The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has completed a study that comes up with two ways to use compressed air technology to store wind energy in underground chambers, the national lab said Monday. The two ways both use data and computer modelling to figure out the best sites that could successfully bank wind energy to be used at a later time.

Compressed air, as its name suggests, makes use of an electrically powered air compressor that sends pressurized air into a storage facility, which can be man-made or an underground reservoir. The pressurized air is let out later to run a turbine and generator to produce electricity. As much as 80 percent of the electricity used to compress air can be recovered when the pressurized air is used to generate energy, the lab said. Power losses are common when converting one form of energy to another.

Power in under ground caves

Utilities in the Northwest have a good reason for taking a look at energy storage technology. Wind power makes up about 13 percent (8.6 GW) of the power supply for the Northwest, the national lab said. Wind power tends to be most plentiful at night, when demand is at the lowest. Storing wind power for use during the day would help utilities meet their customers’ demand and manage their grids, which run smoothly when there is a balance of supply and demand. That prompted the Bonneville Power Administration to work with the lab to look into whether compressed air would be a good fit.

Many U.S. utilities or power producers have done preliminary studies or even pilot projects to check out different types of energy storage technologies, including various types of batteries. Often their regulators require them to gradually increase the amount of renewable energy they supply to their customers. Wind and solar have been popular choices, but they don’t generate a steady supply of electricity around the clock. Here is where energy storage comes in handy to help utilities manage their supply and demand.

The researchers were looking for two suitable underground sites for storing compressed air. They used data from gas exploration in Washington state and a computer model that simulates the flow of fluids underground. The idea is to see how much air a site can hold and how easy it’d be for the air to be harvested for power generation. For the study, an ideal underground storage would be at least 1,500 feet deep and 30 feet thick, and it should be close to transmission lines, the lab said.

Pacific Northwest

They found two locations, a place by the Columbia River, just across from Boardman, Ore., and another one in the Yakima Canyon that is roughly 10 miles north of Selah, Wash.

Sasquatch watches over the lobby of Facebook’s data center in Oregon

The scientists then sketched out two different processes for storing and re-using energy. At the Columbia River location, which is close to a natural gas pipeline, a compressed air storage plant can use natural gas to heat the compressed air and in the process boost the amount of electricity that can be produced.

At the Yakima location, the facility can use geothermal heat to run a chiller, which will in turn cool the air compressor to make it run more efficiently. Geothermal energy also can heat up the compressed air when it’s released from storage.

Bonneville will now take the results of the $790,000 study and do a round of cost-and-benefit analysis to figure out if compressed air makes for a good business case.

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What are the challenges of growing a solar installation company? SolarCity provides some good insight into that question as it reports earnings for the first full quarter since it became a public company last December.

Raising funds to support its financial product offerings, signing up a greater number of new customers, expanding its operations, and shortening the project completion process are just some of the issues outlined by SolarCity’s executives during their discussion with financial analysts yesterday.

These issues are nothing new, of course, but SolarCity’s financial results help to quantify some of their costs. Given that the solar market is still young, most of SolarCity’s competitors are private and often much smaller.

The California company installed more megawatts of solar energy projects during the first quarter than it initially anticipated (46MW instead of 41MW). But it didn’t raise its 2013 installation forecast, which remains at 250 MW this year. SolarCity boosted its first-quarter sales to $28.2 million but posted $31 million in losses.

“At this stage, we still find ourselves delivery constrained. It’s a matter of scaling our residential operation as well as bringing in our commercial projects on schedule that prevent us from increasing the guidance from 250MW right now,” said CEO Lyndon Rive during the conference call. “We are just focusing our operational capacity.”

SolarCity runs on a business model that is quite different from many of its competitors. The company does the sales, engineering, installation and maintenance with its in-house crew. Rivals such as Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance farm out the installation and maintenance work to roofers and other installers. Some of them want to build their brands and invest in marketing and sales to consumers while others sell their financial products and services to installers. Vivint, which has built a large home security system business before getting into solar, operates more like SolarCity.

SolarCity’s model requires much more capital to scale up the business. It needs to hire and train more people, maintain trucks and other tools of the trade and set up shop in expanding its reach across the country. It also has to aggressively court consumers.

The company does business in 14 states, and in March it announced a plan to set up operations in Nevada. The company saw its operating expenses grow from $24.7 million in the first quarter of 2012 to $34.5 million a year later. It serves home and business owners, as well as schools and government agencies. It’s getting into the utility market, too. By the end of the first quarter, SolarCity had accumulated 54,416 customers, and most of those customers are in the residential space: 33MW of the 46MW it completed during the first quarter went to homes.

Raising enough money to finance leases and power purchase agreements is another big challenge for SolarCity and its competitors. With leases or power purchase agreements, customers pay a monthly fee for the electricity generated from the solar panels on their rooftop. They don’t own the panels, however, since they didn’t pay for the high upfront costs of the equipment and labor that can run around $20,000 for an average system in places like California.

The investors that give the funds that support those financing options own the solar electric systems, and they get to take advantage of a 30 percent federal investment tax credit and count on revenues from the monthly payments for the duration of the contracts, which usually run 20 years. As of May 10, SolarCity has enough funds to finance 158MW worth of projects.

SolarCity is a formidable fundraiser. In its 2012 annual report, the company said it had raised $1.7 billion to finance installations since its inception from companies such as U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. SolarCity also puts in its own money in some of the funds to finance the installations. The pressure to raise money consistently is even greater now that SolarCity is a public company and must not only show growth but also generate profits at some point. It doesn’t want to be in a situation where the demand for its leases outstrips the funds available, something that happened to SunPower during the first quarter of this year.

SolarCity also needs to shorten the amount of time it takes from selling solar panel systems to installing each project. It has 195MW of backlog, some of which are planned as multi-year projects. But overall, the company wants to sell and install the equipment during the same month, Rive said. To accomplish that, the company is constantly looking for ways to simplify the installation process by using different designs for racks and other components. It also invests in software to reduce the time it takes to apply for permits and complete the sales process.

SolarCity has been an interesting company to watch since its start in 2006. It was one of a crop of venture-backed companies in the emerging residential solar market. Now, how well the company can grow its business and make a profit will be used by investors to evaluate other solar retail service companies that want to go public.

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RedWave Energy says on its website that early markets for the technology could be industries like explosives detection and high speed communications. But later down the line, the end goal could be harvesting solar energy in a method that has twice the capacity of current solar cells and panels but at a lower cost.

Nanotechnology is being used to eek out as much efficiency as possible from solar cells and panels. For example, Swedish startup Sol Voltaics says it has developed a low cost way to make tiny nanowires out of the semiconductor gallium arsenide. Sol Voltaics turns these nanowires into an ink, which can be layered onto basic solar panels and boost the efficiency of a standard panel by 25 percent.

But RedWave Energy’s nano scale antennas — or nantennas — work differently than solar cells. Nantennas act as an antenna or collector to absorb light of specific wavelengths and convert it into electricity. The technology has been around for decades, but RedWave Energy is now trying to commercialize nantenna technology licensed from Idaho National Labs, tech from University of Colorado, and is working with manufacturing company MicroContinuum.

RedWave Energy says it will start to talk more about its energy capture technology after it builds its prototype in the second quarter of 2013. We’ve reached out to the company and will update this if we hear back.

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The announcement came after SunPower executives said last week that demand in the hot Japanese market exceeded what the company could deliver during the first quarter. Last month, market research firm IHS reported that the average wholesale prices for silicon panels delivered to Europe rose for the first time in several years.

The shift has come at a heavy cost to solar manufacturers like First Solar and SunPower, however. For over two years, solar panel makers have had to reduce production or even shutter factories while posting losses quarter after quarter. Dozens have filed for bankruptcy, including Germany’s Alfasolar, as reported by PV Magazine Monday. The bankruptcy of Suntech Power’s main subsidiary in March rattled the industry, particularly those who have bought the Chinese company’s solar panels.

First Solar, which makes solar panels and develops solar power plants, closed its big manufacturing plant in Germany last year and suspended plans to build new factories in Vietnam and Arizona. Those moves as well as First Solar’s efforts to reduce its spending on administration and, to a lesser extent, research development and sales, have allowed the company to survive the downturn. First Solar brought in new top executives over the past year and presented a convincing plan last month for improving its technology and sales in emerging markets for the next several years.

For the past three years, First Solar’s executives have discussed in earnest the need to grab market share in emerging markets such as India, China, the Middle East and Latin America. Germany was once its largest market, but the country, which has steadily reduced its government incentives for solar energy generation, accounted for just three percent of its sales in 2012, according to First Solar’s 2012 annual report.

In an earnings discussion with analysts on Monday, First Solar’s CEO Jim Hughes pointed out that the company has expanded its market reach since early 2012. Back then, it was talking mostly about sales in the United States, Canada, India, Europe and Australia. Its purchase of a Chilean solar power developer earlier this year created a new talking point about Latin America. The Chilean company was developing about 1.5 GW of projects when First Solar announced the acquisition. Overall, First Solar is working on about 1.8 GW of projects in Latin America, though those projects are under development and the company isn’t promising that all of them will succeed.

Hughes also announced that the company has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia for the second phase of a 2GW plan that it first announced in 2009. The second phase will see First Solar supplying 300 MW-500 MW of solar panels, and construction could start in the second half of 2014. The first phase, a 30MW project, is set to start construction in the third quarter of this year, he added.

Meanwhile, the company is building some of the world’s largest solar power plants right here in California. One of them, the 230MW Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One in Los Angeles County, has run into “weather-related delays” during the first quarter of this year. That partly contributed to lower earnings from the previous quarter. Completion of the project is now set for the end of this year rather than the second quarter.

The company generated $755 million in sales for the first quarter of this year, down $320 million from the previous quarter but up $258 million from the year-ago period. It posted $59.1 million in net income, or $0.66 per share for the first quarter, $154.2 million in net income, or $1.74 per share for the fourth quarter of 2012. It reported $449.4 million, or $5.20 per share, in losses for the first quarter of 2012.

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ABB is spending $6.35 a share for Power-One. Power-One has 3,300 employees, and in 2012 produced $120 million in earnings, with $1 billion in sales. Bloomberg reports that the deal is 7.7 times Power-One’s earnings (EBITDA), which is lower than the average price of 8.5 times earnings that has been paid over the past three years for clean power companies.

There was a record-breaking 3.3 gigawatts worth of solar panels — or 16 million individual solar panels — installed in the U.S. in 2012, making solar power the fastest-growing energy source domestically. Another record year is expected in 2013.

Solar panel makers are struggling because the price of solar panels is so cheap right now, and that has led to an oversupply of panels in the market. There will be more consolidation and bankruptcy this year for solar panel makers.

In recent years the solar inverter market has also been developing new technology, and have begun to introduce micro inverters, or smaller inverters coupled with each solar panel. Traditional solar inverters are larger are there have commonly been one per solar panel rooftop installation. ABB has been aggressively acquiring technology across the power grid sector, and has also been investing in clean power tech through its venture arm, over the past two years.

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Midsummer, based in Jarfalla, Sweden, has developed equipment and processes to make thin film solar panels, using the material copper indium gallium (di)selenide, or CIGS. If the term CIGS rings a bell, that’s because the ashes of CIGS firms have burned brightly — and burned their investors’ cash – in recent years.

Silicon Valley’s MiaSolé, which had originally impressed investors with its high conversion efficiencies, was sold at a bargain-basement price to Chinese renewable energy firm Hanergy earlier this year. Reports are that the firm was snapped up for 10 percent of the price tag the board was after. There was also Solyndra, Nanosolar, Heliovolt, and others that have struggled.

But beyond just CIGS, the entire solar panel market is laboring under the weight of oversupply, and manufacturers have production capacities for about twice as many solar panels than the market needs. Even the big manufacturers are struggling and one of the biggest, China’s Suntech, has been unable to pay bondholders, with the subsidiary responsible for much of its manufacturing slipping into insolvency.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’ll be difficult to sell new equipment to prospective manufacturers. But that hasn’t stopped Sweden’s Midsummer. It believes its new approach to CIGS deposition offers major advantages.

Optical disk approach to solar panels

Midsummer’s approach is to produce individual CIGS thin film cells on a stainless steel substrate. The cells are “punched out” of the stainless roll before deposition. “We wanted to produce many small thin film solar cells and then later on put them together in a module,” says CEO Sven Lindström.

This approach draws on optical disc manufacturing techniques, treating each individual CIGS cells in much the same was a CD or DVD would be created. It certainly marks a departure from current thin film semiconductor deposition, which tends to be employed in a continuous process, either onto a glass substrate or a roll of stainless steel. The closest relative to the Midsummer process in PV would be MiaSolé, which uses a stainless steel substrate cut into cells. But even MiaSolé uses a continuous deposition process with the cells being sorted into efficiencies batches afterwards.

What’s the advantages of the CIGS semiconductor deposition onto individual cells? Lindström believes that it allows R&D improvements to be made more quickly and incrementally, one cell at a time. The company is aiming to produce 200 to 400 cells per hour on its equipment, and says it can change the process parameters a little for each individual cell. Midsummer employs its 2D bar coding system for the substrate, so individual cells can be logged on a database and efficiencies assessed.

Midsummer claims that other advantages include that its cells can be employed in a flexible module, which is a market segment that has been largely left open after Global Solar and Uni-Solar ceased production. The difference between Midsummer’s approach and those companies’ technologies is that Midsummer’s cells are significantly more efficient. Midsummer can produce modules with an efficiency of 14 to 15 percent, while Global Solar and Unisolar were producing modules for closer to 8 to 10 percent.

In addition, Lindstöm says the weight per square meter of Midsummer’s modules is below three kilograms per square meter, which is more lightweight than competitors. Flexible modules have been touted as a solution for commercial rooftop panels or membrane roofing, where weight load is an issue. Light weight, flexible panels could also open up other more unusual markets, like on the roofs of trains.

In terms of costs, the Midsummer claims its flexible module can be made for $1.10/W and with glass for $0.70. It has a roadmap for $0.50/W by the end of 2014, which is slightly ahead of competitors. It also believes that such costs can be achieved at a relatively small scale, tens of megawatts instead of hundreds or gigawatts.

It should be noted that while Midsummer has a line up and running in its labs in Sweden, but that the efficiency and cost results have not yet been tested in scale production. And with very few solar panel manufacturers looking to add capacity, there’s a chance that won’t happen soon.

“Nobody is buying”

While all of these advantages and this new approach appears promising, it could be incredibly hard to find buyers willing to invest in new solar panel equipment. “Nobody is adding new capacity,” at least for the next 12 to 18 months, says Finlay Colville, VP at NPD Solarbuzz. “This makes it a really big problem for anybody who is introducing a new tool,” particularly turnkey thin film lines.

But that doesn’t mean all is lost for Midsummer. It reports that an unnamed Chinese customer has one of the Midsummer lines currently installed for testing. The solar market’s geographical shift away from traditional European markets and to new ones in the Middle East and East Asia may also provide opportunities.

A GTM Research report released recently predicted that the Middle East and Africa will provide 1 GW of demand for solar panels in 2013, an increase of over 600 percent on 2012. The strong performance of thin film panels and CIGS’ in hotter temperatures could also give that technology an advantage. GTM Research’s Shyam Mehta thinks that if some of the CIGS cells that have reached 19 percent efficiency in a lab setting, could be applied to commercial production, there could be good prospects for the technology.

Even with a PV manufacturing market under considerable stress, innovation is still required to drive efficiencies up and costs down and Midsummer may allow for iterative improvements, cell by cell, for the first time in thin film. CEO Lindstöm reports that the company is well funded at present, but for its approach to make an impression it will have to start selling equipment sooner rather than later.

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Sol Voltaics, which is discussing its product and funding for the first time this week, said it has developed a low cost way to make tiny nanowires out of the semiconductor gallium arsenide. The company turns these nanowires into an ink, which can be layered onto basic solar panels and boost the efficiency of a standard panel by 25 percent.

The idea is that solar panel makers would want to buy this technology because they can sell the more efficient panels at a higher price, and raise their margins. In addition, the overall installed cost of the more efficient solar panels (they produce more power) could be lower by 15 percent to 20 percent.

Swedish solar innovation

Founded in 2008, Sol Voltaics won’t be producing its nanowire ink — called SolInk — at pilot scale until 2015, and commercial scale in 2016. But it’s already started to prove that its technology works, and has had its nanowire cells certified by research firm Fraunhofer for an efficiency of 13.8 percent. This year the company is focused on demoing how its ink boosts efficiency on a larger scale, and in 2014 they’ll work on perfecting the equipment that its customers will use to cover panels with the ink.

With just 20 employees, Sol Voltaics has been operating in a relatively lean mode for a solar manufacturing company. To date the startup has raised just $11 million in funding from private and public funders and family offices, including Industrifonden, Foundation Asset Management, Scatec, Nano Future Invest AS, Nordic Innovation and Vinnova. The company hopes to raise another $10 million to $20 million this year, and plans to cap all of its funding at $50 million by 2016.

Sol Voltaics has some well-known names in the solar and venture capital sectors. The company was founded by Lund University Professor Lars Samuelson, who is an expert on the type of semiconductor that Sol Voltaics uses to make its nanowires. The company is led by Dave Epstein, who is a serial entrepreneur and former partner with Crosslink Capital, and Magnus Ryde, who was the former CEO of TSMC America, is Sol Voltaics Chairman.

How does it work?

Sol Voltaic’s innovation is that it’s figured out how to make tiny wires using the normally expensive but highly efficient semiconductor gallium arsenide. Solar scientists have spent years using gallium arsenide in various ways to make ultra-efficient solar cells, but the only way the material can be cheap enough to actually be used on a commercial scale is if it’s used in very small amounts — hence the nanotech wire part. But, again, in previous years the production of nanowires has also been relatively expensive.

The breakthrough came when Samuelson figured out a way to make the gallium arsenide nanowires in a gas phase instead of in a solid phase. Sol Voltaics calls this their aerotaxy process. Under the right conditions, in an air reactor, the company can grow these nanowires in seconds and store them in a liquid, producing a sort of ink.

Sol Voltaics wants to take this ink and sell it to solar panel makers, alongside production equipment that they can use to layer the ink — inkjet style — onto their own solar panels. The nanowires in the ink act as guides for the light and concentrate it. The company says the capital expensive of the ink and machines add 1 to 2 cents per Watt for the panels.

Sol Voltaics is targeting Chinese and other global silicon solar makers that are struggling and producing many of their panels at a loss right now. Proving that the technology can help them out — and is worth the investment — will take quite a few key partners and demonstrations. The good thing, though, is that if one customer starts using it as a competitive advantage and it works, others will want to use it to keep up.

Some of these huge solar maker players will have to survive, and could adopt and invest in new technologies to do that. The ones that do survive, will see the continued solar panel market explode over the coming years. There was a record-breaking 3.3 gigawatts worth of solar panels — or 16 million individual solar panels — installed in the U.S. in 2012, making solar power the fastest-growing energy source domestically.

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Empower Micro Systems CCO Jon Bonanno told me that the company’s inverter tech “is a quantum change in how solar is done.” It can be attached to a solar panel system, on the rack or the frame, or embedded at the individual solar module level. Bonanno says the inverter is five times more reliable, five percent more efficient and costs 20 percent less than traditional “string” inverters, which have been used for decades. The potential of a lower inverter cost, is that the entire cost of the solar system could be lower, in addition to the recent dramatic drop in solar module prices.

Empower Micro Systems doesn’t plan to manufacture the inverter box itself. The company is a fabless chip firm and it sells its integrated circuits and architecture design to manufacturers like inverter makers and solar module producers. In that respect it’s adopting Intel’s mode, churning out the chips inside the inverter devices.

Bonanno is pretty confident of the disruptive power of the inverter tech, called the “Universal Micro Power Inverter.” He thinks it can “replace all solar inversion options, hands down.” The key technologies of the inverter are how the system on a chip synchronizes and controls the power flow at a low voltage, as well as the design of the inverter box itself.

Enphase Energy’s tech

Microinverters use energy storage tech to temporarily store the DC power from the solar panel and decouple it from the AC grid power. The Empower Micro System’s inverter uses a next-gen solid state capacitor for this energy storage tech, while other systems more commonly use more traditional liquid-filled electrolytic capacitors.

The next steps for any startup are bringing this hardware to market. Bonanno says the company has already signed one agreement with a “top-three” module maker, and is in discussions with many more module makers and power supply vendors. Just this Sunday, Bonanno said the company’s field trials went live with solar installers. This year the inverter will be certified and could be produced in pilot production by the third quarter of 2013.

The technology has attracted a list of angel investors including Jurgen Krehnke, recent President & General Manager of SMA Americas, Ken Lawler, General Partner at Battery Ventures and Silicon Ventures, Kiki Tidwell, Kauffman Fellow and cleantech investor, and Eugene Zhang, Managing Director at Tsinghua University Executive Entrepreneur Club. Chinese module manufacturers will be key for the company’s market strategy. Empower Micro Systems is currently in the process of raising a $5.5 million series A round.

There’s a lot of competition in the solar inverter space. Not only are there the new microinverters companies like Enphase Energy, and power optimizer tech from the likes of Solar Edge and Tigo Energy, but also the traditional inverter giants like SMA dominate the market. The company will need to launch and scale to prove a competitive edge.

But Empower Micro Systems plans are actually even more audacious than just replacing solar inverters. The technology can be applied to energy storage and electric vehicles, and Bonanno says one day down the road they hope to move into those markets, too.

Updated at 3PM PST, to fix the spellings of Jon Bonanno, and Jurgen Krehnke.

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This week eight Chinese banks asked a court to find Suntech subsidiary Wuxi Suntech insolvent and to allow it to begin restructuring. Suntech responded to the court and said it would not object. The New York Times reported that the bankruptcy is “expected to lead to a takeover of the Wuxi operations by Wuxi Guolian, a financial conglomerate controlled by the city government of Wuxi.”

The solar market has seen an oversupply of solar panels and plummeting prices for those panels for over two years now. Two thirds of solar cells are made in China, where the Chinese government has given Chinese solar makers access to large low cost loans. The oversupply and drop in prices has led to huge solar manufacturers like Q-Cells to startups like Solyndra and Abound Solar to file for bankruptcy.

Suntech solar panels

Suntech may be the largest to date, but it won’t be the last solar maker to crash. As MIT Tech Review put it earlier this week: “hundreds of solar companies need to fail to help bring the supply of solar panels back in line with demand.”

The weeding-out process will help slow the fall in solar panel prices and allow demand to rise back up again. Down the road the re-balancing will enable these companies to continue to invest in more efficient cells and new innovations, which will bring down the cost of solar through technology even more. Another 180 solar panel makers could reportedly disappear by 2015 due to consolidation.

At the same time, Suntech’s woes partly come from a financial scandal. The company got in trouble with a fund it controlled that financed solar power plant development in Europe.

Of course, it’s not all positive that Suntech has declared bankruptcy. As Ucilia Wang wrote for us last week:

The drama presents an ugly turn for a company that was solid and took technology and market risks to grow. . . Chinese companies in general had been known more as mass producers rather than innovators. . . Suntech’s decline also leaves a depressing note in the efforts by the federal and local governments to expand solar manufacturing in the U.S.

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In new data provided by the Edelman Trust Barometer survey of 31,000 global respondents, 68 percent of respondents trust the “renewables” business to do the right thing, as compared with 58 percent for natural gas, 53 percent for utilities and 49 percent for oil (see image below).

That’s a license to lead, folks. Despite significant perceptual headwinds, renewables emerge with a 10 point lead over its nearest energy competitor. As a marketer, I’m reminded of why I originally found this sector so energizing and inspiring during the cleantech boom of 2007-2008.

Note the high trust in places like China and India. Not surprising, considering the clear messages sent by those governments about cleantech deployment, and the ability of those nations to leapfrog traditional energy systems to meet electricity demand for growing middle classes. Both countries boast cleantech leaders like Hanwha Solar, Suzlon and Tata.

Note the low numbers for Japan (66 percent) and Germany (63 percent). These are consistent with both countries’ lower trust in business and energy.

The German numbers shocked me the first time I saw them. But for this country, renewables have graduated to the “big energy” establishment, which I expect engenders less trust than the sheen of new technologies in emerging markets.

For Japan, trust in the entire energy industry is lower than other countries post-Fukushima, but renewables are trusted most within the Japanese energy sector.

Broadening focus to the entire energy industry, this data corroborates another trend: so-called “purpose-driven” energy innovators enjoy a trust premium over other energy professionals. This not just a cleantech thing, it’s an advanced energy thing. This is for two reasons:

When asked to rank attributes that shape trust in a company, respondents ranked “purpose” – protecting the environment, partnering with NGOs – as most important, and being an “innovator of new products” close behind (see image below and note the orange and purple attributes that respondents rank as more important for the energy industry as compared with general business).

Clearly, energy companies can earn more credibility by better communicating real global citizenship and helpful innovation.

On the flipside, communicating about the success of business “operations” (dark blue) was valued only as table stakes for being an energy company, not as a major trust-builder. I would argue this is true if we’re talking about large companies, but I think the opposite is true for advanced energy start-ups where the onus is much higher to prove operational success.

The data also shows how technology is trusted more than energy. In my opinion, the marriage of technology and energy is a net gain for energy company trust building. See the image below, which depicts how much higher technology is trusted than energy (78 percent vs. 67 percent). I interpret this as further proof that innovation gives the energy industry license to lead.

This is reflected in the strong Silver Spring IPO on Wednesday. Silver Spring is an innovative energy IT company, not just an energy company. Energy IT is a highly credible sector populated by other promising companies like OPOWER and FirstFuel, and a primary focus for venture capitalist still focused on cleantech. The public trust data corroborates the investor enthusiasm.

Would you like more data on trust in the energy industry? Don’t hesitate to contact me at joey.marquart@edelman.com.

Joey Marquart is the global cleantech sector lead for Edelman, the PR firm. He is based in Silicon Valley and oversees communications programs for solar, bio, EV, materials and smart grid companies.

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