of quality ratings work. O’Rourke is slowly amassing the tools needed for that task. The data itself comes from hundreds of private and public sources, among them government, non-profits and private, third-party research firms. He’s been working on the consumer-facing GoodGuide site for the past two years and tells us he has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And he currently has 12 full-time and 12 part-time employees working on compiling data and product info.
O’Rourke has also taken the more unusual step of classifying his company as a “for-benefit” company, which means that it has a social aim, and dedicates a certain amount of profits for social benefits. To get that status GoodGuide had to incorporate in New York State (instead of the usual Delaware route) and get all of its investors to sign on.
So why not just be a nonprofit? O’Rourke tells us that when it comes to doing deals with the likes of phone companies and raise funding from investors, a nonprofit has a tough time. Besides, the company is considering making money by supplying a business-to-business solution or licensing its solution.
From a purely consumer/user perspective, the team has developed a pretty sticky site. In addition to the easy-to-read ratings, it also has the latest product news (like recalls) and a discussion forum. We can tell you that as GoodGuide adds more and more products to its rankings database, we’ll be spending more and more time using it.
900 million PCs or 300 billion mobile handsets. Which is the bigger opportunity? Mobilize 08: GigaOM’s Next-Generation Mobile Conference
DOE and Santa Barbara Raise the Solar Roof
Craig Rubens - Energy
One of the most heartening indicators of the solar sector’s overall health is the increasing number of near-daily press releases we get about new rooftop solar installations. This week there were two major installations, one in the nation’s capitol, the other in sunny Santa Barbara. And while individual rooftop installations rarely top 1 megawatt of generating capacity, distributing power generation across many roofs helps stabilize the grid and reduces the need for more transmission investment.
In the Beltway, the Department of Energy has finally come around to practicing what it preaches by installing a 205-kilowatt SunPower solar-electric system atop the roof of the Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C. The system is expected to provide 8 percent of the DOE-owned building’s electricity needs at peak hours. It’s a small step, smaller than many residential solar installations, but it provides an appreciated high-profile nod from the federal government that these sorts of installations are viable. Best of all, we’re confident the next administration won’t take them down the way Ronald Regan ripped Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the White House.
Across the country, the City of Santa Barbara held a groundbreaking (roofbreaking?) ceremony today for its new solar array to be installed downtown, sketched above. The city tapped two solar startups to tackle the project. The 384 kW system will be designed and built by Pasadena-based EI Solutions while San Mateo, Calif.-based Tioga Energy will operate and manage the array under a 20-year power purchase agreement with city.
Graphic courtesy of EI Solutions.
900 million PCs or 300 billion mobile handsets. Which is the bigger opportunity? Mobilize 08: GigaOM’s Next-Generation Mobile Conference
Khosla Calls Picken's Natural Gas Vehicle Plan A Dead End
Katie Fehrenbacher - Startups
Cleantech venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has been bullish on biofuels to power vehicles, but he called wind wildcatter T. Boone Pickens’ plan to power our cars with natural gas a dead end at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group’s Green and Clean conference on Wednesday. Khosla said natural gas could be an easy way to initially reduce transportation emissions, but because it’s a fossil fuel and emissions reductions are just around 20 percent, it’s still an interim, dead-end solution that we should not pursue.
We’re actually glad to hear that Khosla isn’t basing his opinions on just market size and costs but also on the effects of global warming. Khosla is strong believer in supporting cleantech solutions that can scale quickly and cheaply enough to deliver the solution to massive amounts of users in spots such as China and India. He said to the audience: “If you support everything, you are in fact doing us a disservice. . . . Look at the data. If there is not a high rate of return, it should not be something you support — at least not in the next five years.” Other transportation technologies that he does not support because of cost are fuel-cell-powered cars and hybrid vehicles.
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