GigaOM » Green Energy

Need to charge your phone? Ride your bike with a Siva Cycle Atom battery pack

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:32:40 +0000

People riding bikes for exercise, recreation or commuting don’t need to waste their energy any longer. Oh, they can still ride, but now they can recoup some of the power they generate on their ride and use the juice to charge up their mobile devices. A new Kickstarter project for the Siva Cycle Atom is the secret.

The Atom is made of two parts: a small generator with electronic power regulation and a removable battery pack with a USB port. Most bicycles with a quick-release rear wheel can use the Atom, which sits between the rear tire and bike frame. A USB cable can be run from the Atom to a charge a mobile device while riding, even as the battery pack recharges. Here’s how it works:

Taking the Atom’s battery pack with you when leaving your bike is a snap; just remove it when you lock up your bike. I like the fact that the battery pack pulls “double duty”: You can recharge it through a conventional outlet as well. With a 1300 mAh battery capacity, a fully-charged Atom should recharge an iPhone to about 70 percent full. Handsets with larger batteries — say the new Galaxy S 4, for example — would only get about 40 to 50 percent of a recharge with the Atom.

The project is hoping to raise $85,000 by May 23 and it’s well on its way already: At time of writing, over $55,000 were pledged. The first 300 early-birds already committed a discounted $85 for the Atom, so if you want in now, you’ll have to fork over $95. The project founders expect to sell the Atom for $105, so you can still get a discount now. Delivery estimates for the Atom are November.

Are there cheaper ways to recharge your devices? Of course there are. But this product is perfect for heavy bike commuters. And when I take weekend rides, I often use my phone to track the ride via GPS so I can get speed, elevation and other data. The apps and radios to make that happen aren’t kind to my phone batteries, so the Atom would be a great companion for those activities too.

This post was updated at 6:11am, April 26, to accurately reflect the product name.

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7 Stories to read this weekend

Om Malik — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 07:00:49 +0000

What a wonderful week it was – I met with lots of interesting people, read great stuff and generally felt that all was right with the world of written word. Here are my picks – seven stories you should read this weekend.

No evidence of disease: This is one of most powerful, moving and shocking stories I read this week. It is about a woman who befriends a cancer patient. The writing is sublime, almost painting-like in nature. You feel the pain and the rage and disappointment.
BusinessWeek magazine thinks San Francisco is the best city to live in the United States. Long time San Francisco resident David Talbot (of Salon fame) doesn’t think so and laments the growing influence of technology industry on San Francsico politics and real estate markets, which in turn is destroying the unique character of the city by the bay. Weirdly, I agree with him.
Your brain on pseudoscience: the rise of popular neurobollocks: Steven Poole of the New Statesman shreds the psychobabble/brain science books coming to the market, labeling them as “self-help books dressed up in a lab coat.” It is a brilliant piece.
Like many of the 1980s kids, I love Tom Wolfe and Martin Amis. In this freewheeling interview with Esquire, Amis shares what he has learned about life and writing. “The only real measure of merit — prizes certainly aren’t that — is longevity, how long your stuff lasts,” he muses.
A tablet is not yet a book: there is nothing more to say, except read this thoughtful essay by Dan Turner.
The supposed decline of green energy: Clean energy and data centers have finally become part of the conversation. Andrew Winston looks at the recent developments and tries to make sense of what is happening in green energy. I know this is not my usual fare, but I am interested and everyone else should be too.
An American made car. This is the story of Cadillac ATS, a new car from Michigan.

PLUS: I am hosting the second annual GigaOM Roadmap conference in San Franciscoon November 5, 2012 with my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher. We have invited folks like Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Tumblr’s David Karp, Nest’s Tony Fadell, designers Yves Behar and Scott Wilson and many others to talk about how we design our connected future. Join us.

Vimeo debuts Focus Forward, a film series about the big ideas in tech

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:00:08 +0000

There’s no time like the present to be using technology to make something really big. Of course, a lot of people and companies are already doing just that — but unfortunately, they don’t always get the kind of wide exposure they deserve. That may be partly because the media coverage of such big-picture, highly technical projects is not as accessible and absorbing as it could be.

So it’s awesome that video sharing site Vimeo has joined forces with General Electric and video publisher Cinelan to launch “Focus Forward” – a micro documentary series that aims to showcase big, world-changing technology innovations in a compelling way. The project’s website describes its mission thusly:

“In the span of three minutes, these films will encompass everything from medical advances to economically viable ‘green’-powered homes to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries, not to mention innovations in transportation and healthcare, gene therapy and waste management, or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires them.”

In all, it’s a very cool mission. The series launched in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking — including Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica and Objectified) and Jessica Yu (who won an Oscar for Breathing Lessons), among others –are signed up to make Focus Forward films that will premiere online and at film festivals throughout the year.

But to me the most exciting thing is that the project, which is hosted on Vimeo, will also be open to submissions from the general public. People who submit videos to the contest, which is called the “Focus Forward Filmmaking Challenge,” will be up for $200,000 in cash prizes, including a $100,000 grand prize. Submissions will open during the Tribeca Film Festival this April, and the prizes will be handed out next year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. This is what Focus Forward says it’s looking for:

“We’re looking for professionally produced, three-minute end-to-end stories about people or organizations whose innovative efforts in medicine, computer science, robotics, engineering, green energy, or other fields of applied technical knowledge have had a significant positive impact on humanity. Recent, cutting-edge inventions that are changing how we live today are of special interest.”

With how inexpensive digital SLR cameras with video capabilities have become in recent years, and the huge amount of innovative tech projects out there, there is a lot of opportunity to create awesome films that fall into the Focus Forward mold. It’ll be exciting to see what people come up with.

Here’s a video explaining what the Focus Forward Film Challenge is all about:

Focus Forward – Short Films, Big Ideas: Filmmaker Challenge from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

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‘Zero emissions’ wholesale data center coming to Iceland

Barb Darrow — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 14:43:27 +0000

Colt, the British data center specialist, is building what it and partner Verne Global call a “zero emissions” data center slated to come online by year’s end.

The new facility, to be located on an old NATO base in Iceland, will run solely on geothermal and hydroelectric power, the availability of which make Iceland attractive for building data centers.

Colt built the 37 modules that will make up the 500-square-meter facility and will ship them to Keyflavik, Iceland, for installation next month and to be operational within four months, according to a blog post by Bernard Geoghagan, executive vice president of Colt’s data center services.

Geoghagan wrote:

This will be the first wholesale data centre space in Iceland, and the first dual sourced 100% renewable powered data centre in the world.

Data center energy use is in the spotlight, especially as cloud computing initiatives ramp up. In 2010, data centers worldwide used 1.5 percent of all electricity, up 56 percent from 2005.

Colt built and will assemble the containers and foundation infrastructure–power supplies and cabling; HVAC; security and monitoring systems; lighting and flooring for the facility. Verne will supply the computing resources and fiber optic cabling on site.

Photo courtesy of flickr user Martin_VMorris

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Cleantech apocalypse? No, but it’s cyclical

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:10:00 +0000

The cries declaring that cleantech is headed for an apocalypse keep on getting louder. The latest is an article this month in Foreign Affairs on The Crisis in Clean Energy, which is getting attention from the blogosphere like this post on The Coming Cleantech Crash. A couple of months ago, I addressed some of my own concerns over a growing depression around cleantech investing and sectors.

I don’t think cleantech is headed for a sharp crash, given it’s been going through consolidation and a downward coasting for some time now. The cleantech sector is inherently cyclical — tied to international, domestic and local politics, oil prices, the economy and public sentiment — and is clearly facing a down cycle right now. Ask any cleantech-focused investor and they’ll tell you how they’ve ridden the cleantech seesaw up and down, and then up and now down again.

A few things are contributing to this slow downward trend. The traditional venture capital model of investing hasn’t been working as well as many investors had expected and a variety of firms have pulled back on investments or cut cleantech investing completely. Not many firms will admit it, but it’s still happening. And yes, there has been a series of cleantech IPOs this year, but as Rob Day points out, many of these IPOs are being done out of necessity for fund-raising, and are also piggybacking on summer of social media IPOs.

The potential drop in government support from both the U.S. and European countries, will contribute to the downward trend. The Department of Energy’s budget is facing the knife, and the markets that carried the solar industry — Germany, Spain, Italy — are pulling back. As we’ll see at Intersolar this week, solar firms are desperately seeking new markets to enter. The few-year term cycles for politicians also contribute to the up and down nature of government support.

The big problem, which the Foreign Affairs article points out, is how to invest in innovation for energy technologies — which takes a long time and a lot of money to produce — in the face of a drop in overall spending on it. Innovation breakthroughs come from basic science research, which takes money, but as Bill Gates has pointed out, his call for boosting energy R&D funding won’t likely be even remotely possible for several more years.

Trending back up

So, you proactive folks are probably wondering: If this is a down cycle, when will it start cycling back up? The good news (at least for cleantech companies), is there isn’t any avoiding moving to a low-carbon future, as fossil fuel dependence is creating immediate problems for national security and climate change.

Will public opinion turn the tide? I think the more digital documentation of extreme weather, the more people will be demand from their legislators that this change happen.

For more investors to get back in (or newly enter) the space, investors need more proof that certain kinds of greentech investments will make them money. Those are both the low-risk small returns of solar, or the high-risk large returns for new greentech innovation. The latter hasn’t happened yet, and everyone’s still waiting for a Google of cleantech. There could be some blockbuster greentech firms on the horizon — there’s been enough investment that likely something will appear — whether that’s via some of the new funds like Silver Lake’s Kraftwerk fund, or the next generation of funds from VantagePoint Venture Partners or Vinod Khosla.

Ultimately if the economy recovers more, government support could potentially rise again. And then there’s China, which is the world’s largest investor in clean energy, and which will be creating its own massive market for green technologies, regardless of what the U.S. does. In the same way that developing countries skipped over installing land line phones and went straight to cell phones, the developing world and China will install the next-generation of energy technology (including clean power and the smart grid) to meet its growing demand for power.

Clearly parts of the cleantech sector are moving into a consolidated, and depressed state, but I’m confident the cycle will trend back up at some point. The harder question is: When?

Image courtesy of Petroleum Jelliffe.

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Feds offer $105M loan guarantee for “Project Liberty” biofuel plant

Ucilia Wang — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:30:12 +0000

Poet’s so-called “Project Liberty” biofuel plant, which will use corn waste instead of edible corn, is getting some support from the U.S. government. On Thursday, the Department of Energy announced it will offer Poet a $105 million loan guarantee to build out Project Liberty in Iowa, which is supposed to eventually produce up to 25 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year.

Through loan guarantees, the government promises to pay back loans if borrowers can’t. In many cases, the government is providing the loans as well, via the Federal Financing Bank.

The financial support could help Poet finally get Project Liberty into commercial-scale production, and the plant has been in the planning stages for years now. Poet initially was hoping to start building the plant in 2009 and operating it in 2011, and back in 2008, the company was aiming for the plant to eventually produce 125 million gallons of biofuel per year.

Project Liberty is the first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant by Poet, which already runs a fleet of corn ethanol plants. We interviewed Poet’s CEO, Jeff Broin, a few years ago about the company’s foray into cellulosic ethanol production; you can read the Q&A here.

A cellulosic ethanol refinery uses plants or other non-food feedstocks to produce biofuels. Poet plans to use enzymatic hydrolysis to convert corn cobs, leaves and husks from local farms into ethanol. There’s no shortage of cellulosic ethanol technology developers, but many of them have run into technical and financial difficulties to build their first large-scale refineries.

The loan guarantee is the second offered by the DOE for a biofuel plant, but it’s poised to be the first to use the financial aid to build a refinery. The DOE previously offered a $241 million loan guarantee to Diamond Green Diesel, a joint venture of Valero Energy and Darling International, to build a plant in Louisiana that would use primarily animal fats and used cooking oils to make 137 million gallons of diesel per year.

But Diamond Green Diesel pulled out of the final leg of the loan guarantee negotiation a few months ago and announced in May it would build the plant using money from a Valero subsidiary. Valero Spokesman Bill Day said in an email to us that the application process became “too burdensome and costly.”

The DOE could support more biofuel projects with its loan guarantee program, and back in February, KiOR said it had received a term sheet for a $1 billion loan guarantee. KiOR has since held an IPO, however, and brought in at least $150 million.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has offered more biofuel loan guarantees, including $250 million to Coskata, $80 million to Enerkem and $75 million to INEOS New Planet BioEnergy.

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The spark for a green web movement: extreme weather

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 07:00:27 +0000

Ever since GigaOM launched a focus on greentech about four years ago, I’ve been waiting for some kind of social network or web movement to emerge that can effectively galvanize people around either green policies, the use of green technology or more sustainable lifestyles. So, now I’m wondering if the spark that could help deliver that green web movement is extreme weather.

Think about it: The catalyst to spur a social movement needs to fundamentally affect people on a core level. Who hasn’t been touched directly by the unusually hot or cold weather in 2010 and 2011 or been affected both directly and indirectly by the weather disasters that have struck the planet in the past 18 months, from hurricanes to floods to blizzards? Even if people don’t have first-hand experience with these disasters, the influx of photos, videos and news stories (available 24/7 on the web) of people dying or losing their property in extreme weather events is, to put it callously, a persuasive factor.

Now yes, the jury isn’t completely out that the extreme weather of 2010 — which is looking to be the most extreme on record — is completely the fault of human-induced climate change and that the weather trend won’t go up and down over various years. But it’s generally thought by scientists that such extreme weather couldn’t likely be happening without the influence of human-caused climate change.

So assuming the connection between human-induced climate change and extreme weather becomes even more concretely linked scientifically, it then becomes the job of digital online media — and social sharing — to show the connection (and, yes, journalists have a role here, too). The environmental group 350.org, which was founded in 2008 by activist Bill McKibben, 350.org has been pushing this exact movement forward, using social media, viral videos (see video below), and user-generated content to show the link.

Stephen Thomson, of Plomomedia.com, edited and narrated the video above, and the content is a reading of a sarcastic op-ed that McKibben wrote for the Washington Post . Yet, the video isn’t exactly viral (yet) in the same way as a funny cat video, or Y U No Guy; it’s got around 100,000 views on YouTube. The numbers need to grow into the millions at least to start making a dent. If you have any thoughts on what can deliver this tipping point, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I know that web social movements often grow out of something inspiring, like how Obama used the web to energize his constituents and score the White House. Inventor Saul Griffith wants the future to sound awesome so it will inspire the next-generation of energy-focused scientists and inventors. But fear, guilt, and shame are powerful emotions, too, particularly when the fundamental issue is one of a possible planetary disaster.

Image courtesy of NASA Goddard Photo and Video.

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Green Energy Preps for Thin-Film

Craig Rubens — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:33:24 +0000

Less than a month after Green Energy Technologies signed a deal for a thin-film solar module production line from Applied Materials, the company says it has already received requests for four times its expected capacity next year, Bloomberg reports. The solar silicon-wafer maker, a subsidiary of Taiwanese Tatung, plans to leverage the technology of LCD-maker (and fellow Tatung affiliate) Chunghwa Picture Tubes to begin manufacturing its amorphous silicon thin-film product in December. Production capacity is scheduled to reach 30 megawatts by February of 2009 and 50 megawatts by the end of 2009.

While the company also announced it had signed an eight-year, $947 million contract with undisclosed partners in Australia and Asia, the company’s shift from traditional silicon PV to thin-film is motivated by the promise of higher gross profit margins. While the price per watt of a traditional crystalline silicon solar module is about $3.80, Green Energy estimates it can make thin-film solar for around $2.80 a watt.

This is still significantly higher than the $1 a watt Holy Grail of grid parity. But with increasingly large players moving to get a slice of the thin-film pie, will there be space for small, venture-funded startups like Nanosolar in the market? Intel just threw its hat into the ring by spinning off SpectraWatt with $50 million in venture funding, as well as investing $37.5 million in German thin-film player Sulfurcell. But the pie is big and expected to get bigger. It’s estimated that thin-film PV could grab 28 percent of the solar market by 2012, representing some $19.7 billion in sales in that time frame.

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Smartphone history comes alive

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 15:05:42 +0000

Don’t you want to be prepared for the "Smartphone" category on Jeopardy? C’mon, Alex is just dying to ask questions like "This first Smartphone processor had a "leg" up on the competition." Of course, you know the answer to be "What is an ARM?"

OK, let’s say you didn’t know that one. No problem as "awarner", a MobileGadgetNews member, just put together a nice Smartphone history site for you to study. The site is definitely worth a browse to understand the evolution of how we arrived at today’s versions of these mobile devices. Nice job awarner; I’ll take "3G Data" for $500….

-kct

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Lucent-Alcatel Say – I Do!

Om Malik — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 19:59:13 +0000

Alcatel and Lucent Technologies have finally decided to tie the knot and merge their two companies, in what amounts to be a gigantic first step in the telecom hardware consolidation. The combined company will have a market capitalization of $36 billion, and will have sales of around $25 billion and will have 88,000 employees. This is not really a merger of equals, and if you read the terms of the deal, its Alcatel swallowing Lucent.

* Telecom Feeding Frenzy
* Life After Lucent: Telecom Feeding Frenzy
* Telecom Gear Mergers Ahead
* What’s up with Optical Stocks?
* LULA bad news for Juniper?

Under the terms of the agreement, Lucent shareowners will receive 0.1952 of an ADS (American Depositary Share) representing ordinary shares of Alcatel (as the combined company) for every common share of Lucent that they currently hold. Upon completion of the merger, Alcatel shareholders will own approximately 60 percent of the combined company and Lucent shareholders will own approximately 40 percent of the combined company.

Serge Tchuruk, chairman and CEO of Alcatel who will become non-executive chairman of the combined company and Patricia Russo, the chair(wo)man and CEO of Lucent will become CEO of the combined company. There are two compelling reasons for this deal – the carriers desire for IMS, the technology that would let them merge the wireline and wireless networks. Lucent has done great work in that space, and the combined company will do well because of that. In addition, it solves Tchuruk’s transition dilemma. He did not have a #2 and with his time was running out – well you know how it is!

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