Green Tech

Maybe I shouldn't come to the office anymore. Working from home would treat the planet better, according to the American Electronics Association.

The trade group issued an Earth Day report Tuesday encouraging employers to expand telecommuting, partly to help cut carbon emissions and use of electricity. Among its arguments:

If everyone who could perform a job remotely did so just 1.6 days per week, $4.5 billion worth of fuel would be spared. That would prevent the release of 26 billion pounds of carbon dioxide each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Nearly half of workers commute more than 20 miles total every weekday, according to a 2006 study by the University of Maryland.

Some 45 million people work remotely, according to the Telework Coalition. Employees of IBM, for one, take novel approaches, such as using Second Life to interact.

Various studies show that telecommuting helps to lure attractive employees, prevents them from burning out, and saves companies money. The American Electronics Association promotes telework for potentially bringing parents, retirees, and others with scheduling constraints back into the workforce as baby boomers retire.

That's all good news for providers of Web-based software and broadband services seeking yet another marketing angle.

Online collaborative software, for instance, can reduce a company's paper waste and reduce IT management expenses. The makers of Cisco's WebEx, Google's apps, and others push telecommuting as a "green" practice.

However, telework has downsides. It may help families better balance their personal and professional lives, but it can also can lead to working around the clock, thanks to always-on gadgets. Americans have paltry vacation time as it is, compared with Europeans.

And although workers can deduct many expenses of a home office, utility bills for maintaining one can be expensive.

Plus, companies need to ramp up security measures when allowing a worker to toil on a virtual private network, or cart around a laptop loaded with sensitive data.

Congressional bills have been introduced that would force federal agencies to set up telework programs. Part of the reasoning has been to keep people working despite emergencies such as a natural disaster or terrorist strike.

A growing body of scientific evidence makes plastics increasingly less attractive to "green" consumers. Hormone-altering substances seep from drinking bottles. Great plastic garbage patches swirl in the ocean. And plastic bits have been found to concentrate poisons at levels a million times higher than in the water. Many people don't even know that most plastic is made from petroleum.

But agriculture giants including Archer Daniels Midland and small companies such as Cereplast are baking plastic from corn, soy, potatoes, and tapioca. Start-ups are even exploring pig urine and carbon dioxide to make plastics. Bioplastics could make up 30 percent of the plastics market by 2030, according to Helmut Kaiser Consultancy.

Still, most plastics continue to be made from petroleum or natural gas, which, although increasingly expensive, remain cheaper than using plants.

Fossil fuel plastics involve toxic chemicals to produce, can harm human health, pollute ecosystems, and are rarely recycled. Some people struggling to eliminate daily use of plastics find it nearly impossible.

However, codes marking many plastic products can help people figure out what's inside the bottle and what to do with it when it's spent, depending upon regional recycling rules.

To help recyclers, the plastics industry more than two decades ago started a labeling system that identifies seven major types of plastics by a numeric stamp on the bottoms of bottles. But what do the numbers mean?

I took a look at the seven categories in products from around my apartment. I retain a fair share of ecologically-damaging habits, but it hurt to make a trip to the store for polystyrene cups (No. 2) and root beer for the polyethylene six-pack rings (No. 4). The PET water bottle (No. 1) was mailed to me in a press package from a company that makes "green" products. However, while sometimes I splurge on bubbly bottled water, I try to use a stainless steel Klean Kanteen for flat water. (Ahem, the HDPE foot powder (No. 2) was left by a guest.) Check out the photo gallery for more.

MENLO PARK, Calif.--How much water does it take to make a pair of leather shoes? Eight-thousand liters.

That's from Hans Enggrob, head of innovation at the DHI Water Group, a research and consulting firm, speaking at the Nordic Green conference taking place this week at SRI International's offices here.

It takes 2,000 liters to make a cotton T-shirt, 2,400 liters to make a hamburger, and 1,200 liters to produce a gallon of ethanol, he said.

But beer drinkers should rejoice. It only takes 75 liters for a glass of beer and 140 liters for a cup of coffee, he added. Much of the water in these products goes toward irrigating crops used to make these products.

Enggrob, like many others, points out that the world is facing a pending water crisis. Several start-ups concentrating on water purification and desalination have received funding in recent years and large giants such as General Motors have put more emphasis on water. Still, demand is growing faster than supply. China, Australia, and several African nations are already grappling with water shortages. In the U.S., some believe Lake Mead could run dry by 2021.

In the middle of the 20th century, there was about 4,000 cubic meters of fresh water per person per year, Enggrob said. Now we're close, globally, to 1,000 cubic meters per person per year. One thousand cubic meters per person per year is defined as water scarcity, he said. Water stress is defined as having 1,700 cubic meters per person per year.

Most countries also have to update their regulations and municipal water systems with regard to water reuse and purification. Singapore's NEWater, which constitutes part of the water coming out of the taps there, is actually reprocessed water from the sewer. Japan and Dubai make somewhat extensive use of gray water. But most jurisdictions haven't gone that far.

Purification is the bright spot in water. When oil is burned, the molecule is consumed, forcing humans to look for more. Water gets polluted but it can be cleaned.

"We have pretty much the same amount of water that we had four billion years ago," said Paul Frederiksen, head of research at Grundfos, a Danish company specializing in energy-efficient pumps.

Despite high-profile pledges by major tech companies to green the grid, efforts to improve efficiency in data centers remain stunted, according to two recent studies.

Fifty-one percent of companies have a solid plan to green their IT operations, down from 55 percent in 2007, according to a study released Monday by Digital Realty Trust. The company owns and manages corporate data centers.

But highly publicized efforts to improve data center performance and design include those of the Green Grid consortium of tech bigwigs such as Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices. The Climate Savers initiative, backed by Google, the World Wildlife Federation, and dozens of other organizations, aims to halve computing power consumption by 2010.

An overwhelming and growing majority surveyed by BPM expressed a need for industry standards for efficiency as well as for heating and cooling systems. Given the absence of such guidelines, more than 60 percent said they turn instead to green building standards from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design from the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council.

However, 80 percent noted that they look at a broad number of factors to green data centers, taking into account hardware as well as the design and operations of the overall facilities.

Fewer company representatives expressed plans to pursue carbon credits to make up for their operations' emissions: 18 percent in the recent survey, showing a drop from one-quarter in 2007.

IT power consumption cost at least $1 million for 20 percent of respondents, and upwards of $10 million for 8 percent of them. The study contacted decision makers at companies with 5,000 or more employees in March.

And although power demand by data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005 , the Business Performance Management Forum found a similar lack of efficiency improvements in its study released earlier in April.

Three-quarters of those surveyed graded themselves a "C" or worse for green computing, and 65 percent said they lacked precise plans for improvement. But nearly half of respondents noted that their use of IT-related energy grew in 2007. Forty-six percent even ran out of space, power, or cooling systems.

A Forrester report in March predicted that spending on green IT services will grow by 60 percent each year to $4.8 billion by 2013.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday announced a $10 million grant to develop technology to make solar power mainstream.

The Chesonis Foundation donated the money for research in three areas: materials to improve conversion of light to electricity; storage; and hydrogen production from solar energy and water.

Called the Solar Revolution Project, it will provide funding for 30 five-year fellowships in solar energy.

The idea is to pursue "blue sky" research, in an effort to fill the void between corporate-funded applied research and the limited amount of federal money dedicated to basic science research in solar, said Ernest Moniz, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative.

"There are some really hard problems that need to be solved for the really big breakthroughs to come," Moniz said. "The underlying science of photosythesis is extremely complicated and not well understood at the electronic level."

As part of the campus-wide MIT Energy Initiative, the university already has other ongoing solar-related research initiatives, including the recently announced MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems.

The Solar Revolution Project funding is meant to be flexible to allow researchers to pursue breakthrough technologies. A solar leadership council will be formed to coordinate activities among different research efforts at MIT, Moniz said.

The Chesonis grant will also help fund a solar energy research report, modeled on the university's influential reports on nuclear and coal.

Although the power is free, solar electric panels are relatively expensive because of the large up-front cost. Solar power is small fraction of the overall electricity production in the U.S.--just half of one percent in 2007, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Researchers and solar companies are trying to develop large-scale manufacturing technologies and higher solar cell efficiency to bring costs down.

"Personally, I believe that terrawatts of solar power by mid century is a very real possibility, even likely," Moniz said.

The Chesonis Family Foundation was founded by Arunas Chesonis, an MIT graduate who is CEO of telecom company Paetec Holding.

Updated at 9:30 a.m. Pacific with comments from Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative.

Three solar-thermal companies have raised money in the past week in a sector that's showing life, despite a choppy investment environment.

Infinia on Tuesday said it has taken $7 million from Asian contract manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group, part of a total of $57 million in a Series B round first announced in February.

The company uses a dish to concentrate sunlight onto a Stirling engine, which makes electricity. It intends to sell its 3-kilowatt devices to small-scale utility plants.

On Monday, eSolar said it has raised $130 million from Idealab and Google.org. Its solar-thermal systems, designed for utility-scale power plants, use mirrors to reflect light onto a tower that turns a turbine.

And last Thursday, Stirling Energy Systems announced a $100 million investment from renewable-energy developer and waste management company NTR.

Stirling Energy Systems makes a huge concentrator dish that generates heat to turn a Stirling engine that makes electricity. It's under contract for two power plants in the Mojave Desert that would initially generate 800 megawatts of power.

Solar-thermal technology has been around for decades, and Stirling engines date back to the 19th century. But the high cost of silicon-solar cells has made solar-concentrating systems more attractive in desert areas like the Southwest United States and Spain.

Denmark-based Agroplast wants to transform pig urine into plastic dinnerware and household items.

We all have to have dreams, I suppose.

The company has essentially devised a way to better commercialize urea, a compound of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, found in urine.

Other animal waste products like manure can be inserted into the system, but pig urine is particularly interesting because it is an environmental hazard, says Peter Tøttrup, a partner at Seed Capital, a Danish venture firm that also helps the government incubate start-ups. We ran into Tøttrup at the coffee urn at the NordicGreen conference in Menlo Park, Calif., this week.

"There are 20 million pigs in Denmark, and what they do environmentally is a problem," he said.

Transforming farm waste into plastic precursors is potentially attractive over other bioplastic ideas because the feedstock effectively has no value. In fact, it has negative value because animal waste must be disposed, which costs money. Some other bioplastic companies make their resins out of corn starch.

Tøttrup claims that the process could, conceivably, result in plastics that cost a third less than conventional plastics made from fossil fuels. That's a big conceivably. Traditionally, bioplastics made of vegetable matter have cost more than fossil fuel plastics. Evaluation of the pricing will have to wait until large volumes of this stuff are made. Agroplast is going into a pilot study now, Tøttrup said.

Agroplast says its farm-friendly chemicals have other uses too. They can be used as fertilizers, as an ingredient in lotions, and "as a flavor enhancer in cigarettes," according to the company's Web site.

That puts a new spin on the good, clean taste of Kools.

Which are the companies to watch in clean tech? Most are definitely not household names but they are having an impact.

Below the photo is a list of some of the newsmakers in the renewable energy business, with a focus on start-ups. Along the way, you'll get a feel for the technology categories that define this corner of green tech.

1. Ausra: Originally from Australia, Ausra is one of the movers and shakers in solar thermal, a technology that is already competitive with utility-scale fossil fuel power generation.

Mirrors reflect light onto a liquid that makes steam, which drives a traditional electricity turbine. Other companies have different designs including BrightSource Energy which recently signed a huge deal with Pacific Gas & Electric and eSolar, which is reported to have just raised $130 million. Honorable mention goes to Infinia, which uses a Stirling engine to make distributed solar electricity.

2. SolFocus: Another technology for utility-scale solar power is concentrating photovoltaics (CPV), where light is magnified onto high-efficiency solar cells. SolFocus, incubated at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, is well funded and already has a few customers.

3. Southwest Wind Power. There are several companies taking different approaches to small wind turbines, designed for homes and buildings. Southwest Wind Power has turbines for remote off-grid locations but it now also has a ground-mounted one for homes. Another company to watch is Aerovironment which just had its small turbines installed at Logan Airport in Boston.

4. First Solar. In the traditional solar photovoltaic market, First Solar the one to catch. The reason is simple: cost per watt. Its cadmium telluride-based panels take up more space than silicon cell panels, but its overall cost has set the mark in a highly competitive field. Hot in pursuit are other thin-film solar companies--Heliovolt, Global Solar Energy, and Nanosolar, which are making cells from yet another material, CIGS (copper indium gallium and diselenide).

5. Cool Earth Solar. Apart from the great name, this company is taking a potentially disruptive approach to solar electricity. Never mind expensive plants out in the desert. Why not just float reflective balloons in open fields?

Overall, you'll see that a lot of the action in renewable energy is not in the residential solar panel world, perhaps what most people would think.

Instead, most of the money is going to utility-scale power plants to make power at peak times of the day. And businesses, helped by favorable financing models, are the big buyers.

Expect it to stay that way in the coming years but not without some bumps. Lux Research predicts a shake-out among the larger companies because supply of polysilicon will overshoot demand in a few years, bringing prices--and a few solar vendors--down.

And will this influx of capital result in cheaper solar panels for average consumers? Yes, but government policies make a huge difference on the economic equation. What's also needed to make solar really widespread is more flexible financing to lower the hefty upfront cost.

For Earth Day 2008, CNET News.com green tech reporters selected leading companies in five different clean technology categories. Here are the ones in the electricity business to watch.

It's hard to think of an electric utility as a real mover and a shaker. Most plod along, keeping the lights on, sending the bills out, and delivering dividends to shareholders.

But there are some exceptions and, as new energy technologies come online, power providers are on the front lines of clean tech. Which are worth calling out?

Pacific Gas & Electric
PG&E is at the forefront of technology adoption in renewable energy and plug-in hybrid programs. California has perhaps the most stringent set of mandates for renewable power in the U.S. and the most aggressive carbon emissions goals.

Of course, PG&E is not sitting on mountains of coal as many other utilities like Duke Energy are, so it can afford to push for policies that favor cleaner fuels.

But California is an important testing ground where solar thermal and other energy technologies will be put through the paces on the way to commercialization. Special mention goes to Austin Energy, the municipal power utility in Austin, Texas, which has a green building program among many others. It, too, appears willing to try new technologies.

SunEdison
Tech enthusiasts tend to believe that higher solar cell efficiency is the key to making solar electricity mainstream. It's not. Financing is.

SunEdison caters to businesses which establish a power purchasing agreement. Here's how it works: a provider like SunEdison or MMA Renewables installs, owns, and maintains panels at their customers' locations, and the customers purchase the electricity their rooftop panels produce at a fixed cost.

A number of start-ups, including SolarCity and Sun Run, are pursuing the model of essentially leasing panels to residential customers as well. If they don't get it right, somebody eventually will.

EnerNoc
Some people call energy efficiency the "fifth fuel" along with coal, natural gas, nuclear, and renewables. EnerNoc is one of a handful of new companies in the demand response area, along with ConsumerPowerline, Powerit, and Comverge.

What these companies do on behalf of utilities is dial down power consumption at homes or businesses to ease the demand on the grid. Cutting down just a little--15 minutes of dimming the lights at Home Depot, for example--can prevent the grid from crashing and, potentially, obviate the need to build more power plants.

GridPoint
Everyone agrees that the grid needs to get smarter and join the 21st century. Not simply for reliability but to meet demand growth.

GridPoint makes a device that lets utilities dial down usage remotely in people's homes. It just completed a "smart charging" test with Duke Energy that let people charge plug-in hybrid electric cars at night, after demand on the grid peaks.

Advanced metering and energy monitoring companies, including Silver Spring Networks, SmartSynch, and Fat Spaniel Technologies, are at the forefront of applying IT to the electricity grid. Verdiem, meanwhile, is focused specifically on PC power management.