Sun Catalytix, a company that's trying to develop a revolutionary clean-energy system, has finished a round of seed funding and secured a technology license from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based company was formed about one year ago to commercialize research from MIT professor Daniel Nocera in which he attempts to mimic the process of photosynthesis.
Polaris Ventures finalized a $3 million seed round of funding for Sun Catalytix and expects to raise a series A round next year, said Polaris' Bob Metcalfe, who is also on the board.
Sun Catalytix is pursuing a breakthrough system that would use cheap solar panels to produce hydrogen, which would be stored and then used to produce electricity in a fuel cell.
(Credit: MIT)The core of the company's technology, which Nocera has sought to patent, is a low-cost catalyst for an electrolyzer, a device that splits water to make hydrogen. That hydrogen can be used with a fuel cell to make electricity. Or the hydrogen could be combined with other materials to store energy in a liquid fuel, such as methanol or ammonia, Metcalfe said.
Nocera envisions that homes would be equipped with solar panels to produce hydrogen from water during the day. At night, the stored hydrogen could power a home without releasing carbon emissions.
The key difference with the Sun Catalytix electrolyzer is that it is being designed to be made with cheap materials and work with all sorts of water, said Metcalfe.
"Splitting water to make hydrogen is as old as the hills. The breakthrough here is that it's dirt cheap. They operate in dirty water like water from the Charles River and they've used salt water from the Boston Harbor," he said.
The catalyst that splits the water molecules uses cobalt phosphate, which is cheap and abundant compared to expensive metals such as platinum, Metcalfe added. So far, the five-person company has built a number of prototypes made from PVC plastic.
A fully functioning system would take a number of years to develop and depend on other components being cheaper, including solar panels and hydrogen storage, Nocera has said.
But Metcalfe said that Polaris believes the company can commercialize the technology "in the short attention span of a venture capitalist." Typically, venture capitalists expect to generate a big return in five to seven years.
U.S. electric-car maker Tesla Motors plans to go public soon, two sources familiar with the matter said, amid growing interest in green technology and battery-powered vehicles.
An IPO filing from the 6-year-old start-up, best known for its $109,000 all-electric Roadster, is expected any day, said one of the sources. The person did not give a specific time frame, although IPOs typically take several months.
Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes declined to comment on what he called "rumor or speculation."
Tesla Model S
(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)Tesla would mark the first public offering from a U.S. automaker since Henry Ford's Ford Motor debuted its shares in 1956. The IPO represents a landmark in the resurgence of electric-car technology that most carmakers had dismissed as impractical until recently.
The company's chairman Elon Musk said early last year that an IPO was a possibility in either late 2008 or 2009.
But the financial market turmoil following the collapse of Lehman Bros. in the latter half of 2008 virtually shut down the IPO market. The appetite for IPOs has picked up since mid-September this year with a robust pace of new filings.
Tesla's IPO would follow the successful debut of lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems, whose shares rallied 50 percent on their first day of trading on September 25.
Analysts have said that the success of A123, the first green-technology IPO this year, would encourage more venture capital-backed green companies to go public.
Tesla will compete with established automakers like Ford, General Motors, and Nissan Motor, all of which are racing to launch electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles. Tesla, by contrast, is a small player with a high-end market and limited production.
A combination of factors has driven the recent interest in developing electric, or partially electric vehicles, including the Obama administration's push to have 1 million rechargeable vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015 and low-cost Department of Energy loans for manufacturers.
Venture funds back green cars
The carmaker is developing a second, lower-cost model, an electric sedan known as the Model S, which will have a base price of $49,900.
Tesla said in September it delivered 700 Roadsters since February 2008. The Roadster, which is built on a Lotus frame, can go from 0 to 60 miles an hour in less than four seconds, making it faster than a Porsche 911 or a Ferrari Spider.
The electric-car start-up was offered $465 million in low-cost loans by the U.S. Department of Energy to help build the new Model S. Tesla said it will build the new car in California.
Tesla's investors include Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Other investors include Daimler; Abu Dhabi-based Aabar Investments, which owns a stake in Daimler; and venture capital funds Valor Equity Partners, Technology Partners, The Westly Group, and Compass Venture Partners.
Tesla said it had achieved overall corporate profitability in July with about $1 million of earnings on revenue of $20 million.
But like established automakers, survival in the hyper-competitive U.S. automotive market has not been easy for Tesla. The company had to face cost overruns and production delays for the Roadster.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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BEIJING--Lorry driver Zhang Jianwei isn't worried about cleaner fuel requirements that come into force in China next year, raising the price of motor fuels--he will just keep buying cheaper, dirtier diesel at smaller stations.
Zhang's example underscores the cautious approach the world's second largest oil consumer is taking to introducing tougher diesel and gasoline specifications, and shows why there will be little initial impact on China's fuel trade.
Motorists across China will switch to 150 parts-per-million (ppm) sulphur gasoline from January 1, 2010, from 500 ppm, and a lower content of benzene, a carcinogen, three years after the specifications were first announced.
The changes, a hard sell to motorists already facing record pump prices, won't bring China's fuel standards into line with even stricter Western market benchmarks, tempering the risk of Asia's leading gasoline seller flooding export markets with still more fuel.
"It will not allow them to break into advanced markets yet, but I don't think they aimed for that anyway," said Al Troner, managing director of AP Energy Consulting, and an expert on Asian fuel specifications.
But its start to move Chinese oil firms beyond their traditional role of being self-sufficient toward being more like aggressive exporters in South Korea and more recently, India. For example, 150-ppm gasoline will probably help boost Chinese sales into Australia, which uses a similar grade.
Also from January 1, China is launching automotive diesel with a sulphur content of 350 ppm, to differentiate from the 2,000-ppm general diesel used by its vast rural and industrial sectors. However an 18-month "transitional" period is allowed before the specification becomes mandatory.
One significant change in diesel quality is the cap on polyaromatics, a main contributor to urban smog. That requires refiners to use costly hydrocracking and hydrotreating units, instead of traditional catalytic crackers.
Oil duopoly Sinopec and PetroChina have in the past decade or so been spending heavily on units that strip sulphur and crack heavy residues into motor fuels, as China imports a growing share of sour and heavy crude oil.
The new specs mean the cost of fuel is set to rise further, a challenge for refiners like Sinopec to pass on to Chinese drivers already paying record pump prices.
"It's Sinopec's chance to showcase our strength in technology. But as it costs to build and run hydrocrackers to meet the specs, we will expect a premium price for premium quality," Sinopec's spokesman, Huang Wensheng, said.
The diesel factor
The formal introduction of automotive diesel specs highlights the oil industry's focus on meeting the rapid growth in road freight traffic in an economy that is heavy on manufacturing and as the country swiftly expands its highway networks.
China's demand for automotive diesel overtook gasoline in absolute volumes a couple of years ago, and is poised for strong growth in the coming years, analysts said.
Automotive diesel now makes up more than half of China's total diesel use of some 3 million barrels per day, against a third previously.
"The improvement in auto diesel standards in the past has been slowed in part because of China's massive use of rural diesel by tractors. Auto diesel is growing rapidly," said Lu Changjiang, Sinopec's fuel quality and efficiency chief.
China's environmental watchdog wants to fast track the more stringent standards, and Sinopec says it has the technical ability to produce Euro V motor fuels with sulphur content of 10 ppm and steeper cuts in polyaromatics.
"We're aiming to catch up with European standards (V) by around 2015/2016," said Tang Dagang, head of vehicle emissions control of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, adding that mationwide specifications for 50-ppm gasoline, already in use in Beijing and Shanghai, are expected to be announced soon.
For the country's swelling fleet of private car owners--car sales in China recently passed those in America to make it the world's top market--the mandatory shift to cleaner petrol of 150 ppm will put China in the league of clean fuel markets like Japan and Australia.
And the cut to 1 percent from 2.5 percent of benzene places China at the top of the moderately high quality ranks, said AP Energy's Troner.
But both the government and oil firms will need to gauge if users like lorry driver Zhang are going to pay up, after a doubling of prices in the past five years and a dwindling of China's exports, which has heightened competition among truckers.
To cut the bills for his 1,000-liter tank, Zhang says he may stop more often at gas stations near his mountainous hometown in Fujian, where cheaper and lower-grade fuels are popular, before hitting the 4-lane interprovincial highways dotted by petrol outlets run by state giants Sinopec and PetroChina.
"If it can save me 300 to 400 yuan ($45 to $60) per trip, I will not hesitate to refuel at the smaller stations," said Zhang.
Story Copyright (c) 2009 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Additional stories from Reuters
Dozens of home energy monitors are coming to market, but nobody knows whether only hybrid Prius owners will use them.
Whole home energy monitors, or displays, are designed to help consumers conserve energy by providing far more detailed information than a monthly bill. These types of devices are already available, but millions more are poised to enter U.S. homes in the next two years, largely through utility-run smart grid programs.
The gadgets themselves vary, but the common thread among them is the ability to capture a stream of energy information from a meter at a given moment. Simply by surfacing real-time data, either with a small device or Web software, it's believed the system will prompt people to change their habits and ratchet down consumption by 5 percent to 15 percent, according to studies (PDF).
But even as more sophisticated and user-friendly products come to market, it's unclear whether consumers will track energy use regularly, particularly once the novelty wears off.
"Not everybody is an energy nerd yet," said David Schatsky, principal at consulting company GreenResearch. "While people who study this area are aware of the energy space, the average consumer is not."
Schatsky recently completed a study on home energy displays and concluded that they won't likely be a hot holiday season gift anytime soon. In the next two to three years, he projects there will be millions of these devices installed, with the numbers ramping up to tens of millions after that. Existing displays cost roughly $100 to $200 but Schatsky expects that many consumers will initially receive them for free from utilities as part of smart-grid programs.
In a survey, he found that about half of consumers said they were interested in tools to lower home energy bills. But in reality, the percentage of people who will actively manage their energy is probably much less. There are also technical hurdles to making these devices provide real-time information and useful recommendations.
As a result, he expects that energy-efficiency programs run by utilities in the next few years will drive adoption and provide some lessons on what resonates with consumers and not. As part of the multibillion dollar smart-grid grant program announced last month, about one million consumers will get in-home displays from utilities looking to lower consumers' energy consumption in smart-grid programs. Those programs are expected to get off the ground in the next few months.
Motivating consumers
The drive behind smart-grid technologies is to enable the grid to use electricity more efficiently, integrate more solar and wind power, and potentially eliminate the need to build new power plants to meet growing demand.
Countries around the world are investing to upgrade their grids, but there's a gnawing concern in the U.S. that consumers aren't sold on the benefits. Home energy displays are supposed to be one of the ways that utilities can help consumers save money and lighten their environment footprint.
At their most simple, a whole-house energy monitor shows what's happening on an electricity meter and translates that into cost and kilowatt-hours. For example, seeing that a home's current electricity use is higher than typical could lead a person to unplug a video game console or turn off lights. More sophisticated devices can provide information on how much individual appliances use and generate statistics.
When used as part of smart meter rollout, these devices can be a gateway for energy-efficiency services offered by a utility, such as demand response. For instance, a monitor can employ a color system where red indicates that the electricity rate has gone up because it's a time of peak demand.
The Web is a natural extension to these energy gadgets. Google's PowerMeter is being offered through utilities that install smart meters, which feed real-time energy use to the Web-based monitoring application. But Google is starting to offer PowerMeter through other devices, including a small monitor called the TED 5000.
The information and displays are meant to not only inform consumers but to motivate them to be more efficient. In order for that to work, the devices need to be simple to install and useful just at a glance, say monitor makers.
"There's all this talk about the smart grid, but if customers don't participate, it will be a bust," said Paul Nagel, the vice president of strategic development at home automation start-up Control4. "If they don't engage, then they'll never get energy savings."
Home area networks
One of the challenges that all energy display companies face is the technical barriers to getting them installed. The most sophisticated system would use a home-area network built around a smart meter and a network of Zigbee-enabled appliances and thermostat. But even with big investments in the smart grid, millions of homes still won't have smart meters.
Energy management companies are developing alternatives for getting data regularly from the meter to a display. Bridge devices can read meter information using the automatic meter reading (AMR) protocol, which is already available in millions of meters. Another approach is to clamp sensors onto a circuit box to get data or to install "smart plugs," which transmit data from appliances.
Even if a consumer is willing to navigate these technical issues, there is the question of whether the device will provide energy savings over time.
New home energy management companies are focusing on doing more than just monitor data because they are worried about what's called "mean time to kitchen drawer." That is, a person may have a small display on a kitchen counter as a reminder about energy use. But when the batteries run out, will they simply stash it in a kitchen drawer and forget about it?
Companies are now building in data analytics to provide recommendations or to automatically control appliances to ratchet down energy use. EcoFactor, for example, is developing a hosted software application that can analyze data from wireless thermostats and make changes to make the home more efficient.
Control4, a company which does touch-screen displays to manage video and music in a home, is now branching into energy management. Its EMS 100 device, which runs Linux on an Arm 9 processor, is powerful enough to analyze daily information to provide recommendations on how consumers can make changes to save energy, said Nagel. The company plans to offer it through utilities starting in the first quarter of next year.
Energy management services could be bundled with other home-automation products or even cable and telecom services. iControl and AlertMe in the U.K. plan to bundle security services with tools to manage heating, cooling, and lighting.
One way that utilities and energy management companies expect to motivate consumers is by comparing one home's usage to neighbors in comparably sized homes. Start-up Grounded Power is using social science techniques already proven with recycling and seat belt programs to encourage consumers to save energy, said Mike Bukhin, the vice president of engineering.
"Our users are taking snapshots of data subsets and comparing their data to others' in the community. 'How does my fridge compare to yours?' They also have the ability to ask resident experts questions about their data. The data in turn is shared with the rest of the community," he said.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore discusses his hopes and fears for the future of the smart grid.
(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)SAN MATEO, Calif.--Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore hopes that America's next-generation power grid will be a lot like the Internet. Or at least that's the plan.
How close we get to that goal depends on what happens in the next five years, Gore said in a speech here on Thursday evening at blog VentureBeat's GreenBeat conference, where he outlined many of the challenges the United States faces in upgrading its power grid. Along the way, he made comparisons to how the advent of the so-called smart grid will enable the kind of solutions and business innovation that the Internet brought during the 1990s.
"The analogy to the Internet is quite an exact one. Not completely exact, but it's very relevant for lots of reasons. We are moving inexorably toward a widely distributed energy generation and storage model. We are still locked into the old centralized energy generation model," Gore said. "The rapid development of new generations of new smart storage systems are going to make a tremendous difference in connection with the smart grids." Those systems are designed to enable easier storage of unused electricity for peak times, when supplying it to large groups of customers can be difficult and more expensive.
Gore also foresees an entirely new set of devices and instruments to help utilities and consumers control and monitor usage--technology and business models that may not yet have been imagined. "(It's) much the same way the Internet made it possible to see this generation of Internet-ready devices that did not even exist before the Internet began to build out," Gore said.
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A recent study by Pike Research has found that over 76 percent of consumers see recycling as the key to reducing the world's e-waste.
However, 37 percent of consumers also think that recycling their e-waste should be a free service, according to "Electronics Recycling and E-Waste Issues," a study released Thursday.
That's not to say consumers necessarily believe electronics manufacturers should be the ones picking up the tab. Only 10 percent of those surveyed saw recycling as a "producer responsibility," and only 14 percent thought the cost of free e-waste recycling should be built-in as part of product purchase price.
The independent survey was conducted by the research firm as a Web-based questionnaire on a "demographically balanced" sampling of 1,000 Americans.
The study results are a bit surprising because many companies offer rebates on new items in exchange for recycled goods, implying that there is already an e-waste recycle tax built into the price of products. There are also many company-sponsored recycling programs. If you go by the statistics in their sustainability reports, the biggest producers and sellers of electronics also do recycle a relatively large amount of consumer e-waste.
Some consumers might also be a bit lazy when it comes to recycling their old tech junk. The average consumer had "2.8 pieces of unused, broken, or obsolete electronics equipment in their home or storage area," according to Pike Research.
Thirty-five percent also thought there should be a convenient service wherein e-waste recycling is picked up at their curb, like they have for other trash.
But not to worry, Pike Research released a report in May that concluded that e-waste build-up will plateau by 2015.
Nissan will begin taking orders for its LEAF EV in Spring 2010.
(Credit: Nissan)The EV Project, a pilot program to develop a nationwide public charging system for electric vehicles, is expected to give people an opportunity to inspect the Nissan LEAF EV more closely on Thursday and announce expansion plans that include San Diego.
The unveiling will take place at a press conference in San Diego and include representatives from San Diego Gas & Electric, the City of San Diego, the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), and Don Kramer, the president of Ecotality's subsidiary eTec.
Electric-charging station manufacturer Ecotality has received $100 million in stimulus funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and is one of the lead partners on the EV Project which will span 11 U.S. cities in five states: Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington.
While the company has been partnering with Nissan to make public charging options a reality in the U.S., Ecotality has repeatedly said its stations are designed to fit Society of Automotive Engineers standards so that they'll be compatible with any electric cars built to that standard.
Ecotality announced Wednesday that its CEO Jonathan Read is currently in China as part of a 40-person delegation accompanying U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. The group is taking part in the China Clean Energy Roundtable as part of President Barack Obama's visit to China.
Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao announced Wednesday a U.S.-China "Electric Vehicles Initiative" to encourage research and develop joint standards for electric transportation, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
(Credit:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory )
Carbon nanotech has been applied to everything from boat construction to windshields and now, with a licensing agreement from Livermore Lab, a Hayward, Calif., company will apply it to water desalination and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has licensed a new carbon nanotube technology to its spinoff company Porifera. The company will develop permeable membranes for CO2 sequestration, water desalination, and other liquid-based separations based on discoveries made at Livermore.
The technology integrates carbon nanotubes into polymer membranes, increasing the flux of carbon dioxide capture by two orders of magnitude thanks to the material's unique "nanofluidic" properties. This technique could enable a less expensive method of capturing carbon from coal plants, according to the Livermore. Sequestering CO2, a greenhouse gas emission, is one strategy for curbing global warming, although this particular process has yet to prove out on a industrial scale.
"The technology is very exciting," said Olgica Bakajin, former Livermore scientist and now chief technology officer at Porifera. "The reason it makes sense to do it is because of the unique nanofluidic properties of carbon nanotube pores. It's at the right place to take it to the marketplace."
Nanotubes are graphitic layers wrapped into cylinders a few nanometers in diameter, (approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair) and up to several millimeters long. Their extraordinary strength and unique electrical and thermal conductive properties make them attractive for many applications.
Porifera is funding the carbon capture project with a $1 million-plus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency. It's pursuing the water purification angle with a $3.3 million DARPA grant to develop small, portable self-cleaning desalination systems.
(Credit:
GoodGuide)
Just in time for the crazed holiday shopping season, San Francisco-based GoodGuide releases the first iPhone app that lets you scan bar codes for what the guide calls "impartial" health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings of not only the products you are scanning but their companies, too.
GoodGuide's free app lets you scan an item's bar code and instantly retrieve info on that product's health, environmental, and social responsibility ratings.
(Credit: GoodGuide)As our Webware staff wrote in August, "GoodGuide is the reason we have awards for tech services and products: it's a small and relatively unknown service that demonstrates real leadership on the Web." And as we report in Health Tech just this week, GoodGuide is an invaluable resource when shopping for toys, as it provides the levels of lead, mercury, chlorine, etc., that might be in the toys.
But GoodGuide's newest app is quite possibly the group's pinnacle achievement thus far. Now, instead of having to be organized enough to do your research online before hitting the stores, or using the app's 2008 iteration, which involves entering a product into a GoodGuide database on your phone, now anyone with an iPhone can literally scan bar codes while shopping.
Seriously, this could become a tick. I kind of want to spend all day scanning bar codes with the same fervor I used to pop package bubbles as a kid. As GoodGuide spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara (mother of two boys, ages 8 and 5) tells me in a delightful English accent that somehow makes everything sound healthy and socially responsible: "It's making it easier to be good. We all want to do this, but god, who's got the time to research it all?"
I envision scoffing with delight at the higher-priced products that don't actually measure up to their less expensive counterparts, a discovery likely as satisfying as catching a poker player mid-bluff. Or, conversely, I can see justifying a slightly more expensive product that is far healthier for my body and environment.
Of course, the value of such a system hinges on how good the information is. GoodGuide licensed Occipital's RedLaser bar code-scanning technology for this app and culled ratings for more than 62,000 food, personal care, household chemical and toy products and companies, and plans to add thousands more every month. Learn more about GoodGuide's rating system here.
Best of all, of course, is that GoodGuide's app is free--a fact that also sounds delightful in an English accent. All you need is the funds to own an iPhone, but that's a different story.
The California Energy Commission on Wednesday unanimously approved the first energy efficiency standards for televisions in the state over opposition from the Consumer Electronics Association.
The rules mandate that televisions sold in California starting in 2011 consume 33 percent less electricity than current models and 49 percent less by 2013. The regulations affect TVs that are 58 inches wide and less.
Video: In this episode of The Green Show, CNET's David
Katzmaier explains the factors that affect TV power use. (He's
introduced at about 1:38 minutes in.)
Although it's a state-level regulation, it is potentially significant outside California as other states are considering adopting similar rules. Unlike voluntary programs, such as the Environmental Protection Agency's EnergyStar program, the rules mandate certain levels of efficiency. For example, a 42-inch TV that consumes 183 watts or less by 2011 needs to consume 115 watts or less by 2013, the Commission explained in its statement.
The effort to regulate television efficiency, which was backed by California utilities and environmental groups, will save money for consumers on electricity and significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, say backers. After 10 years, the energy savings will be $8.1 billion, or enough to power 864,000 single-family homes, according to the California Energy Commission.
The Consumer Electronics Association has fiercely opposed the mandate, which has been under development since early 2007. The industry group submitted a statement arguing that efficiency gains should be done through voluntary efforts by manufacturers and more consumer education. (Click for PDF of submission to the CEC.)
At the same time, some television manufacturers and the LCD TV Association supported the measure.
As consumers upgrade to flat-screen TVs, there's a concern that there will be a significant increase in aggregate power usage, in part because people are buying TVs with bigger screens. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that implementing the efficiency rules will cut the state's electricity use by almost 1 percent and mean that a 500-megawatt power plant will not need to be built to meet rising demand for power. (Click for Q&A from NRDC).
The California Energy Commission has energy efficiency mandates for a number of household appliances, such as refrigerators. The state's energy efficiency policies have kept the per capita energy consumption steady since the 1970s, according to the Commission.
