GreenVolts, which is commercializing technology from the national labs to better concentrate sunlight, has received $10 million in funding.
The company, based out of San Francisco, has a concentrating system for photovoltaic panels that effectively lets its put the power of 625 suns onto a solar panel. The high concentration levels thus allow it to shrink the real estate required for a single power plant. As a result, the power plants can be built closer to the consumers--i.e. people living in the city or suburbs--which in turn cuts down the cost of transmission lines.
Several other companies are working on concentrators for photovoltaic panels and some have received far more money. SolFocus, which can bring you the power of 500 suns, has raised $52 million. The GreenVolts concentrator is more efficient, the company claims, because it casts minimal shadows onto the solar panels, among other reasons. The concentrator also rotates with the sun. Greenvolts licenses its basic technology from the national labs.
The company has a contract to build a two megawatt facility in Tracy, California for Pacific Gas & Electric by the fourth quarter of next year.
GreenVolts? Series A round of funding was led by Greenlight Energy Resources and included Avista, a solar company.
GreenVolts CEO Bob Cart came up with the idea of going into the solar biz after sailing around the South Pacific. There, he helped locals fix solar panels discarded by sailors who had passed through earlier. Distributed power sort of struck him as an interesting opportunity.
You can make solar panels with impure silicon, claims Roy Johnson. You just have to know how to isolate the undesirables.
CaliSolar, a solar start-up that derives from research originally conducted at UC Berkeley, has come up with a way to make solar cells out of upgraded metallurgical silicon, which is less pure and less costly than the industry standard electrical grade silicon, according to Johnson, the company's CEO, at a meeting at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place this week.
Electrical grade silicon is 99.99999 plus percent pure, but it costs $150 to $250 a kilogram, he said. Even before the worldwide shortage of silicon the stuff costs $50 or more a kilo because of the ornate processing procedures. Only around 70,000 tons are manufactured worldwide.
By contrast, upgraded metallurgical silicon is only 99 percent or so and goes for $20 to $50 a kilo. Approximately 1.2 million tons get made a year.
While the purity differences may not sound big to you, to a solar panel it's usually a deal breaker. Photovoltaic solar panels generate electricity by separating negative charges from positive charges contained in the sunlight that strikes them. The negative charges (electrons) are then captured, converted to AC power, and then used to power things in your house. Pure silicon is usually needed because impurities prevent electron capture.
CaliSolar gets around this by isolating the impurities during manufacturing. The impurities can be channeled into the borders between crystals, Johnson said, which don't generate electricity anyway. The impurities can also be coaxed, through chemical and physical forces, to "float" to the top of a wafer, where they can be etched off. In other words, it nullifies the effect of the impurities by coming up with ways to ensure that the impurities aren't uniformly distributed.
The solar cells coming out of CaliSolar's labs are already roughly competitive with standard silicon solar cells in terms of efficiency, said Johnson, a former networking executive. If CaliSolar can mass manufacture solar cells with a 14 percent efficiency rating--which means that they will convert 14 percent of the sunlight that strikes them into electricity--these solar cells will cost far less than the 16 percent efficiency cells that are common on the market today.
"We are already making market-competitive solar cells" in CaliSolar's labs, he said.
CaliSolar, however, isn't selling its cells yet. It has delivered samples to potential customers and hopes to have a prototype plant built in the first quarter of 2008. Following that, it will build a mass production plant. (To get that bigger plant, however, it will also have to obtain about $30 million to $50 million in funding, which isn't as tough as it sounds these days.) The company conducts its silicon research in Berlin, but will likely build its mass-production solar plant in California, which will likely become the largest solar market in the world, Johnson said.
Silicon panels weigh a lot, so manufacturers want to build them near the customer base. CaliSolar will make silicon ingots, which get turned into wafers, and solar cells, but it does not plan to make solar panels. Instead, it will sell its solar cells to panel makers.
The technique of using impure silicon was invented by Eicke Weber, a former UC professor now at Germany's Frauhofer Institute.
The next solar panel could be a window.
Konarka Technologies and Air Products have received a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop a transparent, flexible solar panel that could be placed on a piece of glass or integrated into a window.
Konarka specializes in organic photovoltaics. These are complex molecules that can harvest portions of the infrared and visible light spectrum and turn the energy into sunlight. Organic photovoltaic panels don't last as long as silicon panels and 't aren't as efficient as silicon or other types of panels. But they can be transparent and flexible, allowing them to be placed unobtrusively on a lot of surfaces. Konarka also has an unobtrusive wire grid.
In the alliance, Konarka will work on the organic photovoltaics, while Air Products will try to tweak its conductive polymers (i.e. plastic that can conduct electricity) for this application.
If it works, it could be huge. But that's a big if. Konarka, which derived out of work conducted by Nobel prize winner Alan Heeger, has been around for years and raised $105 million in private investment funds. Unfortunately, it has also yet to have a breakthrough commercial application. Revenue mostly comes from grants and engineering services. The company recently got a new CEO.
Among other projects, it is also working on developing a polymer solar cell for recharging cell phones and other consumer electronics products. The idea is to integrate the solar cell. In February, Konarka investors said they hoped they would be able to announce an alliance for consumer electronics later this year.
The majority of the nearly 50,000 celebrants at the Burning Man counter-culture event have been re-adjusting for two weeks to the real world of running water, cubicles and commutes. With the week-long party in the Nevada desert in the rearview mirror, how green was the burn?
Supporters and critics of the festival of radical self-expression anticipated that this year's Green Man theme would set the ephemeral city apart from those of the past. Many hoped that Burning Man would clean up its act, show off promising clean technologies and set a fresh example for eco-friendly events. Others accused festival planners of hypocrisy, pandering to the green chic trend and corporate interests by inviting green tech companies to participate.
As a first-time Burner, I've finally shaken the playa dust from my shoes and mind to conclude that it was perhaps the most and the least eco-friendly mega-event I've attended. Tom Price, Burning Man's environmental director and one of four staff members charged with greening Black Rock City, acknowledged some of the contradictions.
"The idea of making a temporary city in the middle of nowhere is inherently unsustainable," he said. "That said, if we start from the assumption that the thing is inherently wasteful and consumptive, then it's that much more of a success when we're actually able to mitigate the impact."
Trash to treasure
Burning Man is a sand painting writ large, its map a mandala of controlled chaos. Any look at sustainability starts with its standing as the world's largest "leave no trace" event. No garbage cans are provided. Participants must remove from the premises any matter out of place, known as "MOOP," whether cigarette butts, boa feathers or even substances otherwise considered natural. I recall someone shouting a sunrise wake-up call from a megaphone that bodily fluids, too, should be considered MOOP.
Burning Man 2007: Green Man theme
Burning Man officials have been prowling the playa with GPS devices to identify camps that neglected their trash, ready to make public maps of shame. They'll be wiping the slate clean until mid-October. Before 1998, revelers simply bulldozed the trash into a pile, set it afire and left.
Anecdotal evidence from Price and veteran burners suggests that there was less MOOP left over this year than in prior years, despite record attendance. Figures detailing the use of water and other natural resources are expected to be compiled in the coming months.
This year recycling efforts expanded. Recycle Camp continued to collect cans, and the city took two trucks of bottles and cans to recycling centers in Reno. Burning Man donated 56 bundles of lumber to Habitat for Humanity in Reno, Nev., the largest donation received there, and up from 42 bundles in 2006.
Organizers also instituted composting. The staff commissary used cornstarch-based tableware and utensils. The San Francisco Department of the Environment provided 65 green curbside composting receptacles. All of that, along with teabags and coffee grounds from the center camp cafe, filled a 30-cubic-yard dumpster delivered to a facility in Reno that creates garden fertilizer. Last year, that material would have gone to a landfill.
Albertson's grocery store in Reno volunteered to accept recycling on Labor Day, when most trash facilities are closed, and pledged to use its recycling earnings to help schools pay for maintenance on solar arrays donated by festival participants.
Cooling the burn
Even if the trace of tens of thousands of pairs of footprints has disappeared from the Black Rock desert, how can something that climaxes with manmade fires lighting up the desert sky possibly be gentle to the earth?
Fire artists used thousands of gallons of propane. Most conspicuous, an exploding oil rig blasted a mushroom cloud 300 feet high into the sky. However, only 1 percent of the event's carbon footprint comes from all the burning and explosions, according to Price.
Some attendees suggested lighting the archetypal neon-laced, centerpiece Green Man sculpture with solar-powered LEDs or even soy-based candles, rather than burning it. Instead, "The Man" burned twice this year after a San Francisco performance artist set it on fire days early. Black Rock City took some heat for rebuilding the figure rather than leaving its ashes be.
"I mean, it was just some two by fours and plywood," said Price, countering such objections. "Come on. It visually looks substantive but there's not that much to it."
He emphasized that Forest Stewardship Council certified wood was used--and less than last year--decorated with paint containing low or no volatile organic compounds. The amount of power used to light the main pavilion was halved thanks to LEDs and compact fluorescent bulbs.
Although builders tried to find mercury-free neon, in the end they decided the toxicant was necessary, ironically, for the desired hue of green. Fireworks also continued as planned.
Perhaps even more dazzling than such manmade displays of light and heat were those created by nature that week, including a lunar eclipse and a luminous double rainbow.
Hoping to counter the "masculine energy" of Burning Man's heat and flames, a woman circulating center camp passed out fliers for Water Woman Festival, location yet unplanned.
Getting there and beyond
Reflecting the world beyond Black Rock, most people trekked there in gasoline-fueled cars. Transportation to and from Burning Man accounted for 87 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions, said Price. That includes air travel by individuals from far-flung locales as well as some 140 small airplanes landing on the city's temporary airstrip.
Mammoth RVs idling to run air conditioning were the most obvious, un-green sight, although I admittedly enjoyed the comfort of one on a stiflingly hot afternoon. Yet, there was also a fair share of hybrid sedans and veggie oil Mercedes station wagons. Ride-sharing posts were well-trafficked on Craigslist and Burning Man's Web site. A biodiesel-powered schoolbus escorted Burners to and from Reno.
And although fossil fuels powered most transportation from afar, most people pedaled pollution-free bicycles around Black Rock City. The city also provided 700 bikes, falling short of the goal of 1,000 because recovering from the Green Man's arson took so much time, said Price.
Power to the people
Black Rock City services used 11,000 gallons of fuel from a carbon-neutral, waste food-based biodiesel company in Minden, Nev., shifting 90 percent of the generating capacity away from fossil fuels. In addition, large theme camps like Opulent Temple networked and shared 150-kilowatt generators with other camps rather than using less efficient, smaller generators.
Burning Man goes green
to a fire-wielding sculpture.
The Alternative Energy Zone accounted for nearly 500 campers in 81 camps, continuing its tradition of promoting the use of renewable sources of energy.
However, most burners with electricity used gasoline for generators. To ensure that our dance party would last all Thursday night, for instance, my camp of almost 40 people required us each to bring at least five gallons.
The blazing desert sun and winds at 60 miles per hour provided obvious potential sources of energy and challenges for dozens of novel art exhibits large and small. Art cars, teepees, the Man, a flying saucer and countless exhibits were powered by solar panels.
With the grand Big Rig Jig sculpture of trucks welded together, the petroleum theme seemed poised to cartwheel across the desert. Unfortunately, most people missed the highly anticipated Mechabolic, a giant garbage-eating slug machine and demonstration of gasification that was still being built a few days before the weekend burn.
However, a big highlight was Peter Hudson's massive Homouroboros zoetrope, which combined solar panels and stationary bicycles to create an optical illusion of life-size monkeys swinging from branches. From a distance, it looks like a mushroom cloud. Hudson, who dreamed up the idea the before the Green Man theme was announced last year, explained the theme of his piece.
"The technology has gone so fast in the last 100 years, but we still make the same mistakes we've made for thousands of years," he said.
Closed to business
Before the event, controversy raged that Burning Man was selling out by inviting corporate participants to exhibit products. Such murmurs were largely silent on location. Placards at the Green Man pavilion were decidedly low key and text heavy, with some spelling out the ABCs of wind power, the promise of algae for biofuel, and so on--not quite the clean tech "world's fair" that some anticipated.
The Green Man pavilion ran into more than a few speed bumps. Displays were removed for several days after the man's premature burning. Blinding dust storms interrupted this writer's two trips there. The sight of dust-covered friends huddling beneath a clean technology booth, hair made into instant dredlocks from whipping winds (with goggles and masks little help) would have perfectly fit some warning poster about global warming.
About a dozen companies exhibited, a number that event officials would not confirm. Many companies invited to participate reportedly declined because they had to agree not to display logos or discuss business.
Among the logo-free products displayed was the prototype of an off-grid, solar-powered carport harnessing enough energy to power a home. Parked underneath was a model of a Tesla electric car.
"Burning Man would not be Burning Man if companies were allowed to market their services and products and use their brand," said Bob Noble, CEO of Envision Solar, maker of the Lifeport. "It would be a terrible distraction from the freedom and art and the noncommercial character."
Although he met people from several other renewable energy companies, Noble said he didn't even remember their names or collect business cards. "We didn't talk business. It was more technology, because that's what interests us."
Too many trinkets
Gifting is a core component of Burning Man culture. Many gifts fit the green bill, like natural fiber necklaces and organic lip gloss. I gave away vintage embroidered handkerchiefs spritzed with rosewater, pat on my self-righteous back. But the many plastic keychains, theme camp-branded cups, toxic glowsticks and even the odd USB drive felt more like MOOP.
Perhaps the most ecologically offensive "gift" at Burning Man were trinkets dropped into the porta potties, playing "Happy Birthday" MIDI tunes. Somebody had dropped musical geegaws, maybe birthday cards, into many commodes, thinking it funny that hapless facilities workers would have to later retrieve them.
Outside of Black Rock
It may be a never-never land where adults shed their everyday skins and, clad or not, flaunt their inner freaks, but Burning Man is not insulated from the outside world. Many participants aimed for people to take the greening theme to heart. Three eco-themed film festivals were held in addition to talks and workshops about sustainability that were too numerous to be counted on the official agenda. Onsite, the Earth Guardians group educated visitors about the Black Rock ecosystem. Offsite, some of Burning Man's 25 staff members have advised organizers of Coachella and other music festivals on waste-reduction strategies.
Black Rock City's donation consisted of enough solar arrays to supply nearby Gerlach and Lovelock, Nev., with the equivalent of several million dollars of electricity for the next couple of decades.
A loose collection of Burners without Borders has expanded notably in Chicago and Austin, Texas, volunteering to help low-income residents build and fix up homes. They have already helped to rebuild communities in regions devastated by Hurricane Katrina as well as by the 2004 tsunami in Thailand.
And Google's Burning Man Earth brings interactive exhibits of the playa to PCs around the planet.
Carbon neutral zone?
The Cooling Man project aims to make Black Rock a carbon-neutral city through encouraging individuals to buy offset credits that fund clean energy projects. About 650 tons have been donated so far--a pittance against the estimated 27,000 tons of carbon spewed by burners, but still more than double last year's 250 tons' worth. For example, the CoolingMan calculator estimated that I contributed about a quarter ton of greenhouse gases by showing up in a gasoline sedan.
David Shearer, the Burning Man science adviser who helped initiate Cooling Man, hopes that people will offset 1,500 tons of carbon this year. He is optimistic that in the next few years, the festival will begin building the cost of carbon offsets into the price of the ticket, adding another $10 to the minimum $185 cost.
With or without carbon offsets, every person is MOOP in the delicate Black Rock Desert. As others have said, the best way for Burning Man to leave no ecological impact would be for it not to take place.
Nevertheless, as far as events of its size go, Burning Man is a relatively solid citizen. How many real cities in which we live year-round leave such a slight footprint on any ecosystem?
Burning Man is a dystopia as much as a utopia. Cage matches inside the Thunderdome underscore its Mad Max undertones. Maybe there's no better place for the reality of the world's widening deserts and shrinking supplies of fresh water to hit home for office-dwelling urbanites. That tiny taste of resource deprivation made me unusually grateful for mundane creature comforts.
On the way home, I first saw green ground a few hours out of Gerlach, Nev., in a patch of sod outside of a Starbucks--normally something to scoff at. But I knelt to the ground and ran dry fingers through the damp grass, bliss for fingertips chapped by dust from the dead lake bed of the playa. That turf, like the experience of the "Burn," was out of place in the desert, yet so green.
Google has produced enough electricity from its headquarters in the last four days to watch about 251,073 hours of television on a flat screen.
The news comes from Google's site dedicated to letting folks know exactly how many kilowatt-hours its solar project is paying out.
Aerial view of the solar panels covering several of Google's buildings in Mountain View, Calif.
(Credit: Google)The search giant has covered the roofs of eight buildings and two carports at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters with solar panels in an effort to build the largest solar panel installation of any corporate campus in the U.S.
On Monday, the system was turned on and Google has been monitoring its success rate. The average seems to be about 10,000 kilowatt-hours per day, according to Google's solar graph.
That equals 8,347 coffee makers running for an hour, 6,257 dishwasher runs, 3,642 loads of laundry washed and dried, or 41,737 alarm clocks running for 24 hours, going by U.S. Department of Energy standards.
Google said it's producing enough electricity for each solar paneled building to cover about 30 percent of its demands.
Amid all the fermentation in the alternative-energy sector, the historic Pearl Brewery in San Antonio is poised to become a showcase for solar power.
And it'll be a big one, to boot. CPS Energy and renovator Silver Ventures want to turn the former brewery into the largest solar energy installation in Texas: a 200-kilowatt array of panels will crown a 67,000-square-foot warehouse that's being rehabbed for mixture of office, retail and residential use as the Full Goods Building. The project will provide approximately one-quarter of the building's total energy needs, according to CPS Energy, the municipal power utility in the central Texas city.
CPS Energy says it now has a renewable energy capacity that can handle 11 percent of its customers' peak energy needs. Its goal is to get to 15 percent by 2020, through sources including wind power and landfill gas.
Altogether, the solar power project--which will also serve as an educational facility for students and visitors--is expected to cost $1.35 million. The San Antonio Business Journal says the project is due to be completed in 2008.
The brewery was in operation from the 1880s to 2001. (Pearl Beer is apparently now brewed several hundred miles to the north in Fort Worth.) Overall, the facility covers 22 acres, and already houses some initial projects, including the Center for Foods of the Americas, a culinary institute that opened in March 2006.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Buying a solar panel should be like purchasing a refrigerator or hot tub, according to ReadySolar.
It should be a home product that comes ready to install in one box with simplified instructions so nearly anyone can install it. Hence the company's so-called "Solar in a Box" product it's pitching here at Launch: Silicon Valley.
(Credit:
Ready)
ReadySolar makes a modular, prefabricated solar-panel box. The aim is to bring down the cost of solar installation and components, according to Meredith McClintock, the company's founder and president. The company does that by building a proprietary chassis in which any kind of solar panel can go.
The Solar in a Box system will be sold directly to builders and can be installed by crane in several hours with less than a dozen parts. The company says the advantage will be that builders won't need a subcontractor specifically to install solar panels.
The typical solar system can cost between $9 and $11 per watt of power, or $30,000 and $60,000 for a new home. ReadySolar says it can bring the cost down to between $4.50 and $5.50 per watt.
Attempts to power hybrid cars with solar panels have been around for a few years. But now a company called Solar Electrical Vehicles is producing commercially available after-market panels for hybrids, starting with the Toyota Prius.
Get the sun to juice your hybrid car.
(Credit: Solar Electrical Systems)The fiberglass, molded panels fit on top of 2004-2007 Prius models. They are attached using an epoxy glue. Unlike previous attempts, these panels fit the curve of the roof.
To maximize your sun power and driving range, you need a larger battery installed than what comes standard with the Prius, according to company founder Greg Johanson, who says that battery storage is the most challenging aspect for solar-powered cars.
In terms of distance, the panels will get you up to 20 miles a day, depending on the size of the battery. They can improve fuel efficiency by up to 29 percent. The standard-equipped Prius battery, recharged by the sun, will take you about two miles at under 35 miles per hour.
Johansen said that because of tax credits, getting a 1 kilowatt solar electrical system on your home to charge your car can make better financial sense than getting a solar roof on your car. But that doesn't taking into account the cool factor.
"It is way cooler driving down the freeway and have people pulling up alongside and giving you a big thumbs up. It's hope for the future," he says.
Next up on their production plans is the hybrid Toyota Highlander and other SUVs.
Cool Earth Solar is banking on solar power priced more like a bicycle than a Mercedes.
The Livermore, Calif.-based company, which is still officially in stealth mode, has raised $750,000 in capital with a goal of raising a total of $950,000 to build a prototype, according to founder Eric Cummings. Announcements of board members and executives will be coming in June, he said.
Cummings has taken a radically inexpensive approach to solar power generation, taking into account land use issues as well.
His product design calls for hoisting several connected plastic balloons, referred to as "inflatable solar concentrators," to generate electricity on solar farms.
These balloon-shaped solar collectors (see presentation PDF file for diagram) use plastics to reflect light onto photovoltaic panels to generate power.
The technique of concentration is being actively pursued by several companies because it allows solar devices to squeeze more electricity from expensive solar cells.
Cool Earth Solar says its solar collectors, which are about two meters in diameter, will be cheaper than other concentrators because of the inexpensive plastic it will use to magnify light. Typically, concentrators use sophisticated lenses or polished aluminum.
Cummings envisions that these balloons will be cabled together above farmland and would be replaced every year. That's a radical notion in the solar industry where providers typically warranty panels for 20 or 25 years.
By placing the concentrators above farms and other rural areas, the sun can be put to work generating electricity at a large scale without taking up huge tracts of land, according to Cummings. The design calls for the PV "receiver" to be cooled by circulating water.
Cummings says that his "phase 2" design deployed at large-scale farms will be able to generate electricity at 29 cents per watt. That's far below the industry benchmark, usually measured at $5 to $7 per watt.
Cool Earth Solar, like many green technology companies, is trying out new ideas or recycling abandoned ones to build a business. (See stories on Planktos and Magenn Power for other examples of "out of the box" green tech thinking.)
As with many of these early stage companies, investors and potential buyers will be tracking how well Cool Earth Solar's cost-per-watt projections match with initial tests.
AUSTIN, Texas--If you can't get the sun to the solar cell, bring the cell to the sun.
That's one of the ideas behind SolBeam, a company that pitched to investors at the Clean Energy Venture Summit here on Tuesday.
The company, which is looking to raise $10 million, is trying to exploit the technique of concentrating sunlight to increase the electricity output of photovoltaic (PV) material. But it wants to break with traditional practices to lower power generation costs, said Daniel Colbert, the CEO of SolBeam who is also a venture capitalist at NGEN Partners.
Many large-scale concentrators place focusing lenses directly above photovoltaic material. These concentrators are typically mounted on poles or another structure so they can move during the course of the day to ensure maximum light intake.
SolBeam's design calls for decoupling the lens from the PV material. Another difference from typical concentrators is that SolBeam plans to have a flat panel.
The company envisions a few different configurations. After his presentation, Colbert described the basic design.
There will be a rectangular box that will hold the lenses that concentrate the light. Underneath that is an array that holds the photovoltaic material. To maximize the light on the array, there are two motors, or actuators, that move the PV to the optimal position, he said.
This mechanically controlled version will be the most cost-effective of SolBeam's anticipated products, delivering electricity at 15 cents per kilowatt, he said.
Other designs call for "steering" the light to hit the PV at the optimal angle.
The company has already received seed funding.
