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1. MTI Shows Off Fuel Cell With Removable Cartridge
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2. Daily Sprout
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3. EU Reaches Deal on Renewable Energy Target
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4. Boosting Cleantech With Cost-Benefit Analysis
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5. Will the Economy Slow Utilities Entering Solar?
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6. Lithium-ion Battery Maker Boston Power Snags HP Deal
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7. Siemens to Build 123MW Solar Turbine Generator for BrightSource
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8. Obama Wants Gore to Help Repower America
MTI Shows Off Fuel Cell With Removable Cartridge
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
On one hand, this is an achievement, making fuel cells easy to use for for consumers. Fuel cells have made very little headway into the consumer electronics market and making the product as easy to use as possible is necessary to spur adoption. As an MTI spokesperson explains to us, “MTI Micro strongly believes that asking consumers to fill up with methanol via a squirt bottle is simply too cumbersome and time consuming. By developing the cartridge, the user experience will be both more appealing from a convenience standpoint, and practical.”
MTI is probably spot-on in its assessment that the cartridge will likely be the more popular way to operate the fuel cell in the mobile world. These fuel cell chargers are targeting people who are on-the-go and would carry an extra cartridge in their bag as a backup — I couldn’t envision carrying my own supply of methanol that I would periodically inject into the device.
But on the other hand, removable fuel cell cartridges add more waste into the system than refilling cartridges. Disposing of a cartridge after 25 hours of use — which is charging a cell phone battery over 10 times, listening to 10,000 songs on an MP3 player or taking 6,000 pictures — can equal a significant amount of waste over a year. The cartridges are meant to be recycled, however, so there is an end-of-life plan.
The cartridge is also part of MTI Micro’s roadmap for moving into the largely empty fuel-cells-for-gadgets market — and, more importantly, a potentially lucrative part. Jim Prueitt, MTI Micro’s VP of engineering and operations, said the cartridge “demonstrates that MTI Micro has developed their own standardized cartridge design.” If a company can supply the fuel source and the charger it creates a bigger business. Think HP’s ink jet cartridges for printers sold alongside the printer — as this Popular Science article on the Inkjet Refill Racket, notes on the business model: “The printers are dirt cheap, but you have to keep buying ink for eternity. And wouldn't you know, it turns out that printer ink, especially for photos, is probably the most expensive substance per volume you'll ever buy.”
We’re not sure how much MTI’s cartridges will cost, but MTI’s CEO Peng Lim previously told us that a refill would cost “less than a cup of coffee.” So, not too bad. The company will also do a lot to actually bring fuel cells to the consumer market — it’s one of the leaders in the space and it has three OEM partners — Samsung Electronics, NeoSolar, and an unnamed global digital camera manufacturer — that are evaluating how to use the fuel cells in their products.
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Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Car Czar Candidates: The $15 billion auto industry bailout this close to being finalized calls for a new federal official to oversee restructuring, handle angry creditors, and wrangle Big Three CEOs earning $1 a year. Who’s best for the job? — Reuters
UK Struggling to Meet Targets for Renewable Energy: The chief of Britain’s Major Energy Users Council calls the UK efforts to quickly diversify away from fossil fuel dependence a “pursuit of arbitrary, politically determined targets of questionable practicality.” — BBC News
Tom Friedman Hearts Better Place: The Times columnist compares bailing out Detroit (”Car 1.0″) to pouring billions of tax dollars into the mail-order-catalog business on the eve of the birth of eBay. — NYT
Solar Stocks, Suppliers Take a Beating: Solar-cell manufacturer Q-Cells of Germany lowered forecasts yesterday, sending solar stocks south and leaving deals in question throughout the supply chain. — Cleantech Group
What the Bailout Means for You — and Them: A rundown on how investors, auto industry execs, workers, suppliers, dealers, and consumers will be affected by Congress’s plans for Detroit. — Financial Times
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EU Reaches Deal on Renewable Energy Target
David Ehrlich - Automotive
EU leaders have agreed on a bill that would require the region to use renewable resources for 20 percent of its energy needs by 2020. While they reached an agreement yesterday, details of the bill still need to be worked out at a summit in Brussels later this week.
If passed, the deal will allow member states to run joint projects on renewable electricity production, heating or cooling. It also adds the ability for member states to fulfill their EU obligations using renewable electricity produced by new projects in third-party countries, as long as the electricity is consumed in the EU.
According to BusinessWeek, that means a country such as France could build big solar arrays in North Africa, and then plug into them from home and count the energy and the carbon dioxide savings toward its EU obligations.
The bill is part of a wider EU climate change package that’s targeting a 20-percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, as the AFP notes, as well as a 20-percent reduction in energy use.
Transportation is a significant part of the bill; it stipulates a goal of at least 10 percent renewable energy in the transport sector by 2020. Second-generation biofuels get extra credit, with biofuels produced from waste, residues, or non-food biomass to be counted at two times the input toward the 10-percent target.
There’s an extra incentive for electric cars as well, with renewable electricity consumed by electric cars to be credited at two-and-a-half times the input. But trains won’t be getting as much love; renewable electricity for railroads would only be counted once.
The AFP said that Italy, which doesn’t have much in the way of a renewable energy infrastructure right now, gained a concession in the bill that calls for the EU to review the agreement in 2014. But in a statement, the EU said that the review will not affect the overall 20-percent target but will “serve to improve, if necessary, the efficiency of cooperation mechanisms.”
At least one environmental activist group isn’t completely happy with the bill. The Climate Action Network is criticizing the use of so-called “effort sharing,” which sets energy reduction targets for individual sectors, including agriculture, transport and households, none of which are covered by carbon emission trading schemes. The group told AFP there was no credible mechanism to ensure compliance in those sectors, calling the effort-sharing part of the bill “a farce.”
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Boosting Cleantech With Cost-Benefit Analysis
Celeste LeCompte - Carbon Markets
This week, the Supreme Court is hearing a case, Entergy v. Riverkeeper, that will decide how big a factor cost is when it comes to utilities’ compliance with the Clean Water Act. Power plants, after all, use local water supplies to cool their facilities, which can have a substantial negative impact on organisms living in the water. The SCOTUS blog describes the issue succinctly:
The question before the Court was whether Congress in Section 316(b) had explicitly removed the consideration of costs and benefits from the calculation of the "best" technology, or whether the provision is instead sufficiently ambiguous to allow the EPA to use its discretion in considering costs and benefits.
The challenge in this case, however, is conducting a cost-benefit analysis when the “benefits” are environmental, not strictly economic. Both EPA and the utilities need a standard approach to measuring those costs. According to the SCOTUS Blog, Justice Breyer suggested that what is needed is "a way of [balancing costs] that they have some discretion over, that doesn't involve some enormously elaborate thing — and that's what I'm searching for."
This question of how to value non-economic benefits is one that’s becoming increasingly common, as carbon markets, ecosystem services and triple-bottom-line accounting gain prominence in the business community. (You can read a longer piece from me about this here.)
Earlier this year, the Financial Accounting Standards Board — which dictates how publicly traded U.S. companies report their financial information — released a draft of new rules for disclosing business risk that included environmental liabilities. Such standards could help boost the comparative value of new clean technologies, by reducing the value of other, “dirty” industries. Should the court decide to affirm the value of water protection, Triple Pundit rounds up some interesting investment opportunities here.
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Will the Economy Slow Utilities Entering Solar?
Jennifer Kho - Energy
When Congress passed $18 billion in national renewable-energy tax credits in October, it also approved a provision allowing utilities to take advantage of the credits for the first time. That led to wide speculation among solar insiders that utilities would be entering the industry en masse (also see stories here and here).
“A lot of utilities do want to operate and own and they have the tax appetite [to take advantage of the tax breaks," Julia Hamm, executive director of the Solar Electric Power Association, told me then. Now, the economic slowdown is leading some insiders to wonder whether that trend is also slowing, in spite of an announcement last week that Southern California Edison completed the first of its planned 150 commercial rooftop installations, albeit four months later than originally expected.
"Utilities are taking a step back," Michael Butler, CEO of investment bank Cascadia Capital, told me. "Not completely, but they're being smarter with their cash."
Stephen Simko, an analyst at Morningstar, said he's been hearing similar rumblings. "We've heard a lot about U.S. utilities that had planned activities cut back in 2009, saying 'we have to save money.' We're seeing some projects from utilities, but not as [many] as we’d thought.”
Meanwhile, Nathaniel Bullard, an analyst at research firm New Energy Finance, says he hasn’t seen a pullback from utilities yet. Because utilities are generally fiscally conservative, it would likely have taken a few months or a year after the passage of the tax credits for them to begin monetizing the credits anyway, he says. “SCE, PG&E and Duke are the only ones that really had plans, and I haven’t heard of them pulling back,” he said. Other utilities that hadn’t yet announced plans to own solar projects might not have taken action on the credits for some time, regardless of the economy.
Marcelino Susas, vice president of marketing for Energy Conversion Devices, which makes thin-film solar, also doesn’t expect that utilities will be dissuaded by the economy. “They may be indirectly impacted because their customers are having problems, but utility bills are usually paid first — you typically have low default rates on utilities — so I wouldn’t think they’d have a cash-flow issue,” he said. “In Europe, utilities are already in solar in one form or another, and I think the U.S. will follow suit now that there’s more incentive in place to do that.”
Many industry insiders, like Susas, think the long-term prospects for utilities owning solar look good. Now that utilities are eligible for tax credits, it will likely make more financial sense for them to own projects outright than to buy solar electricity from companies in the business of financing and owning such projects now, Bullard said.
In any case, it's clear that utilities could have enormous influence on solar, so the question of what they will do – and when – is bringing more uncertainty to a market already suffering from unknowns about what the next quarter will bring (see examples here, here and here).
With many utilities’ responses to the tax credits still under wraps, the added economic complications mean that uncertainty is likely to continue.
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Lithium-ion Battery Maker Boston Power Snags HP Deal
Katie Fehrenbacher - Picks
Boston Power thinks the upgrade will be well worth it for customers. The company says Sonata lasts for three years, runs for about four hours on a charge and that the charge fades less than comparable lithium-ion batteries. HP’s massive marketshare is a game-changing win for such a young company, and Boston Power CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud tells us that the last three years of hard work are culminating in this deal.
While this is Boston Power’s first major deal, Onnerud hopes that potentially next year the Sonata batteries will be the standard option sold for laptops with other partnerships. Onnerud also said that the startup recently created a transportation division to explore how the lithium-ion batteries could be used for vehicles. Boston Power is backed by a total of $70 million from Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, GGV Capital and Gabriel Venture Partners.
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Siemens to Build 123MW Solar Turbine Generator for BrightSource
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
BrightSource Energy has contracted Siemens to build a 123-megawatt solar-powered turbine generator for its massive Mojave Desert solar-thermal projects, the Oakland, Calif.-based startup announced today. Having raised more than $160 million (including$115 million from Google.org, BP, and other big investors in Series C financing last May) and snagged a deal to sell California utility PG&E up to 900 megawatts of solar power, BrightSource apparently decided not to let delays in the state approval process slow it down.
Building a steam turbine generator — which converts hot steam into mechanical work — takes years. So while BrightSource plans to begin construction on its Ivanpah Solar Power Complex in 2009 if California regulators give the green light, the company does not expect the Siemens generator (the companies say it will be the largest of its kind ever built) to arrive until 2011 — mere months before the company plans to begin supplying electricity to utilities. That leaves very little room for error if the company is to meet its deadlines.
“It takes time and patience and a lot of planning ahead to make all of this work well,” John Woolard, BrightSource CEO and a partner at VantagePoint Venture Partners, the startup’s lead investor, told the San Francisco Business Times in August. That’s when the Bureau of Land Management ushered BrightSource to the front of the line for approval of applications to build utility-scale solar projects in the federally-managed desert. “Fortunately,” he said, “this is something we’re not bad at.”
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Obama Wants Gore to Help Repower America
Craig Rubens - Hitlines
President-elect Barack Obama and once-presidential-hopeful Al Gore met today to discuss (what else) “energy, climate change, and job creation — and how those three things go together.” Obama didn’t say what role Gore will play in his administration but pledged that the former VP will be part of the plan to “create jobs all across this country in all 50 states to re-power America.” The meeting, reportedly called at Gore’s request, is perhaps the strongest pitch Obama will get from the cleantech community.
Gore has outlined a five-step plan to achieve his goal of generating 100 percent of the U.S.’s electricity from renewable sources in 10 years. Though Obama hasn’t agreed to Gore’s lofty goal, he has committed, in varying degrees, to implementing Gore’s recommendations. Obama has promised to boost the energy efficiency of federal buildings, work with governors to promote clean energy, invest huge amounts in our electrical infrastructure and help Detroit retool to become a leader in green cars.
The elephant in the room is still the issue of carbon regulation. During the campaign, Obama said he was in favor of a cap-and-trade scheme, but since the economic crisis has taken the spotlight, carbon mitigation has been quietly looming in the corner. Putting a price on carbon, either through a carbon market or with a tax, as Gore himself suggests, is the greatest boost the government could give clean technologies.
But the cynical question posed by MSNBC isn’t how far Gore can push Obama to clean up our energy sector; it’s how much will Obama ask Gore to publicly temper his climate crisis rhetoric? While Obama has said renewable energy and energy efficiency will play vital roles in boosting the economy, he probably won’t go as far as Gore would like, given the stormy financial climate.
So, can Obama fight for cleantech while battling a recession? We hope Gore is able to explain how the only way to fight the recession is with cleantech.
Image courtesy of Change.gov
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