In an announcement made last month, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband confirmed a cash-back scheme in which businesses and individuals can receive up to 40p for every kilowatt-hour of electricity generated in solar panels and photovoltaic (PV) installations of up to 5 megawatts. Estimates suggest that, under the tariff, one typical household panel could deliver around £900 a year in cash back (a return of around 10 per cent) as well as a saving of £140 on electricity. Further incentives will see the proceeds be tax-free, as well as a new “pay-as-you-save” scheme, funded by renewable energy loans from banks and supermarkets.

With a YouGov survey showing that 71 per cent of homeowners would consider installing green energy systems if offered sufficient financial incentive, and Miliband predicting that 10 per cent of the population will have installed renewable energy technology in the new decade, the introduction of the tariff looks set to kick-start the sector. In Germany, where feed-in tariffs have been in place since 2000, 130,000 homes are now fitted with PV panels every year and similar success has been seen in California, which implemented its own scheme in 2008.

However, the key to realising the government’s targets clearly lies in establishing an appropriate tariff level and the infrastructure to cope with the resulting interest. Critics have suggested the return on investment is too low, and that it is necessary to offer a higher subsidy; the Spanish industry is now experiencing bust after boom, the market having been saturated by subsidies which were too generous. It is imperative that the UK learns from both these successes and failures if we are to establish a UK industry and attract international investment.

In the North East, the announcement has been warmly received. County Durham glassmaker Romag is expecting a surge of interest in its PV glass, PowerGlaz, predicting that sales will increase by 60 per cent year on year. Indeed, so confident is the business that it is investing in an installation at its own headquarters, which will become the largest of its kind in Europe. As a further reflection of its optimism, the business is also creating a specialist centre to train people across the manufacturing industry in sectors including development and planning, electrical professions and roofing.

Equally important, the region has also made great progress in laying the research and development foundations for industry to build up from. This stretches from the Newcastle Photovoltaics Application Centre at Northumbria University, to the region’s two centres of excellence, the New and Renewable Energy Centre and the Printable Electronics Technology Centre. The latter revealed in July that it had secured a £12 million grant from the government and £8 million from One North East to continue its pioneering work aimed at establishing the UK as the international leader in the field. The centre estimates that up to 250 jobs locally and 1,500 jobs nationally could be created as a result.

Indeed, the spirit of innovation has stretched beyond. In November, the North East hosted the national PV conference, Solar Flair 2009, aimed at demonstrating to a wider cross-section of organisations the business opportunities that will be created by the new industry. One such company to fully grasp the potential is Romag, which has looked to capitalise on the region’s status as the dedicated low-carbon economic area for electric vehicles by launching a canopy that uses PV glass to generate the charge to power an electric car.

Of course, this is just the start. The feed-in tariff will serve to galvanise the UK PV industry, providing a huge boost to businesses across a range of sectors, and delivering a step change in the country’s domestic generation capacity. Nowhere is this more true than in the North East, the region that powered the industrial revolution and is now driving the low-carbon one. Its unparalleled manufacturing pedigree, research, development and commercialisation excellence and business innovation offer it a unique opportunity to become the Silicon Valley of the UK, attracting investment not just from the rest of the UK, but from Europe and the rest of the world.

Editor’s note: This was a guest commentary by Chris Pywell, Head of Strategic Economic Change for One North East, the regional development agency for the North East of England.

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One “Rosenfeld” would equal an electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year, as much as is produced annually by one 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant.

Arthur Rosenfeld, who recently retired at the age of 83 after two five-year terms on the California Energy Commission, led the way in helping the state set its first-ever energy standards for household appliances and buildings. His mission as an energy-efficiency evangelist was launched in 1973 during the OPEC oil embargo … rather than rail on the oil producers, he reasoned, wouldn’t it be better if the US could find ways to stop wasting so much energy?

Thus began the University of Chicago-trained physicist’s quest for a more energy-efficient society. He eventually went on to found what would become the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Centre for Building Science, which has helped to develop numerous technologies for boosting energy efficiency.

“He recognised early on, earlier than anyone else I think, that really great gains will come from energy efficiency, that there’s an enormity to be gained by this approach,” said Richard Muller, a physicist who took one of Rosenfeld’s graduate courses in 1965.

Rosenfeld’s impact on energy efficiency explains why 54 scientists from 26 research institutions around the globe came together this week to publish a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters suggesting a new unit to describe energy savings.

They state, “The proposed name for this metric is the Rosenfeld, in keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honour of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question — Dr Arthur H. Rosenfeld.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Rosenfeld’s name has become an energy term. His impact on California’s per capita electricity consumption, which has remained flat since the mid-’70s, has long been dubbed the “Rosenfeld effect.” And he himself coined “Rosenfeld’s Law,” which asserts that the amount of energy required to produce one dollar of economic output has decreased by about 1 per cent per year since 1845.

Rosenfeld calls the latest proposal by Berkeley Lab scientist Jonathan Koomey — a former student of his — and colleagues “nice.”

“I’m honored that Jon Koomey got 53 of my oldest friends to join together on such a nice thought,” he said. “This nice article is really the result of the early usefulness of using cars, homes and power plants as an example of savings from energy efficiency.”

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Of course you don’t. That’s because these life-altering technologies didn’t spring up ready for market overnight, but evolved, often behind the scenes, for years before we were ready to use them en masse.

Viewed through the filter of our memories, technological progress tends to seem revolutionary, with one amazing innovation after another coming to mind as immediately game-changing. In reality, though, progress is more incremental, moving forward — or sometimes sideways into blind alleys — slowly over time. With that in mind, then, we offer these helpful rules for identifying “cleantech porn,” ie, news reports that play to our fantasies about clean energy more than they reflect reality:

1. View anything described as a “Holy Grail” with great scepticism. (And, yes, we here at Greenbang have been guilty of that as much as anyone else.) Endless and cheap clean energy without any downside is indeed a Holy Grail … because it’s probably impossible, which brings us to the next warning sign of cleantech porn …
2. Beware any “innovation” that violates the laws of thermodynamics. If someone claims to have found a way to get more energy out of something than was put into it in the first place, keep your wallet in your pocket. And if a startup announces it’s developed a perpetual motion device, run.
3. Think twice about any breakthrough that promises to cut the cost of something by an outrageously wonderful percentage in the next few months. The R-Squared Energy Blog has a nice take on one such claim — a reported announcement from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that it could produce algae-based fuel for $2 a gallon — here.
4. Watch out for Pigs in Space. OK, not pigs, but anything else space-based with claims to be commercially viable, affordable and ready to deploy in the near future. Yes, space-based solar energy, lunar colonies and Earth-orbiting hydroponic farms are possible, but they’re not ready to hold your breath for anytime soon.
5. Be on the alert for “some guy” announcements. Not to denigrate garage-based tinkerers and part-time inventors … we’ve all heard of how Bill Gates got started. But, more often than not, “some guy” is not likely to discover the clean-energy Holy Grail (see Rule No. 1) that researchers armed with hundreds of millions in government or corporate funding are also searching for.

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That’s because, whenever it imports goods from other parts of the world, a nation is effectively “outsourcing” its carbon emissions to the export country. It makes sense, when you think about it: if you stop making widgets at home, you’ve reduced your widget-related carbon emissions. But, unless you choose to do without widgets at all, you’re still getting widgets from somewhere. So your widget-producing trade partner has actually moved your widget-related emissions onto its own soil.

In a globalised economy that ships millions of different widgets of various kinds around the world every day, that emissions outsourcing can be anything but minuscule, according to new research from the Carnegie Institution.

Ken Caldeira and Steven Davis, both researchers at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, have found the US, Japan and western Europe outsource considerable amounts of their carbon emissions by importing goods from other countries, typically developing ones like China. Their results were often surprising, as with the case of Switzerland, which turns out to be far less low-carbon than it would appear on paper.

While Switzerland ranked 63rd in national carbon emissions in 2006, those figures told literally less than half the story. Davis and Caldeira’s analysis found that the emissions associated with Switzerland’s imports actually exceeded the amount of carbon dioxide emitted within its borders. The same was true for several other small countries, according to the researchers.

In fact, in parts of Europe, the per capita footprint for outsourced carbon dioxide emissions amounted to more than 4 tonnes per person … considerably more than the 2.5 tonnes per person in the US, which generally enjoys a far less green reputation than its EU counterparts.

Davis, lead author of the study, said the findings could actually help overcome some of the obstacles that have stood in the way of reaching a global agreement on carbon dioxide emissions cuts.

“Where CO2 emissions occur doesn’t matter to the climate system,” he said. “Effective policy must have global scope. To the extent that constraints on developing countries’ emissions are the major impediment to effective international climate policy, allocating responsibility for some portion of these emissions to final consumers elsewhere may represent an opportunity for compromise.”

Can anyone say “carbon sales tax”?

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The good news first: more venture capitalists and private equity investors see an initial public offering (IPO) being likely for one of their green investments in the next year or two.

And now the bad news: While green businesses are perceived as a good investment, the ones most likely to make a dent in our energy consumption and carbon emissions — things like wave energy, tidal power, energy storage and biological sequestration of carbon — are the ones furthest down on VCs’ lists.

Those are some of the findings from Carbon International’s survey of 90 British and European investors who already have cleantech investments or are actively seeking them out. The survey found that 65 per cent of investors believed an IPO would be a “feasible exit” for at least one of their investments in 2010 or 2011. An overwhelming majority — 87 per cent — also reported that their current environmental investments are either outperforming the general market or doing at least as well.

Investors say the most attractive businesses for future funding fall in the realms of energy efficiency and resource recovery, which are less capital-intensive than other cleantech sectors like marine energy.

These little “green shoots,” though, still come with considerable risks. For example, some investors say they expect to see a “development hiatus” in environmental industries around 2012 and 2013, thanks to a lack of funding available for early-stage companies today. Other potential obstacles they identified in the survey: lack of political momentum, lack of capital, low oil prices and “muppets who don’t know what they’re doing.”

While oil prices today might still be enough to spur an all-out push for clean energy, investors say they expect more money will flow in that direction as energy costs keep rising. National legislation and international policy will also help drive such investment, they believe.

For now, though, circumstances are working against companies focused on more expensive next-generation energy technologies. Investors say biofuels and fuel cells are the least attractive sub-sectors at the moment — although Carbon International notes they still have their “hardcore fans.” And a reluctance to invest in some of the more costly energy technologies could haunt us down the road, the survey indicates.

“Our survey reveals some positives: the environmental sector is performing well and there is a strong expectation that the IPO markets will re-open,” said Tom Whitehouse, CEO of Carbon International. “But the survey also raises concerns. The majority of investors fear that early stage sectors, particularly capital-intensive ones such as wave and tidal power, energy storage and bio-sequestration, will fail to secure sufficient funding to grow from either private or public markets. If so, it’s difficult to see renewable energy targets being met.”

Carbon International plans to officially release the results of its survey during the Environmental Opportunities Forum at the London Stock Exchange, set for 25 – 26 March. The forum will provide advice to private companies on how they can raise money privately and/or through an IPO. It will also showcase private and quoted investment opportunities to an audience of institutional investors.

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In a paper published in the American Chemical Society journal Macromolecules, scientists from IBM and Stanford University describe how they’re working to develop green organic catalysts that could make it easier to recycle PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastics such as those used for drink bottles.

“Many people put these in the recycling bin,” said IBM researcher Bob Allen. “It’s difficult to actually use this for new bottles. You cannot use this more than once for a bottle. You have to use it for some other secondary application.”

The right green catalyst, on the other hand, could provide a chemical means of breaking down the long polymer chains in plastics back into the building blocks for new plastic bottles and other products. The process is called “organocatalysis.”

“We can generate new materials from these wonder catalysts we’ve developed that are, for example, biodegradable or biocompatible for use in the body, or in a landfill, they’ll break down into harmless small molecules,” Allen said. “Or we can use the green chemistry catalyst to break down plastics that are in the environment.”

Such a development could help make a serious dent in our plastic waste output, which includes some 13 billion plastic bottles every year. In the US alone, the average person sends around 63 pounds of plastic packaging to the landfill each year.

“We’re exploring new methods of applying technology and our expertise in materials science to creating a sustainable, environmentally sound future,” said Josephine Cheng, IBM fellow and lab director of IBM Research, Almaden. “The development of new families of organic catalysts brings more versatility to green chemistry and opens the door for novel applications, such as making biodegradable plastics, improving the recycling process and drug delivery.”

In medicine, for example, many drugs designed to target cancer cells are often so potent that they attack cancerous and healthy cells alike. The use of organocatalysis could help in the design of custom polymers that could help to better deliver drugs to a specific cell or region.

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But there’s another concern with clean energy that should give us pause, especially in a difficult economy like the one we’re in right now … and that’s the fact that renewables (we’re including nuclear here as well) remain prohibitively expensive compared to our old, dirty and carbon spewing energy friends like coal.

Consider the new report from the engineering consultancy Parsons Brinckerhoff, which this week noted that the UK’s plan for offshore wind energy is potentially two to three times more costly than nuclear power (which itself is no bargain). And this from a company that supports offshore wind! (Onshore wind development, the report pointed out, is cost-competitive with gas, but frequently falls victim to NIMBYism … the “not in my backyard” objection.)

So nuclear’s the way to go then, right? Not without governments with very deep pockets (we’re looking at you, taxpayers). As energy analyst Richard W. Caperton points out in a new memo, “Building a nuclear reactor today will involve dealing with tremendous financial uncertainty.” In Canada, for example, the Ontario government last year ditched plans for new nuclear power after receiving just one compliant bid … for $26 billion, more than 3 1/2 times greater than earlier estimates. The US experienced similar sticker shock for a proposed two-reactor plant in Texas, where cost projections have risen from $5.4 billion to $18.2 billion.

Worse yet, even with hefty, government-backed loan guarantees, few developers are jumping in to build new reactors. In the US, despite a tripling of available funds, only four candidates have come forward with proposals for new nuclear plants, and they’re an ugly field featuring “rising cost estimates, delays, flawed reactor designs and credit downgrades,” according to clean energy experts.

All right then, so let’s forget new nukes and encourage microgeneration, turning every home into its own little power station. That’s essentially what the British government hopes to do when it rolls out its new feed-in tariffs for small wind turbines and rooftop solar panels on 1 April. The scheme will pay homeowners a premium for the renewable energy they generate and feed back into the grid.

Sounds nice, but — again — there’s a price. As columnist George Monbiot points out in the Guardian, the amount of money the UK government has set aside for such homegrown clean energy equates to a cost of £430 per tonne of carbon saved. That’s one stiff pricetag.

But, wait. Aren’t we close to achieving the ultimate in clean energy technology: nuclear fusion? Yes, we’ve made some stunning advances in the lab of late, at a cost so far of £2.1 billion for the US’ National Ignition Facility and £9 billion for the ITER fusion reactor being built in France. But bringing fusion energy up to scale in a timely and commercially viable manner is an entirely different nut to crack.

As Steve Cowley, director of the fusion programme at the UK’s Atomic Energy Authority said to the BBC, “The principles are right, but there’s a lot of difference between principles and practice and that’s where we have to do our work.”

In other words, we’re not there yet.

However you look at it, it appears likely we’re going to have to spend a LOT more for energy in years to come, whether it’s increasingly difficult-to-drill planet-heating petroleum, tricky-to-complete nuclear power or intermittent sun and wind. What does that mean for industrial, globalised society as we know it? We’ll probably start finding that out in the coming decade, won’t we?

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At least, that’s what researchers in California have found after studying thousands of different wines from California vintners. Seems that, when a nice bottle costing $25 or more is slapped with an “organic” label, the prices oenophiles are willing to pay drops considerably.

The study, which looked at 13,426 wines from 1,495 California wineries, found that vintages made with organic grapes were judged superior to non-organic varieties and — grape for grape, year for year — were able to command an average premium price of 13 per cent more per bottle … so long as the wine didn’t feature an eco-label. Once the appellation “made with organically grown grapes” was added, though, that premium disappeared. In fact, the label typically drove the price per bottle down by 7 per cent.

The researchers aren’t sure why, but speculate it might be due in part to shoppers confusing wine made from organically grown grapes with organic wine, which is made without sulfites and other chemical preservatives.

“Organic wine earned its bad reputation in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Laura E. Grant, a PhD candidate in environmental science and management at the University of California, Santa Barbara.. “Considered ‘hippie wine,’ it tended to turn to vinegar more quickly than non-organic wine. This negative association still lingers.”

In fact, many California wineries seem to be aware of the perils of an eco-label. The study found that only one-third of vintners that use certified, organically grown grapes in their wines advertise that on their labels.

“Producers of two-thirds of these wines must suspect that consumers, for whatever reason, wouldn’t appreciate the use of organically grown grapes,” said Magali Delmas, an environmental economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the study’s lead author. “Otherwise, why would they refrain from drawing attention to this benefit on their labels?”

For wines that do carry green labels, Grant added, the winery’s loss is the customer’s gain:

“Wine made with organic grapes — especially if it has an eco-label — is a really good deal,” she said. “For the price of conventional wine, you get a significantly better quality wine.”

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“Investors cannot remain silent to the threats of global climate change, which has the potential to negatively impact businesses and their long-term profitability,” said New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, whose office oversees the state’s $129.4 billion pension fund. “The New York State Common Retirement Fund wants the companies it invests in to more clearly assess and better manage the far-reaching risks of climate change.”

According to Ceres, a coalition focused on business sustainability, investors filed 95 shareholder resolutions with 82 US and Canadian companies in 2009 — a 40 per cent increase in filings over the previous year. Ceres calls the jump a “first sign of the growing pressure on companies to disclose climate risks and opportunities in the wake of the recent Securities and Exchange Commission’s climate disclosure guidance and other recent policy developments.”

Shareholder resolutions are proposals to vote on certain issues at a company’s annual shareholder meeting. While they’re typically non-binding, the results of such votes often generate significant media attention and can put pressure on a business to change its policies.

Among the companies targeted by investors last year were ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. Both were asked to report on regulatory, legal and reputational risks, as well as environmental impacts, from their extensive Canadian oil sands operations.

“As the SEC recently affirmed with its disclosure guidance, climate change presents clear material risks and opportunities for US businesses — and investors have a right to know which companies are well prepared and which are not,” said Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres, which helps coordinate the shareholder filings.

Besides ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, other companies at which energy- and climate-related resolutions were filed last year include:

• Southern Company, which is one of the largest producers of electricity in the US and the second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide among the nation’s power generators.
• International Paper
• RR Donnelley
• Weyerhaeuser
• Boston Properties
• CVS Caremark
• Federal Realty Investment Trust
• Home Depot
• Kimco Realty Corporation
• Kroger
• Lennar
• Lowe’s
• MGM Mirage
• NVR
• Ryland
• Safeway
• Standard Pacific
• Target
• The TJX Companies
• Toll Brothers
• Walmart
• Wynn Resorts
• CONSOL Energy
• International Coal Group
• Massey Energy
• CMS Energy Corporation
• Dynegy
• MDU Resources Group
• Mirant Corporation
• The Southern Company
• American Express
• JPMorgan Chase
• SunTrust Banks
• BP
• Chesapeake Energy
• Chevron
• EQT Corporation
• Shell
• Valero Energy
• 3M
• AK Steel
• Apple
• Aqua America
• C.R. Bard
• Eagle Materials
• Expedia
• Gentex
• KBR
• Layne Christensen Company
• SanDisk Corporation
• St. Jude Medical
• Team
• Vulcan Materials
• Great-West Lifeco
• Viterra

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The “chip-based spectral shaper” under development at Purdue University converts ultrafast laser pulses into bursts of finely-tuned radio signals that can enable secure computer connections, high-definition television broadcasts and other communications without the need for any wires.

The technology eliminates one of the problems associated with today’s continuous-wave radio-frequency transmissions, which often encounter interference from signals reflecting back off of walls and other objects. However, the new device reduces such interference by generating radio signals with laser pulses lasting just one-tenth of a trillionth of a second.

“What enables this technology is that our devices generate ultrabroad bandwidth radio frequencies needed to transmit the high data rates required for high resolution displays,” said Andrew Weiner, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue.

The new device also overcomes the difficulty that conventional computer chips have with transmitting high-frequency signals, thanks to “timing jitter” caused by the uneven timing at which transistors open and close. The jitter problem doesn’t affect current wireless computer communications because ordinary computer chips operate at a relatively slow speed of around 3 gigahertz. It does, however, affect devices that operate at 60 gigahertz, which falls within the 57 to 64 gigahertz band that doesn’t require licensing by the US Federal Communications Commission. (Other frequencies are reserved for military communications.)

That means a 60-gigahertz system for wireless communications could enable devices that are compatible worldwide.

“There is only a very limited window for civil operations, and 60 gigahertz falls within this window,” said Minghao Qi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Purdue’s chip-based spectral shaper converts ultrafast laser pulses into just that frequency using tiny “microring resonators” of silicon that filter out some frequencies and allow others to pass. The microring filter can be tuned by heating the rings, which causes them to change so they filter different frequencies.

Qi said the technology is about five years away from being ready for commercialisation.

“Of course, ideas about specific uses of our technology are futuristic and speculative, but we envision a single base station and everything else would be wireless,” he said. “This base station would be sort of a computer by itself, perhaps a card inserted into one of the expansion slots in a central computer. The central computer would take charge of all the information processing, a single point of contact that interacts with the external world in receiving and sending information.”

Qi added, “(I)nitially, industry will commercialise devices that only receive signals, for ‘one-way’ traffic, such as television sets, projectors, monitors and printers. This is because the sending unit for transmitting data is currently still a little bulky. Later, if the sending unit can be integrated into the devices, we could enjoy full two-way traffic, enabling the wireless operation of things like hard-disc drives and computers.”

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