Archive for October, 2008

One of the hottest areas of cleantech investor activity in the past year has been algae. Yes, algae. More specifically, technologies that enable the production of fuels from algae.

The concept is premised on the fact that algae is a rapidly growing organism that converts sunlight and atmospheric carbon dioxide into lipids, which in turn can be refined into various hydrocarbons. In other words, a carbon-neutral fuel cycle. Pretty cool.

A number of start-up companies – such as Solazyme, Live Fuels, Solix Biofuels and GreenFuel Technologies – have emerged in recent years to pursue this possibility, some fetching sizable quantities of capital from blue-chip investors.

I frequently receive emails with links to videos promising interesting energy/environmental technologies, and most strike me as quackery of some degree or another. However, I recently was pointed to a video produced by a company named Valcent Products that appears particularly compelling. To be clear, I am not recommending this company or its stock, but I do like the tack that Valcent seems to be taking.

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

As some of my long-time readers may know, I have never been a truly ardent fan of compact fluorescent lighting (CFL). Why?

1. Probably most important to me, in my experience with CFLs, I haven’t been satisfied with their start-up characteristics. They take a little while to “warm up” to full luminescence, and until then, the light seems very sickly to me. It actually makes me a bit nauseous. I know that better quality (i.e., more costly) CFLs perform better than cheaper generics, but even CFLs from General Electric I’ve bought still don’t turn on as well as I have come to expect from four decades of living with incandescents.

2. Except for some new (and considerably more expensive) products, CFLs generally don’t work with dimmers. I once found this out the hard way – snap, crackle, pop.  I don’t know about you, but a lot of the light circuits in my house are on dimmers, and as a result I continue to run incandescents on them.

3. It is becoming more well-known that CFLs contain mercury, and hence their disposal is a real issue. Even worse, if one were to break, the release of mercury represents a significant risk – at best a big clean-up nuisance.

4. CFLs aren’t cheap. True, CFL prices are coming down closer to the levels of old/inefficient incandescents, but they are still substantially more costly. For lights that are rarely used, the extra investment doesn’t make much sense to me, as the energy actually saved is small.

So, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the emergence of LED (light-emitting-diode) products for consumer application. I like the quality of LED light, and LEDs don’t have the mercury issue, so it seems like the superior long-term lighting solution.

I’ve been told that household LED lighting is still many years away, but at least some products are trickling into the marketplace. For instance, see EarthLED lightbulbs, which are available at Think Geek. Clearly, they are still a niche item for the early adopters, as they cost $60 to $100 per unit, but at least their emergence into the market now puts consumer LED lighting on the gameboard, hopefully on a quicker path of cost reduction as learning curve and scale production effects are achieved.

Since LEDs have virtually infinite lifetimes, in the future there will no longer be a need to make lamps with removable bulbs in sockets. Savvy marketers out there should begin working to overturn the old paradigm of reusable lamp/disposable bulb, making way for LED lamp fixtures that are inherently designed to capitalize on the unique and compelling advantages offered by LED lighting.

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

In Cleveland, the Great Lakes Energy Development Task Force (a collaboration involving many local public, private and academic organizations, led by the Cuyahoga County government) has commissioned a feasibility study for developing the Great Lakes Wind Energy Center (GLWEC). The GLWEC would include a demonstration offshore project in Lake Erie off of downtown Cleveland, along with an applied research center to facilitate the development of lower-cost, next-generation offshore wind energy technologies and approaches.

The long-term market opportunity for offshore wind just in the Great Lakes – much less the oceans of the world – is huge. A 2004 study indicated a theoretical potential for almost 250 gigawatts (250,000 megawatts!) of wind installations in the Great Lakes, and the Land Policy Institute at Michigan State University recently released a report indicating 322 gigawatts of potential in the waters offshore the state of Michigan alone.

Of course, nowhere near this much offshore wind generating capacity is likely to be installed, but even if 50 gigawatts is installed in the coming decades, at $4 million per megawatt, this would represent $200 billion of investment in the Great Lakes. That seems worth pursuing with some vigor.

As a member of the task force, I recently traveled to Hamburg, Germany, to present the state of progress in developing the GLWEC at Germanischer Lloyd’s annual offshore wind workshop. This gave me an opportunity to “take the pulse” of how the wind industry was currently assessing prospects for offshore wind.

The general state of affairs is that the wind industry is too preoccupied with prospects in onshore markets around the world to pay much more than tangential attention to offshore opportunities. For instance, according to the 2007 Report of the Global Wind Energy Council, 20,076 megawatts of wind energy was installed worldwide in 2007, but according to statistics from the European Wind Energy Association, only 210 megawatts was installed offshore (all in Europe). With only 1 percent of the market, it’s easy to see how much a runt offshore wind remains in the overall wind industry.

A key theme of the discussions was the need to maximize reliability/availability/lifetime of offshore turbine designs to minimize overall life-cycle costs of offshore wind energy, given the costs and challenges associated with installation and servicing turbines on top of tall towers in the middle of large bodies of water often exposed to heavy seas and weather.

The wind industry appears to be realizing how naive it was in thinking it would be relatively straightforward to move from onshore to offshore, while simultaneously seeing that offshore wind market needs are rapidly approaching because onshore wind prospects will not be sufficient to meet overall demands for new wind energy installations. In other words, the wind industry is likely to become more serious and earnest in taking head-on the offshore promise and challenge in the relatively near future. Industry leaders can’t avoid it forever. But, in the main, they are avoiding it for now.

In the meantime, I am aware of several entrepreneurial companies – some of whom are working in stealth mode, some of them with substantial wherewithal – that are following Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” playbook and aggressively developing innovations to take on a market niche that the “big boys” aren’t terribly interested in right now. As a result, the current leaders of the wind industry – Vestas, General Electric, Siemens, Gamesa, Suzlon and so on – may wake up in a few years and find that they “missed the boat” in offshore wind.

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

Betcha didn’t know that there was an Energy Policy Act of 2008, did you? Well, you won’t find any bill of that name. But, the passage of last week’s appropriately titled “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008″ is almost tantamount to an energy bill.

The Senate prepared a nice summary of the energy-related provisions that were stuffed into the bill during the chaotic process to get something passed promptly that would reassure the financial markets. I have yet to review all of the provisions, but it’s clear that many of them have favorable implications for a variety of clean energy technologies, inluding wind, solar, energy efficiency, hybrid vehicles, biofuels, and smart grid.

It’s nice that there has been at least one small silver lining to the dark cloud of financial implosions in the past few weeks.