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1. What the Looming Lithium Squeeze Means for Electric Car Batteries
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2. Obama's Green Stimulus Bill Opens Doors For Tech
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3. Clean Power Leads New U.S. Electricity, Says Report
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4. Daily Sprout
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5. Get Ready for Growth of the Smart Building Chips
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6. Is the World Approaching 'Peak Water'?
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7. Clean-Energy Industry Pushes for Tax Refunds In Stimulus
What the Looming Lithium Squeeze Means for Electric Car Batteries
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere — in your phone, laptop, and by this time next year, maybe your car. The technology is slated for GM’s Chevy Volt, Toyota’s plug-in Prius, and electric versions of the Daimler Smart and BMW Mini.
Until recently, lithium went primarily into ceramics and glass. Now batteries make up one-fifth of the world’s end-use market for the mineral — a share that will only grow if the auto industry goes where lithium-ion startups like ActaCell, A123 Systems and Imara are betting it will. But shortages could stop an emerging industry in its tracks — or dramatically reshape it — within a decade: Mitsubishi estimates that lithium demand will outstrip supply as early as 2015.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s mineral commodity specialist on lithium, Brian Jaskula, offers a more conservative estimate, forecasting that demand will begin to drive lithium prices up in the next 10 to 15 years. But the signs are clear: Lithium, which now costs less than a buck per kilogram, will not stay cheap for long.
This reality has put Bolivia’s lithium-rich salt flats in automakers’ sights. The country has more than half of the planet’s total lithium deposits in the brine beneath those plains. There’s just one hitch: The Bolivian government is none too keen on giving up its resource to foreign miners.
According to Time, Mitsubishi and Toyota (one of the only major automakers that produces its own batteries) have both broached talks about lithium development with Bolivian officials, with no luck. Lacking the infrastructure to manufacture batteries, Jaskula said, it will take Bolivia years to build out the industry it hopes will jump-start the national economy.
But politics and trade negotiations hardly tell the whole story. Enter: Innovation. In the looming lithium squeeze, battery makers whose technologies use less of the mineral could enjoy an advantage — just as thin-film solar became the hot new thing when polysilicon shortages shook the photovoltaic industry last year.
This means the Chevy Volt may be in for a redesign. As is, the Volt battery uses a relatively high load of lithium carbonate for the amount of power in its battery: 1.4 kilograms per kilowatt-hour. At current prices ($8/kg, up from $0.50 a few years ago), that works out to only about $180-worth of the raw material in every car. But if a supply squeeze sends lithium prices through the roof — and causes fully-loaded batteries to add more than the current $10,000 or so to a car’s total cost — lithium-heavy chemistry could be a luxury GM can’t afford.
According to Jaskula, competing designs offer the same amount of power for less than a third of the lithium. For low-margin electric vehicles like the $9,000 model recently announced by India’s Reva, rising lithium prices could be a deal breaker.
Higher lithium prices could also give the nascent U.S. battery industry a steeper climb to the top. The U.S. consumes more lithium than any other country, despite having only 760,000 tons of the world’s 13.8 million tons of identified lithium resources (those of known quantity, quality and grade), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. While most U.S. lithium imports now come from Chile and Argentina (69 and 29 percent, respectively) China has brought new supply online in the last few years. In a peak-lithium world, that could put Asia’s already-leading battery makers one more step ahead.
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Obama's Green Stimulus Bill Opens Doors For Tech
Celeste LeCompte - Misc
The Obama administration's $825 billion economic recovery package, nicknamed the "Green New Deal," is packed with references to doubling renewable energy generation, funding public transportation and energy-efficiency projects, and investing in clean water and environmental restoration. But it's not just a present for the cleantech crowd — the infotech world is getting some goodies, too.
Sure, the bill pledges funding for computerizing the health care system, modernizing education delivery (including technology), and, yes, the green-hued smart grid. But many of the same items that have the cleantech crowd champing at the bit to see the bill passed offer hidden opportunities for tech firms, too. Today's environmental innovations, from greener highway design to safer water delivery, depend heavily on data, data and more data, positioning tech firms to seize a substantial piece of one of the hottest markets in town. Celeste spells out four big opportunities over at GigaOM.
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Clean Power Leads New U.S. Electricity, Says Report
David Ehrlich - Big Green
Things are looking up for renewable energy, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency just released “Electric Power Industry 2007: Year in Review,” and for the first time, renewables (not including hydro-electric power) led the way in new electric generation capacity in the U.S.
Total new net summer capacity — which is tested during the summer peak demand period — increased by 8,673 MW in 2007, with wind accounting for the biggest percentage of that new capacity, at 5,186 MW. Natural gas and coal accounted for most of the remaining increase.
Things look good for the future, too. Over the next five years, renewable energy could make up 20 percent of the new capacity in the pipeline, although with the current global credit crunch, some of those planned projects could get dumped.
Overall numbers for renewables looked less stellar. Renewable energy contributed 2.5 percent, or 105 million megawatt hours, of total net generation in 2007. That’s the fourth consecutive year that the number has gone up, but wood biomass and wind power currently make up most of that 2.5 percent, with geothermal and biomass from other sources accounting for the rest.
But the EIA report isn’t all about utility-scale power, there are also more businesses and homes feeding small-scale renewable energy back into the grid. With net metering, people are credited on their bill for any excess electricity they send to the utilities. In 2007, there were 48,820 customers, mostly residential, participating in net metering programs across the country. That’s way up from just five years earlier, when there were only 4,472. And which state is leading the way in net metering? California, with 34,910.
But Texas beat out California in a different ranking, coming out on top for so-called “green pricing” programs. That’s where business and residential users can specifically purchase renewable energy from their utility. A total of 835,651 customers in the U.S., again mostly residential, went with a green pricing program, with Texas accounting for 17 percent. Oregon came in at No. 2 with 12 percent, and California had to settle for the No. 3 spot with 7 percent.
It wasn’t all good news. Carbon dioxide emissions by electric generators and combined heat and power facilities increased by 2.3 percent in 2007, to 2.52 billion metric tons, up from 2.460 billion. That reverses a decline in CO2 emissions reported for 2006.
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Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Quizzing the Car Czar: With the U.S. auto industry hanging in the balance, an expected federal “car czar” faces ten fundamental questions, from whether the SUV is dead (or close to retirement) to how close we really are to having mass-market electric cars. — Wall Street Journal
How Detroit Can Get Back in the Game: GM and Chrysler have two months to devise plans for long-term profitability. Some advice: Ditch the push production and supply-chain model, and go for a consumer-driven demand-pull production model. — Forbes
Cap-and-Trade on the Fast Track: Pressure is on the Obama administration to move emissions-reduction legislation in time for the U.N. conference on climate change in Copenhagen this year. — Cleantech Group
Shelby’s Moon Shoot: Shelby SuperCars, which plans to launch an all-electric version of its Ultimate Aero in the second half of this year, says the car will have a lithium-ion battery pack and a 200-mile range. — Jalopnik
The New Coke: Coca-Cola plans to more than double the number of diesel-electric vehicles in its delivery fleet this year. Has the end of the era of the big dirty truck arrived? — Wired’s Autopia
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Get Ready for Growth of the Smart Building Chips
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
Making buildings more energy-efficient has started to move into the national spotlight with President Obama’s green portion of the stimulus package. And it might be geeky, but wireless networks that will monitor energy consumption will play a significant role in efficient buildings. How significant? According to research from Instat chips and nodes used to build wireless networks based on the leading standard, 802.15.4, (the one the ZigBee specification is based on) will grow from 7 million in 2007 to 292 million in 2012 — that’s nearly 4,000 percent growth over the next five year period.
Smart energy will be the most common application for these 802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks, Instat notes. Those smart energy applications include embedding chips in meters to enable utilities to track customer’s energy consumption remotely, as well as chips for wireless sensor networks that monitor energy consumption in buildings.
The growth in the 802.15.4 chips and nodes is substantial because it’s starting from such a small market. Two years ago, 294 million consumer electronics devices were shipped with Wi-Fi chips embedded in them. That’s just shy of the number of 802.15.4 wireless chip market expected by 2012. Still, it’s a start — we’ll be watching how much the Obama green stimulus will give a boost to these types of networks. (For more on energy management using networks, check out our Smart Home Energy briefing, and our Green:Net Conference in March in San Francisco).
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Is the World Approaching 'Peak Water'?
Jennifer Kho - Water
At the Clean-Tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, Calif., this week, Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute and one of Wired magazine's 15 people President Obama should listen to, compared the global water situation to that of oil and said that a time of "peak water" might be coming. It's not that the world will actually run out of water. After all, water is mostly a renewable resource. “[B]ut we may run out of the ecological value that the water provides,” Gleick said in a keynote speech Wednesday.
Water already has reached or exceeded peak ecological limits in many places around the world, he said, noting that 200 million people die of water-related diseases every year. And that is a risk, not only to people and to the environment, but also to industry. The risks to companies are “both real and growing,” he said, adding that very few companies don't depend on water for something. Companies that use water to make everything from clothing or semiconductors face growing competition, especially from agriculture, which uses 80 percent of the water used by humans, he said.
That's leading to higher costs and limits on water use in some markets, such as water-constrained Beijing, which stopped permitting new water-intensive businesses to set up around the city, he said. “If water is dirty, you need to pay to treat it up front, not to mention [cleaning it again] afterward to meet standards,” he said. “In the past, water has typically been thought of as a low-cost input to production – and it's still low-cost in some areas – but that's changing.”
These challenges translate into opportunity for water companies, and the water market's huge size – an estimated $400 billion to $500 billion per year, Gleick said – adds to the attraction. But while opportunities and solutions exist, sometimes they’re hard to find, Gleick said.
For one thing, the water industry is very complicated, with many moving pieces. “People who understand water technology often don't understand economics, and a corollary is people who understand economics don't always understand water economics,” he said. “Water is a weird thing.”
For example, water may be an economic good, it’s also a human right. While the cost of water is far lower than the actual cost of extracting that water, raising prices would doom the poor. It's difficult to find solutions to the water crisis that can generate enough money to be economically sustainable. “It's entirely possible to create brilliant water technology that the places that need it the most can't afford,” he said.
The low price of water also keeps it from being economically viable to transport very far. “If you think about a tanker full of oil, it has a far higher value than a tanker full of water,” he said. “So you can only transport [water] so far before it becomes cheaper to do something else, like desalination."
Gleick ended by saying that solving the water crisis is a difficult but tremendously important task, requiring efficiency and conservation, advanced economics, smart technology and better governance. “Water is already constricting industrial production and growth in some regions, leading companies to think about their water and ecological footprint in ways didn't use to have to,” he said.
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Clean-Energy Industry Pushes for Tax Refunds In Stimulus
Jennifer Kho - Policy
Hidden in an obscure section of the economic stimulus plan that the U.S. House of Representatives is set to consider next week is a provision that could provide the refundability that has been at the top of the clean-energy industry's wish list. If it becomes law, the measure could enable the hard-won federal tax incentive, which passed in October and took effect at the beginning of this year, to have a real impact in an economy where financing is scarce.
The problem with the 30 percent investment incentive, as it stands now, is that it relies solely on a tax credit — and in this economy, many companies aren't earning enough money, or paying enough in taxes, to take advantage of the credits. That has rendered the incentives moot, in many cases. As Ethan Zindler, head of research for research firm New Energy Finance says: If the tax credits are not of use to you, they don't solve the problem.
At the Clean Tech Investors Summit in Palm Springs, Calif., Thursday morning, Scott Brown, CEO of private-equity fund New Energy Capital, said the tax equity markets "are really dead.” Combined with a much reduced debt market, raising money for new clean power projects is "going to be very difficult unless there are changes in the stimulus bill," he said.
Chris O'Brien, head of North American development for Oerlikon Corp., said at a panel on Wednesday that the industry needs the stimulus measure to get around the tax equity problem, and from a government perspective, “there's no incremental cost increase, because the refund and the credit are equal.”
The draft of the economic stimulus bill includes language that would do just that. It would allow companies to receive the same incentive in the form of grants instead of tax credits, effectively creating tax credit refunds, O’Brien said. "That's the kind of thing that, as drafted, would provide the stimulus to spur short-term investments in new wind and solar projects," he said. "This is a very gigantic step forward."
Cleantech insiders have been lobbying hard for this type of provision. Earlier this week, the Solar Energy Industries Association and the American Wind Energy Association teamed up to push for refundable tax credits in the economic stimulus package.
SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive is circulating an open letter to Congress and meeting with lawmakers to push for the refundability, according to a spokesperson. "The investment tax credit for solar power is floundering because of the credit crunch," the company said in an email. "Unless the ITC can be fixed, the U.S. solar industry and hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs are in jeopardy."
The Senate finance committee is expected to take a look at the bill next week, O’Brien said, as he encouraged the audience to call senators on the committee to push for these measures. The refundability provision "will provide a lot of certainty to financial market and I think will have huge impact on getting those markets started again.”
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