Cleantech

Most of Silicon Valley focuses on the cost of the photovoltaic module, and how to bring that down. In fact, most of Silicon Valley focuses on how to fundamentally change the basic technology of the module - from crystalline silicon based to thin film deposition. Very sexy. And very risky. And currently breaking the back of more than one company and investor who is trying. What's worse, the module is only 30-50% of the per kwh cost anyway.

In the meantime, the cost of solar on a per kwh basis has continued to improve, primarily on the back of unsexy work on the integration and installation side, as well as the growing size of the average photovoltaic installation. This is despite the increase in average module prices in recent years, driven by the silicon shortage.

Cleantech Blog has written about the concern that the real make or break for solar economics is how much power you get out of the system, not just the cost per watt of the panels. We believe that installation and design decisions are the make or break for that variable, not the technology choice. We have also written on the topic of integration and installation, and the need for better data and monitoring on the back end, like our friends at Fat Spaniel are improving, to inform the analysis.

But what about the analysis on the front end of the installation process? Everyone in the industry knows that installation is a large portion of the upfront costs, and everyone knows that how well you design your solar system has large implications for the economics of your installation.

So how do we actually streamline solar from the front end? Well, it's happening. The solar decision making software tools are slowly developing. There are a number of products available now to streamline the modeling and estimation of solar installation costs and performance, and make the end user and installer's life easier: including products like CPF Tools, OnGrid, and PVOptimize, which range from spreadsheets to on demand services. My favorite is CPF Tools, by Clean Power Finance, and I had a chance to meet with a couple of their executives, including Joseph Brakohiapa, the other day to discuss what they are doing. For one, they have married solar estimation and modeling tools with an on-demand MRP system for solar installers. I certainly believe in on demand software, and it's hard to see how modeling tools without links into your inventory and proposal systems can actually take much cost out. And second, they are working to integrate those tools into the financing model for small scale solar loans. When coupled with backend monitoring like Fat Spaniel's, I can see the path for real progress - and possibly more importantly, I can see a way for both the installer and the end customer to finally begin to manage risk and cut costs.

From monitoring, to ERP, to decision support and business intelligence. No industry in today's world can scale without it. It's time the solar sector grows up.

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is founding contributor of Cleantech Blog, a Contributing Editor to Alt Energy Stocks, a blogger for CNET's Cleantech blog, and the Chairman of Cleantech.org.

I have subscribed to Forbes for over a decade because, unlike many other popular business journals, it seems to have a genuine voice -- even if I sometimes disagree with it.

On a plane flight from Cleveland to L.A. last Thursday night, I read the March 10, 2008 issue, and was amazed at how pervasive cleantech has become -- even in its stoutly conservative pages:

• Pages 4-5: an advertisement from General Electric (NYSE: GE) touting their solar efforts.

• Page 24: an advertisement announcing the winners of the 2008 Eni Awards, sponsored by the Italian energy giant Eni (NYSE: E), "aimed to promote research and technology innovation in the field of energy and its concersion, with particular focus on renewable sources."

• Pages 38 and 40: an article on Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), profiling their (relatively) progressive stance on carbon legislation.

• Page 39: an advertisement from BP (NYSE: BP), illustrating their investments in domestic energy opportunities, especially highlighting biofuels and solar. • Page 56: an advertisement by SKF (Stockholm: SKF) -- one of the largest suppliers of bearings for wind turbines.

• Page 71: an advertisement by XL Capital (NYSE: XL) featuring an illustrated solar farm, promoting their "strength to cover the world's largest energy and environmental risks".

• Page 85: an advertisement by Siemens (NYSE: SI) depicting their offshore wind turbines.

It was the SKF ad that really floored me, making me take notice just how ubiquitous cleantech is truly becoming. I've never seen SFK advertise anywhere before. Just which decision-makers is SKF trying to reach with this placement in a mass-market magazine?

Cleantech is seemingly everywhere. True, some of it may be "greenwash", but a lot of it is real, and it is growing.

Then I went back to reading the magazine, and realized we still have a ways to go: on p. 19, Steve Forbes writes yet another editorial continuing to stoutly deny climate change. I laugh and shake my head: some things never change.

Maybe Mr. Forbes should take better note of what the major corporations showing up in the pages of his magazine are actually doing to make money. After all, isn't Forbes the paragon of capitalism? If companies are rushing to cleantech in droves, shouldn't Forbes take heed of what the market is leading these companies to do to increase their profitable growth?

Richard T. Stuebi is the BP Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement at The Cleveland Foundation, and is also the Founder and President of NextWave Energy, Inc.

I was thinking today, in cleantech we often talk a lot about energy efficiency. Californians often cite that this state has grown its economy for the last 20 years without a significant increase in energy usage per capita, compared to the rest of the country, where GDP per capita goes up, and energy usage goes up just as much. But of course, California has lost much of its manufacturing sector over that same 20 year period, too. Perhaps no coincidence?

But if we wanted to actually do it, where could we actually save energy without impacting GDP growth, make a serious difference in our power bill, and do it in a big way - targeting say, 50% of our total power usage on a per capita basis?

CFLs & LEDs - We are already moving aggressively towards compact flourescent light bulbs, and the penetration rates are still low. As that trend continues, and LEDs come into the mix for more and more applications, our lighting bills should trend straight downward for the next decade. Now if we can just stop cringing at the thought of a $3 lightbulb!

Heating and Air Conditioning - I know whenever my power bill goes higher than I like, I just watch how often I turn the heater on, and adjust the thermoset a bit. The answer here has always been some combination of improved technology, smart metering and more transparency in billing and usage, and energy prices rising high enough for consumers to feel the pinch. Oh, and did I mention insulation, California?

Hotwater heaters - Can anybody say, "tankless"?

Power generation -If every power plant was upgraded to the latest generation of technology - in the power generation world - newer tends to equal more efficient all else being equal - the impact could be staggering. But bottom line, this means our regulators would have to approve the increase in utility capital expenditures and pass those costs on through to us in the short term. That's about as likely as George W announcing a plan to tax every SUV Detroit makes and give the money to the poor to buy solar systems.

Solar - As for solar - which is typically sold on a "reduce your energy bill" pitch, not a chance. At $0.15 to $1.00/kwh (depending on who's counting and how they count), if we actually reduced a significant amount of our building load with solar power we'd likely send our GDP plummeting. There are lots of reasons to love solar, but decreasing energy usage per unit of GDP is not one of them. At least, not yet.

These aren't new ideas. But definitely worth repeating until we learn the lesson.

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is founding contributor of Cleantech Blog, Chairman of Cleantech.org and a blogger for CNET's Cleantech blog.

The cleantech sector has developed as a major player in the fight against climate change. One of my friends, Dan Whaley, has founded a company called Climos to attack global warming in a new way, sinking massive amounts of carbon into the ocean depths using ocean iron fertilization. The approach has seen significant scientific study, but as he acknowledges, still has a ways to go to prove its effectiveness. That is where Climos comes in. The exciting part is the sheer scale of the potential carbon sequestration (on the order of a billion tons) and the low cost (possibly on the order of $5 to 7 per ton, according to Dan). Dan and Climos believe that they can use iron fertilization to sequester tremendous amounts of carbon, play a big part in reducing global warming, and use the carbon trading markets to finance the projects. I was also intrigued to learn more from Dan given the quality of the companies, like DNV and Ecosecurities (LSE:ECO.L), that Climos is working with to help design the carbon abatement methodology, and the care that Climos is taking to understand the environmental science. Like our own efforts in carbon, Dan believes in science and standards first. (On a personal note, I do not have a lot of choice in that matter, as my wife is an environmental scientist and statistician.) As a result, we asked Dan to do an interview with Cleantech Blog and tell us how they believe harnessing the power of the sea can play a big role in the fight against climate change.

Dan, you are one of the new class of technology entrepreneurs who is moving into cleantech. Can you share some of your background, and why you chose carbon?

In 1995 I founded the first company to commercialize travel reservations over the net, GetThere.com. We went public in 1999 and sold to Sabre in 2000. If you've booked a ticket on United Airlines' website, you've used an example of the infrastructure we built.

I think that entrepreneurs by nature love big challenges. We like to find opportunities where key technologies, services or business transformations can make a profound difference to the world. We understand that the missing ingredient we provide is the vision and the sheer will to make those transformations happen. We are perhaps at our best when the odds are against us, and when most people say we're crazy.

A few years ago, I drove from here down to Buenos Aires. Somewhere along the way, I think I woke up and really fully realized that there were some extraordinary challenges out there facing us that were much more pressing than most people had been giving them credit for. Challenges that were much more important than whether people could book their travel online, for instance. GetThere was a powerful lesson to me that I could set my mind to something and achieve it, but it was also a little numbing at times too--sometimes I wondered just exactly what I was really contributing to the world.

By contrast, the energy and environmental challenges we face as a species are exactly the kind of thing an entrepreneur likes to tackle head on. Plus it actually makes a difference whether we succeed or not.

Tell me a bit more about the concept of ocean fertilization and how it could abate C02? Why iron?

Ocean Iron Fertilization (OIF) was first proposed nearly 20 years ago by an oceanographer here in California named John Martin, at the time he was the Director of Moss Landing Marine Labs. He was the first to discover that iron was the trace nutrient limiting photosynthesis, and hence primary production, in most of the world's oceans.

Photosynthesis uses freely available sunlight to convert CO2 to organic material, which higher level organisms consume directly or which sinks into deep waters of the ocean to be sequestered for up to 1000 years. Clearly we need to lower our emissions dramatically, and immediately, but if atmospheric CO2 that we have already put into the atmosphere is ever to decline, it will be photosynthesis that eventually does the work.

Over the last billion years, phytoplankton (the micro algae that grows ubiquitously in the ocean) have helped to concentrate over 80% of all mobile carbon on the planet into the deep ocean. This process is referred to as the Biological Pump, where after plankton bloom, mature and die, they sink to the deep ocean, carrying carbon along with them. The deep ocean recirculates over very long time periods. The lag between downward flux and eventual recirculation creates an extremely effective trap. This process is probably easily 20-30x more effective at storing carbon than plant growth on land, which returns most carbon back to the atmosphere on short time scales (10-100 years).

A tiny amount of iron can stimulate a lot of phytoplankton growth. 12 publicly-funded, open ocean experiments over 15 years have shown this. The science community is now proposing the next generation of experiments, at moderate as opposed to small scale and potentially funded by private sources. We hope to answer the question just how much carbon is sequestered (not just grown), at what scale can this be done safely, and whether this can fit in to the market mechanisms that have evolved worldwide to fund the mitigation of carbon dioxide.

Who else is doing this and what exactly do you do differently as far as ocean fertilization goes?

Up until now, it has been purely been a research effort, with cruises funded by public agencies such as the National Science Foundation. There are now a few companies proposing to do this, though the primary competitor, Planktos, appears to be winding down operations due to problems fundraising. We decided to pursue this because we feel like this is one of the largest potential tools mankind might have to address global warming. Perhaps our primary differentiator is that we want to make sure that if this is done, it is done credibly and scientifically.

Our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Margaret Leinen left NSF in January. She was the head of Geosciences there and managed a $700M research budget. Her research career was in paleoceanography and biogeochemistry. Our Science Advisory Panel includes people such as Dr. Rita Colwell, the former Director of NSF, Dr. Tim Killeen, the Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the recent President of the American Geophysical Union, Dr. Bob Gagosian, the former President of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Dr. Tom Lovejoy, the President of the Heinz Center, and so forth.

What is different about what is happening now is that the demonstrations of OIF will be larger, focused on different questions and also funded in part by the private sector. The carbon market is the mechanism that the world has chosen to fund emissions reductions and carbon mitigation, and so if OIF can be an effective way to safely remove CO2 from the atmosphere, that will probably be financed via the carbon market.

How will you verify that the abatement is happening?

To quantify the carbon removed, we deploy a range of sensors, the most important of which are called "Neutrally Bouyant Sediment Traps" to measure the amount of carbon falling past a certain depth in the ocean. Identical measurements are taken both inside the project area as well as outside the project area--this gives us an idea of what would have happened if we hadn't been there.

There are further nuances which are important to account for, such as how much carbon really ends up coming out of the atmosphere to replace that which is being used at the ocean's surface. Also, we will need to model the impact on nutrient stocks before they are replenished via deep winter mixing, etc. There many important other details, but this probably illustrates the basic concept.

Can you go into some more detail on the questions of permanence, always a major concern in new carbon reduction methodologies.

The permanence of storage is measured in choosing the depth we place the sensors at. This depth is determined by looking at what is called the ventilation or residence time of water at difference depths in the project area. Because the oceans circulate so slowly, most of the world's water mass, in fact the majority, has not seen the surface since before fossil fuels began being combusted in the late 1800s. I think that is a fairly surprising fact to most people. By sampling water at depth for signs of human activity which also have a known history, such as tritium from bomb testing in the 1950s or from CFCs that began being released in the 1920s, oceanographers can tell how long any cubic meter of water has been away from the surface.

Putting this to practice, if you sink carbon past water that hasn't seen the surface for 300 years, and if you know the directionality of circulation in that place in the ocean, you can be fairly sure that this carbon won't see the surface for at least 300 years moving forwards. This is how we understand permanence in addition to quantity.

The IPCC defines permanence as at least 100 years, so we will likely use this definition--but ultimately the carbon market will decide what that number is, not us. Keep in mind that significant amounts of carbon are stored for timeframes which are shorter as well, i.e. 75 years, 50 years, etc. This timeshifting of carbon is meaningful and helpful as well, but we won't claim credit for this. Also, the minimum (i.e. 100 years) is just that, the minimum. Much of the carbon will be stored for much longer--hundreds to even thousands of years.

Many people question the value of 'timeshifting' carbon. They wonder if we're creating a problem for ourselves later when this carbon comes back. There are several important things to consider here. First, we really have no other options--other than emissions reductions, which are important--but really separate. There is no other way to 'dispose' of the carbon that we've put up in the atmosphere already. Nature timeshifts carbon--at some point, nearly all carbon will see the atmosphere again, the question is on what timeframe. The effectiveness of sequestration in the ocean is the reason that the majority of 'mobile' carbon has ended up there over time. Second, this approach gives us time to address our emissions problem. People have likened this to a concept called 'oscillation damping', where if you have a pulse that takes time X (as in the number of years we have been adding too much CO2 to the atmosphere) then it may take you 2X or 3X or 4X to 'dampen' that pulse, depending on its amplitude. So if we've been creating this problem for 100 years, and it takes us another 25 years to solve, then we may have to mitigate for several multiples of that. This is an unscientific quantification, but perhaps a useful illustration--and I think it also serves to highlight what a huge challenge we have ahead of us.

Aren't you worried about the impact on the environment on "adjusting" ocean nutrients? I know that has been a concern of some environmental groups.

I think there are a number of distinct concerns rolled up in your statement. One is the fear that OIF is 'messing with mother nature.' Many people feel that humans simply can't get anything right, and that we if we try to fix what we've already broken, we're likely to make it worse. This is an unscientific attitude, and one that I think also fails to appreciate some of the unique aspects of this concept.

Other concerns are whether a change in the level of iron is potentially harmful, or whether the drawdown of existing macronutrients such as nitrates, phosphates and silicates (which is what the addition of iron triggers) could result in permanent shifts, or deplete productivity elsewhere--i.e. no net benefit. There are a number of answers for this.

First, this is already happening. Iron naturally fertilizes phytoplankton blooms--and these are the largest source of carbon sequestration happening as we speak. About three billion tons of CO2 is stored safely at depth in the ocean every year, and has been for a long time. Iron is a benign mineral. It in and of itself is simply not harmful.

Second, nature has already done more aggressive iron fertilization at scales much larger and for periods much longer than we are contemplating. During the last million years on at least five or six separate occasions between the major ice ages, natural iron inputs to the ocean increased by many times what they are now for thousands of years at a time. Productivity (i.e. plankton) increases appear strongly correlated with these times of increased iron. A recent paper by Cassar, et al this year has linked nearly 40ppm of the 80-100ppm swing of carbon in the last interglacial to increased iron enrichment of ocean waters by aerosol and other transport mechanisms. If iron fertilization simply removes nutrients that would have eventually been used elsewhere, then you would not have seen sustained productivity increases in the paleo record. Where we are now is a result of all of these previous episodes--and more than likely this will happen naturally again in the future, whether humans do it on purpose or not.

Lastly, OIF will be done gradually, over decades. It can be stopped at any time.

The key is to continue to explore this as a potential mitigation mechanism and to see whether it can be both effective and safe. Demonstrations run by scientists, and funded by the private sector which can deploy the capital required for the larger projects, are probably our best chance of this.

You intend to sell carbon credits based on this process. What standard will you use, and who do you expect will be the likely buyers?

Long term if this is to be meaningful it will need to be accepted in regulated markets, in the short term the voluntary market can help provide the bridge financing to get us there. We think the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) is probably the best current standard, but there are others as well. We'll target as many standards as appropriate. The methodology we are currently developing is designed around the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) specification--though since it takes place in the middle of the ocean it will never qualify for those credits without changes to the regulatory framework.

You mentioned you approached the problem from the science, standards and measurement & verification end first. That's an approach I definitely agree with. Can you go into some more detail? I know you had mentioned working with DNV, among others.

A number of things need to be done before larger demonstrations like the one we propose.

First, the key science questions that will to be asked of this next generation of experiments need to be asked. We will be proposing a series of science workshops with the community this year to help facilitate that. One of the conferences will be on long term modeling. Another will be on measurement and verification techniques. We will be announcing these over the next several months.

Second, a comprehensive Environmental Impact Assessment needs to be performed by an outside party that reviews concerns in detail and against the peer-reviewed literature, identifying which are likely not an issue, which are questions of appropriate project design, and which need more study. We will be initiating this process over the next several months.

After these processes are complete we will begin to structure our proposed cruise, and publish this ahead of time. This also involves applying for appropriate international permits, etc.

DNV, or a company like that, will be involved in validating the Project Design Document (PDD) after we select a specific operating site, and before we actually go to sea. They will also come on the cruise to provide direct verification of the results.

Many of these general activities are called for by a document we produced last year which we call a Code of Conduct. We think that it is vital that companies like ours operate in a scientific, responsible and transparent manner.

So this process is kind of like planting trees, except in the ocean?

Yes, except it happens faster and the storage is more permanent. Forests store carbon in the form of standing biomass--in other words, you get storage for as long as the forest is managed and preserved. If it burns down, or gets harvested, a large part of that carbon is returned to the atmosphere. Also, if the tree dies and is not replaced, nearly all of that carbon is returned on short time scales (< 100 years). This is not to say that we shouldn't be planting trees. We should, and we are--the UN just finished planting a billion trees the week before the recent Bali conference. We need to be doing a lot more of that. Two of the most attractive aspects of ocean fertilization are low cost and large scale. Can you give us some insight into where ocean fertilization fits on the spectrum of cost and potential abatement levels?

We think credits from OIF can be delivered for about $5-7 a ton long term. No one knows what the annual global capacity might be. Certainly three billion tons a year (CO2) are already being done naturally. It is possible that another billion tons annually might be able to be added to this number, but that is pure speculation. Some people have quoted numbers that are much higher than this, but I think that's probably not a constructive exercise right now.

And of course, when do you expect to be able to offer credits off of this platform, now that the VCS has been released?

We have just received the first draft of the methodology back from Ecosecurities and DNV (Det Norske Veritas) is in the process of a formal assessment. After their comments, and possible revisions, we will submit the methodology to the VCS steering committee. They have told us they will require a 2nd formal review by a qualified verifier, after which it would qualify to be accepted as a VCS methodology.

We will also be asking other peers in the science community to help us evaluate and refine the methodology. They will certainly be the most important check. We expect it will be refined many times as measurement and modeling approaches improve.

The credits of course will be dependent on the successful completion of our first cruise. We expect this in 2009.

Dan, your OIF approach is certainly exciting given the scale and low cost of the potential CO2 abatement, and I wish you the best. It is certainly not a easy task.

Neal Dikeman is a founding partner at Jane Capital Partners LLC, a boutique merchant bank advising strategic investors and startups in cleantech. He is founding contributor of Cleantech Blog, a Contributing Editor to Alt Energy Stocks, Chairs Cleantech.org, and a blogger for the CNET Cleantech Blog.

As has become my custom, with the year drawing to a close, I now look in the rear-view mirror and try to distill what I see. In no particular order, here are my top ten reflections on 2007:

1. Popping of the ethanol bubble. Not long ago, it seemed like anyone could get an ethanol plant financed. Now, no-one will touch them. Why? Corn prices have roughly doubled, and producers can't make money selling ethanol into the fuel markets when having to pay so much for feedstock. Along with the increasing realization that public policies so far to build ethanol markets has largely been for the financial benefit of big agri-businesses such as Arthur Daniels Midland (NYSE: ADM), ethanol has now become a dirty word to many. Progress on cellulosic ethanol technologies may not happen fast enough to redeem seriously diminished public perceptions about ethanol generally.

2. Continuing photovoltaics bubble. For illustration of this phenomenon, let's take a look at First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR). Nothing whatsoever against the company; indeed, they make a very fine product. It's just that their share price has increased by a factor of 10 -- from $27 to nearly $280 -- in one year. At current levels, the company's market cap is $20 billion, at a P/E ratio of over 200. I know the solar market is hot, but geez, c'mon. A 10x return in one year on a publicly-traded stock is simply not supposed to happen.

3. Increasing costs for wind energy. For many years, wind energy has become more competitive, as the industry matured and production efficiencies were tained. However, with increasing prices for virtually all commodities (e.g., steel, copper, plastics) and a weakening dollar against the Euro (note that most turbines are made in Europe), the economics of wind are unfortunately moving in the wrong direction right now.

4. Gore as rock star. First, an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth. Then, the Nobel Peace Prize. To top it off, becoming a partner at top-notch venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. What next for the what-could-have-been 43rd President? Whatever it is, at least the cleantech sector now has its iconic poster-child.

5. Cheers to Google. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has gotten into the cleantech game in a big way by creating an initiative with the mission to develop and launch renewable energy technologies that produce electricity more cheaply than coal. Once that aim is achieved, renewable energy will rapidly become ubiquitous, and we really will start getting on a path of serious carbon emission reductions.

6. Death of the incandescent lightbulb. Early in 2007, Australia led the way to ban incandescents, to force a shift to more energy efficient lighting technologies (fluorescents for now, perhaps eventually LEDs). Amazingly quickly, the U.S. followed suit, passing an energy bill by year-end that effectively phases out incandescents by 2014. This should have a major energy efficiency impact, and yield a big cut in greenhouse gas emissions, in a relatively short amount of time.

7. Tightening CAFE -- finally! After decades without change, the U.S. Congress finally acted to impose more stringent corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for auto/truck manufacturers. The main milestone is a 35 mpg combined car/light-truck standard by 2020. For the first time, trucks are now part of the CAFE equation, closing the loophole that helped propel SUVs to prominence. Strengthening CAFE is probably the most important thing that American politicians could do to actually make a meaningful dent in reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

8. Uncertain future for coal. On the one hand, MIT released a major study entitled "The Future of Coal" that compels a radical R&D push to commercialize technologies for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), underscoring the reality that coal-fired electricity generation is going to be a major factor for a long time. On the other hand, I don't see any such coal R&D push actually happening, nor even that much progress on CCS. A recent statement by the U.S. Department of Energy concerning its oft-touted FutureGen program for piloting CCS technology indicates a possible retrenchment. Meanwhile, Pacificorp -- which is owned by Warren Buffett's legendary holding company Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRKA and BRKB) -- recently cancelled a coal CCS project in Wyoming, with a spokesman quoted as saying that "coal projects are no longer viable." Ouch.

9. Oil at $100/barrel. Starting the year at about $60/barrel and then promptly falling to near $50, oil prices increased steadily from February to November, reaching the high-90's. I suspect we'll see $100/barrel sometime in 2008; I don't suspect we'll see oil below $40/barrel very much anymore. Even at prices not long ago considered absolutely stratospheric, it appears that there's been very little customer/political backlash so far: the world doesn't seem to be ending for most Americans.

10. Serious dollars betting on energy technology. There's been a lot written about the big surge in venture capital invested in new energy deals. I find even more intriguing the increasing amount of corporate and public sector investment in new energy R&D. As perhaps the most prominent example, in the U.K., the government has pledged up to $1 billion over the next 10 years in matching support to private investments in the Energy Technologies Institute, which includes the participation of such leading corporate lights as BP (NYSE: BP), Shell (NYSE: RDS.A and RDS.B), Caterpillar (NYSE: CAT), Electricite de France (Euronext: EDF), E.ON (Frankfurt: E.ON), and Rolls-Royce (London: RR.L). That's a lot of money and corporate weight in the mix. I can't imagine that such an initiative will produce nothing of use.

Best wishes to you and yours for 2008. Let's hope it's a good year, even better than the one wrapping up.

Richard T. Stuebi is the BP Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement at The Cleveland Foundation, and is also the Founder and President of NextWave Energy, Inc.

When I was in the UK a few weeks ago, one of my friends asked me to visit with Aerstream, a company where he is on the board of directors. Aerstream is a case in point of the many exciting cleantech companies coming out of the UK. I had a chance to chat with Jeremy Smyth, one of their executives. Backed by a group of UK angel investors, they are looking to bring their product into the US shortly, and he had asked me to do some brainstorming with Jeremy on his various strategy options.

I came away extremely impressed. Their product is called CleanAer, and while the technology started life in drug delivery around an inhaler style device, they have developed a range of products for cleaning and freshening the air in the home or workplace. The home version is designed to do a better job of both a typical heated wick style air freshener and a several hundred dollar Ionic Breeze type system all at once.

The technology works like this: They have a reservoir filled with proprietary liquid solution (in this case including the freshener), which forces the liquid through a simple, low cost gravity driven delivery system, and then using a combination of a capillary action mechanism and a small electrical charge, they disperse and ionize the liquid into droplets in the air at an order of magnitude smaller than is economically feasible from other devices. Because of the charge, the tiny droplets once in the air attract pollen, dander, and other allergens, removing them from the air stream we breathe along similar principles to the Ionic Breeze.

However, because of the unique capillary and ionization technology, the end result is that with very low power (the home device runs for 60 days on two double AA batteries as opposed to a wall plug) the product puts the solution into the air in much smaller droplets than other technologies, and in fact in such small droplets that they can diffuse faster and more evenly throughout a room than competing products on natural convection currents alone - no fans needed. Simple in concept, hard to get right, and with a retail price point in the $60 range, much cheaper than anything of similar effectiveness on the market.

The technology around this delivery mechanism is covered by a range of patents, and they have the consumer product in stores in the UK, and available online, as well as some major industrial cleaning services companies. If you are interested in more information, the Aerstream website is www.aerstream.com, and you can reach Jeremy by emailing jsmyth@aerstreamtech.com.

Neal Dikeman is the contributing founder of Cleantech Blog, a contributing editor of AltEnergyStocks.com, the blogger behind CNET's Cleantech Blog, and the founder of Cleantech.org.

I have mentioned my friend Justin Label, one of the partners at Bessemer Venture, before. Among other things he writes the Venture Again Blog. Bessemer is a highly respected old-line Silicon Valley venture capital firm. It has been an active investor in clean tech for a while, and is a backer of Miasole as well as SV Solar. I found myself on a plane recently with one his colleagues, Ted Lin. More than its investments, Lin was describing to me a new carbon friendly initiative that Bessemer itself is undertaking internally.

Its logic is simple, if it is investing in clean tech because it believes in being part of the global warming solution, not only making money, then it should practice what it preaches.

While still in its early days, it is targeting both its power and travel usage, and expects it will likely implement an internal reduction plan as well as purchasing offsets.

I asked Lin where this came from, and he said this initiative has come down from the top of the firm. It makes sense, and it is good to see the activity happening. My hat is off to the company.

Lin also pointed out that Bessemer is going to be buying offsets for its smaller portfolio companies (those under 50 people). "The goal is that when these companies grow into bigger companies and leave the nest, they will continue the tradition. We want them (our portfolio companies) to lead the next-generation of environmentally responsible enterprises."

One of the things he did ask: did I know any good offset providers? As with any venture capitalist, the company is looking for the "best of breed." So if you are interested in helping Bessemer, e-mail Lin at Ted@bvp.com.

As consumers, we generally like choices. In the world of cleaner cars, those choices have been few and far between, but slowly that is changing.

I had a chance recently to test drive two of the cars whose creators are bent on changing the way we view transportation, a converted all electric Scion eBox by Silicon Valley startup AC Propulsion, and a Saturn Vue Greenline hybrid. Both were highly enjoyable. The first, with a $70,000 price tag and a $10,000 deposit, is clearly an EV targeted at Conspicuous Sustainability consumers. I guess then, that the Saturn Vue Greenline with a $24,000 price tag, is perhaps the hybrid for the rest of us.

One of my friends, who was considering buying an eBox invited me to take it for a spin up and down some of the San Francisco hills with him while he was test driving. I have to admit, coming down California Street into downtown, one of the City's steeper hills, is an entertaining way to get used to the feel of regenerative braking on a true EV. I highly recommend it. For most of the drive I never touched the brakes. To stop you simply take your foot off the accelerator. And for those who have not driven an EV before the acceleration itself is phenomenal. Touch, and Go. Of course, with a $55,000 price tag for the EV conversion (you provide the Scion), limited range, and few electric charging stations, a purchase would be a hard call for me to make. The payback on fuel savings, many times the useful life of the car.

In contrast, General Motors (NYSE:GM) had given me a 2007 Saturn Vue to drive around for a week, to get the feel of it. If anything, GM is not known as an innovator of clean technologies. They are still tarred with the who killed the electric car brush by many environmentalists. That has only made it harder for GM to get out the message on things like its massive R&D effort in fuel cell cars, its push into flex fuel and ethanol with the Live Green Go Yellow campaign, and now hybrids. Having been to a number of their press luncheons on some of the new technologies they have been developing, I had some idea what to expect, but had not written about it before. The Vue is what is known as a mild hybrid, and its lack of bleeding edge, ultra green technology compared to a Prius had a few of my greener friends turning their noses up at it. But this didn't really phase me after I drove it. As a car and SUV, I found it quite impressive. It handled wonderfully, was extremely quiet, and quite comfortable. You can feel the regenerative braking, but only as a slight tug, so besides the lack of noise, it is like driving any other SUV. Saturn bills it as getting the best highway gas mileage of any SUV, and the cheapest hybrid SUV on the market (not to mention a little quicker than the conventional Vue). Like all hybrids today, the payback is real, but not so great. At the average miles driven per year for most Americans we are talking 9 to 11 years or so compared to the standard Vue, according to my conversation with the Saturn people. If you happen to a real heavy commuter 25,000 to 30,000 miles per year type of thing, the payback may be down towards 5 or 6 years. In short, despite the c. 20 percent fuel savings, a consumer is looking at 120,000 to 150,000 plus miles before reaching a payback, depending on your assumptions, for this or almost any hybrid. The real payback, as always, comes from just buying a smaller car, hybrid or not.

What I love is that the Vue Greenline is really just the first in the Saturn line of hybrids and cleaner fueled cars. GM is basically planning on making virtually the entire Saturn line as green as can be. It is rolling out something like 8 new hybrids or hybrid versions of existing Saturn makes as we speak over the next couple of years. And at a $24,000 price tag, I could actually see buying one of these.

So whether you have the pocket books to look for full EV conversion or just a mild hybrid to make a small difference like the rest of us, the choice is there.

Is Microsoft Vista global warming friendly? Could Vista be the best-selling clean-tech product in the world? I was thinking about this question the other day, and started e-mailing the Microsoft press relations folks looking for an answer.

The Microsoft answer--yes, it is. They have a recent release titled "Windows Vista Power Management Features Can Help U.K. Companies Reduce Their Carbon Footprint" on some independent research they had done by PC Pro Labs in the U.K.

Here's their quote:

"Windows Vista is Microsoft's most energy efficient operating system to date with its power management system, functionality, reliability and default settings focused on helping to reduce overall PC energy consumption. The key areas where the Sleep mode in Windows Vista has been improved compared to the equivalent Standby mode in Windows XP include:

• Enter Sleep mode after being inactive for 60 minutes
• In Windows Vista, it is much easier for users to change the power management settings themselves
• The Sleep mode is more reliable than Windows XP's Standby mode, both in terms of entering the mode and safely resuming back into Windows
• Windows Vista is much quicker at resuming from Sleep, now taking two to three seconds compared to five seconds for Windows XP."

They also published a white paper titled "Windows Vista Energy Conservation". Reading through it all, Vista does seem to be an energy efficiency masterpiece.

But I wonder--the description of these tests seemed to quite fairly compare the XP and Vista operating systems running through a series of different scenarios--but it's not a survey of real world conditions.

So I'm probably convinced that if you run the same computer post-Vista the exact same way you ran it on XP, that you'd use less power. Vista itself may actually be the best-selling clean-tech product in the world. But in the real world, we don't work that way. Each year we add a whole lot of new features and programs that suck down power, and buy more powerful PCs to run them on with every upgrade. And part of the promise of Vista is to enable even more such goodies--possibly offsetting the energy savings.

So are Windows users who have upgraded to Vista running the same programs in the same way, and the same (or more energy efficient PCs) and therefore using less power? Or are they actually using more or different features, or on a more powerful energy hog PC, and despite Microsoft's energy efficiency efforts, using more power on a daily basis anyway after the upgrade? That might not be something Microsoft could control--but I'm sure curious as to the answer from a carbon standpoint.

As a matter of full disclosure, I run XP at the office, Vista at home, own a small amount of Microsoft stock (and am a very big fan) and have a very bad habit of leaving my computer and monitor on--but I'm working on that.