Greentech Media:Green Light Blog

Fiat and Chrysler Pull Back on Electric Cars; Bad News for A123 Systems?

2009-11-07T20:28:09+00:00

Fiat, the new owners of Chrysler, has apparently pushed back the effort to release an electric car, according to Reuters. Fiat has scrapped the Dodge Circuit, a two-seater electric sports car, as well as a plan to make a fleet of 220 electric and hybrid cars. The Department of Energy gave the company $70 million in grants in August to develop that fleet. Not sure if we get the money back.

The Envi electric car group has been absorbed into the regular car making group, Reuters said.

That could be bad news for battery-maker A123 Systems. A123 lost the deal to supply batteries to General Motors for the Volt earlier this year (although the two companies publicly vowed to remain friends). The Chrysler deal in April helped A123 rebound. The battery maker subsequently pulled off a successful IPO.

Will the changes at Fiat/Chrysler hurt? It's hard to say, but it's not great news. On one hand, Fiat and Chrysler still plan to come out with electric cars. Lou Rhodes, who headed up Envi, will head up electric car development for Fiat and Chrysler.

On the other hand, it sounds like electric cars are going to come out of the combined company later and at a slower pace. Chrysler earlier said it wanted to have an electric car out by 2010. On Friday, Fiat CEO Sergio "Marchionne told reporters and analysts electric cars would only represent "one to two percent" of Chrysler's sales by 2014, equivalent to less than 60,000 vehicles," Reuters wrote. The company is considering a delivery van in the U.S. Will they put some out in 2010 or will it be later? Hopefully more clarity comes next week.

"Until the [battery] storage gets resolved, I think electric vehicles are going to struggle," Marchionne was quoted as saying.

HP’s Data Center Smart Grid: Two Trends in One Name

2009-11-06T22:57:13+00:00

Hewlett Packard has connected the dots between the trendy term "smart grid" and its work to make data centers more efficient.

Witness the HP Data Center Smart Grid line of products and services. Essentially, HP has integrated power and temperature sensors with displays and controls to help data center operators track and manage those variables.

It's all part of the race to integrate all the disparate data center efficiency systems, from more efficient cooling systems and less power-hungry servers to new sensor and control networks.

The competition includes giants like HP, IBM, BMC and CA as well as startups like SynapSense, Arch Rock, Sentilla, Power Assure and others (see Data Center Efficiency: Pulling it All Together and The Race for the Data Center's Brain).

Energy costs are a rising concern for data centers (see Data Centers Could Hit 'Resource Crisis'). Not only that, but some data centers can find their growth constrained by limits on the power available to them (see GE Looks to Data Center Efficiency and Sun: Data Center Efficiency for Everyone).

HP's new iteration on the topic includes its Thermal Logic-enabled line of server products, as well as the HP Performance-Optimized Datacenter, or POD - a set of servers in their own cooled cargo container for modular additions to data centers.

To manage it all, you've got HP Insight Control, its server management tool, which has power management capabilities, as well as the ability to track virtualized servers (see Virtualization, the Next Wave).

There's also the HP Data Center Environmental Edge system to visualize, analyze and measure power and cooling parameters in the data center.

The comparison of a data center to a utility distribution grid isn't that farfetched. After all, many data centers have their own dedicated utility substations, making them little grids in their own right.

Applied Buys Advent Solar

2009-11-06T22:38:47+00:00

Applied Materials has purchased most of the assets of Advent Solar in cash to boost its offering of factory equipment for making crystalline silicon cells and panels.

Albuquerque, N.M.-based Advent has developed a process that makes use of thinner silicon wafers to make cells with electrical lines on the back of the cell. Many manufacturers make cells with the contact lines – which transport electricity produced – on the front of the cells.

Putting the lines on the back would leave more room on the front to trap light, and that should boost electricity production. Founded in 2002, Advent also developed a process that it said would completely automate the assembly of solar cells into panels.

Advent had wanted to make its own cells and panels, and even signed a deal last year to buy $350 million worth of silicon wafers from Deutsche Solar.

In September 2008, Advent said it had lined up Enerpoint, MHH Solartechnik and SunConnex as its distributors. Advent had planned to ship 250 megawatts to these companies through 2013.

By March this year, Advent said it was in the business of licensing its knowhow.

The company raised $70 million in Series D in 2007, and that brought the total to $110 million. Investors included ZBI Ventures, Sun Mountain Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Battery Ventures and @Ventures.

Applied declined to disclose the purchase price.

Also on Friday, San Diego-based Applied Solar Inc. said it had completed the sale of its assets to Quercus APSO, a subsidiary of The Quercus Trust.

Quercus APSO plans to change its name to do business as Applied Solar LLC. Applied Solar plans to launch a product in 2010 that will be built into asphalt roof shingles, the company said Friday.

The company has listed some production descriptions on its website. One of them touted a panel embedded with crystalline silicon cells made by Suntech Power that would take place of the regular shingles.

Applied Solar, by the way, used to be called Open Energy. It announced the name change in January this year.

EPA Wants Real-World Environmental Data From the Smart Grid

2009-11-06T20:00:29+00:00

The Environmental Protection Agency is eager to see some utility data on the positive environmental impacts of smart grid deployments around the country. Just what it wants to do with the data is still up in the air.

That's the gist of comments EPA representative Stacy Angel made in a Thursday conference call hosted by the Electric Power Research Institute.

"What I would like is to see results from the deployments of where environmental benefits have been achieved," Angel said. Perhaps the utility industry could create a clearinghouse for such data, she suggested.

Estimates of the smart grid's impact on reduced greenhouse gas emissions, pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants, and overall energy efficiency gains are all over the place.

A big one, EPRI's Green Grid study from last year, put the potential energy savings at 56 to 203 billion kilowatt-hours across the country. That could equal a carbon emission cut of 60 to 211 million metric tons, depending on factors such as how dirty the energy of a particular utility was to begin with, before it started using less of it through smart grid systems.

A more recent one from the Utility Telecom Council (see Smart Grid News) says a generic one-million smart meter deployment with distribution automation and some distributed power generation sources could cut about 300,000 tons of carbon emissions from a utility's footprint (see Smart Grid's Low-Tech Savings: Fewer Truck Rolls).

But Angel noted that emissions reductions claims and methodologies to calculate them differ. "What's the common – or any – approach to what we can attribute to smart grid?" she asked the 140 or so participants on the call.

The EPA would also like to see a distinction between direct improvements from smart grid systems – say, efficiencies from utility-controlled distribution grid automation systems – and the indirect impacts of enabling more energy-saving technology in utility customer's homes and businesses, she said.

A measure of the direct impacts comes from EPRI, which says that hooking up distribution and transmission grids with smart control systems could save the country about 300 billion kilowatt-hours, or a little less than 10 percent of the country's generating capacity.

The indirect impacts of things like home energy management systems, on the other hand, are harder to preduct, since they deal with the complexities of how customers will react (see Utilities Mull Price Points, Policies for Home Energy Management).

Angel was quick to point out that EPA wasn't demanding such data, nor was it actively engaged in measuring the environmental impacts of smart grid systems at present.

Rather, she said, "I hope that that clearinghouse is something useful for all parties."

GE to Close U.S. Solar Panel Factory

2009-11-06T19:42:13+00:00

General Electric plans to close its only U.S. solar panel factory because production costs have exceeded sale prices.

The Fairfield, Conn.-based company told the Dow Jones Clean Technology Insight that silicon panel manufacturing at its facility in Delaware, will stop in January.

GE will shutter the factory all together by June. The factory can produce 34 megawatts of solar panels per year and employs 82 people. GE plans to layoff the workers with severance packages.

The move reflects the tough times experienced by solar energy equipment makers worldwide as supply far exceeded demand over the past year. Recession and a big reduction in solar subsidies in Spain - once a booming market - are key contributors.

Some manufacturers have seen prices for their products fall by anywhere from 30 percent to 50 percent over the past year.

Some solar company executives say the decline has slowed in recent months as demand picked up, mostly in Europe. But they remain worried about the pace of market recovery.

Earlier this week, Marlboro, Mass.-based Evergreen Solar said it would move panel production from its factory in Devens, Mass., to China next year in order to cut costs.

Earlier this year, BP Solar announced it would close its solar panel factory in Maryland and outsource that work to a contract manufacturer. BP said back then that it would continue to make silicon ingots, wafers and cells in Maryland.

Last month, BP said it had hired Jabil Circuit to assemble panels at a Jabil factory in Poland.

Optimism in Venture Capital and IPO Outlook

2009-11-06T16:47:21+00:00

Always On previewed its December Venture Summit with a breakfast at the offices of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) this morning where it examined trends in finance and the VC outlook for 2010.

Tony Perkins runs Always On, christened Silicon Valley the "Athens of the Information Age." He asked the panel "if the economic recovery is real?"

Doug Merritt of SAP is in charge of sales to SAP's largest clients (SAP will have revenues of $14 billion this year) and gave a 30,000-foot view. "People were so panicked at the end of 2008, they didn't even know how to act," he said. But now "the largest organizations I deal with are actively investing." On the Greentech front, he detailed how Cisco's travel budget has dropped from $750 million to about $250 million, not because the company has reduced travel so much but because it has massivly increased meetings via telepresence.

Mark Reinstra of WSGR spoke of the IPO climate: "There have been ten VC-backed IPOs in 2009, but from an informal survey within the firm, we've seen many more companies preparing for IPOs just within WSGR." The litmus test remains that a company needs $30M to $60M annual revenues to IPO."

Ted Smith of Union Square Advisors said: "There's a lot of stuff coming in the top of the funnel but as far as actual M&A exits – it's a very high bar."

Jim Anderson of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) works in the analytics group, and specailizes in valuations. "There is no question that valuations have dropped precipitously," he said, adding that there is a disconnect between the state of the economy and the multiples and valuations in the stock market. He likened the state of the economy to a near-comatose patient on pain killers. Unemployment goes to 10.2 per cent and the Dow jumps. "The U.S. economy is driven by consumer savings but consumers are hunkered down," he said. Anderson certainly sees significant growth from 2009 to 2010.

"But the little corner of the world that we operate in – the world of VC – innovators will continue to innovate. Adverse environment can actuallly produce the best start-ups," he said.

Sandy Miller, a veteran VC at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) is "much more optimistic" than Anderson of SVB. He believes that "the financial markets almost invariably precede the recovery by two to three quarters. The financial markets have already recovered. There's an appetite for IPOs from institutional buyers, adding "The actual paramenters to go public have been virtually the same for the last thirty years." He also noted that "2010 will be a reasonably active year in the IPO market," and that "when the IPO market rises the M&A market responds as well."

"Greentech company valuations are twice what we would expect for other sectors," he said. (Which is why he's staying away from those investments.)

"It's a great time to be an investor," Miller concluded.

Evergreen Solar Plans to Move U.S. Panel Production to China

2009-11-06T01:22:51+00:00

Evergreen Solar (NSDQ: ESLR) plans to stop producing panels at its factory in Devens, Mass., and shift that work to China, the company said this week.

The Marlboro, Mass.-based company has been producing silicon wafers and cells, and assembling them into panels at the Devens factory.

But running the factory proves expensive, especially when its operation in China will be able to do it for less, the company said.

Evergreen decided to shift some of its manufacturing to China earlier this year. It is contracting with Jiawei Solar to produce cells and turn them into panels.

Evergreen will manufacture the wafers for the cell production in China, and do so in a leased factory being built by Jiawei, the company said when it announced the final agreement with Jiawei. The companies plan to build 100 megawatts of annual production capacities initially. Manufacturing is set to start in spring 2010.

Evergreen plans to shift panel production from Devens to China in mid-2010.

Before inking the deal with Jiawei, Evergreen had considered building its own factory to make wafers, cells and panels in China. But lining up financing for the factory proved difficult. Outsourcing some of the manufacturing would cut costs significantly, the company said.

The company shipped 31.3 megawatts of solar panels from Devens in the third quarter of this year, a 35 percent boost from the second quarter, Evergreen executives said Wednesday.

The company said it could restart panel production at Devens if demand in the United States picks up.

Evergreen's shares rose 9 percent to close at $1.55 per share Thursday.

Sanyo Opens Factories in Oregon, Mexico

2009-11-05T22:47:23+00:00

Sanyo celebrated the opening of two factories this week: a silicon ingot and wafer in Salem, Ore., and a panel assembly plant in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

The silicon ingot/wafer factory has begun production and is set to reach its full production capacity of 70 megawatts per year by April next year, the company said.

Sanyo will use the monocrystalline silicon from the factory to produce its HIT solar panels, which wraps amorphous silicon around monocrystalline silicon.

Monocrystalline silicon already is more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than multicrystalline silicon, though it's also more expensive. Sanyo further boosts a HIT panel's performance by adding amorphous silicon.

The new assembly plant in Mexico will put together the HIT panels. The plant has the capacity to produce 50 megawatts of solar panels per year, the company said. It's the only Sanyo solar panel assembly plant outside of Japan.

Sanyo had 260 megawatts of cell manufacturing capacity before it completed the two factories. The company hopes to boost that figure to 600 megawatts by the end of March 2011.

The company is also teaming up with Nippon Oil to make solar panels that would use a layer of amorphous silicon and a layer of microcrystalline silicon.

Climate Change Bill Inches Closer to Passage, Maybe

2009-11-05T22:15:14+00:00

A controversial U.S. Senate climate change bill passed the Environment and Public Works Committee Thursday. But it's likely to have a long way to go toward the final passage by the full Senate.

Of course, it's not a surprise that there would be lots of political wrangling over a bill that aims to cut emissions by requiring businesses to pay for some of the pollution they generate. It also contains provisions to support nuclear power, another touchy subject

The bill, sponsored by Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer, passed the committee without any Republican support. Republicans demanded more fiscal analysis of the bill, and Boxer, who chairs the committee, said no.

Boxer didn't need the Republicans' votes to move the bill out of the committee – she only needed a simple majority to pass the legislation.

One of the Democrats also voted no. Sen. Max Baucus said the goal of cutting emissions by 20 percent by 2020 was overly ambitious.

Baucus chairs the Finance Committee, which will soon take its turn to shape the bill. He wants 17 percent instead, but would include language that would push the goal to 20 percent if other countries also agree to cut emissions.

The House passed its climate change bill in June. The bill sets a 17 percent goal for cutting emissions. It also includes a mandate that 20 percent of the country's electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020.

Global Solar Gets New CEO

2009-11-05T21:42:35+00:00

Global Solar Energy announced that Jeffrey Britts has been appointed its new CEO. He is replacing the retiring Michael Gering.

Gering, 73, will remain on the board of directors and serve as chairman, the Tucson company said Thursday.

Global Solar develops copper-indium-gallium-diselenide thin films, and has increasingly focused its resources on marketing its products to building material makers.

The flexible CIGS thin films will be embedded in roof shingles by Dow Chemical, which plans to launch the product next year.

The building material market is new for solar energy equipment manufacturers. Most of the solar panels on the market today are installed on top of the roof or on the ground.

Integrating solar cells into building materials presents technical challenges. Skeptics also question whether those materials would be affordable for the masses or become niche products.

Britts has been Global Solar's chief technology officer since 2005 and will keep that post, the company said. Britts joined the company in 1998.

Global Solar has a 40-megawatt factory in Tucson and a 35-megawatt factory in Germany.

Walmart to Outfit New, Renovated Stores With LEDs. 650 Stores in First Year

2009-11-05T20:41:52+00:00

Walmart, the mega-retailer that helped put energy consumption on the agenda for corporate executives, said it will use light emitting diode lights from Cree in new stores and retrofitted ones. In the first year, that will come to 650 stores alone.

The stores will replace ceramic metal halide lights, those honkers you see in the ceiling of big box retailers. The Cree bulbs will emit the same amount of light as a 70-watt bulb but use 82 percent less power.

LEDs have been talked about for years, but are finally going to start appearing in large numbers. Commercial establishments will install them first. The bulbs cut power, and commercial establishments typically have more bulbs, but the bulbs also cut maintenance. LED bulbs last 50,000 hours, far longer than vacuum-tube bulbs. That leads to fewer hours the maintenance people have to climb ladders to replace bulbs, order new bulbs, figure out places to stock the ones that just came in the mail, etc.

LEDs will come to the consumer market, but more slowly. Most people, after all, just change their own bulbs so the cost associated with swapping them is minimal.

The quality of light has also improved with LED bulbs – that "alien autopsy" tone of white is vanishing – and the price is coming down. Need more on lighting? Here's a comprehensive report on the subject that, just by coincidence, I wrote.

In the middle of the decade Walmart started looking at its energy bills and determined that it could whack a lot of operating costs through efficiency. Lighting was an early target. By taking out the light bulbs in the coke machines on the premises, the company saved $1 million a year.

LEDs represent the biggest opportunity in lighting. The second biggest (or first, according to some) will be equipment to network lights so they can be automatically dimmed or turned off.

How Is Obama Doing With Climate Legislation?

2009-11-05T18:46:32+00:00

So much for sick-outs.

The Environment and Public Works Committee of the U.S. Senate approved the Kerry-Boxer Bill by a vote to 11-1. Max Baucus, D-Mont., voted against it because he wants to see greenhouse gases capped at 17 percent below 2005 levels in 2020. The bill calls for a 20 percent reductions. The Republicans on the committee stayed home.

Other committees, however, want to vote on the bill so the full Senate may not vote on a bill until next year. That means President Obama will have to go to Copenhagen without a signed piece of legislation.

While that might be seen as a setback, the push on carbon legislation has been pretty interesting. Right after the inauguration, we talked to various policy makers and venture capitalists. Some said the complexities and conflicting interests meant that a carbon bill wouldn't become law until a second term. Washington analyst KC Mares said that the President might have to make the benefits more regional – i.e. let Michigan and industrial states keep more of the money from any cap and trade system – to make any bill politically palatable. Steve McBee, another Washington consultant, predicted that carbon legislation wouldn't pass this year but might make it before the 2010 elections.

The Kerry-Boxer bill and the companion Waxman-Markey aren't enacted yet, and they will face opposition, but overall progress seems to be on track.

Coulomb In Your Garage

2009-11-05T05:41:58+00:00

SAN FRANCISCO -- Coulomb Technologies plans to launch a residential electric car charging device next year that is likely to cost between $500 and $1,000, said Praveen Mandal, president of Coulomb, at Greentech Media's The Networked Grid conference in San Francisco Wednesday.

The Campbell, Calif.-based company currently sells charging equipment to businesses and utilities in North American and Europe and runs a subscription service for users to access these charging spots.

Getting into the home charging market is a logical next step, particularly given that major automakers such General Motors, Toyota and Nissan plan to start selling plug-in hybrid or all-electric cars in 2010.

Consumers could end up buying the chargers from car dealerships or even utilities, he added. The company hasn't finalized all the sales channels for the product launch, Mandal said.

Back in September, Coulomb said it had snagged a deal to sell its charging equipment at the smart USA dealers, which will be selling Daimler's smart fortwo electric cars.

Coulomb plans to sell the device somewhere between $500 and $1,000, depending on the options consumers choose, Mandal said. The device the company sells in the commercial market is around $2,500.

Some of the options would allow users to decide how they want to schedule charging and check on electricity rates. A more sophisticated service would allow cars (with the proper equipment/software) to communicate with the charging device, for example.

Consumers would be able to schedule charging over the Internet and get a text message if charging didn't start as planned, Mandal said. The device also could be connected to Coulomb's service center, which would be able to detect equipment failure and send a technician to fix it.

You will need an electrician to install the device at home.

Oracle Does Microgrids, Too

2009-11-05T02:11:03+00:00

SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle, which already is making a big push into providing its software to support utility-wide smart grid projects, is also helping them manage smaller pieces of the smart grid puzzle.

Those are microgrids – neighborhood, campus or business-park sized pockets of renewable power, energy storage, demand response and grid-balancing systems that have been proposed as a way to integrate all the complicated pieces of a smart grid in manageable sizes.

Oracle has taken its enterprise software expertise to that scale, working with a southern California utility on such a microgrid project, Linda Jackman, vice president of product management for Oracle's utilities division, said Wednesday at Greentech Media's The Networked Grid conference in San Francisco.

While Jackman didn't identify the utility or project in question, her description of the project – in a southern California community with a fairly slender connection to the larger grid of the utility in question – could be describing Borrego Springs, Calif.

That's where San Diego Gas & Electric has been working on a microgrid project funded with about $3 million from the California Energy Commission and a $7 million grant from the Department of Energy. That DOE funding is from previous years, rather than part of the $3.4 billion in DOE smart grid stimulus grants announced last week.

SDG&E is seeking $100 million from a smaller, $615 million pool of DOE grants aimed at smaller, more experimental smart grid projects to do a second microgrid project at the University of California at San Diego.

Named partners on that proposal include SAIC, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Cisco, General Electric, and Balance Energy, a newly launched arm of defense contractor BAE Systems (see Balance Energy Wants to Build Microgrids, Starting With San Diego).

Oracle is not on that list. But it, like the partners that want to work with SDG&E, may see microgrids as a promising market. That's the view of Pike Research, which believes microgrids will grow to a $2.1 billion market by 2015 with $7.8 billion invested in such systems over that time (see Microgrids: $2.1B Market by 2015).

By the way, the term "microgrid" could refer to a utility-controlled entity (which can also go by the term "virtual power plant"), or one owned by an independent entity, like a college campus or corporation, that sells the power and grid stability it could generate back to the utility.

GTM’s Networked Grid Event Packs the House

2009-11-04T20:12:08+00:00

SAN FRANCISCO -- Smart Grid is the energy theme of the moment – hundreds of millions of government funding, billion dollar smart meter deployments, and hundreds of millions in venture capital have drawn the attention of entrepreneurs, utilities, and corporate behemoths like Cisco, Intel, Oracle, ABB and Silver Spring.

And almost 500 of these smart grid cognoscenti converged at the PG&E Auditorium in San Francisco to assess the state of this nascent many-faceted industry at Greentech Media's The Networked Grid event.

Rick Thompson, GTM's fearless smart grid leader, kicked off the event with a review of some recent industry polling. Here are a few tidbits:

Utilities view the benefits of the smart grid as a reduction in peak demand, energy efficiency, and an increased visibility and control.
As for energy storage, utilities are planning to deploy pilot energy storage systems but there remains lots of uncertainty in storage and many smart grid areas.
The major concerns for the utilities are back-end management and data management (clearly an opportunity for startups) as well as regulatory issues.

David J. Leeds, GTM's smart grid analyst, introduced the Real World Deployments and Policies: 2010 to 2020 panel. What follows are some of the more interesting quotes from the speakers.

Thomas Bialek, Chief Engineer, Smart Grid SDG&E:

"Smart grid is not a revolution, it's evolution."
"In California, we've been very progressive in our utility networks and smart grid is just a furtherance of those activities."
"Will the utilities be the gas station of the future?"

Erfan Ibrahim, EPRI:

"The rumor is that the grid is antiquated – that rumor is coming out of Silicon Valley and it's not true."
Our grid has already been made intelligent "the challenge is we don't have a way of internetworking these nodes, we need a cost effective way of interconnecting already intelligent sensors."
On cybersecurity: "We need more than just a big wall, we need successive challenges to the hacker. Think of grid cybersecurity in a systemic way. It's sophisticated and needs to be done with diligence."
"Pool pumps, water heaters, AC and thermostats are the items that utilities would like to control in order to tackle peak demand."
Amongst the many critical issues with the smart grid are: "Who owns the data and who has the right to use the data collected by the smart grid?"

Andrew Campbell, Senior Energy Advisor, CPUC:

The biggest challenge in the smart grid is considered the regulatory aspect, at least in the eyes of the utilities.
PG&E, SDG&E, and SCE will deploy 12 million advanced electric meters and five million gas meters by the end of 2012. (That's almost 15,000 meters a day!)
There is no specific smart grid related regulatory framework for these deployments.

Kevin Dasso, Senior Director, Smart Grid Strategy at PG&E:

"What does PG&E think of when we think smart grid? The simple explanation: An overlay of intelligence and automation over the existing grid – wires and substations – to offer new services and features. It can enable new services and features – uptake of renewables, bill management, and reliability."
"There is a lot of excitement but excitement can be fleeting – we need to strike while the iron is hot. There will be some kind of half-life – so strike now."
"Build customer awareness and expectations early. Plugging in a smart meter doesn't automatically reduce a customer's bill."
Standards and roadmaps can make or break the success of the smart grid. Smart grid is a journey and we really need a roadmap to guide that journey."
"There will be features ten years from now that we have no idea that could be done."

Cambrios Raises $14.5M

2009-11-04T19:00:38+00:00

Cambrios Technologies, a developer of transparent conductive film for thin-film solar panels, has raised $14.5 million.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said the D round came from its existing investors such as Arch Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures and Oxford Bioscience Partners.

Three companies that Cambrios does business with – Sumitomo, Chisso and Nissha Printing – also put in some money, Cambrios said Wednesday.

Cambrios is a nanotech startup whose first product, called ClearOhm, is a coating material that can be used for making liquid-crystal display screens, light-emitting diodes and solar thin films. The company's key customers are mostly in the consumer electronics industry at the moment.

Cambrios develops products for Chisso to make LCD panels, for example. Cambrios has a development agreement with Nissha to use ClearOhm for making touch screens.

In solar, a transparent conductive oxide, such a zinc oxide or indium-tin oxide, is layered on solar cells to act as electrodes. Cambrios said its coating could replace those more common oxides to boost performance.

eMeter to Manage Smart Meters for Vattenfall

2009-11-04T05:28:52+00:00

eMeter has gotten another toehold in Europe, this time with Vattenfall to manage a smart meter network for the utility's 360,000 customers in Finland, the companies announced Tuesday.

It's not a huge number, compared to the 24 million smart meters eMeter already helps manage in North America and Australia (see eMeter Lands $32M for Smart Meter Data, Home Energy Software).

But if the Swedish-based energy giant likes what the San Mateo, Calif.-based startup does in Finland, it has about 6 million more customers across northern Europe who will need smart meter soon, Chris King, eMeter chief strategy officer, said Tuesday.

eMeter doesn't provide communications for smart meters. Rather, it provides the back-end meter data management (MDM) software to handle tasks like reporting outages, turning meters on and off, and the all-important customer billing process - along with all the data storage that entails.

This isn't eMeter's first European project. It is doing a 100,000 smart meter deployment with Umetriq, a subsidiary of Berlin Gaswerke, which could grow to several million meters, King said That project would appear to be linked to eMeter's partnership with Siemens (see Green Light post).

eMeter also is working with Electralink, a company vying to be a central data repository and for the United Kingdom's plan to have 26 million smart meters in place by 2020 (see Green Light post).

The European Union has set a 2022 deadline for every electrical meter to have some kind of two-way communications and control capability, and utilities are lining up partners to get the job done (see Iberdrola Looks to PRIME PLC Standard).

Some are ahead of the game. Italy's Enel has about 30 million meters installed at almost all its customers. It uses the utility's own proprietary system based on technology from San Jose, Calif.-based Echelon, a company that has millions of meters using its own system under contract throughout Europe (see Echelon Expands Euro Smart Meter Biz).

Other utilities are planning smart meter networks, and Europe is in fact more heavily smart-metered than the United States. But eMeter offers some functions most European smart meter networks now lack, King said.

"There are a lot of smart meters installed in Europe, but implementing those systems, they implemented the minimal connections between the AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) systems and the billing systems," he said. "They've done no dynamic pricing, no demand response, no customer presentment of data."

Emeter can do that, he said. It even has its own Web interface for homeowners to watch their day-to-day energy use, a step that studies show can help customers cut about 10 percent from their power bills – though Vattenfall hasn't yet said what it plans along those lines, King said.

It's true that Enel hasn't done much on the home networking front, though its smart meters have more than paid themselves off by giving the utility information to correct voltages, predict equipment failures and fix other money-wasting distribution grid problems, Echelon CTO Bob Dolin said (see Notes From a National Smart Grid Experiment).

Enel is looking to test out a customer-facing home energy portal, one that may include Google's free PowerMeter energy dashboard, according to a September presentation by Enel executive Livio Gallo (see Enel Considering Google's PowerMeter for Pilot Project).

eMeter certainly has competition for the job, and not just from other startups. Smart meter companies make their own meter data management software, and heavyweights like IBM, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft have been doing a lot of smart grid work that could intrude on the same market (see Microsoft to Play Utility Matchmaker, Oracle Launches 'End-to-End' Smart Grid Software and Integrating the Smart Meter Universe).

In Europe, Spanish company Telvent has seen its fair share of smart grid integration work. As for Europe's smart meters themselves, Landis+Gyr holds a large slice of the market, analysts say.

422.7M Gallons of Seawater Desalinated a Day

2009-11-04T05:11:55+00:00

Energy Recovery, the Oakland, Calif.-based maker of advanced desalination equipment, has signed a contract to install its PX Pressure Exchanger systems in a new desalination plant in Tenes, Algeria. The plant itself will generate 52.8 million gallons of fresh water a day and marks the tenth project in the country for Energy Recovery. In all, those plants generate 422.7 million gallons a day.

And San Diego is trying to build one. There's American ingenuity for you.

Energy Recovery in a lot of ways can be considered the iconoclast of desalination. Reverse osmosis desalination is effectively an energy-intensive pressure play: Water gets forced through a fine membrane that removes seawater. Energy Recovery's machines do not remove salt. Instead, they harness the pressure in the wastewater stream that flows from reverse osmosis systems and then feed it to the pressurizing machines at the front of the process, thereby lowering the total energy required.

Exploiting this pressure drastically reduces the amount of energy required to purify water, which in turn lowers the cost. Energy costs have been the Achilles' heel of desalination.

It took around 20 kilowatt hours per cubic meter to desalinate water with traditional multi-stage systems. Reverse osmosis membranes dropped that to 8 kilowatts to 10 kilowatt hours per cubic meter.

Putting a turbine in the waste stream and turning the pressure into waste stream drops it to 5 kilowatts to 6 kilowatts per cubic meter.

Energy Recovery's pressure harvesting technique drops it to 2 kilowatts per cubic meter. The system is also 97 percent efficient on average.

The company also had one of the few IPOs last year.

Dell, NEI Team Up on Servers for DC-Powered Data Centers

2009-11-03T23:24:29+00:00

Dell is getting a new line of servers ready for the coming world of DC-powered data centers.

Dell will work with NEI to manufacture and market the servers, based on Dell's PowerEdge R710 platform, the two companies announced Tuesday. The move puts Dell alongside competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems that now have DC-powered servers on the market.

Electricity grids deliver power in alternating current, or AC. But servers and other computer equipment use direct current, or DC. Converting AC to DC is mostly done with power converters for each individual device or server rack.

But powering an entire data center with DC power could save the inefficiencies associated with this method, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That includes reducing the inefficiencies in converting incoming grid AC to DC, and then back again, several times to filter out grid power glitches, which many data centers do (see DC For Data Centers?)

"You get much more efficient power usage by making them DC across the board," said Jeff Hudgins, NEI's vice president of marketing. "It's a growing trend."

The telecommunication industry has used central DC power for some time, he added. Japan's NTT DoCoMo unveiled a DC-powered data center in February, one it said could cut energy use significantly, with a goal of a 50 percent reduction in associated greenhouse-gas emissions (see NTT DoCoMo Tests DC-Powered Data Center).

Consider it one of many ways data centers are trying to squeeze energy efficiency out of their operations. Data centers consume about 1.5 percent of the electricity in the United States, but that use is set to double by 2012, requiring the equivalent of 10 new power plants, according to an EPA study (see Data Centers Could Hit 'Resource Crisis').

That's a problem for data centers that are facing rising power bills, or may be unable to expand because they've maxed out the power available from their utility's local distribution grid. It's also a problem for utilities, some of which are offering incentives to data centers that can show efficiency improvements (see PG&E Wants to Give Away More Money, See Fewer Email Attachments).

That's led to lots of new investment in more efficient equipment, cooling systems and power delivery systems, as well as a push into server virtualization and new sensor and control networks to keep a closer eye on data center energy use (for examples, see stories here, here, here and here).

Server makers see the data center energy crunch as an opportunity to speed up the typical cycles for replacing old equipment by offering more energy-efficient gear (see Will Energy Accelerate the Computer Refresh Cycle?).

Abbott Cuts Water Use by 1B Gallons a Year

2009-11-03T19:52:19+00:00

At the end of September, we wrote about how medical supply giant Abbott cut oil and gas consumption by 35 percent compared to a 2006 baseline though, in part, waste heat technologies.

Now, the company says it is saving one billion gallons of water a year, a key milestone considering that some of its facilities are in water-starved Singapore. The company set out to get to 40 percent below its water consumption of 2004 by 2011 but it's already there. Water consumed in manufacturing processes is down 37 percent.

How did the company accomplish it? Through a variety of technologies like installing more water-efficient scrubbers for controlling dust in a Michigan facility or by installing tighter-fitting pipes in other facilities. An Arizona plant implemented leak tags to ensure that leaks are detected and fixed at a more rapid rate.

Conserving water saves energy too – around 5 percent of California's power revolves around transporting water. (The figure climbs to 19 percent if you add heating.) IBM is working on a number of water projects these days as well. Carbon, water and energy are all interrelated, according to IBM.