NRG Energy’s eVgo Network at a Best Buy

Electric car charging company Ecotality has filed a lawsuit against California regulators to attempt to halt a deal that includes power company NRG investing around $100 million into building an electric car charging network in California, reports the San Jose Mercury News, and we’ve confirmed with Ecotality. There were a lot of angry people in the electric vehicle charging community after the NRG deal was announced, and I was wondering if someone was going to sue.

Here’s the back story: in March California Governor Jerry Brown, and California’s utility regulator, announced that a decade-old claim with a partner of NRG Energy, Dynegy, over power contracts during the state’s energy crisis, would turn into a $120 million settlement fund to invest in building out an electric car charging network in California. One hundred million dollars of the fund would be allocated for installing 200 public fast-charging stations, and 10,000 plug-in units at 1,000 locations across the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, L.A. and San Diego County. The remaining $20 million of the fund will go to “ratepayer relief,” or reducing consumer energy bills.

Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Well, it does to NRG’s competitors that don’t see why the power company is settling a claim by essentially winning a $100 million investment deal.

Dynegy had an Enron-style energy trading platform and was one of the companies that was involved in California’s energy crisis. A subsidiary of Dynegy, was a co-owner with NRG of power generating plants, which are currently owned by NRG in California and “NRG assumed full responsibility for resolving this matter in 2006 when NRG acquired Dynegy’s 50 percent interest in the assets.”

Ecotality is holding a call shortly to discuss their position, so I’ll update this post when I know more.

Ecotality execs said on the call:

We are looking to stop an illegal giveaway that would create a monopoly over electric vehicle charging in California. They are illegally trying to give away a monopoly to an out of state company. Our motion to stop this in April was dismissed. We’re asking the court to review this deal under a transparent process. We believe we have a compelling position on this. We hope that we will get the necessary support on this from the industry.

and

Ecotality is focused on California. We’re putting out the charger infrastructure already. The NRG deal was consulted behind closed doors and no one in the industry was consulted about it. The deal gives them a huge advantage over others that are investing investor money, not settlement money. They can literally saturate the market and cherry pick the best real estate.

Ecotality also says it has lost three locations for DC fast chargers and have seen stalls on many more.

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In a statement Inerjys says Shah will focus on “international renewable energy project strategy,” and Pullan will focus on “growth equity investments in clean technology firms.” Shah previously led the Carbon War Room, founded and led SunEdison, and led M&A and corporate strategy for BP Alternative Energy. Pullman previously founded and led the New Energy and Clean Technology Ventures group for Nomura International.

Part of the fund’s strategy will be to use funds to project finance technologies, which its equity arm also invests in, says the WSJ. So basically the firm will provide funds all the way from development stage to commercialization — which sounds like it would require really solid bets and also a lot of money. Inerjys says it will invest in “wind, sun, marine and biofuel power generation, energy storage, transmission and distribution, and smart-grid systems.”

Note that the fund is in the process of raising the billion dollars. Silver Lake’s Kraftwerk was also looking to raise a similar size fund for later stage investing, but I’m not sure how far it’s gotten to meet that fund raising goal. It’s a difficult fund raising environment for cleantech right now.

Update: Shah tells me in a phone call: “We think that cleantech companies at their core are still good investments. We think the way that the investment community has been investing in cleantech has been causing these bad outcomes. We want to try a different approach to investing to get better outcomes. We don’t think the companies themselves are bad, but the model that has been applied to cleantech has been a bad fit.”

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Coupland, who is famous for writing about the intersection of culture and technology, said in a statement: “data transmission is no longer something scary you don’t want in your backyard. Now you want it directly in front of your house.” The device is just in the concept stage, and Coupland doesn’t plan to try to turn it into a commercial business.

But parts of the technology seem real enough. The stackable wireless tech is based on a Bell Labs design called lightRadio, which are compact, low-power cubes that have squeezed a radio and amplifier into the small space. Vancouver’s Mayor wanted to show off the design to show that Vancouver is future-forward and tech-friendly.

Ignoring all the obvious hurdles that would turn this into something real — like cost of the pole or why a carrier would provide connectivity access for the pole — I like the fact that V-Pole is looking to make the source of connectivity transparent, more colorful and more fun.

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Facebook’s Prineville data center.

As the world we live in continues to develop better technologies and new and exciting ways of communicating, our demand for energy grows. Data centers are the engines that drive our connected world, processing the billions of daily transactions, comments and interactions in our digital society. More data equals more energy – and this is starting to become a big headache from a sustainability perspective.

If a singular data center can consume the equivalent energy of 180,000 homes, exactly how large is the overall impact on our planet, and what is being done about it?

Data on energy & computing

Sourcing reliable figures on datacenter output and its effect on the world is difficult, due in part to the fast rate of growth as well as rapidly changing technology and business models. However, the main factor that defines a lack of accurate data has been the unwillingness of major IT brands to act transparently in their operations. Historically, cloud brands have not been willing to disclose information through fear of revealing competitive advantage or disadvantage in operations.

According to a 2007 report from iClimate on global e-sustainability, the world’s data centers and telecommunications networks used a combined electricity of 623 billion kWh. What does that number mean? Well, if the cloud were a country, it would have the fifth largest electricity demand in the world, sitting somewhere between India and Japan on the global energy consumption charts.

The report also indicates that cloud-serving data centers are responsible for 2 percent of the world’s annual CO2 emissions – a figure that has likely grown in the five years since the reports creation. Two percent may not sound like a massive amount, but when you consider how much the ecosystem of data has changed since 2007, that 2 percent could easily become 4 percent in a very short time frame.

The exponential growth in data consumption both at home with super-fast broadband and on the go with 3G and 4G data connections have meant that 2007’s figure really no longer applies. However Greenpeace’s 2010 report “Make IT Green,” predicts the demand for data center electricity will more than triple over the next five years, resulting in an energy demand totaling that of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.

The largest culprit for the massive spike in data seen recently is the mobile industry. Mobile data traffic in 2011 was eight times the size of the entire internet in 2000. By the end of 2012 the number of connected devices is expected to exceed the global population. This mobile boom is largely down to large scale adoption in emerging markets. As of January 2012 India had 0ver 900 million mobile connections and could become the largest mobile market in the world in terms of revenue. As hardware costs fall and functionality increases, this adoption will only continue to rise, and the data serving providers need to expand to accommodate the increased demand.

Cell phone towers on the sky line of Old Delhi.

Location, location, location

So, what can cloud providers do about this mass demand for energy? The future of the industry and how it operates is largely down to 3 things; location, self sufficiency and transparency.

When choosing siting for a new data center, there are a number of considerations. There has to be an adequate availability of affordable electricity, telecommunications infrastructure as well as tax incentives, climate and proximity to end-users.

While many areas of the world can offer these considerations in abundance, the future of a green cloud is dependent on just two. Many cloud companies considering self hosted data are moving to cooler climes to make the most of the ‘free cooling’ benefits. Free cooling is the use of external air for hardware cooling.

Traditionally nearly half of a data center’s power consumption comes from cooling the rooms of servers that physically hold the data. These behemoth computers generate a massive amount of heat, and as such require constant chilling. By locating your data centre in an area of naturally low temperatures, such as the Nordic countries, providers can half their consumption by drawing in the chilled outside air. This shift is already starting to happen as providers find the financial benefits a driving force, and the green outcome an added perk.

The second consideration to location is positioning in relation to a renewable energy source. Many of the worlds largest data center’s are driven by coal and gas. This is classed as dirty energy, however a number of providers are making the move to sustainability through renewable energy

Facebook built its third major data center in Lulea, Sweden – a location chosen for the large amount of existing hydroelectric capacity at high availability. The data center is fully powered with renewable energy from an outer source.

The problem with the location fix is that a huge number of data centers already exist in areas that do not have access to renewable energy sources. For these providers, often their only choice for external power is coal. A growing number of cloud companies are taking matters into their own hands and creating their own source of energy.

The one thing a data center has going for it is size. If we take i/o Data Centers as an example, their facility in Phoenix, Arizona has an enormous 580,000 sq ft footprint that has allowed them to install 5,000 solar panels in an array that will generate a total of 4.5MW at peak capacity. Though this is just a fraction of the 100MW demand, the solar panels will be married with thermal storage technology to reduce the energy drain of cooling during the heat of the day.

Apple has recently announced a 20MW solar array and has also invested in a 5MW fuel cell device on site in Maiden, NC. The industry is starting to sit up and listen.

A company like Google, Amazon, Facebook or Apple has enormous clout in the areas they operate. These tech giants are big fish to the local utility firms, who will all be vying to supply them with power upon creation of new centers. By negotiating renewable energy with the utilities, corporations can begin to change the coal driven ecosystem and drive the industry towards a brighter future.

IT and cloud providers have a duty to research renewable energy sources and implement sustainable power solutions. As well as this duty to source green energy, they also have a duty to report on it. By releasing figures on energy output, full research can be engaged and better solutions and energy standards can be created.

The future of our technological advancement is no longer down to competition and advantage. Providers need to work together to create a better plan for our engorging power drain so that we have a future to enjoy the technology in.

Jason Currill is founder and CEO of Ospero, a global Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company. The company, through a federated cloud strategy, has one of the largest ubiquitous, single vendor cloud platforms in the world. Before founding Ospero, Jason, a seasoned technology Executive with over 15 years international sales experience, worked with Cisco Systems, Business Objects (a SAP company) and NetSuite, in charge of both EMEA and NA territories. Prior to his career in IT, Jason worked on the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE) for almost 10 years as a Futures Trader.

Ospero’s distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) offering, helps business rollout global SaaS instances without vendors having to worry about legal compliance, latency issues and privacy headaches. All of Ospero’s data centers comply with the ISO 4001 standard. The company believes in green and has recently been praised by external assessors for the maturity of their environmental management systems. This article is written by Jason Currill, CEO of Ospero.

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Alt-transportation overload! Why is San Francisco so chock-full of these services? I’ve been thinking about it for awhile and I’ve got a pretty good idea. Here’s why I think it is:

Tech, startup cluster: One of the more obvious reasons is just the vibrant startup and developer ecosystem in San Francisco. Most of these alternative transportation services are reliant on mobile and web technology development, and having a strong developer and startup ecosystem here means there’s more of a braintrust of young creators willing to work on these tools. For example Scoot Networks’ secret sauce is based on using the iPhone as a dashboard for an electric scooter and Zimride’s new mobile app connects commuters and drivers in real time. In addition, local tech companies can provide the testing ground for some of these projects — both Ridepal and Scoot Networks are starting off by selling services to fellow tech companies.

Muni, BART, taxis and parking suck: There’s actually a real need for alternative transportation in San Francisco. Unlike in New York, where you can get a cab in most places pretty easily, and the subways system is pretty efficient, San Francisco’s public transportation and taxi services are pretty lacking. There are also a lot of commuters that come into San Francisco, but there’s very little affordable parking downtown.

San Franciscans are early adopters: San Francisco-ans have always been early adopters, given the city is the heart of the Valley and was the location of the birth of the Internet. Services that are reliant on iPhone use can actual gain traction here, because of the high penetration of iPhones. San Franciscans also care more than most about trying to have more eco-friendly, and more energy efficient, transportation, like car sharing and ride sharing.

Small enough: San Francisco is also compact and small enough that a startup can launch a pilot project here and can actually cover a decent amount of the city. While the same pilot project might be overwhelmed in Manhattan, San Francisco can offer a more compact scale with which to experiment.

City support: The city of San Francisco is actually generally very supportive of these types of transportation. Anything that can help alleviate the public transportation systems and parking spots in downtown can potentially get support from the city.

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Pike Research predicts that there will be 10 trends that shape this growing market over the next decade, like that they think building automation systems will shift over to using Internet Protocol as their basic standard, away from more conflicting and proprietary communication standards. Here’s Pike’s 10 predictions for the smart building market:

1). Cloud: These building energy management systems will largely live in the cloud. It might sound obvious, but for the older-school building industry it’s been revolutionary.

2). Partnerships: The vendors that offer building energy management systems right now are pretty fragmented. Some of the larger players are trying to provide end-to-end systems, and then there’s the startups that have new, novel ideas. Partnerships are emerging as a key way to grow the market.

3). M&A: On that note, large companies buying small ones is a major trend. See the list at the bottom.

4). China: Yeah we know China always seems to land on any of these lists, but it’s going to be a massive driver of growth. It’s building a lot of new commercial and factory building space and will provide itself on including the latest smart building tech.

5). Federal friends: The U.S federal government has emerged as a major customer and partner for companies offering energy services.

6). Standards shake out: The multitude of protocols are converging, but eventually everything will go to IP.

7). No more manual demand response: Demand response — the act of shifting energy consumption at a certain time when more energy is needed — is going all automatic. Previously much of this was done manually, but finally the service is entering the modern digital world.

8). Submeters! If you don’t know what submeters are, check ‘em out. Pike says they’ll be big one day.

9). Design from the ground up: Building information systems aren’t just shaping how buildings run, but they’re remaking how buildings are designed, too.

10). We are all one: The smart building is the smart grid, and vice versa.

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Gaston Gorali, Director General Creativo, Catmandu studios

Behind the doors of Catmandu studios, on a quiet street in the Capital Federal district of Buenos Aires, Argentina, dozens of young animators stare intently at their computer screens in a couple of low lit rooms, obsessing over the way a blade of grass bends or a character’s hair swishes as he moves. Some of the team, which hail from all over the world, have spent days, and weeks, animating a few seconds where bird crap falls on the face of a statue.

This is the crew, which has now blossomed into 120 people after five years in production, who will be responsible for whether Argentina will be able to produce a smash success out of its first real attempt at making a 3D computer animated feature length film. Picture what Pixar and DreamWorks are doing, but on a fraction of the budget, using a scrappy team and a startup mentality, and a decidedly Latin American flavor.

Of course the movie has to be about football (soccer, for you Americans) — the national past time, obsession and massive money-generating industry for much of Latin America, and the world. The movie is called Foosball, and it’s the tale of a young boy and a team of foosball characters that come to life and play football on a grand scale. The walls of the studio are covered in various misfit football characters that are running, dancing and playing, what else, football. (The team asked me to not photograph the characters directly as to keep some of the mystery hidden).

Dark rooms for animation at Catmandu studios

When the movie arrives in theaters next year, the creators, which include world famous, award-winning writer and director Juan Campanella, and executive producer Gaston Gorali, hope that it will be able to spark a “virtuous cycle,” and the beginnings of an Argentinian animation industry, says Gorali in an interview with a the Geeks on a Plane group in Catmandu’s studios last week. Gorali knows the risks, too. “If you make a bad movie, it really effects the next films,” that could follow, he says.

The project has the makings of a hit. Variety has described it as “the biggest film currently coming out of Latin America.” Before Foosball, Campanella directed and produced the Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes and is the most famous Argentinian director of the past few decades. Gorali, who previously worked on an animated show for Fox Latin America, managed to convince Campanella to not only write Foosball, but direct it, too.

So what’s the problem then? Well, Argentina had no animation industry. At all. Gorali likens developing Foosball, while also building the Catmandu studio, as driving a train full speed while putting the rail road tracks down in front of it. The studio had to recruit and train new animators, some of which had little track record, but who all had the desire to work on something brand new.

Essentially the studio had to operate as the startup, scrappy version of the big animation houses. While DreamWorks might have a couple thousand people working on several different animated computer-generated films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make each, Catmandu is making just one film, Foosball, and on a budget of $14 to $15 million.

Gorali says that to do this, the studio totally eliminated the various layers of management and executives that usually exist at the large animation houses. And while labor costs in Argentina have gone up a lot over the last two years, the salaries that the animators are paid are significantly lower than what American animators would normally bill for. The animators use basic software and the team has developed many of their own tools to be able to develop their own techniques.

If 3D computer-generated foosball characters don’t sound like a safe bet to you, you’re probably the wrong audience. The film isn’t targeted at American, or even English-speaking viewers, though it’ll be released in both Spanish and English. It’s distinctly being created for Latin America and Spain, as well as Europe. The first pre-sold territories are Russia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

The world will just have to wait for 2013 to see how well Foosball is received by its fans. If it manages to score some level of success, the movie could become the gateway for an entirely new creative and technical industry for Argentina’s students and developers. And that would be a huge feat for the scrappy, young team, and would also would make them not unlike the band of misfit foosball players that they’ve spent years animating.

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Liquid Metal Battery is developing a battery for the power grid using molten salt sandwiched between two layers of liquid metal. The battery is still at least two years from commercialization, and the team has built a 16-inch prototype, though they might later scale that up to 36 inches. The company is betting that a battery based on liquid metal electrodes will be stable, scalable, and low cost enough that it could revolutionize grid storage.

Right now the grid has very little energy storage and power plants are basically producing the exact amount of energy that buildings and systems are consuming in real time. That makes the grid inefficient and also costly, and in addition the lack of energy storage is a barrier when it comes to adding less reliable clean power sources like wind and solar (the sun only shines and the wind only blows at certain times).

Gates originally learned about Liquid Metal Battery when he took Sadoway’s class via MIT’s online open-course program. Gates took Sadoway’s 34-lecture series on batteries and contacted Sadoway by email to meet with him and learn more. Gates is also a limited partner in Khosla Venture’s funds. In addition to the group of investors, the liquid metal battery project received a $6.9 million grant from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program.

The bulk of the development work left to do at Liquid Metal Battery will be focused on getting the cost of the battery down and figuring out the optimal size and shape. The company will also likely need more money down the road when it wants to start commercially producing the battery.

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I have no idea if the lawsuit has merit or how likely it is to succeed. But I do know that gender discrimination and sexual harassment are alive and well in the traditional venture capital community and to some extent in the Valley. The issue is something that I’ve talked about ad nauseam with female founders, reporters and press over the almost ten years of my Valley reporting career. It’s not a secret — if you’re a woman that works in the Valley, you’re familiar with this.

But the reality is that this old school, old boys club mentality, is one of the many things about the established venture capital community that will need to, and I think eventually will, change, purely for competitive reasons — not necessarily because Sand Hill Road all woke up one day and took a class on gender discrimination. If firms are under utilizing women investors and are seen as unfriendly to women founders, it’s a competitive disadvantage.

Some of the younger, more nimble, incubators and firms know this and are actually using how undervalued women are in the traditional venture capital community as a competitive advantage. For example, an investment thesis behind 500 Startups is to invest in under-represented groups — both women founders and founders of color — and women make up more than half of the small team of 500 Startup’s partners.

There’s a growing amount of women founders taking place in Y-Combinator every year, though it’s still pretty small. But if a firm has a reputation for being not friendly towards women, then it’s just another barrier to doing these types of deals in an increasingly competitive environment. Internet firms like Etsy are trying to proactively grow — and then tap into — an emerging population of women engineers and developers. It makes sense, they’re a population that’s being under utilized. Women 2.0 is trying to grow a female founder, mentorship ecosystem as well.

There’s a lot of things that aren’t working for the traditional venture capital world. The Kauffman Foundation issued a report recently that found that the venture capital industry was not delivering the desired returns, and basically not adjusting to the times. I feel like an old-school mentality around gender is just another symptom of that failure to evolve. And VC firms that are continued to be seen as old boys clubs will just miss out on potential investment opportunities.

Tech Crunch and Fortune point out that Kleiner has more female partners than most, and that it’s been trying to lead in this area. I’m not sure what will happen with Kleiner’s lawsuit, but the fact that it’s out there publicly, clearly isn’t good for building their reputation around being women-friendly.

Image courtesy of stevendamron.

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Amonix

A solar startup with a new type of technology, and funding from Kleiner Perkins and the Department of Energy, will start cutting staff next month, reports Dow Jones Venture Wire. Amonix, which makes concentrating solar photovoltaic tech (CPV) that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto solar cells, will cut 76 workers across its offices in California, according to the report.

Earlier this year Amonix, through its manufacturing service provider Flextronics, also laid off about 200 out of roughly 300 workers at its North Las Vegas solar equipment factory. The company said back then that it made the move so it could modify the production equipment for making a new product later this year. I’m not sure if the workers were ever rehired.

Amonix’s technology has gone into a high profile, large solar project in Colorado that was backed by a $90 million Department of Energy loan guarantee and is owned by a company called Cogentrix (owned by Goldman Sachs). That 30 MW project — one of the largest of its kind using CPV tech — started producing power in Colorado already, says Dow Jones.

But other than that win, Amonix has had a rough year. The company lost its CEO late last year in a tragic accident and the company no longer lists a CEO on it website.

The company managed to raise $129.4 million in the Spring of 2010 from investors Kleiner Perkins, Westly Group and the Angeleno Group, as well $25 million from Goldman Sachs and MissionPoint. Dow Jones reports that Amonix also had a $9.5 million federal tax credit and a $15.6 million Department of Energy grant. That’s in addition to the DOE loan guarantee for the Cogentrix project.

Amonix’s technology uses lenses to concentrate sunlight 500 times onto triple-junction solar cells. Each system has 53-kilowatts of generation capacity and is made up of 7 giant modules mounted on a dual-axis tracker. Each module measures 10-ft. by 49-ft and contains 36 sets of lenses and receivers; each receiver contains 30 solar cells.

CPV-evangelists says that the technology promises to significantly reduce the amount of solar cells needed for a solar project, which make up a big part of the cost of a solar energy system. The systems can also be smaller and more modular so can be built in more diverse places than the massive desert solar thermal plants. Well, that’s the idea anyways — the technology is still nascent.

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