The announcement by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson capped the administration’s effort to reduce the country’s reliance on imported oil and greenhouse gas emissions. They noted that, prior to President Obama taking office, the fuel efficiency standard hadn’t gone through this large of an update since the 1980′s. The administration also is proud to have corralled 13 major carmakers to support the new regulation.

The new rule affects passenger cars and trucks for model years 2017-2025. It’s an extension of the standard adopted in 2010 for model year 2012-2016.

Here’s what you need to know about the new standard:

1). What model years does the new standard cover? It will affect car models 2017-2025 and calls for an incremental increase of the fuel efficiencies during that time.

2). What are the new fuel efficiencies?: The new fuel efficiency is set to roughly double the efficiency of the new cars on the road today. The standard calls for increasing the efficiency to 35.5 mpg by 2016 for the combined average (passenger cars and trucks) and eventually to 54.5 mpg by 2025.

3). Why do we need the new standard? The proposed standard takes into consideration the greenhouse gas emissions produced by cars on the roads and aims to curb that. Plus, encouraging more fuel efficient cars also means more savings for consumers, who have shown a preference for more economical cars when fuel prices go up and, well, the economy tanks.

4). How will the new rule affect tech investments and innovation? Carmakers will have to come up with a variety of ways to make their vehicles go farther with the same amount of fuel, and that will require new technologies, such as new gasoline engines and transmissions, materials to reduce the weight of a car and energy efficient air conditioning systems. The new rule will require passenger cars to increase their fuel efficiencies at a greater pace than trucks because, Jackson said, the technologies that will be required to improve the trucks’ efficiency could take longer to reach the market.

To encourage innovation, carmakers will get credits that count toward their compliance of the fuel efficiency requirements if they invest in and use certain new technologies, such as cars that run on electricity, fuel cell or natural gas.

5). How will consumer benefits? More fuel efficient cars, because of their use of new technologies, will likely cost more. But the government maintains that the fuel savings will more than make up for the high prices.  Consumers should see an increasing amount of fuel savings as more fuel efficient cars are rolled out through 2015. By 2025, the fuel savings should reach over $8,000 over the lifetime of that vehicle, according to the federal government. The fuel efficiency rules from 2012 through 2025 will save over $1.7 trillion in fuel costs and reduce oil consumption by 12 billion barrels overall.

6). What are the environmental benefits? The standards, for models 2012-2025, also will lower greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2025, or 6 billion metric tons over the duration of the fuel economy program. Jackson said the reduction will be much more significant than any other efforts so far to reduce emissions by other industries.

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The San Diego startup puts kiosks in shopping malls and other retail spaces — particularly in locations near stores selling consumer electronics — that dispense cash, gift cards or coupons for mobile gadgets. The company has lined up buyers who promise to pay for the gadgets it collects, so when a consumer uses the kiosk to sell her phone, ecoATM can search for the best price from among its network of buyers and pass on part of that revenue to the consumer.

The company raised $14.4 million only over a year ago, and investors from that round, including Claremont Creek Ventures and Coinstar, also put money into the new round. New investors include PI Holdings, Moore Venture Partners and Koh Boon Hwee, who ecoATM describes as a “Singapore billionaire” (he was former chairman of Singapore Airlines and Singapore Telecom and worked at Hewlett-Packard).

EcoATM already has kiosks operating in about 50 locations in California and a smattering more in other states such as Kansas, Nebraska and Washington, according to the company’s website. The one at the Nebraska Furniture Mart was the company’s first installation and put in service in the fall of 2009. The company used to have a more ambitious plan of installing 200 kiosks by the end of 2010.

The new funding will enable the company to carry out a broader, national rollout, said ecoATM’s CEO, Tom Tullie, in a statement.

E-waste recycling isn’t a new idea, but making it convenient could help it become a habit. Even though people know recycling is a good thing, they may not go out of their way to hunt for recycling centers and drive there or ship their gadgets. Some recycling centers take old gadgets but don’t pay for them. So getting money or other goodies in return could be an attractive incentive.

The Consumers Electronics Association estimated back in 2008 that each American household owned 24 electronic devices. The head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, has called on electronic companies to think about how their gadgets could be recycled while they are designing products. In 2005, the U.S. generated 2 million tons of e-waste and only about 350,000 tons of them were recycled, the EPA said. The rest just ended up in landfills here and abroad.

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Here’s what you need to know:

1). What model years does the new standard cover? It will affect car models 2017-2025 and calls for an incremental increase of the fuel economy during that time.

2). What is the fuel efficiency standard now?: 27 mpg. It’s set to increase to 34.1 mpg by 2016 for the combined average (passenger cars and trucks).

3). Why do we need the new standard? The proposed standard takes into consideration the greenhouse gas emissions produced by cars on the road and aims to curb that. Plus, encouraging more fuel efficient cars also means more savings for consumers, who have shown a preference for more economical cars when fuel prices go up and, well, the economy tanks.

More fuel efficient cars will require new technologies, and that in turn will likely drive up car prices. Meeting the new standard will cost the auto industry $157 billion, the government estimated. Will consumers want to pay more? The government believes the fuel savings will outstrip the higher car prices. The estimated net savings should reach anywhere from $311 billion to $421 billion during the life time of the cars sold between 2017 and 2015. Consumers should be able to save up to $6,600 on average in fuel costs for driving a 2025 model. Oil use should fall by 4 billion barrels and greenhouse gas emissions should be cut by 2 billion tons over the life time of these cars.

4). What does the 54.5 mpg really mean? The 54.5 mpg has been tossed around as the fuel efficiency goal for 2025, and there is nothing to stop car companies from making improvements to achieve it. But that figure is based on the amount of greenhouse emissions reduction the EPA wants to require for the 2025 vehicle model, and the reality is automakers will be allowed to achieve the emissions reduction goals through different measures, designed as incentives, that won’t be counted toward the fuel economy numbers. One measure is the use of more efficient air conditioning systems, which not only requires fuel to run but also releases greenhouse gas emissions in the forms of hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants.

The agencies said the fuel economy requirements they are setting will therefore increase from 40 mpg in 2017 to 56 mpg in 2025 for passenger cars and from 29.4 mpg to 40.3 mpg for light trucks. The combined average of the two will go from 35.5 mpg to 49.6 mpg.

But wait, the fuel economy numbers that future cars will actually achieve will likely to be lower than that because automakers can also use other measures, designed as incentives, to count toward their compliance, the agencies said. The incentives include emissions and other credits for making flexible fuel vehicle and electric cars. For example, the proposed rule aims to encourage the use of hybrid electric technology in full-size trucks, so manufacturers will earn credits for doing that. The manufacturers will have to incorporate these new technologies into a certain percentage of their production in order to get the credits, however.

To encourage more plug-in hybrid electric, all-electric and fuel cell cars, the proposed rule would enable the EPA to give higher values to them when calculating each manufacturer’s compliance from 2017 to 2021.

5). Do automakers like the proposal? Well, major automakers, from the Big Three to the big Asian and European car companies certainly expressed their support when the President Obama announced the intention to set a new standard in July this year. There were negotiations before the announcement, and one of the compromises was to reduce the 2025 goal from 62 mpg to 54.5 mpg. You can expect more lobbying and negotiations among the various interest groups before the final rule is set.

6). What’s next? The release of the proposed rule kick starts a 60-day public comment period, after which the agencies will hold public hearings before finalizing the rule. Since the rule will affect cars down the road, the agencies said they plan to do a mid-term evaluation of the rule to see if changes should be made.

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The project, called SignalGuru, involves using many smartphones mounted on the dashboards to take images of traffic signals to figure out the frequency of the green and red lights at various intersections. The data, collected through crowdsourcing, will then be analyzed to predict how quickly the lights will change. The phone will then tell the drivers when to slow down so that they can avoid having to stop and start the car when the traffic signal goes from red to green.

The idling and accelerating of a car requires energy, or course, and that energy adds up over time. In fact, minimizing this stop-and-start move has shown to reduce fuel use by as much as 20 percent, the researchers claim.

An inconvenient truth

Designing fuel-efficient cars is something carmakers can’t avoid. Federal regulation requires the average fuel economy to reach 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The transportation sector accounts for about 33 percent of the emissions from fossil fuel combustion in the country, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Cutting fossil fuel use will save both money and the environment.

Emmanouil Koukoumidis, a visiting professor from Princeton and the leader of the SignalGuru project, sought to take advantage of the growing number of people who use their smartphones as navigation devices. By combining the image-capture and analysis features, the smartphones used in the project would display a recommended speed to help the drivers avoid stopping at the next red light. Koukoumidis and other researchers have run field trials in Cambridge, Mass., and Singapore.

To keep the drivers’ eyes on the road, however, the researchers believe the recommended speed should be conveyed by voice, much like what stand-alone navigation devices do. Better yet, the two can combine their functions so that one device will tell the driver to slow down or take an alternative route to achieve the best fuel efficiency, Koukoumidis said in a press release. Other potential uses of a SignalGuru device include snapping photos of parking lots to determine the availability of parking spots.

Working with frenemies

Carmakers also have been working on marrying GPS with other communication tools for a variety of uses, from avoiding accidents to cutting fuel costs. Ford is working on technologies that will allow cars to talk to one another. Toyota and Microsoft, meanwhile, are developing mobile apps and other software and hardware to make it possible for cars to communicate with homes and the electric grid to accomplish tasks such as figuring out the best time to charge cars.

General Motors announced on Thursday that it will work with LG to design electric cars, and one of its plans is to make use of LG’s expertise in consumer electronics and communication equipment designs and manufacturing for creating telematics systems inside the car.

Many of these projects are in the early stages of development, and consumers won’t find those technologies inside their cars for many more years. Already, the idea that future cars will come with a built-in and sophisticated communications network has prompted concerns about security breaches. But without a doubt, using technology to reduce our energy use will always be a good thing.

Images courtesy of MIT and General Motors

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Uncle Sam wants in on the innovation action, too. Recently the U.S. government, via the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), launched a contest to cater to these do-gooders, and I chatted with the EPA team to hear about what’s behind their app plan. It’s all about using a wealth of data and low-cost computing to protect people’s health and the environment.

Q.  What is the end goal for the EPA’s app contest?

A. The goal of EPA’s Apps for the Environment Challenge is to encourage software developers to use EPA data to make applications that help people understand environmental information. We believe the more people understand the data, the more it will help guide decisions and ultimately help protect people’s health and the environment.

Q.  How did the EPA come up with the project?

A. The project came out of a meeting with Malcolm Jackson, the EPA’s chief information officer, and Aneesh Chopra, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy. They agreed that it would be beneficial for EPA to encourage developers to use our data. EPA is building our engagement model on the success that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has had in engaging developers.

Q. What types of data sets are available for the apps?

A. EPA offers data on a wide variety of environmental topics such as air monitoring in metropolitan areas (AIRNow), toxic releases from facilities (Toxics Release Inventory), Superfund, drinking water (Safe Drinking Water Information System), environmentally safe products (Design for the Environment) and environmental enforcement (Enforcement & Compliance History Online). The data are available through several means: the data sets page of the EPA’s Developer Resource Page, Data.gov and EPA’s Data Finder. For the Apps for the Environment Challenge, developers may use relevant data from other sources besides EPA.

Q. Has there been a lot of attention and submissions to the contest? How is it going so far?

A. This is our first challenge of this type, and the response has been really positive. The White House posted a blog about the challenge, and various parties have tweeted about it to almost 3 million people. We started a listserv, the EPA App Developer Community, and over 900 people subscribed to it in the first five weeks. Interested developers have been asking us about the challenge and our data, and in response, we’re holding weekly Data Discovery Webinars to inform and educate developers about specific data (see www.epa.gov/appsfortheenvironment/webinar.html).

Video explanation here:

And more questions are answered on the EPA site.

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In contrast to the other next-gen biofuel startups that have gone public this year, Iowa-based Renewable Energy Group is an older firm formed out of a consolidation of several firms, and bills itself as the largest biodiesel producer in the country. Renewable Energy sold close to 68 million gallons of biodiesel, or 22 percent of the U.S. overall production, in 2010, according to the company’s filing. Five million of the 68 million gallons came from plants operated by other companies.

Renewable Energy runs six biodiesel plants with a total capacity of 212 million gallons per year and owns five of them. It wants to use proceeds from the IPO primarily to buy a refinery in Illinois that it currently leases. The company also wants to expand its reach into making green chemicals and other types of feedstocks and biofuels, including algae oil.

Renewable Energy uses mostly animal fat, used cooking oil and “inedible corn oil” to produce biodiesel. These feedstocks are cheaper than using virgin vegetable oils such as soybean oil, the company said. In fact, the company shifted away from using soybean oil in 2009 because soybean oil had become a pricy feedstock and was eating into the company’s profit.

The company has shown growing revenues, generating $216.46 million in 2010, $131.5 million in 2009 and $85.45 million in 2008. Strong demand boosted the company’s sales for the first three months of this year to $100.1 million, up from $33 million in the same period a year ago. The company’s biggest customer is Pilot Travel Centers, which sells diesel and biodiesel to truck drivers, and which accounted for 29 percent of Renewable Energy’s revenues in 2010 and 24 percent in 2009.

At the same time, Renewable Energy Group isn’t profitable on a yearly basis, but has been on a quarterly basis. The company posted losses of $21.59 million in 2010, $68.86 million in 2009 and $15.88 million in 2008. But for the first quarter of this year, the company posted a net income of $3.74 million, up 21 percent from $3.08 million in last year’s first quarter.

The company has been around since 1996 and mostly operated refineries owned by others until recent years. It then embarked on a series of acquisitions and mergers for refineries. In 2010 alone, it merged with Blackhawk Biofuels and bought some or all of the assets of Central Iowa Energy, Tellurian Biodiesel, American BDF, and Clovis Biodiesel. And this year, Renewable Energy bought a Minnesota plant owned by SoyMor Biodiesel.

The biodiesel industry has relied mostly on state and federal tax incentives to compete. The industry experienced a downturn starting in 2008 partly because of taxes on U.S. biodiesel being exported to the European Union, the crashing economy, and high soybean prices. The implementation of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) 2 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a federal renewable energy mandate put in place last year, gave the biodiesel industry a big boost in demand. Through RFS, the government is gradually increasing the amount of renewable fuels, from cellulosic ethanol or biodiesel, that the country needs to use every year until 2022.

Image courtesy of Renewable Energy Group.

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Emefcy, which is using naturally occurring bacteria to treat wastewater and produce electricity, is getting an undisclosed amount from Energy Technology Ventures as well as Pond Venture Partners, Plan B Ventures and Israel Cleantech Ventures.

The Israeli startup, founded in 2008, said it will use the money to develop the technology and deploy it commercially by the end of this year. Emefcy will market its process to cities and owners of industrial systems, from food to pharmaceutical processing plants.

Emefcy is developing a microbial fuel cell that uses wastewater as fuel to produce electricity. The company claims its process is less energy intensive than aerobic or anaerobic digestion technologies. The process also yields treated wastewater that can find other uses. Recycling wastewater has a mass appeal for countries in parched regions of the world, such as the Middle East.

The idea to produce energy from wastewater, particularly from human wastewater, isn’t new and has been explored by other companies and academic researchers around the world. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently gave $1.5 million to a research project at Columbia University to develop a waste-to-energy technology to make water treatment cheaper for poor communities and to minimize wastewater contamination of local rivers and lakes. Many research institutions and companies also are studying and developing microbial fuel cells.

The same cost savings and environmental benefits are driving similar innovations in other parts of the world. Wastewater treatment today uses 2 percent of the world’s electricity supply, or 80,000 MW, at a cost of $40 billion per year, according to the press release about Emefcy’s funding. Deploying wastewater-to-energy technology isn’t cheap, so driving down that expense could help the technology get deployed more widely.

Emefcy is the first non-U.S. company that has lined up investment from Energy Technology Ventures, which made its debut in January this year. GE, NRG and ConocoPhillips said they will invest $300 million via the fund in a wide variety of technology areas, from solar to coal conversion. The fund’s portfolio companies include Alta Devices (ultra-thin solar cells), CoolPlanetBioFuels (biomass to fuels), and Ciris Energy (coal-to-methane conversion).

Image courtesy of Emefcy

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