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1. Upcoming Honda Insight Turns Eco-Friendly Driving Into Game
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2. The Chip to Solar March Continues, Intermolecular Enters Solar Fray
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3. How the Smart Grid Could Create a New Market for Energy Goods
Upcoming Honda Insight Turns Eco-Friendly Driving Into Game
Wagner James Au - Automotive
That’s more or less the premise of the “Eco Assist” dashboard features on the 2010 Honda Insight hybrid. Much the way many video games have heads-up displays that change color according to the condition of a character’s health; the Insight’s speedometer readout has a crescent icon that changes hue based on the driver’s acceleration/deceleration rate, glowing green when it’s most fuel efficient, but turning blue as it becomes wasteful. Like a role-playing game, the driver’s behavior is also tallied over time, and displayed symbolically — here, in the form of an ivy-ringed trophy achievement that a driver can gradually unlock with green-friendly driving. It’s sort of like Wii Fit, but for cars.
These elements are the brainchild of Yasunari Seki, chief engineer for the new Insight. In previous projects, he discovered that a car’s fuel consumption varied by about 20 percent in real-world conditions. “The variance came from different manners of acceleration by individual drivers,” Seki-san told me via email through a Honda publicist/translator. That inspired his idea for a system that not only provided fuel-efficiency feedback, but could “actually help drivers to learn a better way of driving through instruments and electronic indications.”
This general idea took on game-like features after he explained it to his Insight development team, comprised of many younger engineers “who had played with computer games since infancy,” as he put it. They went on to manufacture displays that leverage “the human instinct of taking up a challenge.” If this works as planned, it will translate into hybrid cars that are even more fuel efficient and cost effective than they are now, and an environment that’s even greener.
Hat tip: Jeremy Liew for Lightspeed Venture Partners’ blog.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
The Chip to Solar March Continues, Intermolecular Enters Solar Fray
Jennifer Kho - Energy
The move is the latest example of semiconductor technology crossing into the solar industry, and a sign that in the downturn companies are looking outside of their traditional target markets to find new growth. As proof of its serious solar intent, Intermolecular has hired Craig Hunter — best-known as the founder and former general manager of semiconductor-equipment manufacturer Applied Material’s thin-film solar business — as the vice president and general manager of its solar program. Since leaving Applied Materials in 2007, Hunter had been an entrepreneur in residence at venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, where he focused on the photovoltaic industry.
Lazovsky tells us that while the 5-year-old, San Jose, Calif.-based Intermolecular grew its revenues more than 200 percent last year, this year the company forecasts growth more modestly, at about 35 percent, excluding its new solar business. Lazovsky wouldn’t disclose Intermolecular’s revenues, but he said the company, which employs 114 people, expects to turn a profit this year.
Part of the company’s solar moves will be fueled by recently-raised funding. In January, Intermolecular raised $20 million from CMEA Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Symyx Technologies and US Venture Partners. That funding was on top of $36 million it raised in 2007.
Slower growth in the chip industry could be a key reason for Intermolecular’s sunny moves. The chip industry has been a mature industry for years, whereas solar is still ramping up relatively fast. “It’s an opportunity to take our existing capabilities and point it to a market that’s frankly very high growth,” Lazovsky said. Crosslink Capital in January predicted the solar industry would see a compound annual growth rate of 53 percent from 2008 to 2012, while BBC Research in August forecast a rate of 17.3 percent from 2007 to 2012 for the semiconductor industry. Intermolecular also expects solar’s growth to accelerate. “If you look at the size of the solar market today, versus the size it could be if we could get costs down, there’s tremendous elasticity and demand,” Hunter said.
Lazovsky descibes Intermolecular’s solar technology as a set of processing tools that can be used to conduct hundreds of experiments at the same time, as well as software that can process and evaluate the results of all the experiments to help customers select those most likely to bear fruit in high-volume manufacturing. The tools essentially miniaturize the experiments so that they are conducted on pieces of substrate smaller than a square inch, he explains.
One potential drawback is that experiments that work at a small scale in the labs don’t always work the same way when they scaled up. But Lazovsky said Intermolecular reduces that risk with a number of “process correlation” tools and methods, as well as a statistical team, to help determine how well the results are likely to translate into high-volume manufacturing. Hunter says the company has the necessary expertise in manufacturing to help determine what would and wouldn’t make sense in a manufacturing tool.
In the chip biz, Intermolecular’s technologies have helped companies find better ways to deposit, etch and interface semiconductor materials to make chips more efficient and lower-cost. Lazovsky says customers have been able to conduct R&D 100-200 times faster, on average, than with conventional experimental techniques. Intermolecular is betting that the same advances that delivered low-cost, higher power chips, can now be used to improve solar devices and processes and help the solar market boom again.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
How the Smart Grid Could Create a New Market for Energy Goods
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
Well, yes, but they’re also right. A future smart grid that is two-way and has an open architecture will create energy information — real-time info about customers’ energy use, the electrical load on the power grid and individual energy-consuming devices connected to it. That information can be used to both empower the customer to make smarter energy choices, and at the same time create a market to sell energy-related products and services.
CEO of home energy monitoring service maker Tendril, Adrian Tuck, put it best when he said: “The underlying premise of the smart grid is that it not only delivers power, but information. And, once this information becomes available, it has unlimited potential to enrich utility and consumer experience. We envision a world where goods, services and incentives can be offered directly to the consumer based on their very individual needs.”
No one knows exactly how big the total market for energy goods and services could be, but it could include everything from energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances to building weatherization. According to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, $178 billion was invested into making buildings more energy efficient all the way back in 2004 (their latest figures from a report in 2008), and nearly half of that (49 percent) was spent on energy-efficient appliances and electronics.
So how would such a market for energy goods work? The smart grid would connect to a home energy monitoring system, and potentially to the Internet, to connect information about energy devices and consumption. The homeowner would be alerted by the utility or third party vendor via text message, email or a smart-energy dashboard that, say, a connected washing machine is expending more energy than usual, then be presented with options for buying a new one. Because the power grid is already a network, using information technology, it can connect with already available communication networks, or connect with yet-to-be-created ones.
Such scenarios would require the installation of a lot of technology that isn’t widely available yet. But with the attention being paid recently to the smart grid, the promise of smarter energy is finally moving forward. Indeed, the U.S. stimulus package is allocating $4.4 billion directly for smart grid technology deployments.
More importantly, calls for making sure energy information is freely accessible to the customer and run over an open platform are finally being heard. That’s a key requirement for a market that would rely on energy data to sell appropriate goods: third parties need to be able to speak the same language. To that end, Google, for example, recently unveiled its PowerMeter smart energy tool.
So while some companies are already envisioning ways to use the power grid to create a market for energy products, does a regular home owner really want that? In a variety of early trials for energy management systems, some home owners have demonstrated that they don’t want to actively manage their energy consumption — either they don’t have the time, they don’t care, or their energy bills are low enough that they just automatically pay them. And they may not want their smart energy dashboard to keep urging them to spend more money on upgrading their appliances or lighting.
But like Google does with information management today, a new energy market would have to be an opt-in only system, whereby consumers can control their own data and pick and choose how it is used. (Google is emphasizing that its PowerMeter energy management tool will be opt-in only.) Ultimately there is hope that those interested in saving on their energy bill, or cutting their carbon footprint, would want to opt in and have the option to buy related energy products and services. If that proves to the case, Internet entrepreneurs will be the first ones lined up to start selling.
(Image courtesy of Tendril.)
This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.
Hear Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Cisco execs at GigaOM’s Green:Net.
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