Energy Points uses public and private data to create resource maps that calculate all of the relevant sustainability metrics for a region or industry vertical. Then when Energy Points signs up a customer, the customer gives Energy Points its own resource data, and the Energy Points software can then tell the customer what sustainability decisions will be the best ones to make.

The business intelligence is delivered in an MPG form to the customer, which Energy Points calls “the first universal metric for measuring sustainability.” The Energy Points software translates all the different sustainability metrics into this MPG equivalent.

The value proposition behind Energy Points is that many companies have a set aside budget to spend on making their company more sustainable, but they don’t know what decisions to make, said Zik in an interview. Energy Points is targeting Fortune 500 companies, government organizations and environmental service providers.

Energy Points is a really young company, founded half a year ago, and the tech has been under development for about two years. Zik said the company has pilot customers, but he wouldn’t disclose any names of customers. And the startup is still building out its software-as-a-service platform so that the companies can input their data and get automatic feedback.

In addition, the corporate sustainability space has gotten increasingly crowded over the past few years. Startups like Hara and C3 have raised tens of millions of dollars and have signed up large corporate customers like Coca-Cola and utilities like PG&E. Other companies, like Opower, work with utilities on delivering energy efficiency reports and tools.

Energy Points recently closed its own funding: $3 million led by Plan B Ventures.

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Dr. Jonathan Koomey, Stanford University

This essay is the first of a series of four appearing this week on GigaOm. It draws from material in Jonathan Koomey’s latest book, Cold Cash, Cool Climate:  Science-based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs, which is being released by Analytics Press on February 15, 2012.  

Written for entrepreneurs and investors, this book describes how to profit from tackling climate change, one of this century’s greatest challenges. The author acts as your company’s scientific advisor, summarizing the business implications of the climate problem for both new and existing ventures. Koomey helps you effectively allocate scarce time and resources to the most promising opportunities, drawing upon his more than 25 years of experience in analyzing and implementing climate solutions.

A big lesson from climate science for entrepreneurs

One of the reasons I wrote the book Cold Cash, Cool Climate was because the climate and energy sciences have some important lessons to teach entrepreneurs seeking to reduce emissions and make a profit at the same time. Unfortunately, these lessons have not until now been summarized for that audience. My new book aims to change that.

The most sophisticated analysts of the climate problem think in terms of emissions budgets, defined by questions like “How many greenhouse gases (GHGs) can we emit in the next century and stay under some specified warming limit (like the widely accepted temperature goal of 2 Celsius degrees above preindustrial levels?” Because some important GHGs (like carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide) stay in the atmosphere for centuries once emitted, it’s the cumulative emissions that matter. That’s why people use emissions budgets over many decades to think about the problem.

In the book I lay out a carbon budget and an associated emissions pathway that I call the “Safer Climate case”, which has about a 2/3 chance (based on the latest climate simulations) of keeping global average temperatures from rising more than 2 Celsius degrees from preindustrial levels. This case implies that we’ll keep most fossil fuel reserves in the ground, or find a way to safely sequester that carbon if we choose to burn these reserves. It also implies very rapid emissions reductions: For about three decades, starting in 2012, we’ll need to reduce global carbon emissions by on average almost 7 percent per year (compounded) to meet the constraints of the Safer Climate case, even as population and economic activity grow substantially, and poorer countries continue striving towards modernity.

We’ll also need comparable reductions in other greenhouse gases. This rate of emissions reductions is historically unprecedented, at least over decade long time-scales, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

Feasibility depends on context, and on what we are willing to pay to minimize risks. What if there’s a big climate-related disaster and we finally decide that it’s a real emergency (like World War II)? In that case we’d make every effort to fix the problem, and what would be possible then is far beyond what we could imagine today.

At the start of World War II, the US auto industry took six months to transition from building a few million autos a year to building planes and tanks for the war effort. This shift wasn’t easy, but it happened, and it offers a lesson in what is possible when we really put our minds to attacking a problem.

This example illustrates another important point about rapid emissions reductions: they will likely result in some capital being scrapped before the end of its useful life. This is a problem from a political perspective, of course, but many analysts dismiss scenarios with premature capital retirements as infeasible. Based on the analysis in Chapter 5 of the book, I suspect strongly that we won’t have that luxury, given the rapid reductions we’ll need to achieve (and the problem will grow in size if we continue to build high carbon infrastructure after 2012).

Since the constraints of the Safer Climate case will probably force us to scrap some capital stocks before the end of their useful lives, it’s the entrepreneur’s job to make existing capital stocks obsolete more quickly. That means developing replacement products (and ways to retrofit existing buildings and equipment) that are so much better than current ways of delivering energy services that people are willing to scrap or repurpose that equipment to gain the advantages your product provides. That approach will allow us to minimize and sometimes sidestep the difficult political choices caused by premature retirements of existing capital.

As one example of such a product, consider light-emitting diode (LED) down lights that fit in those recessed ceiling cans that are so common in U.S. homes. We installed almost 50 of these in our new house last year to replace our aging fixtures. We would have had to spend $20 to replace each fixture anyway, according to the contractor, and the LED fixtures we bought instead cost $50 each and fit right into the existing cans.  Not only do they look better than what they replaced, they deliver bright and directional light, they come on instantly and dim just fine, their color rendition is so good that even my wife (who is a stickler in such matters) thinks they are great, and they will last 35,000 hours, which is probably 20 years at the rates that we use most of these fixtures.

The long lifetime (compared to at most a few thousand hours for incandescent bulbs and about ten thousand hours for compact fluorescents) was what put them over the top for us. We have relatively high ceilings throughout the house so the prospect of climbing a tall ladder more than a dozen times a year was not an enticing one. The LEDs eliminate that hassle, and in fact are so good that they will surely encourage others to replace their fixtures before the end of their useful lives, because they are so better than what they replace.  And did I mention that they cut lighting electricity use by more than 80 percent?

Conclusions

Because the required emissions in the Safer Climate case are so rapid, some existing energy sector capital will need to be retired in coming decades (and the more high-carbon infrastructure we build in the next few years the more that will have to be scrapped later).  An entrepreneur can assist that process by building low emission products that are so good that people are eager to buy them and happy to scrap existing capital to put them to work. That won’t make all the difficult political problems of the climate issue go away, but it will help.

Image courtesy of Julipan.

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Amyris’ stock fell close to 30 percent on the news, to $6.99 per share. The company uses genetic engineering to turn biomass into chemicals and fuels, and its first product turns sugarcane syrup into Biofene, a form of the industrial chemical farnesene, which is a fragrant hydrocarbon that’s used to make cosmetics, lubricants and other materials. This is the company’s stock over the past year:

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The primary “mission” of late has been to sort possible future energy resources into boxes labeled “abundant,” “potent” (able to support something like a quarter of our present demand if fully developed), and “niche,” which is a polite way to say puny. In the process, I have clarified in my mind that a significant contributor to my concerns about future energy scarcity is not the simple quantitative scorecard. After all, if it were that easy, we’d be rocking along with a collective consensus about our path forward. Some comments have  asked: “If we forget about trying to meet our total demand with one source, could we meet our demand if we add them all up?” Absolutely. In fact, the abundant sources technically need no other complement. So on the abundance score alone, we’re done at solar, for instance. But it’s not that simple, unfortunately. While the quantitative abundance of a resource is key, many other practical concerns enter the fray when trying to anticipate long-term prospects and challenges—usually making up the bulk of the words in prior posts.

For example, it does not much matter that Titan has enormous pools of methane unprotected by any army (that we know of!). The gigantic scale of this resource makes our Earthly fossil fuel allocation a mere speck. But so what? Practical considerations mean we will never grab this energy store. Likewise, some of our terrestrial sources of energy are super-abundant, but just a pain in the butt to access or put to practical use.

In this post, we will summarize the ins and outs of the various prospects. Interpretation will come later. For now, let’s just wrap it all up together.

The Matrix

Would you like to know what the matrix is? Okay. I’ll tell you — in a bit. For each of the major energy hopefuls I have discussed on Do the Math, I characterize their various attributes in a three-tier classification: adequate (green); marginal (yellow); or insufficient (red) — possibly a showstopper. The scheme is qualitative, and I am sure some will disagree with my assignments.

Before I go any further, let me say that I will not entertain comments griping about why I made a certain square the color I did. I won’t have time to respond at that level, given that there are 200 colored boxes in the matrix. But the beauty is, you can change the matrix any way you see fit and make your own custom version. Go buy some crayons today!. The matrix I’ve created is not without its biases and subjectivity. Whose would be?

Okay, I’ll keep the suspense going a bit by describing the fields.

Abundance: This is essentially the “abundant,” “potent,” and “niche” classification scheme reflected in the preceding posts. Green means that the resource can in principle produce far more power than we currently use and keep it up for many centuries. Red means a bit-player at best. Yellow is the stuff that can be useful, but is incapable of carrying the full load—not that we require everything to do this. We can tolerate a mix of of items, but will not get far by mixing reds together.

Difficulty: This field tries to capture the degree to which a resource brings with it large technical challenges. How many PhDs does it take to run the plant? How painful is it to maintain or keep churning? This one might translate into economic terms: difficult is another term for expensive.

Intermittency: Green if rock-steady or there whenever we need it. If the availability is beyond our control, then it gets a yellow at least. The possibility of going without for a few days earns a red.

Demonstrated: I don’t mean on paper, and I don’t mean a prototype that exhibits some of the technology. To be green, this has to be commercially available today, and providing useful energy.

Electricity: Can the technology produce electricity? Most of the time, the answer is yes. Sometimes it would make no sense to try. Other times, it is seriously impractical.

Heat: Can the resource produce direct heat? Yellow if only through electric means.

Transport: Does the technology relieve the liquid fuels crunch? Anything that makes electricity can power an electric car, earning a yellow score. Liquid fuels are green. Some may get tired of the broken record in the descriptions that follow that a particular resource does not help transportation, wanting to shout “electric cars, fool” every time I say it. But our large-scale migration to electric cars is not in the bag. They may remain too expensive to be widely adopted. Meanwhile, this does not help air travel or heavy transport.

Acceptance: Is public opinion (I can really only judge U.S. attitudes) favorable to this method? Will there likely be resistance—whether justified or not?

Backyard?: Is this something that can be done domestically, in one’s backyard or small property, managed by the individual?

Efficiency: Over 50 percent gets the green. Below about 10 percent gets red. It’s not the most important of criteria, as the abundance score incorporates efficiency expectations. But we will always view low efficiency negatively.

Okay, enough holding out—here’s the matrix (click to expand; see here for colorblind-friendly version).

Yellow boxes tend to deserve explanation. It is usually clear why something would swing red or green, but yellow often has several things tugging at it. If green boxes are given a +1 score, yellow boxes zero, and red boxes −1, adding the boxes with equal weight yields the scores on the right, by which measure the table is sorted: best to worst. The only place I cheated was to give D-D fusion a −2 for difficulty. It’s the hardest thing on the list, given our decades of massive effort invested to date on D-T fusion, while D-D is too hard to even attempt.

Now, equal weighting on all ten criteria is boneheaded. But the assessment is imprecise enough not to warrant a more elaborate weighting scheme. I do not stand firm behind the order that results, and am half-tempted to monkey with weighting schemes until a more preferred order emerges. But I would be cooking the books to further match my preferences. Feel free to weight any way you see fit, and change anything else while you’re at it. Just remember. No griping.

Note that conventional fossil fuels, matrixed-out above, score green in almost every category, except—unfortunately—abundance (see here for R/G colorblind version). The efficiency is high for direct heating (most often natural gas), and middling for electricity or transport. Coal gets no points for transportation, and natural gas is of limited use here (although the bus I’m riding as I type this is powered by natural gas, so I can’t entirely nix its transportation capability). All things considered, all of the fossil fuels get a score of 7 or 8. Note the striking gapwe face between fossil fuels and their alternatives, topping out at a score of 5. One might ding the fossil fuels a point or two for their greenhouse gas contributions, closing the gap a bit.  None of the options in the alternatives matrix are intrinsic carbon emitters.

Quick Lessons

Looking at some of the main trends, very few options are both abundant and easy. Solar PV and solar thermal qualify. A similar exclusion principle often holds for abundant and demonstrated/available. There is a reason why folks (myself included) like solar.

Intermittency mainly plagues solar and wind resources, with mild inconvenience appearing for many of the natural sources.

Electricity is easy to produce. We have loads of ways to do it, and are likely to pick the easiest/cheapest. We won’t necessarily get far down the list if we’re covered by things at the top end (assuming my rankings have any validity and some economic correlation).

Transport is hard. Concerns over peak oil played a huge role in making me sit up to pay attention to our energy challenges. Electric cars are the most obvious way out, but don’t do much for heavy shipping by land or sea, and leave airplanes on the ground.

Few things face serious barriers to acceptance: especially when energy scarcity is at stake.

A few options are available for the homestead. A passive solar home with PV panels, wind, and some method to produce liquid fuels on site would be a dream come true. Here’s hoping for artificial photosynthesis!

The missing category here is cost, although difficulty may be an imperfect proxy. As a result, some of the high-scoring options may more be costly than we’d like. Actually, some of the lowest-scoring options are the costliest! If you’re expecting that we’ll replace fossil fuels and do it on the cheap, you might as well learn to bawl on the floor kicking and pounding your fists, tears streaming. This is our predicament. We have to buck up and deal with it, somehow.

Individual Discussion

For each topic, the link at the beginning points to a more complete discussion on Do the Math.  Here, I just briefly characterize each resource in relation to the matrix criteria.

Solar PV: Covering only 0.5% of land area with 15% efficient PV panels provides the annual energy needs of our society, qualifying solar PV as abundant. It’s not terribly difficult to produce; silicon is the most abundant element in Earth’s crust, and PV panels are being produced globally at 25 GW peak capacity per year (translating to 5 GW of average power added per year). Intermittency is the Achilles Heel of solar PV, requiring storage solutions if adopted at large scale. Solar PV produces electricity directly, which could be converted to heat or transport. Most people do not object to solar PV on rooftops or over parking areas, or even in open spaces (especially desert). I’ve got some on my garage roof as we speak (with storage), so they’re well-suited to individual operation/maintenance. Clocking in at an efficiency of 15%, don’t expect PV to vastly exceed this ballpark.

Solar Thermal: Achieving comparable efficiency to PV, but using more land area, generating electricity from concentrated solar thermal energy automatically fits in the abundant category—though somewhat more regionally constrained. It’s relatively low-tech: shiny curved mirrors tracking on (often) one axis, heating oil or other fluid to run a plain-old heat engine. Intermittency can be mitigated by storing thermal energy, perhaps even for a few days. Because a standard heat-engine follows, fossil fuels can supplement in lean times using the same back-end. A number of plants are already in operation, producing cost-competitive electricity—and heat if anyone cares. As with so many of the alternatives, transportation is not directly aided. Public acceptance is no worse than for PV, etc. But don’t expect your own personal solar thermal electricity plant.

Solar Heating: On a smaller scale, heat collected directly from the sun can provide domestic hot water and home heating. In the latter case, it can be as simple as a south-facing window. Capturing and using solar heat effectively is not particularly difficult, coming down to plumbing, insulation, and ventilation control. Technically, it might be abundant, but since it is usually restricted to building footprints (roof, windows), I take it down a notch. There will be lean days, but my friends in Maine do not complain about their solar heating comfort (with occasional propane backup). Solar heating is useless for electricity or transport, but has no difficulty being accepted and almost by definition is a backyard-ready technology.

Hydroelectric: We have seen that super-efficient hydroelectric is doomed to remain a small player (in the rubric that we maintain today’s energy consumption levels). It’s the low-hanging fruit of the renewable world, and has therefore already seen large-scale development. It has seasonal intermittency (typical capacity factor for a hydro plant is 40%), does not directly provide heat or transport, and can only rarely be implemented personally, at home. Acceptance is fairly high, although silting and associated dangers—together with habitat destruction—do cause some opposition to expanded hydroelectricity.

Biofuels from Algae: I was somewhat surprised to see this entry rank as highly as it did in my admittedly unsophisticated scoring scheme. Because it captures solar energy—even at < 5% efficiency—the potential scale is automatically enormous. But it’s not easy, at present. Dealing with slime will bring challenges of keeping the plumbing clean, possible infection in a genetic arms race with evolving viruses, contamination by other species, etc. At present, we don’t have that magic algal sample that secretes the fuels we want. Heady talk of genetic engineering pledges to solve these problems, but we’re simply not there yet and cannot say for sure that we will get there. Otherwise, the ability to provide transportation fuel is the big draw. Heat may also be efficiently produced, though electricity would represent a misallocation of liquid fuel. Can it be done in the backyard? I could imagine a slime pond in the yard, but care and feeding and refining the product may be prohibitively difficult.

Geothermal Electricity: This option makes sense primarily at geological hotspots, which are rare. It will not scale to be a significant part of our entire energy mix. Aside from this, it is relatively easy, steady, and well-demonstrated in many locations. It can provide electricity, and obviously direct heat—although far from heat demand, generally. It provides no direct help on transportation. Objections are slim to non-existent. I don’t think houses tend to be built on the hotspots, so don’t look for it in a backyard near you.

Wind: Wind is a sensible option that I imagined would float higher in the list than it did. It’s neither abundant nor scarce, being one of those options that can provide a considerable fraction of our present needs under large-scale development. It’s pretty straightforward, reasonably efficient, and demonstrated the world over in large farms. The biggest downside is its intermittency. It will not be unusual to have a few days in a row with little or no regional input. Like so many other things, electricity is naturally produced, while heat and transport is only available via electricity. I sense that objections to wind are more serious than for many other alternatives. Windmills are noisy and tend to be located in prominent places (ridge-tops) where they are extremely visible and scenery-altering. You can’t hide wind in a bowl, or you end up hiding from the wind at the same time. Another built-in conflict emerges on wind-rich coastlines, where many like to take in unspoiled scenery. Small-scale wind is viable in your own backyard.

Artificial Photosynthesis: A very appealing future prospect for me is artificial photosynthesis, combining the abundance of direct solar with the self-storing flexibility of liquid fuel. Intermittency is thus eliminated to the extent that annual production meets demand: storage of a liquid fuel for many months is possible. The dream result of a panel sitting on your roof that drips liquid fuel could provide both heating and transportation fuel. In a pinch, one could also produce electricity this way, but what a waste of precious liquid fuel, when we have so many other ways to make electricity! The catch is that it doesn’t exist yet, that it may never exist, and that feeding it the right ingredients and processing/refining the fuel may eliminate the backyard angle. Still, we all have to have something to gush over. For some, it’s thorium and for others it’s fusion, etc. This one excites me by its potential to satisfy so many purposes.

Tidal Power: Restricted to select coastal locations, tidal will never be a large contributor on the global scale. The resource is intermittent on daily and monthly scales, but in a wholly predictable manner. Extracting tidal energy is not terribly hard—sharing technology with similarly efficient hydroelectric installations—and has been demonstrated in a number of locations around the world. It’s another electricity technique, with no direct offering of heat or transportation. No unusual level of societal objection exists, to my knowledge, but it’s not something you will erect in your backyard and expect to get much out of it.

Conventional Fission: Using conventional uranium reactors and conventional mining practices, nuclear fission does not have the legs for a marathon. On the other hand, it is certainly well-demonstrated, and has no problems with intermittency—unless we count the fact that it has trouble being intermittent in the face of variable load. Compared to other options, nuclear runs a tad on the high-tech side. By this I mean that design, construction, operation, and emergency mitigation require more brains and sophistication than the average energy producer. Nuclear fission directly produces heat (seldom utilized), and is primarily used to generate electricity via the standard steam-driven heat engine, but offers no direct help on transportation. Acceptance is mixed. Germany plans to phase out its nuclear program even though they are serious about carbon reduction. No new plants have been built in the U.S. for over thirty years in part due to public discomfort. Some of this is irrational fear over mutant three-eyed fish and the like, but some is genuine political difficulty relating to the pesky waste problem that no country has yet solved to satisfaction. Nuclear power is not possible on a personal scale.

Uranium Breeder: Extending nuclear fission to be able to use the 140-times more abundant ²³⁸U (rather than 0.7% ²³⁵U) gives uranium fission the legs to run for at least centuries if not a few millennia, so abundance issues disappear. Breeding has been practiced in military reactors, and indeed some significant fraction of the power in conventional uranium reactors comes from ²³⁸U turned ²³⁹Pu. But no commercial power plants have been built to deliberately access the bulk of uranium, turning it into plutonium at scale for the purpose of power production. Public acceptance of breeders will face even stiffer hurdles because plutonium is more easily separated into bomb material than is ²³⁵U, and the trans-uranic radioactive waste from this option is nastier than for the conventional cousin.

Thorium Breeder: Thorium is more abundant than uranium, and only comes in one flavor naturally, so that abundance is not an issue. Like all reactors, thorium reactors fall into the high-tech camp, and include new challenges (e.g., liquid sodium) that conventional reactors have not faced. There have been a few instances of small-scale demonstration, but nothing in the commercial realm, so that we’re probably a few decades away from being able to bring thorium online. Public reaction will be likely be similar to that for conventional nuclear: not a show stopper, but some resistance on similar grounds. It is not clear whether the newfangled aspect of thorium will be greeted with suspicion or with an embrace. Though also a breeding technology (making fissile ²³³U from ²³²Th), the proliferation aspect is severely diminished for thorium due to highly radioactive ²³²U by-product and virtually no easily separable plutonium. Of the future nuclear prospects, I am most optimistic about this one—although it’s no nirvana to me.

Geothermal Heating with Depletion: A vast store of thermal energy sits in the crust, locked in the rock and moving slowly outward. Being the impatient lot that we are, we could drill down and grab the energy out of the rock on our own schedule, effectively mining heat as a one-time resource. In the absence of water flow to convect heat around, dry rock will deplete its heat within 5–10 meters of the borehole in a matter of a few years, requiring another hole 10 meters away from the first, and so on and so on. I classify this as moderately difficult, requiring a never-ending large-scale drilling operation across the land. The temperatures are pretty marginal for running heat engines to make electricity with any respectable efficiency (especially given so many easier options for electricity), but at least the thermal resource will not suffer intermittency problems during the time the hole is still useful. Given its inconvenience (kilometers of drilling), I do not know if examples abound of people having tried this for the purpose of providing heat in arbitrary (not geologically hot) areas. Public acceptance may be less than lukewarm given the scale of drilling involved, dealing with tailings and possibly groundwater contamination issues on a sizable scale. While such a hole could fit in a backyard, it would be far more practical to use the heat for clusters of buildings rather than for just one—given the amount of effort that goes into each hole (and considering short-term lifetime of each hole). I gave this technique high marks for efficiency if used for heat, but it would drop to reddish-yellow if we tried to use this resource for electricity.

Geothermal Heating, Steady State: If we turn our noses up at depletion-based geothermal heat, steady state offers far less total potential, coming to about 10 TW of flow if summed acrossall land. And to access temperatures hot enough to be useful for heating purposes, we’re talking about boreholes at least 1 km deep. It is tremendously challenging to cover any significant fraction of land area with thermal collectors 1 km deep. So I am probably being too generous to color this one yellow for the abundance factor. That’s okay, because I’m hitting it hard enough on the other counts. To gather enough steady-flow heat to provide for a normal U.S. home’s heat, the collection network would have to span a square 200 m on a side at depth, which seems nightmarish to me. But at least depletion would not be an issue in this circumstance. Otherwise, this category shares similar markings and rationale as the depletion scenario.

Biofuels from Crops: We’ve seen that corn ethanol is a loser of a scheme on energy grounds, although sugar cane and vegetable oils fare better. But these compete with food production and arable land availability, so biofuels from crops can only graduate from “niche” to “potent” in the context of plant waste or cellulosic conversion. I have thus split the abundance and demonstration in two: food crop energy is demonstrated but severely constrained in scale. Celluosic matter becomes a potent source, but undemonstrated (perhaps this should even be red). I do not label the prospect as an easy one, because growing and harvesting annual crops on a relavent scale constitutes a massive, perpetual job. If exploiting fossil fuels is akin to spending our inheritance, growing and harvesting our energy on an annual basis is like getting a real job—a real hard job. The main benefit of biofuels from crops is that we get a liquid fuel out of it—so hard to come by via other alternatives. Public acceptance hinges on competition with food or just land in general. Scoring only about 1% efficient at raking in solar energy, this option requires commandeering massive tracts of land. A small-time farmer may make useful amounts of fuel for themselves in their back “yard,” if refining does not create a bottleneck.

Ocean Thermal: The ocean thermal resource uses the 20–30°C temperature difference between the deep ocean (a few hundred meters down) and its surface to drive a ridiculously low-efficiency heat engine. The heat content is not useful for warming any home (it’s not hot). But all the same, it’s a vast resource due to the sheer area of the solar collector. Large plants out at sea will be difficult to access and maintain, and transmitting power to land is no picnic either. The resource suffers seasonal intermittency at mid-latitudes, but let’s imagine putting these things all in the tropics to get around this. Sound hard, you say? Well yeah! That’s part of what makes ocean thermal difficult! No relevant/commercial scale demonstration exists. Like so many others, this is electricity only (and this time, far from demand). Probably nobody cares what we put to sea: out of sight, out of mind. Ocean thermal isnot a backyard solution!

Ocean Currents: Large-scale oceanic currents are slower than wind by about a factor of ten, giving a kilogram of current 1000 times less power than a kilogram of wind. Water density makes up the difference to make ocean current comparable to wind in terms of power per rotor area. Not all the ocean has currents as high as 1 m/s, so I put the total abundance in the same category as wind. Maybe accessing a thicker column of water than we can for wind should bump ocean currents up a bit, but the currents are relatively confined to surfaces. But why dunk a windmill underwater where it’s far from demand and difficult to access and maintain, when a comparable power can be had in dry air? So I classify this as difficult. On the plus side, the current should be rock solid, eliminating intermittency worries, unlike wind. Still, not one bit of our electricity mix comes from ocean currents at present, so it cannot be said to have been meaningfully demonstrated. For the remaining categories: it’s electricity only; who cares what’s underwater; and no backyard opportunity.

Ocean Waves: While they seem strong and ever-present, waves are a linear-collection phenomenon, and not an areal phenomenon. So there really isn’t that much arriving at shores all around the world (a few TW at best). It’s not particularly difficult to turn wave motion into useful electricity at high efficiency, and the proximity to land will make access, maintenance, and transmission far less worrisome than for the previous two cases. There will be some intermittency—largely seasonal— as storms and lulls come and go. I’ve seen a diverse array of prototype concepts, and a few are being tested at commercial scale. So this is further along then the previous two oceanic sources, but not so much as to get the green light. There will be moderate push-back from people whose ocean views are spoiled, or who benefit from natural wave energy hitting the coast. There are no waves in my backyard, and I hope to keep it this way!

D-T Fusion: The easier of the two fusion options, involving deuterium and tritium, represents a longstanding goal under active development for the last 60 years. The well-funded international effort, ITER, plans to accomplish a 480 second pulse of 500 MW power by 2026. This defines the pinnacle of hard. Fusion brings with it numerous advantages: enormous power density; moderate radioactive waste products (an advantage?!); abundant deuterium (though tritium is zilch); and surplus helium to liven up children’s parties. Fusion would have no intermittency issues, can directly produce heat (and derivative electricity), but like the others does not directly address transportation. The non-existant tritium can be knocked out of lithium with neutrons, and even through we are not awash in lithium, we have enough to last many thousands of years. We might expect some public opposition to D-T fusion due to the necessary neutron flux and associated radioactivity. Fusion is the highest-tech energy we can envision at present, requiring a team of well-educated scientists/technicians to run—meaning don’t plan on building one in your backyard, unless you can afford to have some staff PhDs on hand.

D-D Fusion: Replacing tritium with deuterium means abundance of materials is no concern whatsoever for many billions of years. As a trade, it’s substantially harder than D-T fusion (or we would not even consider D-T). D-D fusion requires higher temperatures, making confinement that much more difficult. It is for this reason that I gave D-D fusion a −2 score for difficulty. It’s not something we should rely upon to get us out of the impending energy pinch, which is my primary motivation.

End of an Era

Not only does this conclude the end of the phase on Do the Math where we evaluate the quantitative and qualitative benefits and challenges of alternatives to fossil fuels, it also points to the fact that we face the end of a golden era of energy. Sure, we managed to make scientific and cultural progress based on energy from animals, slaves, and firewood prior to discovering the fossil fuels. But it was in unlocking our one-time inheritance that we really came into our own.  Soon, we will see a yearly decrease in our trust fund dividend, forcing us to either adapt to less or try to fill the gap with replacements. What this post and the series preceding it demonstrates is that we do not have a delightful menu from which to select our future. Most of the options leave a bad taste of one form or the other.

When I first approached the subject of energy in our society, I expected to develop a picture in my mind of our grandiose future, full of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, nuclear, biofuels, geothermal, tidal, etc.  What I got instead was something like this matrix: full of inadequacies, difficulties, and show-stoppers. Our success at managing the transition away from fossil fuels while maintaining our current standard of living is far from guaranteed. If such success is our goal, we should realize the scale of the challenge and buckle down now while we still have the resources to develop a costly new infrastructure. Otherwise we get behind the curve, possibly facing unfamiliar chaos, loss of economic confidence, resource wars, and the unforgiving Energy Trap. The other controlled option is to deliberately adjust our lives to require fewer resources, preferably abandoning the growth paradigm at the same time. Can we manage a calm, orderly exit from the building? In either case, the first step is to agree that the building is in trouble. Techno-optimism keeps us from even agreeing on that.

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter-range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for nonscience majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

Image courtesy of Patrick Hoesly.

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Tesla decked out the car with innovative design features that could attract the soccer-mom crowd. That includes the so-called falcon-wing doors that open vertically and enable passengers to stand up in the car when packing in items like kids and groceries.

In addition Tesla is also telling the world that it’s bloomed into a full-fledged automaker that has a line of cars for all demographics, not just an expensive luxury car (the Roadster) for the One Percent.

To read my full analysis go check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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Elon Musk explaining falcon wings

At a sneak preview in Hawthorne, Calif. on Thursday, electric car maker Tesla unveiled its third car, an all-electric SUV, minivan hybrid called the Model X, for the first time. And yep, true to the rampant speculation on the Interwebs, it’s got so-called “falcon wing” doors, which are a Tesla-designed double-hinged play on gullf wing doors, named after Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Falcon rocket line for his other company Space-X (yeah, Tesla is just one of his three companies).

In contrast to gull wing doors that sweep out and up and take up considerable horizontal space, the Model X falcon wings lift up and have a double hinge so they take up a lot less horizontal space. Tesla designed the doors not only to add that extra cool-factor, but also to appeal to, say, a Mom or family driving to the mall and parking in a tight spot.

Because the doors open up vertically there’s also room to stand in the car while getting in and packing cargo (see photo) like kids and groceries. I fully stood up in the car with the doors open and I’m 5’11 and I had ample head room. The Model X is as roomy as any minivan out there and then some — it seats seven, and has cargo space in both the back trunk, and the front trunk (please don’t make me say frunk).

Rear of the Model X with trunk closed

The Model X is built on the backbone of the Model S, Tesla’s sedan that will be delivered to customers this Summer, and the Model X prototype that we checked out on Thursday was Tesla’s most advanced prototype at a launch to date and little will be changed for the production version, said Musk.

Tesla execs drove us around a short driving track and the car handled like the Model S — it has the same low, long, bottom battery pack design. It’s pretty amazing to ride in a minivan/SUV that can handle like a sports car. Musk says the Model X can go zero to 60 in 4.4 seconds. Think of it as the first cool, green, sporty minivan.

The Model X will be priced similarly to the Model S, said Musk, (Model S costs $50,000 to $70,000) and will have about the same electric driving range, with potentially 10 percent less range, because it’s a heavier car (the Model S has three range option, 160 miles, 230 miles and 300 miles).

OK, enough talk, I know you want to see the first photos of Tesla’s Model X! So here you go:

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Energy usage and tariff information generally isn’t easy to understand. To get input on how to solve this problem, U.K. energy regulator Ofgem has been conducting workshops with consumers across Great Britain. The new Consumer First Panel Report lists suggestions from consumers to help them better understand and engage with the electricity and gas market.

The workshops had 110 total participants in six locations across Great Britain last fall, with the goals of:

• Identify energy information needed to equip customers to make an informed decision.
• Establish the communication channels through which consumers want to receive this information.
• Provide insight into how energy information should be presented to encourage engagement.

Here are some suggestions that consumers offered in these workshops:

• Simpler language.Standardized and more easily understood language could better communicate key tariff and consumption information.
• Fewer tariffs.Consumers proposed limiting the number of tariffs — but this could be a bad thing if time-varying options are not permitted.
• Easier price comparisons.Consumers wanted to make it easier to decide which rate options are right for them.
• Guidance. Electricity retailers could work to build better relationships with their customers by helping consumers find the best tariff for them, and by rewarding loyalty.

Smart meters are essential to implement three of these four recommendations in the UK. Without smart meters, actual consumption data is rarely available, since traditional meters are read only quarterly or annually.

Smart meters also provide key tariff and consumption data, because they provide data more often (at least monthly). Also, tariff (cost) data is based on actual consumption, not the estimated consumption most commonly used today.

Smart meter data also makes it easier to compare prices, thus helping consumers find the best tariff option. Actual consumption data can be plugged into smartphone, tablet, or laptop apps which makes these comparisons. Or, retailers can do this on the web. America’s Green Button initiative is one example of how this is becoming a reality in 22 states by April 2012.

It’s worth repeating: Ofgem said that clear information — in simple language — is crucial to making communication materials from energy retailers more effective. This involves improvements to the language, design and layout.

Ironically, Ofgem made this key point in slightly convoluted wording: “How saving messages are communicated and signposted is crucial.”

This article originally appeared on eMeter’s Smart Grid Watch blog. Chris King is the Chief Regulatory Officer for eMeter. He is a nationally recognized authority on energy regulation and competitive energy markets, and is widely recruited by regulators and legislators to consult on technology issues in electric restructuring and grid management.

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The plant is called the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant and SolarReserve says it’ll be “the largest power plant of its kind in the world.” It’ll also use molten salt for energy storage.

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Tesla Roadsters lined up outside of the Model S Beta Customer event

This week two Valley-backed and government-supported electric car companies — Tesla and Fisker — have been taking two very different paths: one up and one down.

As you read this, I’ll shortly be heading down to Tesla’s design studio to attend the company’s Model X electric SUV launch event. The Model X is the company’s third electric car — which will be one of the first electric SUVs ever in the world — and Tesla could start selling the first Model X cars by the end of 2013. By this Summer Tesla pans to start selling its second car the Model S (if it meets its target), and it’s already sold around 2,000 Roadsters and signed several development deals with huge automakers. If you need to be convinced that Tesla is doing OK, just check out its stock price: it’s above $30, after an IPO in the Summer of 2010 priced at $17 per share.

Then on the other hand there’s Fisker, which has been dominating the electric car news this week with another type of story. This week Fisker announcedthat it’s suspending work on its second planned car, Project Nina, that was supposed to be built in Delaware with a Department of Energy loan. The company had delayed (by months and years) shipping its first car the Karma to the extent that it couldn’t make the milestones to get the remainder of the DOE loan. Fisker is trying

Tesla merch at the Model S Beta Customer event

to renegotiate the loan, or look for other funding for Project Nina, but in the meantime is putting its head down to work on selling the Karma — a car that came out with a $20,o00 higher than expected price tag and a far lower than expected MPG.

A lot of people have asked me why is one doing so well, while the other seems to be struggling, despite that the companies share a lot of similarities. Back in 2008 the companies even shared a few things that were a little too close for comfort (Tesla at one point sued Fisker alleging that Fisker stole Tesla’s design ideas and trade secrets). So here’s 3 10 key differences between these two electric car makers:

1). Tech vs design: Tesla has been building next-gen electric vehicle technology since its inception in 2003, and made a strategic bet at the beginning of its life to build cars around packaging commoditized (low cost) small-format batteries. Tesla is selling its battery pack and powertrain tech to some of the largest auto makers out there, like Tesla’s $100 million deal with Toyota, for its RAV-4 EV. Tesla can use this tech to not only make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from development deals, but all of that IP is extremely valuable, and puts the company in control of a lot more of the development of its cars.

Fisker is a design shop first before it’s a technology company. The company founder Henrik Fisker is the well-known auto designer behind the Aston Martin. Fisker has a long-term supply agreement deal with Quantum for the powertrain tech and software for the Karma and Fisker gets its Karma batteries from A123 Systems. Fisker has no plans to sell or license car tech, which means it doesn’t have that valuable IP and also it won’t be making revenues off of development deals. Also it’s subject to issues in third party tech, like the battery problem that emerged in late 2011, that led to a recall and fix of the Karmas on the market.

2). Stage of development: Tesla is about four years older than Fisker, but it seems like EV-years are like dog years, they’re accelerated. Tesla went through its roller coaster, delay-filled and worrisome years about four years ago. Tesla won $465 millionin DOE loans after it eeked past that period and about three months after it started delivering its

Fisker Karmas

first car. Fisker was awarded $529 million in loans from the DOE, over two years before it delivered its first car the Karma.

Tesla was at just the right stage of development to be able to make use of those government loans to build its own factory for the Model S. On the other hand, Fisker was not in the right stage to start planning a factory for a second car that was supposed to produce 75,000 to 100,000 cars annually.

3). Elon Musk: Tesla has a founder and CEO that has put up some serious cash to keep the business running, particularly getting Tesla through the dark days of the downturn. There’s not an equivalent at Fisker, or at most companies, and Fisker’s investors are made up of dozens of firms and wealthy individuals.

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Here’s the full comment:

We at Nest are proud of creating products that bring true innovation to home efficiency and we are continuing to innovate and bring products to market. The Nest Learning Thermostat is already making a difference, saving customers energy and money. Nest will vigorously defend itself against Honeywell’s patent-attack strategy to stifle thoughtful competition and we have the resources, support and conviction to do so.

If you’re just jumping into this story, Honeywell is a thermostat behemoth, and Nest is a Valley startup that created what it calls the world’s first learning thermostat. Honeywell says that the Nest learning thermostat is infringing on at least seven of Honeywell’s patents, and Honeywell also named retailer Best Buy, which sells the Nest thermostat, in the suit.

Beth Wozniak, president, Honeywell Environmental and Combustion Controls, said in a statement about the lawsuit this week that “Competition is good and we welcome it, but we will not stand by while competitors, large or small, offer products that infringe on our intellectual property.”

Nest is backed by tens of millions of dollars from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and Al Gore’s investment fund.

Here’s some other background on the suit:

• The details behind the Honeywell, Nest lawsuit
• How the Honeywell, Nest lawsuit could stifle innovation
• Honeywell killed off its learning thermostat 20 years ago
• Let the battle for the smart thermostat begin (subscription required)

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Fisker has been one of Kleiner’s largest auto bets to date, and Fisker has raised over $850 million in private funding from dozens of investors including NEA. Kleiner Partner Ray Lane helped lead the deal and was the public face of the investment back when it won its loan from the DOE in 2010.

This week Fisker announced that while it will continue to sell its Fisker Karma, it has suspended its plans to build a second car, its Project Nina, and hasn’t been able to draw down on the remainder of its DOE loan award. Fisker could end up doing alright if its Karma car takes off, but to date the investment hasn’t exactly been a slam dunk.

What was Lane’s idea when he put Kleiner’s funds in Fisker? Lane told me in an interview last Summer that:

When I did Fisker and another car company, my partners thought I was out of my mind. But I had a thesis. We can invest in a car company and either have a way to get the valuation high enough so you don’t get crushed on dilution or get low-cost loans that are high leverage for equity investors.

Then there’s Next Autoworks, formerly called V-Vehicle, which had plans to build a gas-sipping plastic four-seater car in Louisiana at an uncommonly low cost. In addition to Kleiner, that venture managed to also get funding from Google Ventures and oil baron turned green crusader T. Boone Pickens, despite that the company never showed off a car prototype or really explained much about what it’s new development would be.

The company hit some rocky ground in 2010 when its founder Frank Varasano left, and Lane temporarily took over. Then in late 2010, it reformed as Next Autoworks and brought in another CEO. However late last year, it finally stopped pursuing the DOE loan, withdrew its application and shelved its proposed factory.

Lastly there’s Think, a Norwegian electric car company that has tried for decades to build an urban small electric car in both Europe and the U.S. At an event in 2008, Lane announced how Kleiner and investor Rockport Capital would create a joint venture with Think, called Think North America, which would sell electric cars (beginning with the Think City) in the U.S., made in the U.S. Kleiner and Rockport owned 50 percent of the venture, while Think Global held the remaining 50 percent.

Think had a plan to build cars in Indiana back in 2010 and was also waiting on approval of a DOE loan. Think had a plan to invest some $43.5 million improving and equipping the Indiana Elkhart plant, and planned to create more than 400 jobs in the area by 2013. Think never got that DOE loan and declared bankruptcy last Summer.

In an interview last Summer, Lane told me the financial details behind his Think investment. He said Kleiner never put equity in the company, but that RockPort and Kleiner paid $2.5 million each to buy the North American rights to Think if it ever came to the U.S. But when Think restructured later, he said,  it bought back the American rights from Kleiner.

Investing in the auto space is a whole different ball game compared to investing in software, computing and mobile. The time lines and capital needed and much different, and the auto sector is also much more susceptible to economic downturns.

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Greenpeace gave Google the top overall score (53 out of 100), while Cisco (49 out of 100), Ericsson (48 out of 100) and Fujitsu (48 out of 100) followed shortly behind. On the flipside of the top companies, were the stragglers, which included Oracle (10 out of 100) at the very bottom, and TCS (11 out of 100) and Telefonica (11 out of 100) at the second and third to last spots.

Greenpeace gives the most weight in its scores to companies for using their own technology to reduce the world’s green house emissions. For example, a networking company like Cisco develops smart grid technology which can save energy and reduce emissions. The second largest part of the Greenpeace score is made up by how well the company advocates publicly and politically for reducing emissions. Lastly, Greenpeace gives companies points for monitoring and managing their own company emissions footprint.

Google rose in the rankings from six overall in 2010 to number one this week. Last year Google invested close to a billion dollars into clean energy projects. Cisco lost its top spot in 2010 to Google this year.

IBM, which was 3rd in 2010, dropped to 9th overall this week. Greenpeace says that IBM fell across all three categories and obtained four penalty points in political advocacy for being a member of a trade association that is trying to block the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals.

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The first light Soraa is launching is a lamp to replace a halogen bulb (called an MR16), which are commonly used in places like recessed ceiling lights and spot lights on products in stores and venues. These aren’t lamps for the everyday home owner, and Soraa is targeting commercial and industrial building owners first, before it moves to the residential market.

During an interview with Soraa CEO Eric Kim at Soraa’s factory, Kim explained to me that “light is not a commodity,” as he showed me the light from the Soraa lamp in comparison to a variety of LED competitors including giants like Philips that also make halogen replacement LEDs. Indeed in the various tests the bright white light displayed a far better quality, consistency, color and angle than the comparison light.

That type of quality would be pretty cool on its own. But Soraa’s LED light is also highly energy efficient. It uses about 75 percent less energy than incandescent and halogen bulbs, and lasts 25 times longer than halogen bulbs. For a company that’s buying lighting for a commercial building, a Soraa light can deliver a year pay back period in energy savings, said Kim.

How does it work?

Soraa’s secret sauce lies in the startup’s early bet on using the semiconductor gallium nitride for the substrate part of the light. LEDs are usually made by putting gallium nitride onto sapphire of silicon carbide substrates. But Soraa’s light places gallium nitride onto a gallium nitride substrate, enabling the core of the light itself to create better uniformity. Soraa says the combo is more cost effective and can produce more light per lamp than the traditional methods.

While the tech sounds like a perfect thing to license to the big players, Soraa is making the big bet that it can be a vertically-integrated LED manufacturer, making the substrate, chip, packaging and entire light solution. That’s always a slight risk, because that can be capital intensive, but on the other hand, the payoff and potential are a lot higher when you own the whole value chain.

Soraa is currently moving into volume commercial production at its factory in Fremont, Calif. Kim tells me at the company’s current fab, it will be able to turn into a $400 million revenue per year company.

Soraa, which was founded in 2008, is backed by Khosla Ventures, NEA and NGEN Partners and has raised over $100 million in funding.

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• Fisker was founded in 2007. Back in the Spring of 2009 Fisker was estimating to make its first Karma production models by the end of 2009 and enter full-scale production of the Karma — about 1,200 cars per month — by June 2010. The goal was to sell 15,000 Karma’s in 2011.
• According to the September 2009 Conditional Commitment letter, Fisker was supposed to hit a milestone of vehicle sales of its Karma of 11,000 units by September 2011.
• In 2009, Fisker was looking to be profitable on 5,000 cars sold in 2011.
• One of the milestones named on the DOE’s Conditional Commitment Letter in September 2009 was that Fisker’s minimum EBIDTA by the end of 2011 has to be $25 million.
• At the end of 2009 Fisker bumped the Karma launch to September 2010.
• The first Karma’s were delivered in the Summer of 2011. We were there and saw Kleiner Perkins partner Ray Lane get his car.
• The rest of the Karma deliveries in the Summer of 2011 were delayed because the car lacked federal and state certification.
• By September 2011, Fisker was estimating to fulfill orders for the Karma of 3,000 by the end of 2011.
• By November 2011, battery maker A123 Systems had to lower its fourth-quarter and year-2011 guidance by $45 million because of the decreased Fisker volume. A123 Systems said Fisker wouldn’t ramp up volume production until Q2 2012.
• By the end of 2011, Fisker said it had sent 225 Karmas to its dealers and had another 1,200 “in the pipeline.”
• Fisker was hit by two production problems at the of 2011 and early 2012. One was a battery defect that forced Fisker to recall and fix the issue for 239 cars. The other was a software glitch that needed to be fixed in early January.
• Now for 2012, Fisker spokesperson is telling reporters this week that Fisker is making “20 to 25” Karmas a day. The goal for Fisker is to produce 60 cars a day at some point. Will it ever get there?
• For Project Nina, Fisker received the DOE loan to manufacture at a volume of 75,000 to 100,000 per year starting in 2012.
• This week Fisker said that it’s suspended working on Project Nina and laid off workers until it can either renegotiate the loan or find alternative funding for Project Nina.

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