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Kleiner Perkins backs energy comparison startup Choose Energy

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:36:11 +0000

While venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins appears to be retrenching its cleantech investments, the firm also continues to make small investments in young startups focused on the cleanweb, or IT-based cleantech. On Tuesday a Plano, Texas-based startup called Choose Energy announced that it has raised a $4 million Series A investment from Kleiner Perkins and Stephens Capital Partners.

Eight-year-old Choose Energy has developed a service that offers consumers and businesses in deregulated markets options for retail electricity and gas plans. The site is active in Texas, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois, and the company says it will eventually work for the 19 deregulated energy states and 22 deregulated gas states.

While deregulated energy markets have proved to be controversial in some states in the past, as GigaOM Pro analyst Adam Lesser has written, further deregulation could also support business models in areas like smart grid analytics and clean power. It’s been more than a decade since the California electricity crisis and the Enron disaster.

Choose Energy says it is also building tools for retail energy providers to acquire customers based on techniques from telecom, travel, media and other web-heavy industries. The tools used by the cell phone companies to entice new customers to their network are much more sophisticated than what standard retail energy providers are using today. The startup says it has helped 100,000 consumers switch energy suppliers.

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GigaOM Pro: Three trends that could transform the energy efficient data center

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:25:35 +0000

GigaOM Pro analyst Adam Lesser geeked out with Power Assure CTO Clemens Pfeiffer, and came away with three undercover trends that could transform the data center with energy efficiency. You can read the entire post here, but here’s tidbits of the three trends:

1) You say AC, I say DC.
2) Could building management systems (BMS) take a backseat to DCIM?
3) Demand response and the data center.

Why SolarCity pricing low is a godsend for all of cleantech

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:37:53 +0000

GigaOM Pro analyst Adam Lesser writes:

You can count me in the category that believes that SolarCity pricing at $8 rather than the $13 to $15 the company wanted was a major blessing. A blessing for all of cleantech.

He gives a really interesting analysis for the benefit of pricing low and why the investors did this. Read the entire post on GigaOM Pro (for free)!

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Latest in cleantech, via GigaOM Pro

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 01:03:42 +0000

Here’s the cleantech sector’s response to the Presidential election: thank-frickin-gawd. Or, more professionally, GigaOM Pro analyst Martin Piszczalski writes:

Democrats came out ahead in the November 2012 elections, which has many implications for the renewable-energy sector. Importantly, the production tax credit (PTC) for wind power now has a much better chance of being extended soon. Nevertheless, new government support for the renewable-energy industry will be significantly lower than in the past four years.

Read the rest of his research note on how the outcome of the election will effect cleantech, on GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Next-generation batteries will be crucial for the proliferation of electric cars, as well as clean power (wind and solar need accompanying storage). GigaOM Pro recently published a 22-page report on the latest in advanced battery technologies. It’s a fascinating read.

In the report, GigaOM Pro contributor, and Pike Research analyst Brittany Gibson, writes:

Despite inherent risk in this industry, the market garners a significant investment from university, government, and private entities at many points along the development cycle, targeting everything from materials science to marketing to project development. Without attention at each point, advanced batteries will continue to suffer from this industry’s slow pace of development. It remains to be seen whether innovation in this industry can accelerate at any other pace.

Read the rest of the report here (subscription required).

And finally, GigaOM Pro cleantech analyst Adam Lesser today writes about the looming question of whether the U.S. should aggressively export natural gas. Non-subscribers and subscribers alike can read that one, here.

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This week in cleantech: next-gen batteries and the importance of design

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:21:13 +0000

We’ve got a lot of great stuff for cleantech-watchers on GigaOM Pro (our subscription research service) this week. First up:

Over the next decade the advanced-battery industry will witness broad approaches to technology and project development. To date significant resources have been allocated by various stakeholders including the United States government, which currently has 39 different battery- and energy-storage-related research programs. Learn about this market in our in-depth report on next-gen batteries (subscription required).
When it comes to consumer products and cleantech, the two companies that have distinguished themselves over the past few years are smart thermostat maker Nest and electric vehicle pioneer Tesla. So as we ready for GigaOM’s Roadmap Conference, which is devoted to connected design this year and will feature Nest founder Tony Fadell and Tesla’s retail experience head George Blankenship (both are ex-Apple), it’s worth stopping to consider why Nest and Tesla are having signs of early success. . . . read the rest of GigaOM Pro cleantech analyst Adam Lesser’s column on The intersection of cleantech and great design (free to non-subscribers).
The third quarter in cleantech brought into focus the successes and challenges of more-mature companies like Tesla, Airbnb, and Zipcar. It also highlighted energy challenges in India and China. Check out the Cleantech third quarter 2012 analysis and outlook (subscription required).

As well as Adam’s blog posts (free to non-subscribers):

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Most app developers make less than $500 a month (chart)

Rani Molla — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 21:16:46 +0000

We know that not every app is Angry Birds and not every app developer is Rovio. But just how tough are things for the workaday app developer? In a recent GigaOM Pro study (subscription required) of app developers, more than half of the respondents say they make less than $500 a month from their paid apps (see chart below). Perhaps not surprisingly, app development isn’t a full-time job for most of them. Some 75% of 352 respondents either hold another job or do app development only as a portion of their main job. (The picture is even grimmer for developers of advertising-dependent apps — a third of those developers make less than $100 a month in ad revenue, according to the study.)

On the high (and much more rare) end of the spectrum, about 5 percent of app developers in the survey make over $20,000 a month. These developers tend to be part of big app firms.

Click to enlarge
Rani Molla/GigaOM

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Android app development growing at a faster rate than iOS (chart)

Rani Molla — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:23:46 +0000

Apple’s iOS still dominates among app developers, but it may be losing its edge. According to a recent GigaOM Pro survey (subscription required), both iOS and Android use is growing, but app developers are adopting Android at a faster rate. The web-based study surveyed 352 app developers on everything from who they are to where they sell their apps to how much money they make.

It asked them which platforms they currently use and which they plan to develop on next year. The growth in the percentage of developers using Android to create mobile apps is nearly twice that of iOS; and it’s four times as fast (on Android vs iOS) for tablet apps.

Rani Molla/GigaOM

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This week in cleantech: the share economy, efficient data centers & grid batteries

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 19:33:08 +0000

We’ve got a thriving section in our GigaOM Pro, premium research subscription service, based just on cleantech, green data centers, next-gen energy technologies and the like. Here’s some great new content we’ve got in the cleantech section of GigaOM Pro this week:

Cleantech investor Vinod Khosla made news last summer when he told a meeting at the Energy Storage Association that the smart grid was more “smart hype than smart grid.” Importantly for that audience, he noted that all of the fundamental efforts of the smart grid geared at the demand side—smart meters, demand response, real time pricing, smart electronics—would become irrelevant and unnecessary if energy storage got price competitive. They’re starting to . . . Read the rest of GigaOM Pro cleantech analyst Adam Lesser’s take on The Future of Battery Storage on the Grid (subscription required).
Owning physical items — cars, apartments, office space — has both lost some of its luster and will be increasingly inefficient for a global market. It is shifts like these, combined with catalysts like mobile technology, that are driving a greater interest in the share economy, which can broadly be defined as a marketplace where business models are built around consumers choosing access rather than ownership. Check out our report on the Opportunities and Risks in the Share Economy (subscription required).
Around the world, data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that is expected to increase significantly. Greenpeace predicts power consumption will grow 19 percent by 2013 to 31 gigawatts. To cut power and, with it, costs, tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are aggressively pursuing strategies to cut electricity use by greening their data centers. Read our report on The Economics of Clean Data Center Innovation (subscription required).

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Today in cleantech: Apple’s sustainability

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 19:05:47 +0000

Apple seems to be increasingly willing to respond to negative publicity surrounding its sustainability practices, points out GigaOM Pro cleantech analyst Adam Lesser. First Apple responded publicly to Greenpeace’s criticism of its power sourcing at its North Carolina data center and more recently Apple quickly reversed its decision on the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) registry.

Why? Adam says it could be a hedge against the extremely small possibility that one day it might have a competitor (Google) with better green credentials and a product in the same ballpark of quality. But for now, the company will put design first and throw in some sustainability, particularly when there are benefits to the consumer. To check out the rest of this article read it here.

And here’s some other awesome research and reports you missed on GigaOM Pro (subscription required), our premium research service:

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The new resource dependencies

Adam Lesser — Tue, 29 May 2012 18:29:17 +0000

The Volt

This article originally appeared on GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

When thinking about cleantech, I tend to think in terms of resources and supply constraints, meaning that when we switch from a fossil fuel like coal to a renewable resource like wind, I consider what natural resources we’re newly dependent on (unfortunately it’s more than just wind). The move to renewable energy has a lot of great advantages—reduced particulate matter from not burning hydrocarbons, more stable energy prices, energy security, and yes, slowing the accumulation of greenhouse gases driving climate change. But this week I’d like to take a look at five natural resources that will significantly impact the future development of renewable energy.

1) Rare earths: In a great piece in Foreign Affairs a couple weeks back, China analyst Damian Ma profiled China’s attempts to put government controlled pricing on rare earths, a group of 17 elements like lanthanum and cerium that are critical to manufacturing high tech products. Even though China only controls a third of global deposits, it supplies 90 percent of rare earths. Aware that one can’t even build an iPad without rare earths, Beijing has limited the export of rare earths in an attempt to force more manufacturing to move to China and to drive up global prices, a strategy that appears to be working. Importantly for cleantech, rare earths are essential for building EV batteries and the permanent magnets that drive wind turbines. On the bright side, China’s export controls are driving a revival in rare earth mining in Australia and the U.S.

Tesla Model S battery

2) Lithium: Whether you’re building the Tesla Roadster and you’re packing almost 7,000 laptop batteries together or you’ve got a smaller battery pack ala the Chevy Volt, you’re going to need lithium. The capability of storing energy is a central tenet of moving away from fossil fuels as an energy source, and lithium is the battery cathode material of choice right now, despite efforts from startups like Eos Energy Storage and Liquid Metal Battery to produce batteries from very common elements with zinc and sodium. Eighty percent of the world’s lithium deposits are in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, and while there’s plenty of lithium such that it’s not a huge input cost, exponential demand growth combined with its strategic concentration in just a few countries, make it a resource whose price folks should pay attention to.

3) Platinum: One of the barriers to widespread hydrogen fuel cell adoption is the pricy element that catalyzes the reaction of hydrogen fuel with oxygen to emit water. Estimates vary with technology development and the price of platinum, which hovers above $1,400 an ounce today, but for a 100kw fuel cell that would power a small car, the platinum costs would be around three grand. That figure isn’t too far from what the entire internal combustion engine would cost in an inexpensive car. Numerous labs are working on alternatives to platinum catalysts, from nanoparticles with palladium cores to carbon mixed with iron and cobalt.

4) Polysilicon: The issue with polysilicon in the last five years isn’t scarcity but overabundance. It’s a key raw material for many solar photovoltaic panels and hit a low of $23.17 per kg this month after costing as much $475 in 2008 and even $52 last August. On a whole this has been helpful in driving down the cost of solar panels and helping increase solar installations, but it’s been a headache for the companies that invested in thin film solar technology like First Solar, which opted for cadmium-telluride, and Solyndra, which went long on copper-indium-galllium-selenide (CIGS) technology. When polysilicon prices plummeted, suddenly their panels got less price competitive. As new technologies compete for market share in the solar industry, the underlying availability and pricing of key raw materials will guide the market.

5) Natural Gas: The four hydrogen atoms bonded to one central carbon atom that comprise methane are plentiful right now, dipping below $2 per 1000 cubic feet in April for the first time since 2002. The success of all renewable energy is levered to the cost of fossil fuels, particularly in a decreasingly subsidized renewables environment. Cleantech investors consider this hydrocarbon pricing risk, meaning no matter how efficient your solar panel is, if fossil fuels get too cheap, you’re doomed. I’ve noted before that the wholesale shift of the U.S. energy economy to natural gas carries significant risk for all renewables sectors. The future viability of renewables may be less about the cost of oil than the cost of natural gas.

This list is likely to shift as the price of underlying raw materials changes and drives where investors, be it government funded ARPA-E or a cleantech fund, decide to place their bets on renewable energy technology. In the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy generation, technology that incorporates abundant and inexpensive raw materials will have a distinct advantage.

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