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1. Think Saved From the Brink by Investors
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2. Tesla Has At Least One Smart Deal: Daimler
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3. Quercus Trust's Latest Energy Storage Play: Graphene Energy
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4. Daily Sprout
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5. Malls Get Smart With Water Management
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6. Poet Churning Out Cellulosic Ethanol At Pilot Plant
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7. Waste to Power Startup Ze-gen Raises $20M
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8. Enerkem to Squeeze Biofuel Out of Old Electricity Poles
Think Saved From the Brink by Investors
David Ehrlich - Automotive
Norwegian electric car maker Think got a reprieve today, receiving a bridge loan of 40 million kroner ($5.6 million) from its investors, according to Reuters, potentially saving the company from bankruptcy. But Think will likely need even more cash to keep itself up and running.
Think halted production last month, laying off between 50 and 70 percent of its workforce, with CEO Richard Canny saying that his company was in “urgent financial distress.” At the time, he was seeking a bailout from the Norwegian government, but was rebuffed. He said Think needed 100-200 million kroner in short-term guarantees to keep operating.
The biggest chunk of today’s loan comes from private equity firm Ener1 Group, which may be protecting its investment on the other side of the pond — battery producer Ener1. Ener1 Group is the majority shareholder in New York-based Ener1, which has a significant contract with Think. Other backers of the loan were not disclosed.
Back in 2007, Ener1, which makes batteries through its EnerDel unit, signed a deal to supply Think with $68 million worth of lithium-ion battery packs for Think electric vehicles in 2009 and 2010. In Ener1’s latest filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that its revenues and profitability would take a hit if anything happened to that deal, and that it could have a “material adverse affect” on its business.
Ener1 is also looking for some loans, announcing earlier this month that it applied for $480 million in loans from the U.S. Department of Energy’s advanced vehicle incentive program.
Things could be looking up for Think, which said last month that it was planning to file for protection from creditors under Norwegian law. “The financing will allow Think to focus its efforts towards the next stages of the restructuring process,” Think told Reuters in a statement. The company said it plans to raise permanent equity capital and gradually return to volume production.
Think started production on its Think City two-seater in October, rolling out 8-10 cars per day. The company plans to build 44 cars per day when it gets up to full capacity sometime this year.
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Tesla Has At Least One Smart Deal: Daimler
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
It’s official: Tesla Motors plans to supply battery packs and chargers for the 1,000 electric Smart cars Daimler AG has slated for release in the U.S. in 2010. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk announced the deal today at the Detroit Auto Show, confirming rumors that the two companies were getting cozy.
The Financial Times reported last summer that Tesla would supply batteries for the 150 cars Daimler planned to deploy in Berlin — and possibly the expanded test fleet of up to 1,000 cars in several European cities. But Musk told the Detroit Free Press today that the company’s battery technology will be used in the U.S. rollout.
“If the 1,000 vehicle fleet makes sense and the economics are compelling, that will expand to tens of thousands of vehicles per year,” Musk said. This represents the first outside supply agreement for the as-yet unprofitable startup, which has cited its powertrain supply unit as a profitable core.
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Quercus Trust's Latest Energy Storage Play: Graphene Energy
Josie Garthwaite - Startups
Graphene Energy works with the strongest material ever tested — a one-atom thick sheet of graphite — to build ultracapacitors. The material, known as graphene, was hailed as the new silicon last year when researchers discovered that electrons could travel up to 100 times faster in graphene than silicon.
Around the same time, a new generation of ultracapacitors emerged that aimed to seize the future of the auto industry. With ultra-fast charge times, they can absorb voltage drops and surges to extend battery life — or store electricity on their own. But capacity has lagged somewhere around 5 percent of battery’s storage capacity.
Graphene Energy plans to solve this problem by stacking several sheets of graphene (pictured below), which it says could as much as double the capacity offered by today’s commercial ultracapacitors (usually made with activated carbon). The company, which emerged from research at the University of Texas, foresees applications in electric and hybrid vehicles, mobile devices, and wind- and solar-powered electric grids.
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Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Pickens Plan, Redux: T. Boone says “the wind stuff is deader than hell right now,” but promises to push on with his plan to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil. — Wall Street Journal
Who KO’d the Electric Car?:The concept of all-electric cars has faced resistance, but the idea isn’t as new as one might think. It’s just coming out of a decades-long coma. — Time
Gulf States Jockeying for Clean Energy Lead: Oil-rich Qatar and Saudi Arabia are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology funds, putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home. — New York Times
Chu on the Issues: Soon-to-be energy secretary Steven Chu has called coal his “worst nightmare,” alarmed the anti-nuke crowd, and advocated for new energy technologies. — Grist
Ener1 to the Rescue: Electric car maker Think Global has secured $5.7 million in interim financing in a round led by battery supplier Ener1. — CNET’s Green Tech
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Malls Get Smart With Water Management
David Ehrlich - Big Green
Driving a Prius to the mall isn’t the only way to cut the environmental impact of shopping — malls are now getting their own cleantech makeovers. Petaluma, Calif.-based HydroPoint Data Systems announced today that its WeatherTRAK smart water management system has been installed at 30 shopping malls in the western U.S. as part of a pilot water conservation project with mall owner Regency Centers. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.
WeatherTRAK is a “smart” irrigation system that uses data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to automatically schedule irrigation based on local weather conditions and landscaping needs. HydroPoint says it can reduce water use by up to 59 percent and water runoff by 71 percent. Earlier this year, HydroPoint released a new version of its web-based interface, where users can monitor their irrigation systems and get real-time information on field conditions, reducing the number of site visits that are required, which is another cost-cutter.
The technology is being used to cut outdoor water consumption at malls in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Regency Centers in Jacksonville, Fla., expects to save 42 million gallons of water annually with the new systems. There could be significant cost savings for the mall owner, with Regency Centers saying the system will help to lower its water bills, as well as minimize landscape replacement and over-watering maintenance costs.
HydroPoint, backed by Citi Alternative Investments, RockPort Capital Partners, Monitor Ventures, and others, already has an impressive list of big-name customers for a venture-backed firm, including Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon.com, and Lockheed Martin.
The deal with Regency Centers could be the start of much bigger project for HydroPoint. Regency Centers is targeting a total of 36 malls for this pilot project, but the company recently said that, based on the results of the project, this type of technology will be incrementally rolled out into the rest of its portfolio. Regency Centers owns 443 retail properties in the U.S., covering 59.3 million square feet.
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Poet Churning Out Cellulosic Ethanol At Pilot Plant
Katie Fehrenbacher - Biofuels
If your core business is making corn ethanol, you’ve got to evolve. Companies producing ethanol made from corn are canceling plant plans and struggling to stay afloat. Poet is one of the larger corn ethanol makers, and it has been trying its hand at producing next-generation cellulosic ethanol; the company said yesterday it has made the leap into pilot production — 20,000 gallons per year — at an $8 million facility in Scotland, S.D.
Poet says it started up the pilot facility, which is located next to a 9-million-gallon-per-year cornethanol production facility, before the end of 2008. The cellulosic run is a test for a much larger $200 million commercial scale plant named Project Liberty that will produce 125 million gallons of ethanol per year, with just 25 million of that being cellulosic ethanol, in Emmetsburg, Iowa. Liberty is supposed to start construction this year and is projected to be in operation in 2011.
While Poet is one of the larger ethanol makers to focus on next-generation cellulosic ethanol, it’s still moving in little by little. It’s building its cellulosic plants as one part of much larger corn ethanol plants. That approach can minimize risk, and cut costs by using the waste from corn ethanol for cellulosic ethanol. But it is also less aggressive and slower-moving than some of the startup competitors, like Range Fuels and Coskata, which are racing to get to larger scale production this year and in 2010.
We’re not sure how innovative or efficient Poet’s cellulosic ethanol conversion process is, either. The company says it spent $20 million on research in 2008, but Poet’s CEO Jeff Broin would only tell us back in September that the company is “pursuing enzymatic conversion for cellulosic material.” Broin did say, though, that Poet’s intention is to “develop our own IP around the process so that it can be licensed to other ethanol producers.” We’ll see if the company ends up keeping Project Liberty on that proposed timeline given the economy. But then again, corn ethanol isn’t exactly a bright spot, so it’s got to evolve somehow.
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Waste to Power Startup Ze-gen Raises $20M
Katie Fehrenbacher - Biofuels
Ze-gen takes organic waste like wood and plant matter (primarily from construction sites) and gasifies it, producing syngas, which can be used as fuel. The syngas can be produced for cheaper than natural gas and can be used in power plants. Using waste as a feedstock is not only usually cheaper, it also has the eco-value of reusing trash that would have been disposed of in a landfill or in other less sustainable ways.
Ze-gen is raising funds now in order to move into commercial production, which it previously said it plans to start before the end of the year. But the company told us in an email today that it is actually now looking to start commercial production by the latter half of 2010. The company will likely build syngas production plants close to industrial customer facilities that would be using the syngas for power.
A lot of companies are working on converting biomass into syngas, and the basic technology has been used for decades. But Ze-gen says its single-step process is more efficient and more cost-effective. Other companies like Coskata are gasifying biomass into syngas but then taking more steps to turn that syngas into biofuel. Enerkem is working on making cellulosic ethanol using wood from used utility poles, and it said yesterday that its first commercial-scale plant is within a few months of starting production.
When it comes to next-generation biofuel investments in 2009 it seems like investors are doubling down on past investments or shying away from any funding — basically the stronger biofuel startups will get stronger and the weaker ones will be in trouble. Last week cellulosic ethanol maker ZeaChem (which sounds way too much like Ze-Gen) said it raised $34 million in a later stage funding. But also this week, GreenFuel, which produces algae from recycled CO2 and turns it into biofuel, said it has cut almost half of its staff, and doesn’t appear to have been able to close a crucial Series C funding round.
It will be interesting to see how much money is pumped into next-gen biofuels in 2009. Federal support and some promising technologies are counterbalanced by a very difficult funding market. In 2008, biofuel was the second-most-funded area, bringing in 11 percent (or $904 million) of the year's total funding, according to the Cleantech Group.
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Enerkem to Squeeze Biofuel Out of Old Electricity Poles
David Ehrlich - Big Green
The new, 1.3 million-gallon facility is in Westbury, about two hours outside of Montreal, and is designed to use a thermo-chemical process to turn the waste wood into ethanol.
Enerkem, backed by Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures, and BDR Capital, said construction of the plant started in October 2007, and was mechanically completed last month. The company didn’t set a date for when the plant will be fully functional, but said the conditioned synthesis gas island, which serves as the chemical production platform, has been finalized and is in an advanced commissioning stage, with methanol and ethanol production modules to be bolted on over the next few months.
As for those wooden poles, they’re a bargain for Enerkem, which calls them a “negative-cost” feedstock. That means the company is paid to take them away.
Enerkem has been operating a pilot plant in nearby Sherbrooke, Quebec, since 2003, where it’s tested about 20 different feedstocks, including municipal solid waste, forest residues, construction and demolition wood, and treated wood.
Enerkem will be getting its hands dirty with municipal solid waste as part of its work on waste-to-ethanol facilities with Toronto’s GreenField Ethanol. Last year, the companies said their first joint project, a plant that’s expected to produce 9.5 million gallons of biofuel per year from municipal solid waste when it’s up and running by the end of 2010, would be built in Edmonton, Alberta. Enerkem and GreenField plan to work together on a number of facilities and have said they already have a second plant in development.
Last week, Cambridge, Mass.-based cellulosic ethanol developer Verenium said it had completed 75-percent of the commissioning phase of its demonstration plant, a 1.4-million-gallon-per-year facility in Jennings, La.
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