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1. Trash to Fuel: Enerkem Lands $51.5M Led by Waste Management
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2. LIVE: The Bloom Energy Unveiling Event!
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3. Microgrids: Utility vs. Private Ownership
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4. Net Metering to Shine on in New York, California
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5. CFX Battery Pulls in $14.2M, Plans to Ship By Year's End
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6. Microsoft Hohm to Connect with Devices this Summer, One Day Offer Its Own?
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7. Chevron Jumps Into Concentrating PV Solar, Courtesy of Concentrix
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8. General Compression Pumps in $17M for Fuel-free Air Energy Storage
Trash to Fuel: Enerkem Lands $51.5M Led by Waste Management
Jeff St. John - Uncategorized
Cellulosic ethanol startup Enerkem needs trash and money. Massive trash company Waste Management has lots of both. The two said Wednesday that they've gotten together, with Waste Management making a strategic investment in the Montreal-based company as part of a 53.8 million Canadian dollars ($51.5 million) investment with fellow new investor Cycle Capital and previous investors Rho Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures and BDR Capital. That's on top of about 30 million Canadian dollars (about $24.48 million) in previous venture backing, according to the Cleantech Group.
Enerkem told us in January that it was looking for more money to build a second plant to turn trash into ethanol. Looks like they didn't have to search very long — not bad, considering the gloomy climate for raising capital for big projects. The company's core technology is centered on gasifying various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turning the syngas into various fuels.
Its first facility, in Westbury, Ontario, has now operated for about 1,000 hours since it started up in late 2009, and expects to produce about 1.5 million gallons per year of methanol from old telephone poles, with ethanol next on the list of biofuels to produce. The company's thermochemical trash-to-syngas process is only half of the equation — making the syngas into usable liquid fuel is another important test to pass. Other companies want to turn trash into syngas, using various methods and aimed at various end uses — examples include Coskata and Ze-Gen.
Enerkem's Wednesday fundraising is aimed at a second plant, which is expected to cost $70 million and could crank out about 10 million gallons of ethanol per year. It's being built with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada's largest ethanol producer, right next to an Edmonton, Alberta municipal composting facility. The idea is to gasify municipal waste that can't be composted — paper, textiles, plastics, fibers and the like — and turn that syngas into ethanol. Having deep-pocketed partners will be important for biofuel technology startups, analysts agree, given the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to build and operate fuel refineries.
Enerkem isn't limiting its sights to Canada. In March it said it was eyeing a 20 million gallon per year, $200 million plant in Pontotoc, Miss., again adjacent to a municipal waste dump. In December it got news of a $50 million Department of Energy grant for its U.S. subsidiary, Enerkem Corp. to help those plans along.
Houston-based Waste Management, of course, would love to find more ways to turn trash into money. Its Wheelabrator Technologies subsidiary is burning about 7 million tons of waste per year into about 836 megawatts of electricity, and its other landfill gas-fired power projects now generate enough electricity to power about 160,000 homes.
Burning methane — natural gas by another name — to generate electricity is nice, but turning it into a shippable transportation fuel could expand the markets for the byproduct of rotting garbage that also happens to be a very potent greenhouse gas. Waste Management has also invested in Texas A&M spinout Terrabon, along with oil refining giant Valero (pdf), and is working with global gases company Linde to turn landfill gas into about 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas per year to fuel its trucks. The company wants to double its renewable energy production and triple the amount of recyclables processed by 2020.
LIVE: The Bloom Energy Unveiling Event!
Katie Fehrenbacher - clean power
8:45AM: The event started late, and now Bloom’s showing a cheesy video about “realizing dreams.”
Founder K.R. Sridhar takes the stage and introduces California Governor Schwarzenegger.
Schwarzenegger: “I like hanging out with this guy (Sridhar) because then I’m not the only guy with an accent.” I was here at Bloom in 2006 with Mayor Bloomberg. The spirit, the optimism, the daring is part of California. Now the greentech capital of the world. Bloom’s fuel cell technology has potential to revolutionize the energy industry. Power is 60 percent cleaner than coal fired power plant. Don’t need transmission lines. This eBay campus has been powered by 5 Bloom boxes since July. A wave of innovation is washing over the state of California. We need “jobs, jobs, jobs.”
8:58AM: Sridhar takes the stage again.
“It started on Mars.” The thought of handing our children a broken planet is not what I thought we should do. 2 billion people don’t have affordable access to energy. You can’t conserve your way out of this probelm, you can’t drill or mine or burn your way out of this problem. We simply have to find a different way. We saw this as a call to our generation to make an impact. An impact that can do good and make good. The world needs accessible, affordable energy that is sustainable.
Why don’t we follow examples of success: computing — provided access in places we never dreamed 20 years ago — cell phones — you can go to a tiny village and everyone has cell phones. To wireless spread needed to be distributed and also reliable and affordable. Is that bar sufficient for energy? No. The bar is slightly higher. That bar is clean. It also had to be clean. Why clean? When you take a power plant that is hundreds of miles away putting out dirty emissions, either the dirty emissions have to go to you have to go. For energy to be distributed it had to be clean. That was our calling and we at Bloom had to play a part in that.
In the Valley companies are founded with a technology, a product, and what markets can I serve. This company was founded on we saw the problem and thought what is the product that will deliver this? The need for backyard power to be clean is a centuries old idea — we just have to go back to it. Distributed electricity — Thomas Edison had this idea. He was way before his time. The fuel cell. Yes folks, we did not invent the fuel cell — 1830s.
9:10: The core of our technology. The core of our technology simply is sand — available in plenty, on multiple continents on ocean beaches. From this sand you get zirconium oxide. Shows off flat piece of sand. We take this material and do a process we call “powder to powder.” We use mass manufacturing techniques that the semiconductor industry developed a long time ago. The uniqueness of this 4 things: affordable, the kind of fuels that we can use, we can both use as energy reducing and energy storage device, and electricity performance efficiency. No precious metals, no acids. We can use a variety of fuels, without the need for chemical plants that are complex.
In a few years how we will use it is to home energy server of the future. It simply has a solar panel and one of our Bloom Home Energy servers. Together it will give you electricity day and night and also charge your automobile. This is a product of the future — a decade or there abouts.
Twice as efficient as U.S. grid. Need half the fuel of grid. Half traditional fuels. If you use a carbon-friendly fuel you’re neutral. Isn’t that wonderful? This is 24-hour power – not when the sun shines and the wind blow. That’s how this simple piece of sand is different from others. Think of the stack as a chip. Take a bunch of the stacks, put together in a box, about the size of a refrigerator and its about the size of powering a small coffee shop.
We didn’t want to talk about a technology that so many had tried before until we had products and test points. It took 8 years and $400 million to test and make sure the fuel cell worked and get results from the customers. This is a day I’ve been looking forward to a very long time.
9:30 John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins partner and Bloom investor, takes the stage.
Doerr: This is like the IPO of Google. Introduces a panel of customers.
eBay’s CEO John Donahoe: This is a good day for Bloom but also for cleantech. We literally ran into Bloom when we were halfway through . Bloom powers 15 percent of the energy of this campus. KR and the team did everything they said they would do. Our employees love to be the beta customer for this.
Wal-Mart COO Bill Simon: We aspire to power our units with 100 percent renewable energy and reduce our carbon footprint. It has to be profitable first and foremost. We also need scale. So the ability for us to take innovation of this sort is what our business model is.
Rob Carter, CIO and EVP Fed-Ex: Installed Bloom box in Oakland Fed-Ex hub. We met them moving stuff around in the early days of the company. We’ve got a 5 kw array to match the Bloom box so we can take it almost completely off the grid.
Brian Kelley, Coca-Cola: One of aggressive goals is to have measured our carbon footprint in 2004 and have same carbon footprint as 2015 — even with growth. We decided to put a Bloom box at our Odwalla juice plant and power 1/3 of the plant.
Jim Kennedy, Cox Enterprises: Solar makes good financial sense for us, and when we heard about Bloom we thought this is too good to be true. And we decided to try. We installed 4 units at KTVU in San Francisco. It’s been working for over a month now. Powers 70 percent of the facility and we can do it cheaper.
Larry Page, Google: First customer at Bloom. I was surprised. Our facilities manager said oh theres some fuel cells generating electricity. I didn’t have to know about it. We didnt have to call the mayor, etc, which we have to do for some other renewables. People thought they were transformers. They were easy to deploy. That’s the beauty of this product. Distributed power is a big deal. I’m a big supporter of this. Id love to see us having an entire datacenter running on this some day.
10:00AM: General Colin Powell — Kleiner limited partner, and Bloom board member, takes the stage (these are some notes):
This is a breakthrough product. I was looking for what next to do and John Doerr said why don’t you come and see whats going on with Kleiner Perkins. Five years ago I first visited Bloom in a garage. Bloom is exciting because this can help people move up in the middle class — in China they are building out massive amounts of power — clean and dirty — and they want to buy things that consumer energy. I see this (Bloom) also in rural African villages and in homes. My wife keeps complaining that I won’t buy a backup diesel generator – I said honey just wait for a Bloom box (joke).
Over the years I’ve been very excited to work with Bloom, sometimes I give KR lectures — I’m still a general. But I am excited to be out of hiding. We’re not hiding anymore.
Bloom previously announced some large tech company customers like eBay (the unveiling event is being held at eBay’s campus), Google, Wal-Mart, Fed-Ex, and Staples, but Bloom says in the press release material this morning that it has some other impressive customers including Bank of America (a BAC), The Coca-Cola Company, and Cox Enterprises. Other stats from the press release materials is: “each Bloom Energy Server provides 100 kilowatts (kW) of electricity,” and “customers typically expect a 3-5 year payback on their investment from the energy cost savings.” Other math on the Bloom Box return on investment from the Oil Drum puts the ROI more at 15 years (perhaps 3 to 5 years is with the state subsidy).
Bloom says in its press release material that its fuel cell is different than previous hydrogen fuel cells in four ways:
- Lower cost materials
- “Unmatched efficiency in converting fuel to electricity”
- Has the ability to run on a wide range of renewable or traditional fuels
- More easily deployed and maintained
Images of the Bloom Boxes below:
Microgrids: Utility vs. Private Ownership
Jeff St. John - smart grid
Most microgrids of the future won't be making and storing enough power to be grid-independent all of the time. Instead, microgrids will maintain a constant and complex relationship with the utility — buying power at some times, selling it back at others, either disconnecting from the grid to avoid a power outage or reconnecting to help the grid balance its way through instabilities, depending on the circumstances. So a central question for the future of microgrids is what will the relationship be with utilities — will it be utilities, or their customers, that pay for them and control them?
"I don't think it's even close to being baked out yet, as to what those relationships will look like," Pacyna said in a recent interview. But Siemens, a major player in the smart grid, does appear to be making some bets. For example, the German engineering giant is working with BPL Global to link up its utility-controlled distributed generation and demand response devices in homes and other buildings in a microgrid-like fashion — and BPL is "fully focused on the theory that all of their capabilities are basically designed to be utility-sponsored and utility-driven," he said.
Some of the first working examples of a microgrid have been installed by American Electric Power, which wants to own and operate them to help communities prone to loss of grid power and avoid building new transmission lines. And most of the microgrid projects currently underway are being led by utilities.
On the other hand, Siemens is also working with Viridity Energy, a startup that makes software to manage microgrids and has projects underway in New York and Philadelphia. Viridity Energy's CEO, Audrey Zibelman, places herself firmly on the customer side of the microgrid debate.
Zibelman’s idea of an effective microgrid is based on the premise that the customer owns the resource and maximizes its value by selling self-generated power — or "negawatts" of reduced power demand — into more and more markets that have traditionally been the domain of utilities and their big power plant partners. The more money microgrids can make that way, the faster they'll be built, and that should help the utilities with grid stability and integrating distributed generation sources like rooftop solar panels into their renewable energy goals.
But not if the utilities get in the way. "I think the model for the industry can't be one that says it's exclusively the utility's domain to develop these microgrids," she said in a February interview. "I just don't see where utilities that want to operate microgrids for stability will be as aware of the economic benefits to the customer." To be sure, it's not that she's advocating an adversarial relationship between utilities and their microgrid customers, but instead likens the relationship to telecom customers, as in, "They don't want the telephone company to tell them what kind of cell phone they can buy."
Indeed, the evolving relationship between utilities and their customers could be likened to the changes that have come to the telecommunications industry since the breakup of Ma Bell. The Galvin Electricity Initiative, which is leading a Department of Energy grant-backed microgrid project at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology, sees microgrids as a path toward what it calls a "consumer-driven electric power system," one in which every customer has full access to open markets for power that's priced dynamically, and every community has the right to an electricity distribution system that meets its needs.
In some cases, microgrids are being planned alongside communities' efforts to gain energy independence from their utility. Take Marin County, which has created Marin Clean Energy, a "community choice aggregation" (CCA) public power entity allowed under California law to buy and sell electricity from wholesale power markets on behalf of residents in place of their local utility, in this case Pacific Gas & Electric. Marin County is also hosting a microgrid demonstration project linking five municipal buildings, featuring software from Boulder, Colo.-based Infotility and backing from DOE and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
The idea, according to Infotility, is to scale up the microgrid model to eventually "enable utilities and communities to manage distributed renewable energy supplies such as solar and wind as conventional grid assets, as a foundation and reliable part of their energy portfolio" — a future that sounds pretty close to that envisioned by smart grid proponents. But in this instance, utility-community conflict is already built in — PG&E is the sole backer of a California ballot measure that would amend the state's constitution to require a difficult to obtain two-thirds vote for citizens to form a CCA, a move that has drawn the ire of backers of public power, including the Galvin Electricity Initiative's executive director, Kurt Yaeger.
Image courtesy of NREL Solar Decathlon 2009's photostream Flickr Creative Commons.
Net Metering to Shine on in New York, California
Jennifer Kho - Policy
With net metering, as the arrangement is called, customers pay only for their net electricity usage. Their meters run forward when they are using more electricity than they are producing and run backward when they are producing more electricity than they are using. The absence of net metering could cut out much of the economic benefit of building solar systems, at least in places without other financial incentives, such as a feed-in tariff.
In California, the solar installation industry faced the possibility of suffering from a lack of effective net metering rules up until last week. Utilities in the state were limited to accepting only up to 2.5 percent of their electricity from net-metering customers, and one utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, is expected to reach that amount this year. Last year, Adam Browning, the executive director of Vote Solar, said installations would “grind to a halt” in PG&E territory if the net-metering cap wasn’t raised. And Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who wrote the bill to raise the cap, called net metering “absolutely fundamental” to the success of solar in the state.
The California Assembly last Thursday approved a plan to double the cap to 5 percent, a move which the Senate had already passed the previous week. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign the bill into law this week. The extension “sends a clear signal to the growing solar industry that California intends to be open for business tomorrow and for years to come,” said Sara Birmingham, western policy director for the Solar Alliance, in a press release.
Meanwhile, net metering advocates in New York are cheering after the state legislature on Tuesday passed an amendment that will allow non-residential customers to participate in the the state’s net metering program. When the state extended its net metering program in 2008, it turned out that the wording of the law inadvertently restricted the program to residential customers.
New York’s new amendment will allow schools, businesses and other energy consumers with systems of 2 MW or less to be able to get credit for feeding solar power into the grid. "The amendment passed today means the expanded net metering law will finally function as it was meant to and that millions of dollars in green energy systems can be installed,” said Carol E. Murphy, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York.
Vote Solar didn’t immediately have estimates on the expected size of the non-residential market for these small systems. But Rosalind Jackson, director of communications at the advocacy group, said that even if the implications of the amendment are modest in today’s market, it could help support significant growth in the years to come.
Overall, the two net metering wins are part of a trend toward net metering around the country. According to a Vote Solar report released in November, 27 states have solid net-metering standards (which received A or B grades from the group), up from 13 in 2007.
That’s not to say the policy hasn’t had its share of opposition. Opponents, including some electrical and utility workers, have expressed concern that more net metering could reduce the stability of the grid and raise costs for other customers. Other solar advocates favor other policies, such as German-style feed-in tariffs, in which solar customers sell power directly to utilities, instead of net metering, while still others want both.
Image courtesy of SolarCity.
CFX Battery Pulls in $14.2M, Plans to Ship By Year's End
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
Fisher told us in an interview that the company plans to turn on its initial production line by April, with plans to churn out hundreds of prototype battery cells each day in the short term. In the second or third quarter of this year CFX plans to ramp up to more than 30,000 per day, and by year’s end the company hopes to start shipping to customers.
Co-founded in 2007 by Rachid Yazami, research director of France's National Center for Scientific Research, Caltech professor Robert H. Grubbs and French chemist Andrew Hamwi, CFX Battery is working with technology developed at Caltech to produce prismatic (flat), cylindrical, thin-film and coin battery cells.
As part of this year’s planned ramp-up, CFX (one of our 20 Battery Startups Hitting the Road with Lithium-ion) expects to grow its team to 50 people over the next four months, up from just 26 today and only seven people a year ago. Fisher anticipates half of the new hires will be engineers and lab technicians, and the other half will work on production.
Today’s announcement comes nearly six months after CFX Battery announced the first $5 million of this round, and it brings the startup’s total financing to nearly $30 million. According to Fisher, the startup’s current funding will see CFX through the middle of 2011, when it then expects to seek additional financing.
Already, Fisher told us CFX has a “major effort is under way” pursuing government funds from a range of sources, including grants and loans at the state and federal level, military projects, and programs funded by the Department of Energy, DARPA and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).
“We purposely didn’t go after a lot of the auto funding opportunities,” said Fisher, notably the battery grant program. “We didn’t want to take our eye off the ball,” he said. Many of the smaller, venture backed startups that applied for funding under the program, and were disappointed to see big grants go to some of the industry’s heavyweights, “really were only dreaming,” said Fisher.
CFX business development chief Eric Lind explained some of the earliest markets for CFX tech will likely be niche transportation applications, like tire pressure monitoring, and specialty applications like custom RFID cards and displays. Potential customers in the consumer electronics and defense sectors have also expressed interest, he said.
This plan is consistent with what CFX has described in the past: focusing first on building "primary" lithium batteries, which can't be recharged, gaining a foothold in established markets, and then reinvesting the revenue into the company's rechargeable battery work for applications including electric cars, as well as mobile phones and laptops.
In March, CFX plans to reveal some more information about “why our tech is different from all the other stuff that’s out there,” said Lind, which could involve a partnership or two, he added.
CFX hopes to “play” in the automotive, as well as the smart grid, market “eventually,” said Fisher, but it’s targeting lower-hanging fruit to start. ”We’ll let the big guys fight it out on the smart grid and auto, and hype it,” he said. “In the meantime, we’ll go after smaller, more profitable niches.”
Microsoft Hohm to Connect with Devices this Summer, One Day Offer Its...
Katie Fehrenbacher - Green IT
That timeline means that about a year after Microsoft officially launched Hohm to the public, consumers will likely be able to get more granular and real-time data off of in-home devices. Google took about the same amount of time between when it first launched its online energy tool PowerMeter and it announced its first energy device partners.
Batterberry, who is speaking at our Green:Net conference on April 29 in San Francisco, tells us that connecting with third party device makers is part of “phase 2″ for Hohm. Phase 1 was launching the consumer-facing web portal and connecting the site with utility data — so far Hohm has officially announced partnerships with 4 utilities, but Batterberry says more are in the pipeline. Phase 2 is connecting Hohm to devices, including smart plugs, connected thermostats, smart meters and even electric vehicles, and Microsoft already has strategic partnerships with smart meter makers Itron and Landis + Gyr.
Phase 3 of Hohm is opening up the platform to utilities to enable them to have more ability to control devices and load shift. By then the idea is for Hohm to not only be a consumer portal but also a utility interface, and utilities will then be customers, too, not just partners. In that vein Hohm could act as sort of the distributed operating system for energy. Phase 4 for Hohm is a little more fuzzy, but Batterberry described it as connecting to the digital home, and other services like security monitoring.
How long will all this take? Batterberry says it will take a good decade before the operating system for utilities and energy is sorted out, and Microsoft has the size — and patience — to wait it out. “That’s our competitive advantage,” said Batterberry.
One of the most interesting angles to the future of Hohm, is how Microsoft could be involved with electric vehicle smart charging. Batterberry tells us that he thinks “electric vehicles are the killer app for the smart grid,” and because electric vehicles will consume so much electricity and will need so much intelligence to manage, they will help usher in important intelligence services for the smart grid. The plan is for Hohm to eventually connect with EV, home and utility data and help manage the rules, scheduling and conditions for smart electric vehicle charging. Batterberry says Microsoft is already talking to some big automakers, but declined to name potential partners. (For more on smart EV charging, see California Rules Show Opportunities in EV Charging, on GigaOM Pro, subscription required).
How likely is it that Microsoft will one day deliver a Microsoft-branded energy management gadget? Batterberry only said that the idea might be a possibility in the future. But Microsoft has entered the hardware space in several markets, with mixed success, including the entertainment player market with Zune, and the video game player market with the X-Box. If a company like Microsoft — which has tried-and-true consumer brand recognition and consumer electronic making experience — did release energy gadget hardware, it could provide an important way to perk consumer interest in the space. I made a similar argument for the idea of Apple developing a home energy management gadget.
For more on electric vehicle software charging and home energy management see GigaOM Pro:
The App Developer's Guide to Working with Ford Sync
New Opportunities in the Smart Grid
How to Build Better Apps for Electric Vehicles
Chevron Jumps Into Concentrating PV Solar, Courtesy of Concentrix
Katie Fehrenbacher - clean power
Chevron says when the 175-panel project is built on 20 acres — construction will start this Spring and is planned to be finished before the end of the year — it will be the “largest CPV installation in the U.S. and one of the largest in the world.” Chevron will use CPV technology from Concentrix Solar, a Freiburg, Germany-based company that was spun out of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in 2005, and was sold to microelectronics supplier the Soitec Group in December. (Soitec bought 80 percent of the shares and 20 percent remain owned by Fraunhofer ISE and the company's founders and senior management).
Concentrix has been selling concentrating PV plants called Flatcon, which the company says can produce electricity for 10 to 20 percent cheaper than standard PV. Concentrix was also backed by Good Energies and Abengoa Solar that created a joint venture with Abengoa, called Concentrix Iberia, for the Spanish markets. But Gunther Portfolio reported that Soitec bought out Abengoa in the acquisition deal.
The Chevron Questa mine, which produces the metal molybdenum used in steel alloys, made news last year when the recession forced the mine to cut 50 percent of its staff. So it’s not surprising that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who made the announcement, is standing behind turning the tailing site of the mine into a site for clean power.
Image courtesy of Concentrix Solar.
General Compression Pumps in $17M for Fuel-free Air Energy Storage
Jeff St. John - Energy Storage
Entrepreneurs and VCs are now looking for innovative ways to tweak this decades-old technology and startup General Compression has come up with an effective way to use compressed air for energy storage without burning natural gas. On Tuesday, the company announced the close of a $17 million Series A round of funding to help it build a commercial-scale unit to test the proposition.
The round was led by US Renewables Group and included Duke Energy, a utility with a lot of wind power to back up. It comes on top of $9.9 million the Newton, Mass.-based startup raised in 2007, according to Mass High Tech.
General Compression's "GCAES" units use isothermal compression and expansion to generate power without burning any fuel, according to the company's web site. The company claims its 2-megawatt modular units can store power at 70-75 percent round-trip efficiency. Because the units can respond in less than 30 seconds and cycle between compression and expansion quickly, they could be used to back up wind farm power output, which is the company's main focus. As for a working model, General Compression has set an early 2011 date to start building its first commercial project — where and for which customer, it doesn't say.
Nor does it list costs for its energy storage systems, either in kilowatt or kilowatt-hour terms. In general, big (100-300 megawatt) underground gas-fired CAES storage costs about $600-$750 per kilowatt of storage capacity built, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. Smaller scale (10-20 megawatt) above-ground CAES costs about $1,000-$1,800 per kilowatt and $200-$250$250 to $450 per kilowatt-hour, EPRI reported — still cheaper than pumped hydro to build, if not to operate, and cheaper in kilowatt-hour terms than the battery technologies EPRI surveyed in its 2008 cost comparison. (Here's a handy primer on various energy storage technologies.)
General Compression isn't the only startup competing to deliver low-cost, no-fuel CAES. UK-based Isentropic Energy says that its method of heating and cooling adjacent tanks of gravel and capturing the stored energy via a heat pump can pull costs down to $80 per kilowatt-hour. Right now there are only two working CAES plants in the world, one in Huntorf, Germany and another in McIntosh, Ala., so new technologies have a lot to prove.
It's certainly the right time to be bringing new energy storage technologies to market. Any big push to make wind and solar power account for more than a tiny fraction of the world's energy supply will have to deal with the intermittency problem — the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, but the grid's power demands follow predictable peaks that have to be met.
The Department of Energy's $4.5 billion in smart grid grants late last year included $185 million for 16 energy storage projects. Among the batteries, flywheels, fuel cells and other technologies that got a boost were some CAES projects — Pacific Gas & Electric got $25 million to help build a 300-megawatt CAES plant near Bakersfield, Calif., and West Lebanon, N.H.-based SustainX won $5.39 million to develop its own CAES technology. New York State Electric & Gas is working on a CAES facility using an underground salt cavern, and municipal utilities in Iowa have been planning a CAES project since 2003, though construction hasn't started yet.
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