Archive for Technology
Mobile Technologies – Powering a World on the Go
Posted by: | CommentsIn the rugged mountainous region along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in an area often referred to as a “lawless frontier,” a U.S. military special forces unit is on a mission to help locate and track Al Qaeda operatives. It’s risky business. The soldiers must travel dangerous and inhospitable roads and camp out far from central-command support. These “dismounted” soldiers will be on their mission for days on end. Their backpacks, which carry all the food, tents, and artillery they need for the mission, weigh an average of 120 pounds. As part of the load, each soldier also carries a collection of mission-critical electronic devices, including radio communication units, GPSs, and infrared night-vision binoculars—and the primary and rechargeable batteries needed to power them all.
But on this mission, something is different. Instead of hauling in additional primary batteries or packing heavy, loud, exhaust-belching generators to keep the command’s battery packs charged, much of the equipment is powered quietly and efficiently by the sun. The soldiers carry lightweight, backpack-sized devices that easily unfurl into a small array of flexible, camouflaged solar panels. These photovoltaic panels provide power to recharge the lithium-ion batteries required for many of the unit’s electronic devices. And unlike diesel generators, which create heat, noise, and pollution, the solar panels are completely silent and have a low “thermal signature,” meaning that enemies can’t easily identify or track the troop’s location.
This isn’t science fiction but science fact. Manufactured by United Solar Ovonic in Auburn Hills, Michigan, the Uni-Pac portable solar-power system is just one of a handful of portable solar products now being developed or shipped for battlefield operations by companies such as Global Solar Energy, PowerFilm, and Konarka.
Meanwhile, in a much more peaceful part of the globe, a young couple whiles away a sunny afternoon in a Los Angeles park. Like millions of others around the globe, they’re listening to music on their Apple iPods. The low-battery icon comes on and they’re miles from their wall-socket charger at home, but no worries. They’ve brought along a small device called Soldiusl, a solar-powered charger from Soldius in Veendam, the Netherlands, that fully recharges an iPod battery in 2 to 3 hours of direct sunlight.
Clean energy, on the go. From battlefields to backpacks, real warriors to road warriors, our increasingly untethered world is turning to portable applications of clean technology to power its mobile energy needs. To meet the challenge of portable energy sources that are safe, clean, and reliable, innovators large and small are ramping up efforts in sectors such as lithium-ion batteries; embedded, thin-film solar cells; and mobile “power stations” packaged in a standard shipping container. Beyond the huge potential markets of portable power for consumer electronic devices and the military, mobile clean tech is also finding growing applications in disaster recovery and relief, national security, and off-grid power in the rural villages of the developing world.
This wide-ranging sector of clean tech presents growth and investment opportunities for both large and small companies and their investors. The global battery market is about $55 billion, reckons the Freedonia Group, an industry research firm in Cleveland, Ohio. As for battery chargers, look no further than the iPod; Apple sold $8.3 billion worth of them in the year ended in September 2007. Then add in the billions of cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), BlackBerry devices, Game Boy players, and myriad other items carried by consumer armies from Shanghai to Stockholm, and you’ve got some idea of the opportunity for advances in portable energy-storage devices.
The U.S. military is at the forefront of funding and innovation in this sector—something that any entrepreneur seeking backers or customers should know. Many technologies initially developed for the military—the ultimate power user, you might say—are being adapted for civilian use in disaster-recovery areas, refugee operations, and a range of other commercial applications. Some of these, such as pilotless solar-powered airplanes that act as broadband communications platforms for disaster-stricken areas or unwired rural villages, are a few years away from commercial use. Others, such as solar PV panels or micro wind turbines delivered and housed in shipping containers for ready deployment, are already viable commercial niches today.
The U.S. military’s desire for clean tech on the battlefield is not far in the future—it’s here today. In July 2006, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Richard Zilmer, commander of forces in the tumultuous Al Anbar Province in western Iraq, sent a top-priority memo requesting solar and wind power for his troops. Not only was he concerned about the thermal signature of diesel generators tipping off the enemy, but he also knew the security risks of the massive tanker-truck convoys required to haul in the diesel fuel (from as far away as Turkey) to run them.
United Solar Ovonic is just one of a growing number of companies seeking to cash in on the specialized yet very large potential military and civilian markets for clean-energy sources that are easily transportable. Former GM chairman and CEO Robert Stempel, now boss of United Solar Ovonic’s parent company ECD Ovonics, says that the market for Uni-Solar products is booming and that the company plans to up its solar manufacturing capacity to 300 MW by 2010. That would represent a more than tenfold increase in production from 2005. Stempel’s company has shipped thousands of the Uni-Pac portable solar units, with more than half of them being used by defense organizations in the United States and around the world.
Personal Transportation Technology – Carbon-Composite Materials
Posted by: | CommentsIts well-publicized production delays notwithstanding, Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, dubbed “Boeing’s Plastic Dream Machine” by Business Week because of its extensive use of carbon fiber composites, has been one of the fastest-selling jets in commercial aviation history. Could composites— the stuff of tennis rackets, high-performance skis, and bicycles—have a similar impact on next-generation car and light-truck design? Carbon fiber weighs just one fifth as much as the steel it replaces, but it’s so strong that today’s Formula 1 race cars require it in the auto body. Fuel efficiency mavens such as the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins have been pushing composites for years—a 10% drop in auto weight improves fuel economy by 7%—and many industry R&D efforts are underway. A Ford-GM-DaimlerChrysler consortium is working with the Polymer Matrix Composites Group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to break the biggest barrier to widespread carbon-fiber use in mainstream vehicle design: cost. Prices today are $8 to $10 per pound; they’d have to drop to $3 to $5 per pound to compete with steel. Solving the cost issue presents a lucrative tech opportunity for companies such as GM and Atmospheric Glow Technologies, a University of Tennessee spinoff whose plasma-processing technology could dramatically cut carbon-fiber production costs.
Many factors are behind the financial woes of Ford and GM, but their lack of leadership (until very recently) on fuel efficiency has clearly bitten them as gas prices have shot up. “I think it’s now clear to virtually everyone in Detroit that if our government had had the courage ten years ago to raise mileage standards, they might not be in quite the level of complete economic meltdown they’re in today,” says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research nonprofit in Washington, D.C.
Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and especially GM are now putting much more R&D and marketing muscle behind vehicles that run on something besides gasoline—primarily ethanol or electric power. Whether it’s real high-volume commitment or too-little-too-late lip service remains to be seen, and many in the clean-tech and environmental communities, burned by years of false hopes and broken promises from the Big Three, are understandably skeptical. But the companies seem to recognize that current and future shareholder value (and possibly, in Ford’s case, survival) depends at least partially on producing much cleaner, more fuel-efficient vehicles, and they’re pursuing a range of potentially breakthrough technologies to make it happen. “GM turned one hundred years old in 2008, and for the entire time our products have been ninety-nine to one hundred percent petroleum-based,” says Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director in charge of electric-powered cars and trucks at GM’s Warren Technology Center in Warren, Michigan. “That’s not a good business strategy going forward.”
In 2006, Ford turned to an auto industry outsider, former Boeing executive vice president Alan Mulally, to reverse its dwindling fortunes. Mulally brought not only an industry outsider’s fresh perspective to Ford’s CEO job but also a keen sense that focusing on fuel efficiency can play a key role in reversing an American industrial icon’s decline against foreign competition. At the end of Mulally’s tenure at Boeing, for the first time in 6 years, the aircraft manufacturer had more planes ordered in a 6-month period (the first half of 2006) than its longtime European nemesis Airbus, mainly on the strength of its new 787 commercial jet. Known as the Dreamliner, the 300-seat 787 championed by Mulally is the most fuel-efficient long-distance commercial plane ever built. Its revolutionary wing and fuselage design contains 50% plastic composites, which include j resins and fibers of carbon, boron, graphite, and glass; they’re used today in high-end bicycle frames and top-of-the-line sports cars. The most advanced commercial aircraft in the sky today use no more than 25% composites. Lighter, stronger, longer-lasting, and easier to maintain than traditional aluminum alloy, the composites (and other design advances) will help Boeing’s twin-engine 787 use 20% less fuel and cost 10% less to maintain than comparably sized planes. Although the 787 hit major production-line snags in 2007 and 2008, we still feel it sets a new standard in aviation fuel efficiency.
Airbus found itself plagued by management turmoil and manufacturing delays in 2006, but aviation analysts say that the European aircraft maker’s woes were at least partially strategic. Airbus lost its lead when it did not put the same emphasis on fuel efficiency in its new designs as Boeing did, focusing instead on the hulking, double-deck, 555-seat A380 and the A350, more comparable to the 787 in size but without as much use of composites and other energy-saving technologies.
“What do you do when fuel is the price of champagne?” Boeing asked in a three-page ad in Aviation Week in 2006. Oil may not be there yet, but as its price exceeded $120 a barrel in the spring of 2008, Boeing’s efficiency strategy seemed to be the right bet for its customers—the increasingly fuel cost-conscious airlines around the world. As Ford’s new CEO, Mulally calls enhancing fuel efficiency one of the company’s biggest short-term challenges. “With the business environment we have,” he told Business Week in September 2006, “higher oil prices will be with us for a while.”
Another huge segment of the personal transportation sector, often overlooked in the United States, is the worldwide market for single-passenger vehicles: motorbikes, mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and tuk-tuks—the popular Southeast Asian conveyance that’s essentially a motorized rickshaw. These vehicles may be relatively fuel-efficient compared with large cars and SUVs, but emissions are another story. Tuk-tuks, older-model Vespa scooters, and other motorbikes often use two-stroke engines—one of the world’s dirtiest internal-combustion technologies. In the two-stroke process, the engine’s lubricant is burned along with the fuel, so normal operation produces the same belching, bluish smoke as an old junker car that’s “burning oil”—as anyone who’s spent time choking in a Bangkok traffic jam can tell you. The C02 emissions are high, too—even higher than for SUVs, some have claimed, although there haven’t been solid scientific studies. Whatever the actual comparative pollution level, we see a huge business opportunity in cleaner technologies for the nearly $40 billion worldwide motorcycle-motorbike-scooter market, and several companies in the United States and overseas are moving aggressively to meet that need.
Smart Grid – A New Energy Order
Posted by: | Comments“Energy is a $3 trillion a year industry,” says Adams of the Smalley Institute. “By some estimates we’ll spend $10 trillion to $20 trillion over the next ten to twenty years on energy infrastructure globally. So there’s money to spend on shifting our energy future.”
In Smalley’s vision of the distributed storage-generation grid, for example, individual homes might have 3 to 5 days of energy storage on-site to help during downtimes, peak energy usage, and major disruptions, or to serve as distributed “power stations.” Battery packs in hybrid electric, all-electric, or fuel-cell vehicles could also be used to store and feed electricity into the grid when not being used for transportation (most cars sit idle 95% of the time). A number of innovators have called this latter vision the V2Grid (vehicle to grid).
What’s so compelling about these new visions of the grid is that you remove one of the greatest obstacles to the mass adoption of renewable energy: its intermittent nature. While coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants can produce electricity any time of day or night, as long as they have fuel, many renewable-energy technologies are constrained by Mother Nature. Solar power can be produced only when the sun is shining, wind power only when a sufficient breeze is blowing, and tidal power only when waves and currents are flowing.
To overcome this obstacle, you need to have three things. First, you need a power grid that can support and accommodate the two-way flow of electrons from distributed sources, such as solar panels on a rooftop, small wind turbines, or hydrogen-powered fuel cells. With this basic capability, homes and businesses can be both producers and consumers of energy. Second, you need to be able to carry electrons over long distances from far-flung resources, such as massive wind farms in the Great Plains or solar farms in the deserts of the Southwest. It’s been estimated, for example, that if you placed solar generators in the Southwest desert in an area 100 miles wide by 100 miles long, you could produce enough PV power to meet all of the electricity needs of the entire United States. Finally, you need a networked system that can store energy for use during times of outages or when demand is higher than generation, mainly peak energy usage times such as hot summer days when air conditioners are taxing the grid.
The quantum wires being developed by the team at the Smalley Institute could theoretically be a critical building block of this new, vastly more efficient and capable smart grid. However, the quest to create conductive nano-materials for large-scale electricity transmission and distribution will take time. The best-case scenario for such breakthroughs in nanowires is 5 to 10 years, and it could take decades to commercialize the technology and fully transition from our current grid to one based on nanotechnology. But change is coming much sooner in other guises: products such as advanced lithium-ion batteries for backup power storage; smart advanced meters, appliances, and wireless devices that help better manage the flow of electrons; advanced stationary fuel-cell systems that efficiently produce both electricity and heat for homes and small businesses (also known as combined heat and power) and can provide electricity on demand; and superconductors for more efficiency in transmission.
California alone plans to add up to a million solar roofs by 2020 via its $3.2 billion California Solar Initiative, the most aggressive subsidy program ever initiated in the United States. A majority of today’s new solar PV installations, in the United States, Japan, Germany, and elsewhere, do not include on-site backup power storage—they simply generate solar electricity for the home and feed excess electrons into the grid. But on-site energy storage is tantamount to the vision of a distributed storage-generation grid where tens of thousands of systems can feed into the grid on demand at any time of the day. It’s a huge opportunity. With current technology, an average home would need a small vented room full of batteries costing more than $10,000 dollars to guarantee a 2- to 3-day supply of on-site reserve energy. But nano-enabled battery solutions could dramatically change the equation, enabling days’ worth of backup and peak power to the home or grid, in a device the size of a small refrigerator, at a fraction of the current cost
A smart-grid transformation is upon us in ways both large and small.The development and implementation of a smart grid will require significant cooperation and coordination between technology developers, policy makers, companies, entrepreneurs, and investors. In the United States, utilities are a highly regulated but disaggregated business. A hodgepodge of regulations are used in different utility districts at the regional and state level, with no single unifying force at the meta level. “Nothing short of a president,” says RockPort Capital’s McDermott,’ “needs to come in with leadership and solve some of these transmission issues, like Eisenhower did with the interstate highway system.”
It might not take an action that drastic, but until the utility industry can establish standards, with systems and protocols that can be applied across the system, the vision of a next-generation smart grid will be incremental at best. Like the interstate highway and information highway before it, the smart grid will rely on government funding and federal and industry standards to flourish. Indeed, it will take a Texas-sized vision. But with smart and visionary teams like those at the Houston-based
Smalley Institute, along with hundreds of other research organizations, companies, and forward-thinking policy makers in the United States and abroad, we will likely see the current grid, much of it envisioned in the late nineteenth century, finally move into the twenty-first. Therein lies one of the greatest clean-tech opportunities of our time.
The Clean-Tech Consumer
Smart meters: You can’t go out and buy a smart meter—a device that helps manage the flow of electrons into your house by providing detailed information on energy usage and real-time pricing—on your own, at least not yet. But tens of millions of smart meters are now in operation around the globe, and that number is projected to increase dramatically as utilities start to deploy more of them. Two utilities in California alone plan to install more than 6 million smart meters by 2010. Consumers will need to rely on their utilities’ upgrading their systems in order to get one—but we see that trend on the rise. Remember, the cheapest and cleanest energy is the energy that you don’t use. And smart meters will help in that mission immensely by giving consumers the tools to monitor and control their energy use. Think negawatts.
Energy in a box: One of the biggest issues with our electricity system is that most of us have no backup power readily available. If the grid goes down, so does the electricity in our homes, stores, and offices. One trend that could change that is advanced distributed backup energy systems for your home. And we’re talking not about dirty fossil fuel-powered generators but about a new breed of electricity-storage devices that can provide power when the grid goes down, as well as better manage your flow of electrons and help lower your utility bill throughout the year. GridPoint is the first company to offer a comprehensive plug-and-play clean solution for backup power, but a number of other companies are likely to offer “energy in a box” products as battery and control technologies improve. But these plug-and-play systems don’t currently come cheap. GridPoint’s basic system starts at about $10,000. For those with less ambitious needs, companies such as computer accessory maker Belkin are now offering small systems to keep your computer and other accessories running during a brief blackout.
In remote rural Indian villages such as Korukollu, located in the state of Andhra Pradesh, women provide water for their families as they have for generations—by gathering water at a shared community site and carrying it back to their homes. But in this village, something is changing. The water in Korukollu is purified using a technology developed by Dr. Ashok Gadgil at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Northern California. His company, WaterHealth International, is on a crusade to solve one of the biggest problems facing humanity by deploying its solutions in India and elsewhere—and to make money doing it. The company’s technology uses low-voltage ultraviolet light to purify water. The system’s energy needs are minimal, and the purification meets or exceeds some of the most stringent criteria for the removal of waterborne pathogens— including those of the World Health Organization and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Clean water in Korukollu and elsewhere can play a life-or-death role in I the health of the villagers. The World Health Organization has estimated that nearly 2 million people die each year because of unsafe drinking water, inadequate sanitation, and insufficient water for hygiene. Other estimates put the annual global death toll from waterborne pathogens at 3 million to 5 million—a crisis on par with the global AIDS epidemic. Clean up rural water supplies, the thinking goes, and you could eradicate a majority of the diseases that kill millions of people in the developing world: cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, and diarrhea.
“In villages, there is no tap water, so options have often traditionally been contaminated well or surface water or very expensive bottled water,” says WaterHealth International’s president and CEO Tralance Addy. “A one-liter bottle of water costs upwards of twenty cents in India. Our technology allows us to deliver twelve liters of clean water for about two cents—putting it within easy reach of people who earn as little as two dollars per day. We fill a void for reliable, high-quality, healthy water.”
Sounds like a promising recipe for success, but it’s historically been very difficult for companies, including multinationals, to figure out how to make money by serving the markets of the developing world. There just aren’t many role models for the successful build-out of profitable businesses, with decent returns, serving the poorest people on the planet.
But in the water business, a growing number of large and small companies are turning to innovative clean technologies, and equally important new business models, in an effort to change that. In both the developing and developed world, they are using a range of new technologies, including desalination, reverse osmosis, nano-based membranes, and ultrafiltration, combined with new financing schemes and service offerings, to capture their piece of the approximately $400-billion-a-year water market.
WaterHealth International is one player making significant headway. In late 2006 the company received a $7 million investment from Dow Venture Capital, the investment arm of the global chemical giant, along with $4 million from other investors. It also forged a relationship in 2006 with India’s largest private bank, ICICI Bank, to help finance the installation of the company’s water purification and disinfection systems. The company said it was on target to set up 50 new village-based water purification systems per month, mostly in India. In addition to village water systems, the company has developed and shipped units for relief after disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami and for urban centers in the developing world. Eventually, it will target individual households.
WaterHealth International, whose technology received recognition from Discover magazine as a “best of the decade” invention in 1999, believes it can deliver on its ambitious promise by embracing a developing world-centric business model. That means being involved in the entire water supply and purification process from end to end, including design, product manufacturing, financing, servicing, and hiring locals to operate and run the company’s systems.
If companies such as WaterHealth International can beat the odds, rural development and disaster relief will offer a huge viable market—but those sectors still represent just the tip of the water iceberg. Access to clean, safe, reliable, and affordable water is proving just as critical in day-to-day operations in the industrialized world. From office towers to factories to homes, the need for clean water has never been greater. For this reason, clean water, like clean energy, is becoming big business.
Since the mid-1990s, a number of multinationals have positioned themselves as leaders in the water industry. Companies such as Danaher, General Electric, ITT, and Siemens have captured a significant share of the filtration, purification, and processing markets. Other multinationals, such as RWE, SUEZ, and Veolia Water, control a majority of the world’s private water utilities. Since 2002, GE alone has spent more than $3.5 billion acquiring smaller water companies such as ZENON Environmental, Ionics, Osmonics, and BetzDearborn. Other significant acquisitions include Siemens’s purchase of water-technology company USFilter for nearly $1 billion in 2004 and 3M’s acquisition of water-filtration company Cuno Inc. for $1.35 billion in 2005.
One reason for the corporate consolidations and investments is that water is becoming an increasingly profitable business. GE’s investments, for example, seem to be paying off—with a division that now exceeds $2 billion in annual revenue. Water also outperformed oil as an investment sector over a period of nearly 3 years, starting in 2003, according to a Bloomberg report in June 2006. The article reported that “the lack of usable water worldwide has made it more valuable than oil. The Bloomberg World Water Index of 11 utilities returned 35 percent annually since 2003, compared with 29 percent for oil and gas stocks and 10 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.”
We believe that the insatiable thirst for water, in both the developing and developed world, will translate into continued opportunities for multinationals and their acquired companies, as well as for some smaller private companies that develop and deploy unique technologies and business models. Picking the winners won’t be easy, and consolidation will make placing bets even more difficult, but there will be unique opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors, and those seeking new and challenging work as the need for clean water expands and underserved markets are exploited.
Water Filtration Technologies – Water from Air
Posted by: | CommentsHundreds of gallons of water extracted from thin air? It sounds fantastical, but a number of companies are trying to solve the issue of providing water in extreme conditions, including disaster recovery and war zones, and they are looking to some unlikely sources. The cost to ship and supply water to remote and hostile environments today can run tens of dollars per gallon. Aqua Sciences, of Sky Lake, Florida, is one company making progress in trying to provide an alternative that runs closer to 30 cents per gallon. The company’s water-harvesting machine was awarded a Time magazine Best Inventions 2006 award and can extract 600 gallons or more of water per day in just about any environment on the planet. Its company’s president and CEO, Abe Shear, acquired global rights to the technology from an Israeli firm and has contracts with the U.S. military. The company doesn’t like to give details on the technology, but Shear likens it to the effect of a grain of rice in a salt shaker—which pulls moisture out of the salt. Shear points out that the earth’s atmosphere contains trillions of gallons of water at any given time in the form of water vapor. Now that’s a potential resource for him and others to tap.
A Fresh Cup Of Sewage, Please
People are used to the concept of recycling newspapers into packaging and plastic bottles into fleece jackets, but what about recycling wastewater and turning it into drinking water? Most people’s initial reaction is one of disgust. The notion of drinking old sewage, no matter how clean and safe once purified, is enough to make many people sick. But the conversion of municipal sewage, which is made up of approximately 75% water, into potable water is exactly what’s happening in a number of regions that have limited supplies of freshwater. Singapore stands out as a shining example and is becoming home to an increasing number of companies and research organizations that could end up, literally, hydrating the world.
Hyflux, a Singapore-based provider of large-scale, highly efficient water systems to Singapore, China, India, and Dubai, is a case in point. The company is part of a used-water-recovery technology developed in Singapore called NEWater. The process uses microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and other processes to convert wastewater into drinking-quality water. The city-state of Singapore launched the NEWater project in 1998 and now is using water produced at three NEWater facilities both for industrial applications and for mixing into reservoirs for drinking water. Singapore is targeting up to 2.5% of its municipal water supply from reclaimed wastewater by 2011.
In addition to Singapore, the United States and Israel have been water-reuse leaders. In the United States, a number of communities in Southern California; Washington, DC; and elsewhere have discharged high-quality reclaimed water into underground aquifers and surface reservoirs (which then get filtered again) for drinking water. The technique, while still not widely adopted, is called indirect potable reuse. Taking things a step further, Orange County, California, recently launched the world’s largest “sewer to tap” water system, similar to the NEWater system in Singapore, using advanced microfiltration, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet light to purify the wastewater stream. Israel, the water-reuse leader, currently processes 75% of its wastewater—treating it and reusing it primarily for the nation’s vast agricultural irrigation network (not for drinking water). Researchers in Israel are looking at the possibility of turning wastewater into potable water, but they haven’t taken the plunge yet.
Turning sewage into potable water may seem like a relatively new idea, and one that many people hope never becomes a common practice, but NASA has been thinking about it for quite some time. For decades, NASA has funded the research and development of technologies that can support life for extended duration in space, with water reuse and purification being a critical example. Successful long-term piloted space exploration requires an ongoing supply of fresh potable water, clean air, and food. Imagine Christopher Columbus sailing to the New World without adequate food and water supplies—his crew never would have made it. Space travel adds similarly unique challenges. To support astronauts on a 2- to 3-year mission, say to Mars, you need to pack everything with you that you’ll need during the expedition.
While the focus of recent missions to Mars and other planets has been on pilotless flights, NASA is working on returning astronauts to the moon by 2020, and eventually to Mars and beyond. Its current fiscal budget exceeds $16 billion annually, with a portion going to the study of growing food in space, generating onboard oxygen, purifying water, and other extended-duration needs.
In the 1970s, NASA funded development of a water-filtration technology that’s now used on the International Space Station and has been used on every space shuttle mission since its development. Originally designed by UMPQUA Research of Myrtle Creek, Oregon, the technology is now being commercialized for the developing world by Water Security in Sparks, Nevada. NASA originally used the technology to convert human urine and other captured wastes into potable water. “It’s whiz-bang technology,” jokes Ray Doane, president and CEO of Water Security. The company has added a special filter to the original NASA design, creating a system that can remove up to 99.9% of all waterborne viruses. This company’s technology could prove particularly useful in the developing world.
Investing In Clean Technology – Implement Sin Taxes and Carbon Trading Schemes
Posted by: | CommentsFor any significant shift to clean technologies to occur, we will need more aggressive public policies and innovative market mechanisms to place a greater value on activities that reduce GHGs and other pollution while punishing companies and technologies that increase them. Many places in the world today have so-called sin taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. So why not tax our other great addiction: fossil fuels?
It’s already being done in places such as Sweden, which is seeking to become oil-free by 2020. We know the “T word” is a third-rail issue in American politics today. But sin taxes have been more palatable because they tap revenue from the “public bad” (tobacco) and shift it to the public good (cancer research and health care). We’d like to see a similar sin tax, for example, on the most fuel-inefficient vehicles—Hummers and very large SUVs—with the revenue then funding technologies for vehicle efficiency and cleaner fuels.
In electric power, California, Oregon, and other states already collect what’s called a system benefit charge (deftly avoiding the T word). In California it’s a modest monthly utility bill surcharge that funds energy efficiency, clean-energy R&D, residential and industrial programs, rebates, and education throughout the state. That’s helped make California the nation’s efficiency and clean-energy leader, and that will likely continue as the California Public Utilities Commission funds $2 billion in efficiency programs by utilities from 2006 to 2008, the largest such program in industry history.
Carbon trading will likely be a huge financial growth area through 2020. Carbon trading, a market-based scheme that places an economic value on reducing GHG emissions, was a more than $60 billion global market in 2007 and could reach $100 billion or more in 2008. It’s a complicated, challenging, and often far from perfect mechanism, but the underlying theory is simple enough: Companies that reduce GHGs earn credits that they can sell to companies that do not. In other words, there’s a direct, tangible, predictable cost penalty for producing C02 emissions, and an immediate economic incentive for reducing them.
The United Nations Climate Change Secretariat says that the clean development mechanism set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which enables industrialized nations to set up projects in the developing world to offset their emissions, will help reduce more than 1 billion tons of GHGs, or the current annual emissions of Spain and the United Kingdom combined, by 2012. The incentive to earn credits has helped initiate more than 800 clean-energy projects around the world, including wind farms in India and power plants in Brazil that burn sugarcane waste, says the secretariat.
Some environmentalists condemn clean development mechanisms and carbon trading as a “license to pollute.” But we believe that if properly set up, implemented, and enforced, such schemes effectively bring the power of marketplace economics to global environment issues and will be a significant and welcome driver of clean-tech investments.
San Francisco – Money and Mind-Set
Posted by: | CommentsThe City by the Bay, like Portland, only recently began leveraging its traditional green-minded reputation and policies into clean-tech job creation and industry growth. “We looked at our very progressive policies based on the precautionary principle, our solar bonds, our recycling mandates,” says Jennifer Entine Matz, managing deputy director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. “We realized that we hadn’t been thinking of the power those could have in driving workforce development.”
Now that effort is under way in full force. The city contracted with our company, Clean Edge, in 2004 to help identify strategies and initiatives to grow the local clean-tech industry sector. San Francisco clearly has all the potential elements. There’s a robust community of venture capitalists and investment bankers, in the city and nearby Silicon Valley, looking to fund The Next Big Thing. There’s a rich array of world-renowned university and government research labs, and a storied tradition of tech innovation and entrepreneurship. There’s a great potential source of clean-tech financing in the mayor’s energy conservation account, which receives $5 million to $15 million annually in revenue from sales of water from the city-owned Hetch Hetchy Reservoir near Yosemite National Park. And there are several high-profile projects already under way that showcase the payoff of clean tech, including 60,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof of the Moscone Convention Center, another solar roof on a wastewater treatment plant, and a potential project that would literally test the waters for the feasibility of electricity from the power of tidal currents in and out of San Francisco Bay through the fabled Golden Gate.
“Clean tech here is where biotech was 20 years ago—a nascent industry with many disparate parts,” says Matz. “If it’s nurtured and given some attention, it could really explode here. There’s a real sense that this country’s economic future is going to be built around this industry. It’s time to put real money and commitment around it, or someone else is going to do it.”
Support Emerging Economies with a Multibillion-Dollar, Multiyear Clean-Tech Fund
Posted by: | CommentsThe World Bank estimates that two-thirds of the increase in world energy demand through 2030 will come from the developing world. It will cost trillions of dollars to build infrastructure and provide for the needs of the 2 billion people without access to electricity and the 1.2 billion people without easy access to potable water. To solve this serious resource inequity, we believe in the need for development funds to focus on building clean energy and water sources in the developing world.
The Clinton Global Initiative, the foundation headed by former U.S. president Bill Clinton, is working to raise funds from major donors to tackle such pressing issues as climate change, global poverty, and ethnic and religious conflict. Since 2005, Clinton has garnered hundreds of commitments valued at more than $8 billion. Among the commitments are pledges for solar, wind, and biofuels developments by nonprofits, governments, and corporations.
Another former president, ex-Soviet head Mikhail Gorbachev, now leads Green Cross International, a global nonprofit environmental organization. Gorbachev and Green Cross have called for the creation of a $50 billion Global Solar Fund over 10 years. The fund, according to Green Cross, could be raised by cutting subsidies for fossil fuels such as oil and coal. The money would fund the installation of solar PV equipment around the planet, thereby driving down the price of photovoltaics and creating a mass market for a clean-energy technology.
In early 2006, former U.K. finance minister and current prime minister Gordon Brown called for rich nations to spend $20 billion to help finance developing nations’ clean-energy projects. Others, such as award-winning journalist and author Ross Gelbspan, have proposed even larger commitments. Gelbspan has called for the creation of a $300 billion clean-energy fund for developing countries through a tax on international currency transactions.
It’s uncertain whose programs will gain traction and which will be long forgotten a decade from now, but a number of great minds are already thinking about how to fund clean-tech development in the developing world.
There are already many signs of a big financial push from large investors to develop clean technologies, bring down their costs, and deploy them in large-scale implementations. But more venture firms, corporate venture arms, and project financiers will need to join the push. In energy technology alone, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental body focused on energy policy, projects that an estimated $16 trillion will need to be spent between now and 2030 to meet the growth in projected demand for new electricity and fuel sources worldwide. If half of that went toward clean technologies, the annual influx of capital would be about $300 billion a year. We call on corporate boards, pension funds, major banks, governments, developers, and other financial players to look at the opportunities and rewards of clean technology, consider the consequences of not pursuing a clean-tech path, and design investment programs that capture and embolden clean-tech innovation.
Freiburg, Germany – Sun City
Posted by: | CommentsFreiburg, a city of 200,000 on the edge of the Black Forest in southwestern Germany, is the solar capital of the world’s top solar-energy country. The Germans are number one in the world in solar-energy use and production, with more than 150 factories producing PV panels (about half the world’s supply) and related equipment, and Freiburg is the industry’s spiritual center. Home to the International Solar Energy Society, the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Europe’s largest solar research organization), and many related groups, Freiburg also walks the walk itself with a city council-mandated renewable energy target of 10% of the city’s power by 2010.
Led by Green Party member Dieter Salomon as its mayor, the city markets itself as SolarRegion Freiburg and may be the only place with a city-published SolarGuide (in German or English) for visitors to tour its numerous PV installations. If you’re downtown, that would be a walking tour: Freiburg’s central area is car-free. Needless to say, solar manufacturing is a growing, job-creating local industry led by Solar-Fabrik, a 200-employee, $100 million solar module and system components producer (it recently also entered into solar-cell and wafer manufacturing via acquisitions) whose Freiburg factory is Europe’s first zero-emission solar fabrication facility. Talk about practicing what you preach (or sell): Solar-Fabrik powers the whole factory from renewable energy sources, including a rapeseed oil-fired combined heat and power unit, passive solar heating, and PV panels on its roof and walls.