-
1. Daily Sprout
-
2. Home Fuel Cell Maker ClearEdge Power Adds On $11M
-
3. Latest Khosla Fund Investor: Bill Gates!
-
4. Better Place Fuels Up With $350M, Focuses on 2011
-
5. Earth2Tech's Top 15 Connected Car Influencers
-
6. How Siemens Is Tackling the Smart Grid
-
7. Smart Grid 101: Utilities Are Very Risk Averse
-
8. Earth2Tech Week In Review
-
9. Carbon Offsets Come Under Fire
-
10. Navy Sets Sights on Energy Efficiency & Biofuels
Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Duke Energy Jumps for Juwi’s 14MW Solar Project: “Power company Duke Energy said its commercial business unit, Duke Energy Generation Services (DEGS), agreed to buy a 14 megawatt Blue Wing Solar Project from Juwi Solar.” — Reuters
UN’s Rajendra Pachauri Staying Put: “The chairman of the UN’s climate science body said he would not resign in the wake of a row about a mistake on glaciers that appeared in a key report.” — BBC
What to Watch for in Obama’s SOTU: Many businesses and environmental groups will watch President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Wednesday to see whether he “still has the fire in the belly for the climate issue that he had in Copenhagen, or whether he is going to back off at all." — The Hill
Beacon Power’s Flywheel Bet: Beacon Power has begun construction on a plant in New York that stores energy in flywheels. The plan is to charge grid operators for use of the battery system — a scheme that could work in New York, but faces regulatory hurdles in California. — NYT’s Green Inc.
Sun Catalytix Closes ARPA-E Funds, Adds Execs: Renewable fuels developer Sun Catalytix has hired two executives to lead the startup through its recently closed $4 million ARPA-E contract with the Department of Energy: Scott Wilshire, former president of Thar Geothermal, and Mark Barnett, former Connecticut Clean Energy Fund counsel. — Mass High Tech
Home Fuel Cell Maker ClearEdge Power Adds On $11M
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
This new funding — which comes in addition to $15 million that ClearEdge secured as part of this round in August 2009 – brings the startup’s latest round to $26 million. ClearEdge’s regulatory filing, submitted on Friday, also shows an uptick in revenue, to between $1 million and $5 million, up from the $1 million or less indicated on the August filing.
Based in Hillsboro, Ore., ClearEdge says its ClearEdge5 device converts natural gas into hydrogen, ultimately producing electricity and heat for a large home (more than 4,000 square feet) or small business, at only half the cost of typical utility rates. Smaller than a refrigerator, the device is designed to connect with natural gas lines in existing or newly constructed buildings, and it reportedly can generate up to five kilowatts of power per hour.
Rather than burning natural gas, the ClearEdge5 chemically converts it into hydrogen, which then goes through a fuel cell stack to create direct current power and heat. That electricity goes through another component to produce alternating current for the building. Heat resulting from the chemical conversion can be used for water or space heating.
All of this happens with up to 90 percent efficiency (or about 35-40 percent efficiency if you exclude the captured heat and look at electricity generation alone). VP of marketing Mike Upp told Greentech Media recently, the process produces fewer emissions than if you were burning gas at home or getting electricity from a natural gas-fired power plant. Bloom Energy’s device, Upp said, is very similar.
ClearEdge has been focusing mainly on the California market, where customers can qualify for a rebate of $2.50 per watt on fuel cell equipment — or $12,500 for a ClearEdge5 unit. It seems to be in serious ramp-up mode these days, more than tripling in size to 150 employees at the end of last year, up from just 40 in May 2009, the Portland Business Journal reports. By the end of this year, CEO Russell Ford (brought on last spring) aims to double the staff again and hit $50 million in annual sales.
As of late last month, ClearEdge had raised $55 million in venture capital. As much as 95 percent of that funding, the Business Journal noted at the time, had come from Kohlberg Ventures, while Applied Ventures and Big Basin Partners have also invested in the startup.
Latest Khosla Fund Investor: Bill Gates!
Katie Fehrenbacher - clean power
Gates tells CNET that he partly invested in the fund to get exposure to the great entrepreneurs that Khosla is backing. Gates has invested in greentech startups before, and through his fund Cascade Investments invested in algae fuel maker Sapphire Energy, and ethanol makers Pacific Ethanol (however, Cascade later slashed that stake, causing Pacific Ethanol’s stock to plummet). Gates’ Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has also awarded $120 million in grants to organizations and research partners to promote greener agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa.
Gates and Khosla actually seem to share some similar philosophies in greentech. In recent months Gates has become a prominent supporter of placing more emphasis on finding technological breakthroughs to fight climate change, over investing in efficiency measures. In his recently launched Gates Notes website, he penned an article that says:
No amount of insulation will get us there; only innovating our way to what is essentially zero carbon energy technology will do it. If we focus on just efficiency to the exclusion of innovation, or imagine that we can worry about efficiency first and worry about energy innovation later, we won't get there.
Gates got a lot of flack from the environmental community and blogosphere for what many saw as an anti-efficiency sentiment. But his ideas are similar to many of the thoughts delivered by Vinod Khosla in his speeches, and Khosla often talks about focusing only on game-changing (“black swan”) innovations that can have an effect on China and India.
Khosla’s funds also include an investment from the California pension fund CalPERs. I would bet it’s safe to say that there’s likely a lot more interesting undisclosed investors included in the $1.3 billion that Khosla Ventures has raised for greentech startups.
Image courtesy of Gates’ twitter feed.
Better Place Fuels Up With $350M, Focuses on 2011
Katie Fehrenbacher - Automotive
Better Place’s latest round will be led by HSBC Group, which will put in a whopping $125 million and will own 10 percent of the company’s shares. The round also will include new investors Morgan Stanley Investment Management, and Lazard Asset Management, and existing investors Israel Corp., VantagePoint Venture Partners, Ofer Hi-Tech Holdings, Morgan Stanley Principal Investments, and Maniv Energy Capital, among others. Better Place’s Chief Financial Officer Charles Stonehill said the funding “goes a long way toward validating and enabling,” their business model.
Better Place says it will be using the funds to continue deployments in countries where it is currently working — Israel, Denmark, Australia, and Hawaii — and also to expand into markets “in Europe and Asia.” Founder and CEO Shai Agassi (one of our Earth2Tech Top 15 Connected Car Influencers) said on a media call this morning that the company is planning to deploy between 15,000 and 20,000 charging stations for both Israel and Denmark (previously he’s also said hundreds of thousands of charging stations would be required per country).
It’s telling that Better Place is now focusing its efforts on launches in Israel and Denmark in 2011, instead of some of its previous estimates to have technology ready in late 2010 (particularly the now little talked about Bay Area network plan). Renault’s battery-swappable electric vehicle is supposed to widely available in 2011, and by then Better Place hopes to have enough infrastructure built out so that its first vehicles from the Renault car partnership will be able to operate smoothly.
Better Place is already building out electric vehicle charging points around Denmark so that the small amount of Danish EV owners can start using the chargers and sign up for the service. In December Better Place's Director of Communications in Denmark, Sara Helweg-Larsen, told us that there are currently 55 Better Place electric vehicle charging stations installed in Denmark. Agassi said on the media call that in Israel the first commercial battery swap station is undergoing extensive testing and can swap a battery in 2-minutes.
This latest funding won’t be the last capital to flow toward Better Place. As in any infrastructure-heavy play, the capital needed will be enormous. The company raised $200 million for its Israeli network and eventually plans to raise $1 billion to complete that project. For the Danish project Better Place has raised €103 million ($135.8 million) partly from state-controlled DONG Energy in the form of equity and convertible debt and plans to raise more money for that network, too. Renault is investing up to $1 billion into making electric vehicles with swappable batteries.
Earth2Tech's Top 15 Connected Car Influencers
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
A web of key players is starting to take shape as entrepreneurs and global corporations race to carve out a piece of the nascent EV market, as government agencies dole out billions of dollars to jump-start that opportunity, as big thinkers churn out innovative ideas and business models based on the intersection of information technology and advanced vehicles, and as the pressure to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles grows. Listed alphabetically, not order of importance, here's Earth2Tech's top 15 most influential people in the connected car space.
- Shai Agassi, Founder and CEO of Better Place
- George Arnold, National Coordinator for Smart Grid Interoperability, NIST
- Robin Chase, Founder and CEO of GoLoco.org and Meadow Networks
- Steven Chu, Secretary of Energy, DOE
- Mark Duvall, Director of Electric Transportation, Electric Power Research Institute
- Wan Gang, Minister of Science and Technology, China
- Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault-Nissan
- Scott Griffith, CEO and Chairman of Zipcar
- Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
- Jon Lauckner, Vice President of Global Product Planning, General Motors
- Elon Musk, CEO and Chairman of Tesla Motors
- Fumio Ohtsubo, President of Panasonic Corp.
- Danilo Santini, Senior Economist, Center for Transportation Research, Argonne National Laboratory
- Allan Schurr, Vice President of Strategy and Development for Energy & Utilities at IBM
- Jonathan Silver, Director of the DOE green car loan guarantee and loan programs
When former SAP exec Shai Agassi founded Better Place back in 2007, he had one of the most audacious business plans around: Build nationwide networks of battery charging and swap stations for electric vehicles, and sell electric mileage like minutes on a cell phone plan. In the years since, the startup has won over governments and some deep pocketed investors — and helped to put the need for innovative business models and software front and center in discussions about how to deploy large numbers of grid-connected vehicles.
Appointed last spring to lead the intensely complex task of developing standards for the smart grid, Arnold joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) after more than three decades in the telecom and IT industry (he served as a VP at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories, among other firms). Ultimately, the standards emerging from Arnold’s group will shape the basic platform needed to enable widespread adoption of plug-in vehicles and two-way flow of electricity and information between vehicles and the grid.
Robin Chase, one of GigaOM’s Top 15 Mobile Influencers, co-founded car sharing startup Zipcar back in 2000. She has since left the company, founding a new venture called GoLoco, which puts social networking to work in the service of carpooling, as well as the transportation consulting firm Meadow Networks. She’s pushing for further reinvention of mobility systems, envisioning ways to dramatically reduce emissions from the transportation sector using open standards and wireless mesh networks.
Secretary Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former administrator of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said in his confirmation hearing more than a year ago, “These first electric hybrid cars don’t have the energy capacity and the battery lifetime we need…Let’s push hard towards more fuel-efficient personal vehicles.” As energy chief, he has done just that, helping to get long-delayed funds (as well as a heap of new cash from the stimulus package) flowing out for projects across the spectrum of energy tech for connected vehicles, next-gen battery materials and smart charging systems for electric vehicles.
The non-profit Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI, is the “glue” between the utility and auto industries — that’s how CalCars.org founder Felix Kramer put it to us — and Mark Duvall is at the center of EPRI’s activities related to electric transportation and infrastructure. A mechanical engineer by training, Duvall held the post of Principal Development Engineer at the University of California, Davis Hybrid Electric Vehicle Center before joining EPRI. These days he’s focused on projects including plug-in hybrid demos, advanced battery system development, charging infrastructure, analysis of greenhouse gas emissions from plug-in vehicle tech.
Since taking the helm of China’s Science and Technology Ministry in April 2007, former Audi engineer Wan Gang has helped lead the country’s charge to “leapfrog” the world’s leading automakers when it comes to hybrid and electric vehicles.
For several years starting in 2000, Wan coordinated through Tongji University a nationwide research program for electric (and hydrogen) vehicle technology development. And last spring, when Wan and other top officials outlined incentives and policies designed to make China the world’s largest electric car producer, he explained the move as a key component of the country’s environmental goals — and competitiveness on international markets.
"We are convinced that the mass availability of affordable zero-emission vehicles is the most significant breakthrough our industry could deliver," Ghosn (on our GigaOM Pro list of Green IT Winners and Losers of 2009, sub. req’d) proclaimed in mid-2008, "and, together with Renault, Nissan intends to be the breakthrough leader.”
The French-Japanese alliance’s first battery electric vehicle, the LEAF — equipped with an onboard transmitting unit connected through mobile networks to a global data center — won’t launch until later this year. But Ghosn’s strategy may provide cues for other automakers. Under his direction, Renault-Nissan has directed a pile of cash into the technology, partnered with battery makers as well as utilities and started looking at battery leasing and recycling as keys to affordable electric cars.
Few companies have done as much to put the notion of networked vehicles into practice at the scale and speed of Zipcar, the world's largest car-sharing network. Griffith, who took on the chief executive role in 2003, has steered the company through a 2007 merger with top competitor Flexcar, overseas expansion, the launch of a software-as-service business unit (for fleet management) and to the company’s current status as the world’s largest car sharing network, with an initial public offering reportedly in sight.
Griffith has told us that while the company doesn’t plan to go all-electric anytime soon, he sees Zipcar as "a terrific early platform" for electric vehicles. After all, the startup has a few things electric automakers, utilities and charging infrastructure companies need: a large consumer fleet and mass of data about driving patterns and vehicle status. Each car in the Zipcar fleet has a custom circuit board, processor, and modem that receive data over AT&T’s wireless network and allow remote monitoring. (See “Location-Based Services: From Mobile to Mobility,” on GigaOM Pro, sub. req’d).
“When it comes to the auto industry, the EPA apparently is the Emissions Permissions Agency,” Jackson said, back in 2007, of the agency she would later come to lead. The EPA under the leadership of Jackson (and the Obama administration), however, has changed course. In December 2009 the EPA issued a ruling that greenhouse gases endanger human health, paving the way to the first regulation of emissions from vehicles and other sources by the EPA.
In addition to helping to shape the regulatory environment for lower-emission and more fuel efficient vehicles, Jackson’s EPA is developing a new system for plug-in vehicle fuel economy ratings– already shaping up to be a competitive marketing point for electric car makers.
Lauckner’s a company man — he’s been at General Motors since 1979. Appointed to VP of global program management in 2005, Lauckner is credited as one of the founding fathers (along with Vice Chairman Bob Lutz) of the extended-range electric Chevy Volt, due out later this year, and he has overseen its development. The vehicle – intended to help restore GM’s image as a technological leader — represents one of the first serious attempts by the Big Three to launch a plug-in vehicle for the consumer market (after the EV-1), and the automaker has reportedly invested a billion dollars or more on the project. As Lauckner said in an interview with BNET, “Whether you are a supporter of the Volt or not, you have to acknowledge that it has changed the conversation.”
For all its delays, detours, financial hurdles and legal distractions, startup Tesla Motors has stuck around for seven years, launching in 2008 what’s still the only highway-capable all-electric vehicle in the country: the high-end Roadster sports car, which deserves more than a little credit for changing public perception of electric vehicles.
Musk invested in the startup early on, and took over the chief executive role in late 2008. Last year, the company won a federal vote of confidence when it snagged one of the first conditional loan commitments under the DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program to help Tesla deliver a long-promised mid-range electric sedan.
Already Toyota’s joint venture partner for hybrid battery production, Panasonic has embarked on a campaign to bolster its energy storage business and become a heavyweight player in the world of electric cars. As of early January (when Tesla announced a development deal with the electronics giant), Panasonic was around the halfway point in what it expects to be a $1 billion investment over three years in facilities for lithium-ion cell research, development and production.
Late last year, it bought a controlling stake in Sanyo, the world’s largest rechargeable battery maker. And as a result of the move, the company is poised to be at the leading edge of an industry shakeup, analysts told Bloomberg, in which “the auto and electronics industries fuse,” and Panasonic/Sanyo’s dominance gives it “more bargaining power” over car companies as they develop electric vehicles. The firm also has a role to play beyond batteries when it comes to connected cars: Panasonic unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year an HD-PLC system (High Definition Powerline Communications) meant to enable integration of electric vehicle data into a home network via standard outlets.
Santini has served since 2001 as the Department of Energy’s primary technical representative for the U.S. to the International Energy Agency Implementing Agreement on Hybrid and Electric Vehicles. He’s worked for more than 35 years at the Argonne National Laboratory — where energy storage is one of three core research areas, and which often licenses tech to corporations – focusing for the most part on energy and environmental tech. When policymakers or business leaders face decisions related to batteries, plug-in vehicles and hybrids, Santini’s numbers offer a widely respected point of reference — he’s written or contributed to more than 150 reports, articles and conference papers.
A veteran of the utility and meter industries (he held posts at both PG&E and Itron), Schurr is now responsible for computing giant IBM’s market strategy, regulatory policy and partnerships with global utilities. He also heads up the firm’s involvement with smart grid legislation, and its work with automakers, researchers and utilities that are building out the smart grid and readying for an influx of demand from plug-in vehicles. For IBM, a spokesperson put it simply to us, “anything EV-related” basically goes through Schurr.
The Obama administration named Silver, a former venture capitalist with Washington, D.C.-based Core Capital Partners, to head up the Department of Energy's highly competitive loan guarantee program and green car loan program in November 2009. His task? Overseeing the application process, analysis and negotiation for loans and guarantees, as well as staffing — and working to streamline the agency’s operations. At the head of a program that will pick winners and losers in the electric car race, Silver is kingmaker in chief (at least for the short term: see “How EV Battery Startups Can Cross the Valley of Death,” on GigaOM Pro, sub. req’d).
Photos: Danilo Santini courtesy of Iowa State University; Elon Musk courtesy of Flickr user jurvetson; Allan Schurr courtesy of U.S. House of Representatives; Robin Chase credit robinchase.org; all others courtesy of the companies or agencies.
How Siemens Is Tackling the Smart Grid
Jeff St. John - Green IT
So how exactly does Siemens plan to generate all that money? Well, as with fellow giant energy conglomerate General Electric, it's sometimes easier to point to what Siemens is not doing than what it is doing in industries where it has a broad and sprawling interest. Here are our takeaways for what Siemens is, and isn't, doing for the smart grid.
1). Concentrating on end-to-end network infrastructure: Siemens is one of the few corporations out there that can lay claim to almost every share of the world's current grid infrastructure, building everything from gas and wind turbines to high-voltage transmission cables to sensors and controls that monitor and manage the delivery of power to homes and businesses.
The company is taking a similar approach for the smart grid. Right now the company is working on transmission grid sensors and controls, as well as high-voltage direct current transmission lines that can carry power from massive offshore wind farms like the London Array or for other specialty applications, such as an underwater cable project it is building to carry power across the San Francisco Bay. Beyond the physical infrastructure of transmission, Siemens has also developed an open platform to manage the wholesale sale and delivery of power between utilities and grid operators (see Greentech Media).
Farther down into the distribution grid — the network of lower-voltage lines that carry power from substations into neighborhoods and to individual businesses and homes — Siemens is doing a number of projects with utilities including Texas' Oncor, New York's Consolidated Edison and New England's Northeast Utilities. These projects combine grid sensors and control systems with communications and back-end software to manage it all.
2). Providing software to unify the pieces of the smart grid puzzle: One of Siemens' most recent smart grid projects — a stimulus-funded distribution automation system being built for Kansas City Power & Light — helps highlight Siemens' software-centric approach. There are a confusing array of different equipment, networking and other technology vendors supplying products for such projects, but Siemens would like to make sure it can provide utilities with a few key pieces of software to manage them all, Dave Pacyna, senior vice president of Siemens Energy's North American transmission and distribution division, told us in an interview this week.
"The more time goes on, the more we're convinced that all these applications being talked about — like demand response programs, like fault location services and applications, like microgrid control and operation — all these kinds of things are ultimately going to be most efficiently deployed when they can come through one or two common software platforms," Pacyna said. Siemens already makes software to manage the complex network of transmission and distribution assets.
3). Find partners that can help fill in the gaps: Because Siemens is so large and has so many broad smart grid offerings, it needs to partner with some of the smaller firms to deliver the most advanced technology across the network. Pacyna told us he sees managing smart meter data as a key software platform for the smart grid, but Siemens doesn’t make that kind of software. Instead, Siemens is relying on eMeter, a well-funded startup with several large-scale contracts to help utilities manage their millions of new smart meters. Siemens also led a $12.5 million investment in eMeter in 2008, and the two are now involved in several meter data management projects with European utilities.
Siemens recently announced a smart grid partnership and investment in BPL Global, a maker of smart distribution grid systems. Siemens will be using BPL’s technology to control distributed generation resources like rooftop solar panels, as well as allow utilities to directly power down loads at customers' premises to better balance the grid's flow of electricity.
Siemens is also working with startup Viridity Energy to combine Siemens' decentralized energy management system with Viridity's system for managing "virtual power plants," a collection of loads and distributed generation resources at office parks, university campuses or other discrete entities. While Siemens has a thriving building energy management business, it hasn't yet linked those technologies with its smart grid network management systems in a comprehensive way, and BPL and Viridity's capabilities could be seen as ways to bridge that gap.
4). The smart meter is not the linchpin of the smart grid: Unlike GE, which has built up a substantial smart meter business, Siemens sold off its metering business to a private equity firm about seven years ago, and the business unit's technology ended up as part of Landis+Gyr. Perhaps that's why Siemens has de-emphasized the role of the smart meter in its smart grid literature, relegating its function to the term "intelligent billing" in comparison to the "Grid Intelligence" rubric it assigns to grid infrastructure and controls.
Rather than compete in the wholesale smart meter business, Siemens has partnered with Landis+Gyr to develop common standards to ensure their systems are interoperable, as well as with smart meter networking providers such as Silver Spring Networks. But as far as the meter's role in the broader smart grid, "We would agree that while the smart meter is an important enabler to what most people want to achieve, it's nothing more than an enabler," Pacyna said.
However, Siemens does have a small smart metering business, called Automated Metering and Information System, or AMIS. Based on technology from VA Tech, an Austrian company Siemens bought in 2005, it's being tested out by Austrian utility Energie AG in a 1,000-household pilot project which could grow to up to 400,000 customers by 2014. But Pacyna told us that Siemens has no plans to deploy or market the AMIS smart meter solution beyond its current narrow focus in Central Europe.
Image courtesy of Siemens.
Smart Grid 101: Utilities Are Very Risk Averse
Katie Fehrenbacher - smart grid
“There is very little tolerance for problems in this [the energy] industry. You need to understand this beast if you are going to work in the industry.” said Pramaggiore. Three-mile island single-handedly stalled nuclear power, and an issue like the one in Bakersfield (where residents in the region in California ended up suing PG&E last year over heightened rates that they claimed were due to smart meters) can send shock waves through the industry, said Pramaggiore.
Bakersfield and Three Mile Island, of course are very different, but, any appearance of a problem with the smart grid rollout and it will have serious effects on the way utilities react. “We have to get this [the smart grid rollout] right early on,” insisted Pramaggiore.
Scott Lang, the CEO of Silver Spring Networks, who also participated on the panel, had a similar sentiment to Pramaggiore and said the industry needs to make sure that the early rollouts of the smart grid are flawless. Bakersfield was “a perfect storm,” said Lang. We installed the smart meters at the same time as a customer care program had just expired in the area, a new rate case had recently hit the area, and the region experienced an unusually warm period of weather, said Lang, who’s infrastructure technology was installed in Bakersfield. The meters are accurate, we’ve done testing,” added Lang.
One reason for the differences in the tolerance for risk between telecom/Internet and energy industries, is that the stakes can be a lot higher for energy than for communications. If your calls drop periodically, web and mobile services don’t work as advertised, or your Internet connection goes out for a day, it’s really irritating but not necessarily life threatening (GPS for 911 calls not included). But say your heat or electricity goes out for many days, or there’s a dangerous electrical mistake or glitch, that can be a lot more serious.
In addition in the Internet industry in particular, but also for telecom, there’s a history of building new products and innovations that are market risks. Google is the classic example — Google's energy guru Bill Weihl told the New York Times recently that “[I]f you don't say five years later, "We never should have done that" about a significant percentage of it [company projects], then you're being way too conservative.” That statement would never be uttered by a utility executive.
Finally, most utilities are regulated and can’t make big decisions without getting the approval of, and justifying their actions to, their public utility commissions. It just naturally makes building out network infrastructure that much slower and more conservative. That’s also why utilities often times prefer to work with large companies as opposed to small startups. As Pramaggiore put it, that’s just the nature of the animal, so companies looking to sell into the new smart grid market, better be prepared.
Image courtesy of Ian Muttoo’s photostream Flickr Creative Commons.
Earth2Tech Week In Review
Katie Fehrenbacher - Misc
How the FCC Will Promote Open Smart Grid Networks & Real Time Energy Data: Here’s the first glimpse into how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will work with and oversee the smart grid industry.
Why the Power Buildout Will Mirror Cell Phones in Developing Nations: Will developing countries that have not yet built out the power grid to much of their population completely skip the traditional power infrastructure and turn directly to distributed solar for power generation? Several analysts and executives recently have told me "yes," and it'll happen sooner than we think.
Vinod Khosla Boosted Funds to Over $1B: According to filings this week Khosla Ventures has upped the size of its new funds, a large portion of which will go to cleantech, to a total of $1.3 billion, from a previous announced total of $1 billion.
Why The Consumer Will Be King of Home Energy Management in 2010: If 2009 was the year that the smart grid became a hot buzz word and utilities first started to look into energy management devices for their customers, 2010 will be all about how to tackle the emergence of the consumer energy management market.
After DOE Nod, a Long Road Ahead for Green Car Startups: When the DOE makes a conditional loan commitment under its Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program — as it has to five companies in the last several months, including plug-in vehicle startups Tesla Motors and Fisker Automotive — it represents just one of many milestones for these companies as they race to bring greener cars to market in large numbers.
How Weather Data Could Be the Next Location Data: Location data is commonly used in the mobile and web industries as a way to provide context for services, and as an underlying platform for new applications. In a similar way I think weather data could provide a platform for some very important next generation services and applications, particularly when it comes to energy efficiency.
Carbon Offsets Come Under Fire
Justin Moresco - Carbon Markets
The industry to generate and then verify carbon offsets has exploded in recent years largely because of the Kyoto treaty, which established national limits on emissions. The treaty allows regulated companies to purchase credits produced from these offset projects to meet a portion of their emissions-reductions targets set by the international program. More than 300 million credits, each representing the equivalent of one metric ton of carbon dioxide, have so far been generated, and these credits can then be traded on commodities markets. Shapiro says up to 2 billion new credits could be drawn from offset projects if a cap-and-trade program similar to the proposals now before Congress were to become reality.
Shapiro, who traveled to Brazil and Europe and interviewed a legion of experts to write this piece, argues that the system is fraught with pitfalls, from grossly inaccurate readings on the emissions reduced by projects to conflicts of interest from the third-party firms hired to "verify" offsets. A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Policy reportedly found that just 60 percent of the projects it looked at actually provided evidence that they were reliable. Shapiro calls the market for credits produced by offset projects "an elaborate shell game, a disappearing act that nicely serves the immediate interests of the world's governments but fails to meet the challenges of our looming environmental crisis."
Other writers have taken their shots at the offset market, including those at BusinessWeek and the Financial Times. UK-based environmental journalist George Monbiot has likened the industry to selling indulgences and called offsets an excuse for business as usual. But Shapiro's warning comes at a crucial time, as Congress is expected to start debating national climate legislation again later this year.
The offsets allowed under current cap-and-trade proposals in Congress would be far broader and complex than those now traded in Europe and created under the Kyoto regime, according to Shapiro. He points to provisions allowing offsets from reductions in greenhouse gas-intensive farming practices and the preservation of forests as two examples of new classes of "carbon promises" with measurement and accountability challenges.
In theory, allowing for the creation of credits from offsets has benefits – incentivizing businesses and individuals to invest in carbon-reducing projects that otherwise wouldn't have occurred and transferring technology to poorer countries, say through a project that replaces kerosene lamps with solar-powered lights. But if a reliable system can't be established to verify real offsets, then the idea should be phased out. A robust and effective cap-and-trade program could be implemented without offsets – large emitters bid each year for a gradually declining number of allowances, or credits, sold by the government and those that end up needing fewer than they bought can sell them to those that require more. Killing cap and trade because of the offset problem would be like cutting off an arm because of a broken finger.
Image courtesy The Library of Congress via Flickr.
Navy Sets Sights on Energy Efficiency & Biofuels
Josie Garthwaite - Energy
The Navy, which has delivered funding and partnerships to startups including Ocean Power Tech (for testing and an advanced version of the firm’s PowerBuoy) and Widetronix (for silicon-carbide based wafer tech used in electronic devices), pledged recently in a separate announcement to consider the energy efficiency and “energy footprint,” among other factors, when awarding contracts, and the department reiterated that plan Thursday.
Joining hands with the USDA this week, the Navy’s stated efforts to “reduce reliance on fossil fuels from volatile areas of the world” (and slash the number of dangerous trips required to transport fuel on the battlefield), now has a stronger biofuels component.
Under the new agreement, the departments say they will share “technical, program management and financial expertise,” noting several USDA initiatives focused on loans, grants and other support for biomass energy crop producers, businesses adopting energy efficiency improvements and developers of new types of feedstocks.
The prospect of more government funding has to come as welcome news for the struggling biofuels sector (see our biofuel deathwatch map). As Lux Research put it in the middle of last year, the industry "has plunged over a cliff amidst rancorous debate over its near-negligible carbon mitigation, competition for arable land, and poor economics."
But as Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus suggested at the Pentagon yesterday, the military could be a major customer. During the signing ceremony for the new partnership, he noted that the military accounts for as much as 90 percent of energy used by the government, which in turn makes up 2 percent of the entire country’s energy use. As a result, he said, ”Changing the Navy’s pattern of energy consumption and our sources of power, and working with Agriculture to support renewable energy and biofuel projects around the country, we can and we will have a broad and measureable impact on the national energy landscape.”
Photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment