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1. Sapphire Racks Up Another Win for Airline Algae
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2. Abengoa Solar Likely to Get New Neighbors in Ariz. Desert
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3. Daily Sprout
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4. Green Home Retrofits Compete for Cash
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5. Duke Energy Trying to Ditch Rooftop Solar
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6. 5 More Questions for EnerNOC's CEO Tim Healy
Sapphire Racks Up Another Win for Airline Algae
David Ehrlich - Big Green
Two different airlines had algae biofuel test flights this month, and both turned to the well-funded Sapphire Energy for their needs. Japan Airlines took flight today on a plane partially powered by camelina, jatropha and a small percentage of algae-based biofuels, while Houston’s Continental Airlines took to the wild biofuel yonder earlier this month, using a blend of jatropha and algae.
San Diego-based Sapphire has some big-name backers on its side, including Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment, ARCH Venture Partners and Venrock, and with more than $100 million in financing, is one of the most well-funded algae biofuel startups around. Other startups trying to get in on the algae-to-jet fuel game include Solazyme, Inventure Chemical Technology, Aquaflow Bionomic, and Algenol Biofuels.
But how does the green stuff compare with the biofuels that are already on the market? Well, besides sidestepping the whole food vs. fuel debate, Sapphire says its algae biofuel delivers anywhere from 10 to 100 times more energy per acre than cropland biofuels such as corn-based ethanol. Algae also uses less water than corn, and can grow on non-arable land.
And Sapphire touts that its algae biofuel is chemically identical to crude oil, making it compatible with anything on the road, or in the air, today, as well as with current refineries and pipelines. Ethanol can be corrosive, and is usually taken by truck or rail to terminals where it’s blended with regular gasoline.
Maybe Richard Branson should take a look. He got bashed for using very little biofuel in his Virgin Atlantic test flight last February. The Virgin flight also made the big no-no of using food-based feedstocks, with biofuel made from coconut oil and babassu nuts.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Abengoa Solar Likely to Get New Neighbors in Ariz. Desert
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
Arizona’s renewable portfolio standard requires utilities to generate 15 percent of their energy from clean sources by 2025. APS proposes to build 1,000 MW of solar power capacity, financed directly or through power-purchasing agreements with outside developers. First up: a 280-MW concentrating solar plant being built by Abengoa, which has stated a goal of building and operating large solar plants across the Southwest in partnership with utilities.
APS and Abengoa announced the solar deal in February of 2007, but the Spanish firm said all bets were off for the so-called Solana project unless Congress extended the investment tax credit.
Well, the credit passed and now APS and Abengoa say Solana remains on track to come online in 2012. Last month, however, Abengoa said it would have to wait for financial markets to improve before it could finance the project, estimated to cost more than $1 billion. That’s about how much the company has pledged to invest in solar thermal plants each year for the next five years. If APS’s plan gets the greenlight, it may try to lure some more of that investment out to the Arizona desert.
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Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Make Way for Lemons: GM CFO Fritz Henderson says automakers still have a lot to learn about battery science, which means there are going to be some absolute lemons in the brave new world of electrical transport. — Telegraph
China, Europe, Come Together on Climate: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabau and EU officials today signed agreements meant to reduce demand for illegal timber and establish a permanent center in Beijing to promote clean energy technologies. — NYT’s Green Inc.
Big Three Nix Super Bowl Ad Blitz: Chrysler, Ford, and GM, which plugged its Yukon Hybrid during last year’s broadcast, have opted out of the pricey Super Bowl advertising game. — Edmunds
The Problems With Geo-Engineering: Two new studies on geo-engineering, which holds that humanity should consider planet-wide engineering projects to reduce the side-effects of fossil fuel combustion, suggest hopes for this high-tech last ditch effort are misplaced. — The Economist
Green Home Retrofits Compete for Cash
David Ehrlich - Big Green
Looks like energy efficient retrofits of public housing is becoming the green cause of the year — it’s cheap, fights climate change and cuts the energy bills of those who need them. This week the UK government launched a new competition, Retrofit for the Future, that’s offering a total of £10 million ($14.3 million) to builders as incentive to improve the energy efficiency and environmental performance of the UK’s public housing.
Run by the government-backed Technology Strategy Board, the competition starts in March and aims to deliver at least 50 demonstration projects. The Technology Strategy Board, which invests in UK technology firms and research and development, plans to put out a call for companies to bid for contracts to work with public housing groups under the competition.
The competition, though a nice idea, pales in comparison to the $6.2 billion to weatherize low-income homes that’s included in the house version of the U.S. stimulus bill. That cash, which needs to be spent under a tight deadline, will go toward a range of energy efficiency technologies, including new or upgraded insulation, windows and water heaters.
But it’s heartening that governments are finally seeing the importance of energy efficiency retrofits for buildings. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to fight climate change: according to the DOE Weatherization Program, a $1 invested returns $1.65 in energy-related benefits. And the energy consumed by homes is massive. In the U.S., residential homes accounted for 21 percent of all U.S. energy consumption in 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration.
The UK is targeting an 80 percent cut to the carbon emitted from buildings by 2050, and over half of the homes people will be living in by then already exist today, according to the Technology Strategy Board. The UK public housing sector consists of more than 4.5 million homes.
In the UK competition, the Technology Strategy Board is offering 100 percent funding for each proposal, covering costs for the design and build phases, as well as in-use performance evaluation once the project’s complete. The board is looking at whole home or building solutions under the contest, and hopes to cover a broad range of housing types, including high-rises as well as small, semi-detached homes. But the board isn’t just looking at cuts in energy use and carbon emissions as part of the competition, it expects the renos will come at a reasonable cost as well.
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Duke Energy Trying to Ditch Rooftop Solar
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
The energy company, which gets 70 percent of its power from coal, had planned to recover costs for the project through rate hikes. But that scheme screeched to a halt earlier this month after the North Carolina Utilities Commission ruled that Duke could get 10 MW of solar power at lower cost from third-party providers than if it owns the photovoltaic systems itself. As a result, the regulators decided, it would be unreasonable for Duke to recoup the entire cost of the project through rate "riders.”
Now Duke is saying delayed cost recovery could force it to violate federal accounting rules governing the company’s use of energy-investment tax credits — including $125 million slated for an 825-MW coal plant, according to the Business Journal. In other words, it will have a hard time investing in coal power if it can’t gouge customers for solar.
All of this began last spring with a pledge from Duke to invest $100 million in solar rooftops, both commercial and residential, in North Carolina. The state had passed a new requirement for utilities to generate 12.5 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2021, with standards phasing in next year. Duke Energy Carolinas said it would build and operate a 20-MW distributed solar power project to get started. It cut the plan to 10 MW and $50 million after public advocates protested utility ownership as anticompetitive.
The company wants out of not only the rooftop project, but also the requirement to start generating solar energy next year. The massive $173 million solar farm being built by SunEdison — the company that undercut Duke’s proposed rate hike — which the utility has contracted to supply 21.5 MW, won’t come online (with a minimum 16 MW) until the end of 2010.
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5 More Questions for EnerNOC's CEO Tim Healy
Kevin Kelleher - Big Green
A lot has changed since we last caught up with Tim Healy, CEO of EnerNOC, the Boston-based company that reduces electricity demand for power grid operators by automating energy conservation.
“Demand response” is a term being heard more and more frequently these days as companies and utilities alike get serious about running electric systems more efficiently. Enernoc’s stock, meanwhile, has been on a rollercoaster, falling to $5.19 last month from its 2007 IPO price of $26, then more than doubling to $11.06 as of Thursday’s close.
CEO Healy this week gave us an overview of the company’s strategy, its outlook for 2009 and the message it’s sending to a new administration as it shapes its energy policy.
How do you explain your work with demand response to a company that is just waking up to the concept?
Demand response is basically a killer app of the smart grid, an application that curtails electricity usage at peak times in order to increase reliability of the electric grid. It brings supply and demand more into balance and hopefully reduces prices overall on the electric system.
We built a network operations center here that runs our software applications. They allow us to automatically curtail customers’ non-essential electricity usage across our network and track and verify that curtailment. The utilities need that curtailment as an alternate form of capacity. They can actually see it happening in real time and pay us for that performance so that we can compensate the commercial, industrial and institutional customers on our network for their participation in the demand response activity.
Can you give some specific examples of how different companies would change their electricity usage?
For example, with the hotels we work with, we can affect things like pool pumps and water fountains and heating pumps that heat up the spa pools. At a manufacturing facility, we can shut a line down and have it go to maintenance mode during a demand response event. At a data center we might run the auxiliary generation in order to not be taking power from the grid, instead generating their own power from their backup generators.
How does a hotel, say, manage this so they don’t hear complaints from their own customers?
We try to make sure we’re not affecting negatively creature comfort at the hotels. So we probably won’t touch the air-conditioning in the hotel rooms and instead focus on dimming some of the lighting in the main lobby and turning off the heating units of the exterior and interior pools, or running auxiliary generation and so forth.
But if you look at grocery stores, we found data that suggesting that when a store goes from full lighting to two-thirds lighting, the customers actually feel like it’s a little bit cooler in there.
The market seemed to like your new agreement with Xcel Energy. How will that work?
Xcel has asked us to deliver up to 44 megawatts of demand response capacity initially. So we will be working hand in hand with the account managers and other staff at Xcel. There’s a hardware device that we’ll be installing at the commercial and industrial sites that we work with in Xcel’s territory. These customers are getting basic access to our software systems so that they can track their demand response activity. It helps them manage their performance and see their performance and helps them give some insight into energy consumption.
We’ve also announced a number of wins with state governments and cities, most recently in the city of Boston. And a number of wins with the Department of Defense and three or four other states outside of New England to manage their demand response capacity as well. So it’s been one of the best five or six months in EnerNOC’s history in terms of growth and competitive opportunities and also having a say in what’s going on in Washington right now.
What are the kinds of things you’ve been telling people in Washington?
That demand response is extremely attractive in part because it doesn’t need mandates. It doesn’t need subsidies, it simply needs a regulatory construct that allow for demand response to flourish. So we actually don’t expect that there will be direct subsidies of any specific nature for demand response.
What we do want, however, is for the regulatory constructs to evolve and adapt so that we can have an opportunity for more demand response to play a role in the utilities’ resource planning moving forward. The utilities should be given an opportunity to make more money by investing in energy efficiency rather than investing in any other resource in their portfolio.
That’s something that is a new way of thinking about building our nation’s infrastructure and that hasn’t been the case traditionally. Utilities lose money if they invest too much in energy efficiency under many regulatory constructs that exists across the U.S. today, and we would like to see that change.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
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