That’s the whole idea of the ARPA-E program — the small grants are given to high-risk early-stage projects that have the potential to make a big impact, but are likely too early for private investors to support. At the end of the day that means that most of the projects won’t succeed, or as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a speech on the final morning: probability says most of these projects will flop. But in a year when other forms of government funding, and venture capital funding are drying, up ARPA-E is still giving big energy ideas a glimmer of hope.

As Bill Gates once said: we need crazy energy entrepreneurs. And they were there in full force at the ARPA-E Summit. Here are 5 projects I checked out this week:

1). A breakthrough ultracapacitor: Tesla CEO Elon Musk once said he thought ultracapacitors would one day supercede batteries in electric cars. Ultracapacitors store energy in an electric field, rather than in a chemical reaction, and can survive hundreds of thousands more charge and discharge cycles than a battery can, and can also deliver high bursts of power. ARPA-E grant winner FastCAP makes an ultracapacitor that uses carbon nanotubes to increase the surface area of the electrode — the more surface area of the electrode the more energy can be stored. FastCAP says its ultracapacitor has 5 to 10 times higher energy density than commercial ultracapacitors.

During the ARPA-E Summit showcase FastCAP Director of Operations Jamie Beard told me that an early application that its ultracapacitors are being used for is oil, gas and geothermal drilling. Because the ultracapacitors can be used at very high temperatures they can be used down in deep wells where the temperatures are high and the power needs are high, too. Drill operators don’t want to use standard batteries for this because batteries can catch on fire and explode under high temperatures. Beard says that FastCAP’s ultracapacitors can operate safely between -40 degrees C to 150 degrees C.

FastCAP is backed by the Chesonis Family Foundation, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and angel investors. The company has 30 or so people, a 18,000 foot factory in Boston, and a 40-foot-long custom-built pilot line for making its ultracaps.

2). A natural gas tank that works like an intestine: Saul Griffith’s Otherlab is working on a natural gas tank for vehicles that uses small tubes that can conform to the shape of the vehicle. Mimicking how an intestine has boosted capacity in the body, the tubes of the natural gas tank could have maximum storage capacity. Otherlab’s Tucker Gilman pitched the intestinal natural gas tank to investors on the opening night of the Summit. ARPA-E gave the project a $250,000 grant.

3). The waste annihilating molten salt nuclear reactor: This nuclear project isn’t backed by ARPA-E, but Transatomic Power co-founder and CEO Russ Wilcox pitched the technology to investors at the beginning of the summit. Transatomic is designing a new type of nuclear reactor that can run off of nuclear waste and also produce significantly less waste than the traditional lightwater nuclear reactor. Wilcox is the former CEO and co-founder of display-maker E Ink.

Two other Transatomic co-founders are Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie (shown in the video) who are both PhD students at MIT’s nuclear engineering department. Transatomic also counts advisors Todd Allen, Director for the Advanced Test Reactor National Scientific User Facility at Idaho National Laboratory, Michael Corradini, president of the American Nuclear society, and Regis Matzie, who was the former CTO for Westinghouse. Kleiner Perkins’ David Wells gave the company the feedback that while the company and executives are impressive, the project is “out of the range of the VC funding model.”

4). Tweaking E.Coli to solve our problems: Founded in 2007 by synthetic biologist Yasuo Yoshikuni, Bio Architecture Lab uses synthetic biology and enzyme design to convert seaweed into biochemicals and biofuels. It’s tweaked E.coli to be able to turn kelp into fuel. The company received an ARPA-E grant in 2010 to work on a project with DuPont to turn seaweed into isobutanol. DuPont is actively looking to partner with startups in various areas — check out my interview with DuPont’s CEO Ellen Kullman.

Ginko Bioworks is another startup that is focused on using synthetic biology to tweak E.coli — it’s developed a strain of E.coli that can directly use carbon dioxide to produce biofuels. Ginko Bioworks researcher Jason Kelly told me during the Summit that the company doesn’t plan on doing any production of the actual fuel and compared the startup to “biological software developers.”

5). Magnetic algae – say what?: There’s a type of bacteria in the soil that have cells filled with magnetic crystals, and this enables the bacteria to move along magnetic fields. Yeah, that’s pretty weird on its own. But researchers at Los Alamos National Labs are genetically engineering a gene in these bacteria and placing it in algae, creating magnetic algae which can be manipulated using magnets. The technology could theoretically be used in algae biofuel production and fuel use.

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• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
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• Cleantech first-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook

Don’t miss this! It’s one of the only live, free online events for the show. ARPA-E is a program created by the Department of Energy to give small grants to early-stage, high-risk energy technologies that can be game-changers. Here’s to moonshots! They need some powerful stories. Watch to find out why. (If we’re running a few minutes late, be patient, we’ll start soon).

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Griffith showed off this solar mirror and tracker concept at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco Tuesday, and at first glance it is hard to imagine how the concept will translate into a marketable solar energy system later. The idea is in such an early stage of development that Griffith, an inventor who is working on several cleantech ideas through his Otherlab incubator, sounded a tad regretful when I pressed him for details after his talk: “I shouldn’t have shown it.”

Griffith and a couple members of his team are exploring how to reduce the cost of generating solar electricity by shrinking the size of the reflector system and figuring out ways to make them with cheaper materials and production processes. It’s the same goal for many academic researchers and solar companies today. In fact, Google also experimented with using small mirrors and trackers in its quest to engineer a more productive system and cheaper electricity, but the company abandoned the project last year.

The job of solar mirrors is to concentrate and direct sunlight onto solar cells (to produce electricity) or onto a container of water or other fluid to create steam, which is then piped to drive a turbine and generator to produce electricity. Griffith says he’s focusing on the design of the mirrors and trackers that will tilt and move the mirrors to follow the sun’s movement throughout the day and reflect the sunlight onto a target as precisely as possible. Whether the system will be used with solar cells or steam production equipment will depend on who become the investors and customers.

What makes Griffith’s idea intriguing and unusual, though, is how tiny each mirror-and-tracker system is. The 5 cm x 5 cm mirrors and the tiny trackers are about the actual size that he thinks will work as a system that can be deployed in the field, though he says the size and dimension of the system could very well change later as he develops the concept further (his website mentions a 100 cm mirror).

The mirrors can be glass or plastic, but the key is to have the mirrors small and light weight, which reduces the need for hefty trackers to prop them up. Small and low-profile mirrors also are less susceptible to strong wind, Griffith says. Strong wind could knock the mirrors out of alignment and do a poor job of reflecting a precise beam of light. He’s designing this system for large-scale solar power projects, and for those projects it would involve having to use thousands and thousands more mirrors.

The solution then – and the core technology of Griffith’s design – lies in the tracker, which is really an actuator that doesn’t rely on an electrical system to run. Instead, Griffith is borrowing microfluidic technology to design the mechanics of the tracker, which has to move the mirror in a precisely calibrated path that can best capture and reflect light. Griffith says he wants to borrow manufacturing methods from the toy industry to use, say, the injection molding process to make what he calls “single, monolithic actuators.”

Griffith has raised an angel round to fund the research, though he declines to disclose the amount. He’s hoping to get funding from ARPA-E, the federal program for early-stage cleantech technology. His solar mirrors did make an appearance at the recent ARPA-E conference, and you can check out a photo of the mirrors and other cool ideas here.

“It’s a crazy idea, but we have to try it,” he says.

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

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

The importance of time for energy

One of the most important but overlooked issues in promoting low emissions technologies is that unless they are simply better than what they replace, it will be hard to get the broader society to adopt them widely. This means that these products need to be designed to deliver multiple benefits, and often the single most valuable added benefit they can bring is saving people’s time.

Time is money

For a long time I was an avid recycler, drove a super-efficient Honda Civic VX, and always turned the lights out when I left the room. Then I had kids, and my diligence was tested, then abandoned, in the face of the demands of parenthood. I still do the best I can, but there’s no way I can possibly do everything right and also be a good father (and the twins come first).

Fortunately, my decline in environmental virtue had a silver lining: it helped me understand what it will take to create a low-carbon society. Most folks don’t have time in their busy lives to worry about environmental issues, so we need to make it easy for them to make the right choices.

A lot of environmentalists think of pollution as a moral problem, but changing people’s morals is hard. Helping them make their lives better while also reducing pollution? That’s a much easier sell, and that’s the goal for which we need to strive.

I replaced my VX with a Toyota Prius in 2004, and that car exemplifies this lesson. Not only is it efficient, it’s a great car, with Bluetooth, voice recognition, automatic unlock for the doors, adequate acceleration, lots of legroom, and a state-of-the-art navigation system. Soon after I bought it the Prius was named the Motor Trend car of the year—I finally owned a cool car! And the best part was that it was also the most efficient car on the road.

Time is energy

Another truth that follows from basic physics is that speeding up physical processes usually requires more energy. So if you want to push a vehicle through a fluid more rapidly, the power needed goes up as the square of the velocity (as Saul Griffith points out in the Foreword to Cold Cash, Cool Climate). If you want to ship a package overnight, it will use substantially more energy than if you ship by ground. And if you travel by air instead of train, you’ll use much more fuel.

One way out of this bind is to use information technology (IT), which allows us to redefine the task to require less physical energy even though we are accomplishing that ultimate goal more efficiently and quickly. You can use IT to ship information directly (moving bits instead of atoms), in which case transmission is almost instantaneous, or you can use it to better plan your activities, so you reduce your need for physical travel. An example of the latter is the solar powered Big Belly trash compactor for outdoor applications, which not only compacts the waste five times, but also sends a text message when full, so the truck knows when to pick it up. These combined innovations reduce truck travel much more than 80 percent!

Conclusions

Time has value and good solutions embrace that fact; otherwise they won’t become pervasive. It’s hard to value time in our personal lives, but we all know it is limited, in the near term by life’s complexity and ultimately by our finite lifespan. That’s true for businesses, too, whose biggest cost is usually payroll. That means solutions that save time AND reduce pollution will sell like gangbusters.

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GE said in January that some of the home-focused startups that entered the challenge could get investment from GE and its VC partners, and some will receive $100,000 in award money. As of January, $55 million of the $200 million fund had been committed, and out of 4,000 ideas submitted, there had been more than 1,100 in the category of home energy, said GE.

Back in November, GE named 12 winners of its smart grid challenge, which split the first $55 million, and five “innovation award winners” that received $100,000 each. The 12 winners included some bigger companies like OPower, Consert, SynapSense, Soladigm, Scientific Conservation, and SustainX, while the innovation winners included smaller companies like Winflex, IceCode, and GridON.

GE has a strong interest in the home energy market. At CES in January, GE showed off its new Home Energy Management business, including its Nucleus home energy device, as well as its Brillion line of smart appliances and smart thermostats. All these are meant to connect within the home to GE’s smart meters, then as a gateway to the smart grid.

At GE’s event on Thursday, it will also feature an 8-hour discussion between tech execs and pundits, which will include speakers like entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly, designer Yves Behar, and inventor Saul Griffith. Behar designed GE’s electric vehicle charger.

We’ll bring you the winners Thursday morning!

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Using an impressive series of charts and graphs, Griffith explained how quality data visualizations help put energy policy into context. For example, his personal energy usages was 18,000 watts a year in 2007, with about 45 percent of that wattage generated by his airline flights — he takes about 40 a year. Compare that to the 3 percent he consumes on lighting, and one can see that replacing a few lightbulbs in his home, as opposed to eliminating one or two plane rides, has a relatively small impact. He also realized, after putting his usage in context with the rest of the nation, that he uses far more than the average American.

The average American uses 11,000 watts, which means that as a person who commutes to work on a bike, and tries to act responsibly with regard to energy consumption, he’s still “no better than a Texan,” which makes him “a planet-f***ing hypocrite.” The moral here is that with better visualizations and software created to render those visualizations, perhaps citizens can figure out both how to make the biggest impact and where they stand with regard to the rest of the world. And maybe it could take the self-righteous down a notch or two.

That’s the personal level, but at the policy level, Griffith also illustrated how much energy we consume and showed imagery to track how much renewable energy we’d need in terms of solar arrays or tidal power to generate the energy we use today. For example, solar power generates about 1 to 2 watts per square meter of land. So when governments are planning out their energy goals for the next few decades they must take into account if they have the room to replace their coal with solar, for example. They must also look ahead and predict real energy demand, as opposed to the demands of today.

With humanity requiring 18 terawatts of power per year to live the way we do now, Griffith’s points are important to creating a populace and a political class that can have honest discussions about energy consumption, distribution and use. His plea is for those with experience in this to help the government and him make these software programs a reality.

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The so-called Energy Literacy guiding document, as the organizers of the meeting were calling it, will be modeled on the Climate Literacy and Ocean Literacy projects, and will be a dozen or so pages of text and images that lay out the context, background and definitions of energy consumption, put energy in the context of global warming and explain what it means and why it’s important to be energy literate.

As most people know who read this site know, the average American knows very little about personal energy consumption and energy savings. According to a survey published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Americans overestimate the energy savings of actions like turning off lights, and riding public transportation, but underestimate the energy consumption of other things like using central air conditioning. A key to guiding people to make better decisions about their own energy usage, will be establishing the knowledge about how energy flows work at an earlier age.

This brings us back to the document that will be the reference point for this energy education revolution (hey, sometimes revolutions start out in very boring ways). While a dozen-page document might sound like something you could punch out in a couple of weeks, the idea is to draw feedback from across the various interested groups and create something that can be used as a single reference point. The project, led by Matthew Inman, an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow with the DOE (who is the embodiment of your favorite high school teacher), will use a wiki to draw feedback from interested parties over the next few months, and will hopefully deliver the first version of the document by the summer, 2011.

A project with so much potential input, and with such lofty goals, is bound to face that classic problem: way to many cooks in the kitchen. As an outsider to most policy and academic discussions, and as the only journalist at the meeting last week, I was overwhelmed by all the various opinions thrown out about what words to use and avoid by the end of the meeting.

For example, Inman presented some of his first thoughts on wording for definitions of energy use that sounded like a physics lesson, while some in the group thought the definitions should be connected more to climate change from the start. Still, others in the group thought aligning the energy discussion too strongly to climate change would politicize the document. Sometimes a democracy isn’t always the cleanest and fastest way to reach a conclusion.

For me, I was asked to join the discussion mostly as a way to help the language and the document be more accessible to the public. I can envision a document that’s also easy to digest by the average reader, not just by academic leaders and policy makers. If you’re interested in giving input to this document, stay tuned, and I’ll send out the wiki when it goes online.

Beyond the nitty-gritty of the wording of this baseline document, it’s clear more than ever that we need to become much more energy literate by whatever means necessary. Technology can be one tool. Some think a sort of sixth sense for energy, in the form of design elements in buildings, appliances and gadgets, will be a key. Griffith spent time putting together his own energy footprint of a year of his life, and after realizing he had no idea he was consuming so much energy, helped launch the energy tracking website Wattzon.com.

What about you? Are you energy literate?

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Image courtesy of USACE Europe District.

Workers that work in centralized offices less — relying on web-based tools like email, video chat, and collaboration software — mean workers that commute less, drive fewer miles in cars to work, and take fewer plane flights to conduct meetings. Video conferencing is supposed to explode over the next five years with an estimated 29.6 billion video calls made during 2015, according to a report on the video chat market from GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that by 2030, telecommuting and virtual meetings could cut nearly 1 billion tons of carbon emissions annually. Cisco, which all but owns the high end of the corporate telepresence business, often touts how its product can help companies reduce travel expenses and related carbon emissions.

One of the best things to happen to video conferencing in 2010 wasn’t a technology breakthrough, a business merger or the emergence of a new company, but the Icelandic volcano. The spewing monster shut down a good chunk of airline travel for many weeks, preventing the emissions of millions of tons of carbon dioxide, and reminded grounded business travelers that there’s a broadband-based alternative for that transcontinental business meeting. (For an interesting debate over video conferencing and carbon emissions check out this video clip of panelists at Green:Net 2010, Other Lab’s Saul Griffith, Jonathan Koomey of Lawrence Berkeley Lab and Stanford, Greepeace’s IT analyst Casey Harrell, Wired.com’s Alexis Madrigal and The Climate Group’s Molly Webb.)

Of course, broadband networks and connected computers, use energy, too. How much, in comparison to cutting commuting and plane trips, is hard to tell, but many researchers think that the Internet will end up being carbon positive, or in the worst case carbon neutral, because of its capacity to make processes more efficient and to reduce physical goods (called dematerialization in some circles).

Clearly putting hard data on the potential greenness of the human cloud is difficult, but I’m looking forward to more research and discussion on this at our Net:Work event next month.

Net:Work takes place, on Dec. 9 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco (and you can register here).

Image courtesy of giopuo.

While I didn’t get many details out of Griffith last month, the New Yorker has a long profile on the tinkerer out next week, which has some more information on what Other Lab is concocting. Griffith co-founded the lab with fellow MIT grads James McBride and Jonathan Bachrach, and the lab will house WattzOn, the energy consumption information website co-created by McBride, among other projects.

One project in the works at the lab, reports the New Yorker, is an electricity-assisted tricycle, which uses a battery that delivers about a kilowatt-hour of power on one charge, or a 50-mile range if the rider pedals half of the time. Another theme is looking at the ways that people consumed energy decades and centuries ago. For example the group is looking at a 1920′s power supply for a telephone which can last centuries. “There are enormous clues about efficiency to be found in the way we used to do things, before energy was essentially free,” Griffith tells the New Yorker. Another interesting theme is looking at lessons learned from other countries that have a high quality of life but low energy use.

The idea behind the lab, according to Griffith, is:

By being completely selfish, and solving all my own energy problems, I will find some general solution that other people will like, too.

Check out the video below to see Griffith’s thoughts on using the web for dematerialization — essentially replacing atoms with bits, like using video conferencing instead of air travel for meetings.

For more research on energy and information technology, check out my recent piece on Smart Algorithms: The Future of the Energy Industry, in GigaOM Pro (subscription required).