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The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:12:23 +0000

The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent and publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines and investors look for value investments and give money to those companies able to scale with little additional capital.

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Key steps for successful renewable-energy permitting

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:09:00 +0000

Developers of renewable-energy projects frequently spend more time obtaining permits than on the actual construction of their projects. Such delays — often unanticipated — pose serious financial risks. But there are several steps that can reduce exposure to permitting problems. The most important is to identify those agencies that have some oversight of the project and to interact with them often.

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The economics of clean-data-center innovation

cwaxer — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 06:55:45 +0000

Around the world, data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s 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. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? This report attempts to answer that question by looking at the ways in which companies are greening their data centers and attempting to achieve social, economic, and environmental value.

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Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:55:48 +0000

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A growing wind farm in Alaska looks to batteries

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:43:53 +0000

While wind power is one of the cheapest forms of clean power, it’s also one of the most fickle, and to combat that problem, utilities are experimenting with energy storage, and in particular batteries. On Tuesday Alaskan utility Kodiak Electric Association (KEA) announced that it plans to install a 3 MW battery farm and management system made by Xtreme Power next to its large wind farm.

Kodiak Electric Association built the sizable Pillar Mountain Wind Project in 2009, and at 4.5 MW it currently provides about 10 percent of the utility’s power generation needs. But the utility, which operates its own stand alone grid, plans to expand the wind project to 9 MW, and was worried about grid instability at that scale, with the fluctuating wind climate in its area. Eventually KEA is aiming for 95 percent clean power by 2020 and plans the have Xtreme Power’s battery system up and running by the end of the year.

Xtreme Power is a 8-year-old company with a plan to build large battery farms connected to clean power projects, and then supply its management system to control the storage use. The idea is that when variable solar and wind die down, or fluctuate too high, the battery system can rapidly and dynamically store or release the energy when needed to smooth out the grid. One of Xtreme’s biggest contracts is to build a 10 MW storage system meant to back up a 30 MW wind farm planned for the Hawaiian island of Oahu.

Xtreme describes its PowerCell battery chemistry as a “chemical capacitor” that it says can beat lithium ion batteries in terms of energy storage, efficiency, cycle life and cost. The technology was born out of a 1990′s joint venture between Ford Aerospace and defense contractor Tracor that was shelved after its target market — California’s zero-emissions vehicle fleet — collapsed in the wake of the state’s decision to back off its ZEV mandate.

Xtreme bought the technology in 2004 and put its first 500-kilowatt PowerCell in place at the South Pole Telescope in 2007. Since then, it has also tested a 1.5 MW PowerCell at another 30 MW wind project on the island of Maui, and has been working with the transmission hub project called Tres Amigas.

Xtreme has been quiet on how much its battery tech costs, but Sam Jaffe, analyst at IDC Energy Insights, told us a few years back that Xtreme has been targeting around $500 per kilowatt-hour as a profitable price point for grid storage systems. Xtreme says it has already installed 22 MW of batteries and its management system, and plans another 55 MW by the end of the year.

Xtreme Power is backed by SAIL Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, the venture arm of Dow, Fluor, Dominion Power, Spring Ventures, BP, Posco, and Skylake Incuvest.

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Report: The clean power cash grant program was working

Katie Fehrenbacher — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 15:46:21 +0000

A new report out of the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Labs says that the $9 billion clean power cash grant program (formally called the 1603 grant program), which expired at the end of 2011, was working and creating jobs and economic output. The report says that the program created up to 75,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, and delivered $44 billion in total economic output through the creation of wind and solar panel projects.

The cash grant program was funded from the stimulus package as a way to help spur clean power project development, particularly in the wake of the 2008/2009 recession and for small clean power developers. Clean power projects have long been able to take advantage of the production tax credits (PTC) and investment tax credits (ITC), which give clean power companies 30 percent of total eligible costs of a project in the form of tax credits that can be used to offset taxes paid on company profits.

However, because many clean power companies are small and have tax liabilities that are less than the value of their available tax credits, some of the companies couldn’t take immediate advantage of the ITC and the PTC. Commonly those smaller companies would turn to tax equity investors to make up for the shortfall, but the recession made the tax equity market a lot weaker. To help combat all of these issues, the DOE created the 1603 cash grant program, which gave clean power companies an option to take a one-time cash grant that was equal to what they would have gotten from the ITC/PTC, so 30 percent of the cost of the project.

The report says that the $9 billion cash grant program supported the installation of 23,000 clean power projects — both large scale wind and solar panel projects — which is the equivalent of adding 13.5 GW of clean power to the grid (or enough to power 3.4 million U.S. homes). Those projects also attracted more than $20 billion in direct investment from private, regional, and state sources, says the report. The report also finds that these projects will deliver $1.8 billion per year in economic output for the next 20 to 30 years, or the lifetimes of the systems.

As Politico points out, the bulk of the jobs created through the grant program were indirectly, like for parts manufacturing, and a smaller portion of jobs were created for the design and development of the actual renewable energy systems. In addition, it’s hard to tell if the clean power projects would have been installed anyways, with or without the cash grants.

In a campaign year, we’ll see how popular extending a clean power program will be. President Obama is calling for extension of the program, while the report was delivered just a week after Speaker John Boehner called on the DOE to provide proof that its programs create jobs.

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Key technologies for the smart city

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 06:55:30 +0000

As more and more people move to urban areas there is an escalating need for the smart city, where technology, sustainability, citizen well-being and economic development integrate. Currently five key technology sectors are enabling the smart city: smart grids, smart transport, smart water and waste management, smart building systems, and the enabling ICT platforms for the smart city. This report examines each and provides recommendations to those key players — IT companies, telcos, utilities and real estate developers — that wish to benefit and harness those technologies.

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Shell CEO: Energy efficiency, not clean power, is key

Ucilia Wang — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:14:03 +0000

Royal Dutch Shell CEO, Peter Voser, says energy efficiency technology is a must-have to help feed a world with a growing appetite for energy, but the same can’t be say for alternative energy sources such as wind and solar. Voser discussed his thoughts on the future of energy during a Churchill Club event near San Francisco on Wednesday night.

Voser said the world’s energy demand will triple by 2050 instead of double – as some have projected – if people don’t conserve energy and use it more efficiently. He cited China, along with the U.S., as examples of how the government is promoting policies to manage energy demand.

While he also mentioned China’s ambitious plan to increase its use of renewable energy such as wind and solar, he isn’t so bullish about the prospect of alternative sources playing a big role in meeting people’s energy needs. Voser said he hasn’t seen innovations that can speed up the adoption of wind and solar to make a significant dent in the global energy mix. Wind energy, for example, has been around for 30 years, yet its share of the energy market is tiny, he pointed out.

“From the innovation side, the key we need to work on is to shorten the delivery time to get to a sizable percent of the total energy market. We haven’t cracked it on the innovation side,” Voser said. He spoke mostly in generality and didn’t much hone in on what types of innovations should happen to boost clean energy use (and replace fossil fuels).

Shell has set up a venture capital fund that has invested in a variety of energy companies, which are mostly in oil and gas and a few in areas such as ocean power and building materials. The oil giant also is investing in carbon capture and sequestration demonstration projects in places such as Canada and Australia. Such technology remains expensive and risky, and there is no clear policy to make the investment worthwhile, Voser said.

He was pressed to name some “crazy big bets” that Silicon Valley should work on during a question-and-answer session. Though he declined to speak specifically about a particular source of renewable energy, he did say a breakthrough in storing electricity is key.

He was also non-committal in his view of electric cars. Asked whether he would ever buy one, he said that’s a possibility because he figured the world will offer up cars of many stripes, whether they are powered by gasoline, hybrid technology or electricity. “Why shouldn’t I drive an electric car? But, if the electricity in the U.S. predominantly comes from coal, then I’ll not buy one.”

But since he was speaking to a crowd with many people from Silicon Valley, Voser was keen to point out that Shell is big on investing in innovations. When he became CEO in 2009, he said, he decided that the company would work more closely with startups with promising technologies and help commercialize them.

To illustrate that Shell is big on innovations in general, Voser cited the company’s joint technology development work on information technology with companies such as IBM. Shell also is working on R&D projects with Chinese oil and gas companies, he said.

“We are trying to use information technology in order to drive some of our innovations,” Voser said. Shell and IBM banded together in 2010 to develop a Linux supercomputer that Shell would use to do seismic and other analyses for oil and gas exploration.

But he also professed to have found it challenging to figure out how to work with startups in places such as Silicon Valley and not get bogged down on “figuring out who makes the biggest profit off of the IP.”

Photo courtesy of Shell

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Introducing the power router for the grid

Ucilia Wang — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:42:08 +0000

In the telecom and Internet worlds, it’s standard to re-route data over different lines when one path is broken or overloaded. But not so much, when it comes to the power grid, and utilities can’t easily control where power goes. However, a newly-emerged startup called Varentec, backed by Khosla Ventures, is looking to change all that and is developing equipment and software that will allow utilities to manage the sometimes unpredictable infusion of solar and wind power.

San Jose-based Varentec, incorporated in June 2010, is working on what it calls “power routers,” which will allow utilities to channel electrons to whichever transmission or distribution lines they deem suitable to deliver the necessary amount of power and meet demand at any time of the day or night.

“If people want green electrons, then we can guarantee the electrons are green,” Deepak Divan, president and chief technology officer of the company told us. “We can route power around a congestion point. If there is wind being curtailed, we can route the wind to different places to make sure the wind power gets to market.”

Varentec is using a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program (for high-risk early-stage research) to develop its technology for both directing and adjusting the amount of power that flows all the way from a power plant to a home or business, said Divan. Varentec plans to both unveil the equipment and announce a pilot project with a utility in 2013, said Andrew Dillon, Varentec’s head of business development and marketing.

Dillon declined to name the utility, whose involvement could not only help demonstrate the tech but also to market it to other utilities. Utilities are known to shun the use of new (and sometimes expensive) equipment unless they have to do so for regulatory compliance.

Varentec also raised a $7.7 million Series A round last year and counts Khosla Ventures as a lead investor. Varentec is one of the rare smart grid startups that Khosla Ventures has funded.

The current power grid

Currently, the grid isn’t set up to allow utilities to have this dynamic control of the power flow. And there really isn’t a major need for it — yet. The majority of power today comes from fossil fuel-based power plants, which can produce electricity consistently 24/7, and can meet utilities’ demands predictably.

But with the emergence of wind and solar power, there could be a potentially huge headache. Wind and solar power production is variable because it depends on whether the sun shines or the wind blows. If the sun hides behind the clouds or the wind dies, utilities may not have enough time to crank up their coal or natural gas power plants to make up for the temporary loss of power supply, or to direct that power to certain neighborhoods quickly. They also will have to cut power production at these fossil fuel plants quickly once the sun comes out from hiding or the wind kicks up again.

“You don’t want your lights to go off just because wind has died down somewhere,” Divan said. “Utilities are forced to route power from a different place.”

In addition if electric cars become more popular, utilities will have figure out when and where in their territories they will have to provide the necessary amount of power to accommodate car charging. Utilities face penalties for not delivering power reliably – that means, for example, they can’t have too many outages and have to restore power as quickly as they can.

Varentec’s secret sauce

Varentec’s got some ideas about controlling the direction and volume of the power flow, but Divan declined to describe exactly how that could be done. We do know, however, that its power router technology will come with silicon-based converters that Divan said will be more efficient at adjusting the voltage, current and other characteristics of power as it courses through the grid. Power losses happen with each power conversion step, but Varentec’s converters will reduce that loss to less than 1 percent, compared with the 3-5 percent of converters today, Divan said.

Varentec also says its power routers will be more efficient and cost less in other ways. “To regulate 10 MW of power, we only need 1 MW of the equipment. We can get a 10x cost reduction, and that’ll become more economical,” Dillon said.

For an idea of what Varentec is working on, you can check out this presentation from the Georgia Institute of Technology, which is a partner in Varentec’s project and has done its own, separate research in power electronics for the grid. The presentation counts Divan as a co-author but describes another ARPA-E funded project to use a “power converter-augmented transformer” using silicon-based “direct AC converter cells” to control power flow.

Photo courtesy of Florian via Flickr

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Today in Green IT: solar-powered cell phone networks

Adam Lesser — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:10:55 +0000

While we take a stable electrical grid for granted in the developed world, that’s often not a certainty in the developing world, which can make running a business quite difficult. Airtel Nigeria has complained that 70 percent of its wireless downtime results from power supply issues.

So with that in mind, the company has signed a deal with Ericson to upgrade 250 of its diesel powered cell stations with solar generation in an attempt to go green and also to access a stable off grid power source. I’m seeing more of this sort of approach, of co-building renewable energy generation next to critical infrastructure.

Texas based WindData has planned a five data center facility in Pfugerville, Texas with wind power generation locked into the plan so that the data center has good visibility on what its long term electricity pricing will be. As the world trudges toward large scale utilities offering reliable renewable energy sourcing, these sorts of smaller-scale energy projects for businesses with power needs could be an important medium term trend.

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