The Green Skeptic on FOX Business: Solar Energy, Disgruntled Environmentalists and Rising Gas Prices

I sat down with Stuart Varney this morning on FOX Business News for a lightning round on solar power competitiveness versus conventional electricity, an environmentalist's dissatisfaction with Obama's lack of leadership on environmental issues, and $5 dollar gas.

Here's the video:



And here is a link in case your browser doesn't support the player:

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/1457836159001/

Always fun to do these lightning rounds with Stuart.

Have a great weekend!

Missing GridWeek, But Staying on Top Via Twitter

I'm missing GridWeek in DC this week because of some compelling work with a new VerdeStrategy client that has a big announcement later this week.  But I'm able to catch up and keep tabs on what's happening via friends who are there and the hashtag feature on Twitter: #GridWeek.


Here's a sample screenshot:

Pretty cool that you can almost be there when you can't be there...

Philadelphia Subways to Brake for Energy Generation

Image by kitch via Flickr
What do you get when you pair the latest 21st century energy technologies with with one of the country’s oldest transportation systems?

Viridity Energy, a Philadelphia-area smart grid company, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), which has its origins in the early 1900s, when electrified trolleys were the transportation du jour, have teamed up to find out.

Their pilot project will use Viridity Energy's software optimization system to help SEPTA capture and recycle energy generated by trains, trolleys and even electrified buses using the existing regenerative braking capabilities of those transportation systems.

Regenerative braking isn't new. The energy generated by SEPTA's trains is currently captured and fed to the system's third-rail to power other trains.

The innovation here is to store and use the energy through a one megawatt battery array, which should reduce electrical power purchases by 10-20 percent at each location where the batteries are deployed, according to Viridity Energy.

Viridity estimates that one battery will generate $500,000 per year in value. SEPTA hopes to install the technology at all of its electric substations serving trolleys and trains. It may also allow SEPTA to purchase power at night, when rates are low, and potentially provide power to the grid to stabilize regional demand during peak usage events.

The partnership with SEPTA is "a perfect example of how smart grid innovations and advances in technology can effectively be paired with revenue opportunities from competitive energy markets to yield substantial economic, operational and environmental benefits," said Audrey Zibelman, President and CEO of Conshohocken-based Viridity Energy.

For SEPTA, the project is "a foundation for measurable gains in both energy efficiency and voltage stability" in what is one of its busiest corridors, and "a replicable and scalable model for broader system-wide implementation," according to a spokesman.

The partnership received $900,000 in funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania through its 2010 Pennsylvania Energy Development Authority (PEDA) grant program.

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New Energy Symposium 2010

This year's New Energy Symposium took place last week at the New York Academy of Sciences' lush office and conference space at the World Trade Center in New York.

Co-hosted by the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering's (CNSE) Energy and Environmental Technology Applications Center (E2TAC), along with New Energy New York, a consortium of New York State-based energy technology organizations, the two day event featured panelists from industry and government, as well as investors and academic institutions, along with over two dozen presenting companies.

More than one jeremiad was tossed out by the speakers. Most agreed that the time is now to seed the opportunity and not cede it to other countries (China and India were among those cited).

As Dr. Pradeep Haldar, director of E2TAC and head of the Nanoengineering Constellation at University of Albany's CNSE, reminded the attendees, "We are falling behind the rest of the world by $240-260 million in terms of investment in cleantech."

Several presenting companies hope to get a piece of that investment pie and hope that it grows. Highlights among the companies include: Algal Scientific Corporation, Ener-G-Rotors, and Energy Materials Corporation, which were the three "most promising companies" chosen by the extensive panel of investors, including David Wells from Kleiner Perkins, Alex Kinnier of Khosla Ventures, and Annachiara Danielli of Golden Seeds.

Other companies of interest included Paper Battery Company, InnoSepra, and three NYC ACRE tenants, Wind Products, Sollega, and Rentricity.

My three take-aways from the two-day conference:

1.) Time-of-use pricing is essential to make the Smart Grid work and to manage pricing and habits;
2.) Storage to balance the load and demand is essential -- and large increases in intermittent generation (from distributed sources and Battery Electric Vehicles) will increase this need; and
3.) Energy efficiency is still the low hanging fruit and has still not been picked.

The bottom line? While progress has been made towards the new energy future, we've still got a long way to go.

There was a healthy discussion about the role of Europe and India in the future of energy, but the elephant in the room was clearly China.

As Congressman Steve Israel put it in his keynote address, "China is our Sputnik. We need to see China's taking leadership of the clean energy arena as a wake-up call."

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FiTs and Starts: Are Feed-in Tariffs Fit to Be Tried?

Image via Wikipedia

NREL, Golden, CO

With the death of Cap-and-Trade legislation in the Senate, Feed-in Tariffs (FiTs) are starting to become more and more attractive to renewable energy boosters.

But are FiTs all they are cracked up to be?

NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, recently released a A Policymaker's Guide to Feed-in Tariff Policy Design that largely sings the praises of various FiT schemes.

According to a Deutsche Bank study quoted in the NREL guide, 75 percent of global solar PV and 45 percent of wind development are directly related to FiT schemes. In the European Union alone, over the past ten years, FiTs have led to the deployment of 15,000 MW of solar PV and 55,000 MW of wind power.

The benefits of FiTs are obvious to the renewable energy (RE) industry, as NREL states, FiTs drive "market growth by providing developers long-term purchase agreements for the sale of electricity generated from RE sources. These purchase agreements, which aim to be both effective and cost-efficient, typically offer aspecified price for every kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity produced and are structured with contracts ranging from 10-25 years."

Furthermore, "payment level can be differentiated by technology type, project size, resource quality, and project location."

And therein lies the rub. FiTs do not a free market make: 1.) Fixing the price doesn't mean the best price for consumers or taxpayers and 2.) the government picks the technology, site or size of the project.

While you can't argue with success, we are already seeing that such success can lead to excess.

According to a renewable energy player familiar with a variety of country-based FiT policies, such schemes have led to an excess of solar development (viz. the German example) or prices that don't take into account future efficiencies and cost-savings, which can result in windfall profits for developers and manufacturers.

More of our focus needs to be on making renewables more efficient and cost-effective so they don't have to rely on government props and subsidies. The example of Spain should be a warning, where retroactive cuts to their FiT scheme due to the bad economy may endanger that country's solar industry and renewable production altogether.

Fixing prices and picking technologies shouldn't be the job of governments. I'm not saying that FiT schemes can't be properly designed to allow as free a market as possible, I just don't want to see us all go to Abilene yet again chasing the latest "Get FiT" fad.

 

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Smart Meters, Smart Grids and Dumb Folks

Image by S Migol via Flickr

My friend Shari Shapiro at Green Building Law blog makes some good points about the recent smart meter debate going on in California, Texas, Maryland, and now Fairfax, Virginia: 

Smarting Over Smart Meters The Sequel--Maryland Rejects Smart Meters

I agree with Shari that "smart metering is as close as you can get to free market allocation of electricity. When demand is high, prices increase, when demand is low, prices decrease."

And I don't buy the irrational fears about smart meters being "Big Environmental Brother" telling you what to do and taking information about your usage for nefarious purposes.

If folks are that concerned about privacy issues, they best get off the grid entirely, throw out their cable box, stay off the Internet, and cut up their credit cards. Oh, and while they're at it, better stop using that GPS-enabled mobile phone.

Smart metering, which is only a small piece of the overall smart grid puzzle, as Katie Fehrenbacher of Earth2Tech pointed out last week, allows for greater choice and control by consumers over their usage and relative costs of electricity.

Sure, utilities can "control" demand when they need to, but that will only enhance the reliability of electricity delivery, an increasingly important need as our lives, businesses, and economies become even more entwined with the grid.

And that grid is getting old and tired.

"Most of the electric utility infrastructure deployed in the industrialized world was built between 60 and 80 years ago," says Larry Fisher, research director of NextGen, a unit of ABI Research, which released a study on Smart Grid Applications last week.

"Much of this infrastructure is outdated," Fisher says, "and with the continuing increase in demand for power year after year, the grid cannot safely and reliably manage the loads of today and tomorrow without significant upgrades."

Further, the "cumulative global investment in smart grids, including smart meter implementations as well as upgrades to the transmission and distribution infrastructure, will approach $46 billion by 2015," according to the ABI report.

That sounds like an incredible free market opportunity to me. We are fools to ignore it or let the Chicken Littles kill it with their ungrounded fears.

Don't let the dumb folks take the smart out of your investing in the future.

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Jack Donaghy and the Future of Manufacturing in America

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Jack Donaghy is the archetypal American businessman.  He's a striver who thinks he can get to the top through hard work, innovation and creativity -- and okay not a small dose of cronyism -- really, by making things.

But, Jack, played by Alec Baldwin, is a dying breed.  As he points out in last night's episode of 30 Rock, we've become a nation of consumers rather than a nation of makers.

Jack's company has been bought by a cable network from (ahem) Philadelphia, which as one character says in the episode, "doesn't make anything and has no expectations of innovative ideas from its executives."

Despite this, Jack is determined to make something, to use his creativity to create value.

"We need to get back to doing what American businessmen do best," Jack tells his new colleagues. "Making things."

I think Jack is onto something.  And I'm reminded of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with Sheila Kennedy of Kennedy & Violich (KVA) in Boston.

Sheila is an architect, designer, and innovator.  She makes things.  Beautiful things.  Practical things.  Some of the things she makes are going to change the world.  Actually, they are already changing the world.

Her Portable Light Project, for example, is bringing flexible photvoltaics into fabricated products that can be integrated into blankets, handbags, or other useful items to provide a small amount of energy to charge a cell phone or provide lighting for rural villagers without access to power grids.

Soft House is another project of KVA MATx.  Soft House transforms household curtains into a set of energy harvesting textiles generating up to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity -- about half the daily power needs of an average American household.

Sheila makes things.  Yet she was telling me that we've lost the art of making things.  Prototypes, for instance.  It's getting increasingly difficult to find someone in this country to actually make a prototype.  If a designer wants a prototype, she very often has to go overseas to get it made.  Why?

We have become a nation of consumers and packagers and marketers of other people's fabrications.  We've even taken to referring to our economy as a "service economy," as if all we can do now is serve others.  And serve them what?  OPM -- other peoples' makings.

It's really quite extraordinary.  And we're seeing it now in the cleantech sector, too.  The manufacturing, research and development in the sector is shifting oversees, has been for years, but is starting to accelerate now as China, India and others ramp up their capacity to make the products and technologies to meet the energy needs of the future. 

When our economy gets too far from the art of manufacturing, of making real, tangible things, it's a bit like what Ezra Pound said about poetry getting too far from music; it begins to atrophy.

There are some hopeful signs, as Sheila and I discussed.  One of these is Etsy, a consumer web marketplace for other peoples' makings; specifically handmade products, art, books, jewelry, handbags, woodworking, and almost everything else you can imagine.

"Your place to buy and sell all things handmade..." is a great tag line.  We need more hopeful efforts to rebuild manufacturing in this country.  The future of manufacturing in America may be smaller, more localized production and distribution, and it certainly requires a more patient, long-term view.

Perhaps then Americans can get back to what we do best, as Jack Donaghy says: making things.

World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers: Embracing Disruption

The World Economic Forum made its selection of Technology Pioneers for 2010 last month.  The Energy and Environment group is an impressive list:

BioFuelBox BioFuelBox builds, owns and operates modular bio-refineries that recycle brown grease and trap grease and waste water sludge for companies and cities, converting it into premium clean burning fuel for local use. It eliminates the waste streams on site and shares part of the fuel profits with its customers. Steve Perricone, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer www.biofuelbox.com Bloom Energy Bloom Energy aims to change the way the world generates and consumes energy by converting a wide range of renewable and traditional fuels into electricity through a highly efficient electrochemical reaction, rather than combustion. K.R. Sridhar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.bloomenergy.com Boston-Power Boston-Power is pioneering the use of lithium-ion and other materials capable of powering end applications ranging from portable consumer electronic devices to electric vehicles. Christina Lampe-Onnerud, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.boston-power.com Care Electric Energia CARE has designed a turbine system that generates energy from the natural flow of a river, without any alternation of its natural state. It provides fish passage facilities and does not dam the normal flow of materials in the river, conserving the fauna, vegetation and ecosystem. Johann Hoffmann, Founder Epuramat Epuramat’s technology promises to revolutionize waste water treatment. Its Extreme Separator achieves an efficiency of up to 99% in terms of solid/liquid separation of organic and inorganic particles in wastewater and liquids – and it does it in only one treatment step. David Din, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer www.epuramat.com eSolar eSolar aims to become the first solar electricity company to reach parity with the cost of fossil fuel. It hopes to achieve that goal with technology that concentrates the sunlight of mirrors of one square metre to produce steam at centralized towers. Bill Gross, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.esolar.com Lehigh Technologies Lehigh Technologies manufactures very small, micron scale, engineered rubber powders from material derived from scrap tires using a proprietary, cryogenic, grinding technology. These powders are novel materials that are currently used in the manufacture of new tires and other rubber goods. Alan Barton, Chief Executive Officer www.lehightechnologies.com Metabolix Metabolix aims to create a new class of materials that can serve as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics. It has developed bio-based and biodegradable plastics using both engineered microbes and engineered bio-energy crops that grow bio-plastic directly inside leaves and stems. Richard P. Eno, President and Chief Executive Officer www.metabolix.com Serious Materials The construction industry is responsible for 52% of C02 emissions worldwide, which is more than automobiles, transportation and industry combined. Serious Materials is tackling the problem with high tech building materials that include super insulating products. Kevin Surace, Founder and Chief Executive Officer www.seriousmaterials.com Vihaan Networks Limited (VNL) VNL has developed a solar-powered GSM system specifically for remote and rural areas where people have less than US$ 2 a month to spend on their phone bills. Its base stations, which cost one-quarter of traditional equipment, only require as much energy as a 50-watt light bulb. Rajiv Mehrotra, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer www.vnl.in

The Technology Pioneers program is the World Economic Forum's way of identifying and integrating companies – normally in a start-up phase or in their first rounds of financing – from around the world that are involved in the design and development of new technologies. The innovations of these companies reflect society’s attempts to harness, adapt and use technology to change and improve the way business and society operate.

Each year, hundreds of innovative companies from around the world are nominated, and approximately 30 are recognized as Technology Pioneers in three categories:

1. Biotechnology and Health
2. Energy and Environmental Technologies
3. Information Technologies and New Media.

For more information on the Technology Pioneers, visit the web site or download the brochure.

Google and GE Entering Partnership on Smart Grid Technology

From New York Times: "Google and General Electric said Wednesday that they would work together on technology and policy initiatives to promote the development of additional capacity in the electricity grid and of 'smart grid' technologies to enable plug-in hybrids and to manage energy more efficiently.

"The companies said their goal is to make renewable energy more accessible and useful."

The importance of updating and shifting the transmission grid in the US can not be overstated. This would be a boon (not to mention a Boone) to making alternatives more feasible and the new green economy more possible.

Read the full story at: http://tinyurl.com/53rlk5

(Disclosure: The author holds small positions in both Google and GE. This information is not intended as investment advice or promotion.)