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1. Coal Death Watch: DOJ Cracks Down, Costs Stack up
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2. Energy Spending That Was Cut From The Stimulus Bill
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3. DOE Determined to Dole Out Overdue Green Car Loans ASAP
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4. Thanks to Our Earth2Tech Sponsors!
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5. Cash for Clunkers Proposal Yanked from Senate Stimulus Plan
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6. Daily Sprout
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7. Cleantech Startups Take the Stage at TED
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8. Pssst…Wanna Buy Some Solar Panels?
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9. Capacitors Cash In On X-Prize "Crazy Green Idea"
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10. Even With Stimulus, Smart Grid Could Face Rough Year
Coal Death Watch: DOJ Cracks Down, Costs Stack up
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
Here’s an idea: Stop illegal pollution from coal plants. The Department of Justice said this week that it has launched a novel campaign to start enforcing rules already on the books, beginning with a 1.5 GW Westar Energy coal plant in northeastern Kansas. As the New York Times reports, the DOJ filed suit against Westar (which the Bush administration put on notice five years ago), charging that it had made major modifications to prolong the plant’s life without installing required pollution controls. That was the good news for coal this week.
And so, our Coal Death Watch continues: View Larger Map
In Great Falls, Montana last week, developers of the planned 250 MW Highwood coal plant halted work on the project, saying they now intend to build a 120 MW natural gas plant with up to 6 MW of additional power from wind turbines. The local Billings Gazette reports that utility co-ops involved with the project blamed “an aura of uncertainty,” environmental lawsuits, rising costs ($900 million, double their original estimate) and pressure to bring electricity online fast — a sign of the times for energy developers.
On Friday, Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle announced plans to replace a coal-fired plant that powers the University of Wisconsin campus with a new biomass facility by 2012, the Associated Press reports. The switch comes in the wake of a lawsuit settlement with environmental groups. As with the Westar Energy plant under fire from the Justice Department, a federal judge said, according to the AP, that state officials upgraded Wisconsin’s Charter Street Plant without going through the permitting process or installing required pollution controls.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Energy Spending That Was Cut From The Stimulus Bill
Katie Fehrenbacher - Policy
Looks like lawmakers have reached an agreement on a trimmed-down $780 billion stimulus package, which will still provide tens of billions of dollars for clean power and energy efficiency. But the new version of the bill did cut out billions from several key energy program, according to CNN including completely eliminating $ 1 billion for energy loan guarantees. A vote on the bill could come as early as Tuesday:
Funding that got cut that you could care about:
- The new bill allocates $3.5 billion for energy-efficient federal buildings — the original bill had allocated $7 billion.
- The new bill allocates $300 million for a federal fleet of hybrid vehicles — the original bill had allocated $600 million.
- The new bill cut $1 billion for energy loan guarantees.
DOE Determined to Dole Out Overdue Green Car Loans ASAP
Josie Garthwaite - Policy
Washington is in the business of handing out money these days (see: bank bailout, auto bailout, stimulus), but when it comes to cutting checks for a Department of Energy program designed to support advanced vehicle manufacturing, the feds have taken nearly three years to get projects moving. But according to a new Wall Street Journal interview with DOE chief Steven Chu, the stalling stops now. He wants money moving out the door within four weeks, not the additional the five months that people working on the program had planned.
The $25 billion in loans and loan guarantees, created as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and appropriated by Congress in 2006, could breathe new life into some of the more than 70 companies that have applied for funds, including electric car startups Tesla Motors, Integrity Automotive and Zap, and battery makers Ener1 and A123Systems. As recently as last month, a DOE spokesperson told us that applications were "under rigorous and thorough review," and that the DOE was "moving with all deliberate speed in reviewing the applications, but any date by which we might make a decision would be pure speculation at this point." Not anymore. Chu’s the boss, and with some $30-$40 billion expected to require spending (if only I had that problem) after the stimulus bill passes, he’s naming dates.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Thanks to Our Earth2Tech Sponsors!
Guest Column - Uncategorized
We’d like to say thanks to this month’s Earth2Tech sponsor:
- Green IT Tools: Download The Green IT Guide and Toolkit for Sustainable Businesses
Cash for Clunkers Proposal Yanked from Senate Stimulus Plan
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
Strong endorsement from President Obama and Detroit’s Big Three was not enough to keep a $16 billion “Cash for Clunkers” program on the table last night as Senators wrangled with their version of the economic stimulus bill. Amid mounting pressure to shrink the $900 billion bill, Senator Thomas Harkin of Iowa withdrew his proposal to offer drivers up to $10,000 apiece in rebates to trade in older cars (to be scrapped, not resold) and buy more fuel-efficient models assembled in the States, Reuters reports. The rebates would have been offered only to drivers earning $75,000 or less per year (gross adjusted income).
While classic car fans and vehicle restorers came out against the House version of the program, which did not include a mandate for U.S. assembly, international automakers came out swinging against the Buy American aspect of Harkin’s proposal earlier this week. “We should not take away the consumer's right to free choice,” American International Automobile Dealers President Cody Lusk said in a release yesterday. “Any relief for consumers during these economic times should apply to all new vehicles for sale in the U.S. –- not just those assembled here.” The group represents import-brand automakers, which make up 80 percent of U.S. auto sales.
Steven Levitt pointed out other problems with the program — with or without a Buy American clause — on the New York Times Freakonomics blog last summer, shortly after Princeton economist Alan Blinder called Cash for Clunkers as “the best stimulus idea you’ve never heard of.” According to Levitt, there’s a huge risk that this sort of program would distort incentives. From Freakonomics:
Let's say the rules of the program say that a car must be at least fifteen years old to qualify for a big government subsidy to scrap it. [Note: The proposal ended up setting the cutoff at 10 years.] This gives powerful incentives to people with twelve-year-old cars they were planning on scrapping to keep driving them for three more years to collect the government bounty. Instead of reducing the number of clunkers on the road, this program could actually lead to an increase!
Photo credit: D.B. Blas via Flickr
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Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Obama Wants Energy Efficiency Rules, Pronto: President Barack Obama ordered the DOE yesterday to immediately draft overdue standards for making a variety of appliances and light bulbs more efficient. — New York Times
Big Bucks for Batteries: Loan guarantees and grants worth $2 billion for advanced batteries may seem like chump change by stimulus standards, but it’s more money than what’s flowed into the sector from venture capital and private equity firms over the last four years combined. — CNNMoney
Solar Power Partners Goes Ka-ching: California-based Solar Power Partners, which installs and manages solar panels for commercial customers, has raised $32 million in new funding for working capital and project financing. Another $60 million for project financing is expected to come in by year’s end. — peHUB
Shoppers Still Looking for Green Labels: Four out of five people say they are still buying products carrying environmental claims. Half of the 1,000 people surveyed said they buy just as many of these products, which sometimes cost more, as before the economic downturn. — Press Release
Climate Policy Boosts Innovation: A new study finds countries that ratified the Kyoto climate treaty have had more cleantech innovation (measured by patent filings) in the intervening years than those that did not ratify. — Environmental Economics
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Cleantech Startups Take the Stage at TED
Liz Gannes - Startups
Shai Agassi, CEO of Better Place, spoke yesterday, throwing out the audacious claim that there could be 100 million electric cars on the road by 2016, up from 100,000 in 1011. While Earth2Tech readers may be familiar with his schtick, it produced one of the biggest standing ovations of the conference so far.
Agassi compared using oil as energy to the immoral use of slave labor, and urged a dismissal of “little 20-percent growth” targets in favor of ambition. He also rejected the idea that these changes can only happen in the distant future, predicting that oil costs will go right back up again as soon as our economy recovers.
When solving big questions, the two important numbers are zero — zero oil — and infinity — scaling this to infinity. Not little 20 percent growth…If we don't change this, we'll lose our economy right after we lose our morality.
Of course, Better Place flat-out requires that kind of audacity, since its vision — of electric charging stations, battery swap centers, and a re-envisioning of car ownership whereby usage subsidizes the price of the device — requires so much infrastructure.
We also heard from Earth2Tech wonderboy (and Green:Net conference speaker) Saul Griffith, who talked up Makani Power’s method of generating wind power using kites. Within two years, he said, he will put hundreds of kilowatts worth of machines in the sky. Just a paper plane is enough to power a cell phone — larger machines can do much more.
And lastly, one we haven’t written about before: Jon LaGrou, the co-founder of Safeplug, presented a system of power outlets with microprocessors and plugs with memory chips (these can be slid onto existing plugs to retrofit them). LaGrou pointed out that Thomas Edison invented the circuit beaker in 1879, and some 83 percent of home fires start below the circuit breaker safety limit. Safeplug addresses this by detecting overloads at the outlet level. The system also prevents shocks and saves power by only providing power to used outlets. Update: The device can be used to manage some energy consumption, but we want to know more!
Image credit: TED/James Duncan Davidson
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Pssst…Wanna Buy Some Solar Panels?
David Ehrlich - Big Green
Knockoffs aren’t just for high-end fashion and electronics anymore. Suntech Power Holdings says that you need to check the label before you make a deal on your next shipment of solar panels — they could be fakes. Wuxi, China-based Suntech today said it has been granted preliminary injunctions in Germany against a company and two of its distributors, prohibiting them from selling products with the Suntech brand.
And it looks like Suntech’s home country of China is the source of the fake solar products. The injunctions are against a company called Suntech Power Holding (Hongkong) Co. Ltd., which has no connection to the real Suntech. Maybe the panels are coming out of the same factories that churn out those Pamasonic DVD players and Grucci handbags.
But like those other knockoffs, the fake solar panels probably don’t offer the same quality as the originals. You may think you’re getting a bargain, but what happens when your fakes aren’t pulling in as much energy as your neighbor, or they turn a weird color in the rain, or worse, when your smart meter narcs you out to the feds?
Suntech certainly isn’t too happy about the situation, and said that although there have only been what it calls “isolated cases” of these knockoffs being sold, it plans to vigorously pursue the companies selling them.
Last August, Suntech took on the similarly named Sun Tech Solar and its Chinese parent company, with the Green Patent Blog reporting that Suntech sued the competitor in federal court in San Diego, alleging infringement of trademark and unfair competition. Suntech was also peeved that Sun Tech Solar was going to be showing up at the then-upcoming Solar Power Conference & Expo and tried to get the court to close down Sun Tech Solar’s booth.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Capacitors Cash In On X-Prize "Crazy Green Idea"
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
If you watch the winning videos for the so-called “Crazy Green Idea” video contest, developed by the X-Prize foundation to find topics for a new X-Prize contest, you’ll quickly realize that the ideas are not — in any way, shape or form — wild and crazy at all. No geoengineering plots to re-ice the Arctic, blueprints for massive space mirrors to reflect sunlight, or plans to tweak trees to suck up more CO2. Yep, they’re all proposals for serious, slightly geeky, and very important energy problems.
And the winner, announced yesterday, is rightly so, the most reasonable of all — the capacitor challenge. The team asks the audience to solve the problem of energy storage by creating an advanced, cheap capacitor that has no toxic chemicals. The device has to exceed the energy density of lead acid batteries, fully recharge in under one minute and for up to 500,000 cycles, and cost less than two times the price of average lead acid batteries. Wow, inventors who could enter that contest would already have a revolutionary device that could transform handheld gadgets and vehicles. Check out the pitch that won $25,000 via the most YouTube votes:
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
Even With Stimulus, Smart Grid Could Face Rough Year
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
The smart grid might have launched into the mainstream lexicon recently with GE’s super bowl ad and funding included in the current stimulus package, but the budding industry could falter out of the gate in this economic climate. Smart grid companies are showing some concern over utilities slowing down smart grid rollout plans in the near term, and the stimulus package is actually just a drop in the bucket of the investment needed to launch a nationwide smart grid.
This morning, Echelon, which develops networking products to make the power grid smarter, reported a drop in earnings for the three month period ending December 31 — the company reported $36.8 million in revenues, with a loss of $6.26 million, down from $46.9 million in revenues, and a net income of $912,000 for the year earlier. The company’s CEO, Ken Oshman, also expressed slight concern over how the economic slowdown has hindered progress on utilities’ smart grid projects. Oshman added, though, that its utilities contacts in western Europe and North America will help Echelon deliver “modest growth” for its smart grid network products for the year.
Earlier this week, analysts at UBS downgraded Itron, a heavyweight smart meter maker, and said while the company: “may receive new [advanced metering infrastructure] awards at some point in 2009, we believe this is balanced with a risk that '09 guidance is revised downwards at some point due to utility capex cuts and/or AMI project delays.”
Itron, which reports earnings later this month, hinted last month that it might have some delays in its smart meter rollouts: “As is typical, some of the deployment schedules have changed. Some may move forward more quickly than expected and others may deploy somewhat later than their initial schedule.” Not a smoking gun, but that’s usually how financial releases sound.
And while the industry is pointing to the $4.5 billion boost in smart grid funding in the proposed stimulus package (both the House and Senate versions), those funds are actually a small percent of what a national smart grid network would need. Ed Legge, an analyst with the Edison Electric Institute, told us that at least $50 billion is needed for all the investor-owned utilities (which make up 70 percent of the U.S. utilities) to roll out smart grid networks. It would cost about $500 million for each utility, Legge said. That’s a substantial investment for a utility that is facing reduced their demand for energy from customers.
Still, “there is a lot of optimism” around smart grid rollouts these days, said Legge, adding that “the technology is moving forward, not backward.” Utilities like Pepco Holdings and CenterPoint announced smart grid plans just this week. Eric Miller, Chief Solutions Officer, for Trilliant, a company that makes hardware and software for smart meters, says while he’s heard his industry’s concern over a slower rollout, his company is still seeing “a high level of market activity.”
But it’s the sudden positivity and excitement over power grid 2.0, that actually makes the economic downturn particularly frustrating. Companies have waited for years for the smart grid to be hot enough to excite consumers, investors, utilities and policymakers — who thought in 2008 that smart grid would get a Super Bowl ad and repeated mentions from the president? Hopefully the current recession won’t pull the rug out from under the industry in one of its shining moments.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
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