When we hear about growing crops specifically to be used for biofuels, we get nervous. That's because many of those crops, including Miscanthus and Giant Reed, are invasive in the US.

The very characteristics that make a plant particularly useful as a source of biomass energy - rapid growth, competitiveness, tolerance of a wide range of climate conditions - are the same characteristics that make a plant a potentially highly invasive species.

Invasive plants, animals and insects are devastating our native wildlands across the country - they're the second highest cause of species loss after habitat destruction.

Indeed, they are synonymous with habitat destruction, because there's no habitat left once they take over.

Researchers estimate that nearly half the species listed as threatened or endangered are at risk, at least in part, because of invasive species.

In the East, we see massive vines like Asian Bittersweet and Honeysuckle suffocating and strangling our native trees, garlic mustard and mugwort covering the ground, and multiflora rose crowding out meadows. In Maine, you can't drive a mile without seeing Japanese Knotwood, the same is true for Kudzu in the south. Then there are the insects devastating forests coast to coast, and aquatic invasives like Common Reed and Eurasian milfiol suffocating wetlands and lakes.

Billions of dollars are spent each year to control the spread of invasive species in the US by federal and state agencies, and more often, even towns.

Numerous non-native and genetically modified species are being considered for use as biomass feedstocks, such as Miscanthus, which hails from Africa and Asia. It may seem like a good idea to get renewable energy from grasses grown on marginal lands not suitable for crops, but without proper precaution, the next big wave of invasive species could devastate native ecosystems.

"You can make money and a help native wildlife by growing native plants for bioenergy," says Steve Flick, board chair of the Show Me Energy Cooperative. "Missouri farmers are doing this right now as part of the Show Me Energy Cooperative, and it's a model that can work throughout the country."

In addition to using appropriate native species, such as Switchgrass, National Wildlife Federation recommends strong monitoring programs and policies, and encouraging ecosystem restoration to improve wildlife habitat through future bioenergy development.

Giant reed, for example, is being used right now in Florida. Introduced into North American agriculture nearly two centuries ago, it's a very fast growing grass that's a highly invasive nuisance in states from California to South Carolina. This water-hogging invasive species is near impossible to control, out-competes native plants, threatens wildlife, and strains local ecosystems and taxpayer wallets.

Rather than planting new, potentially invasive species, why not clear out the ones we already have and use that for bioenergy?

Read the report by the National Wildlife Federation, Growing Risk: Addressing the Invasive Potential of Bioenergy Feedstocks:

Website: www.nwf.org/News-and-Magazines/Media-Center/Reports/Archive/2012/04-04-12-Growing-Risk.aspx

Photo by jam343/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

by Kerry-Ann Adamson

We all know that Silicon Valley is the beating heart of the tech industry, with large corporations, tiny start-ups, entrepreneurs and the finance community all living, working and drinking coffee together. (This last bit isn’t a throw away reference to our increasing addiction to the black magic bean, but to an article I read in Harvard Business Review in 2010 which said that you are as likely to start up a conversation with a potential investor or tech start-up CEO in the local coffee shop as over a formal meeting in an office.) This melting pot of groups and interest is the key to the success of the Valley. The key players are all there breathing in the same idea.

Do we need a Silicon Valley of Smart Energy? And if so, will we see one emerge? I believe that yes, we do need one. By bringing all the actors together in an environment conducive to change, change happens. Smart Energy is stronger than the sum of its parts, but right now its parts are like hissing cats in a sack, as quick to fight each other as to work together to foster innovation. Just throwing them together won’t enable this change, but it should help them to understand the value of united action. Secondly, investors are still quick to run to the more traditional markets of the old energy paradigm and high tech. Investment in cleantech is still patchy and piecemeal with little evidence of a long term sustainable shift in focus to the Smart Energy sector. A focused geographical region that comprises all the elements of a thriving tech sector would help draw in investors and generate investment.

If the Smart Energy Valley appeared, where would it be? As a European it pains me to write this, but it’s unlikely to be Europe. Even though the European countries compose one of the biggest, if not the biggest, market for Smart Energy in the short to medium term, we are simply too institutionally risk-adverse to celebrate the successes, but critically also the failures, that a thriving Smart Energy Valley would need. Micro valleys (let’s call them “Corries,” from the old Scots word for a round hollow) are springing up all over Europe. These Silicon Corries though tend to promote a regional activity rather than a market. So even though they can be very successful in promoting growth in their regions, their impact on the overall market is limited.

Asia Pacific? More likely than Europe, but still an outlier. In energy at least the focus is still on regional growth and with the markets in Indonesia and China exploding this global focus is still, possibly, on the back burner. Here I could be wrong. If the Smart Energy Valley does appear in Asia Pacific it could well be in one of the younger countries – specifically Australia.

Africa or Latin America? Even with the massive surge in liberalisation of energy investment in Africa and the huge strides that Latin America is making to develop deploy Smart Energy technology, there is simply too much going against them for either to be a realistic candidate.

We are left with India, the Middle East, and North America. These are my front runners. I believe a Smart Energy Valley will emerge. Where will it be? In India, the Middle East or North America.

Did you ever wonder why advances in wind turbines seem to make them ever higher? A typical offshore wind turbine is some 479 feet high, about the height of a 20-story building.

The higher the wind turbine is, the better it can catch stronger winds. Wind turbines at ground level only have energy output of 20-25 percent, but that can double when they 600-1000 off the ground.

That's what Altareos Energies is working on - a turbine that floats in the air. And it's turbine will float higher than 1000 feet.

Altaeros says its first product reduces energy costs up to 65 percent by harnessing stronger winds at over 1,000 feet high. Installation time is shortened from weeks to days, it requires minimal maintenance, and there's virtually no environmental or noise impact.

This first turbine will displace expensive fuel used to power diesel generators at remote industrial, military, and village sites. In the long term, Altaeros plans to scale up the technology to reduce costs in the offshore wind market.

"For decades, wind turbines have required cranes and huge towers to lift a few hundred feet off the ground where winds can be slow and gusty," says Ben Glass, CEO. "We are excited to demonstrate that modern inflatable materials can lift wind turbines into more powerful winds almost everywhere - with a platform that is cost competitive and easy to setup from a shipping container."

A helium-filled, inflatable shell floats to higher altitudes where winds are more consistent and over five times stronger than those reached by traditional tower-mounted turbines. Strong tethers hold it steady and send electricity down to the ground.

The lifting technology is adapted from aerostats, industrial cousins of passenger blimps that for decades have lifted heavy communications and radar equipment into the air for long periods of time. Aerostats are rated to survive hurricane-level winds and have safety features that ensure a slow descent to the ground.

In December 2011, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released draft guidelines allowing the new class of airborne wind systems to be sited under existing regulation.

Altaeros Energies won the 2011 ConocoPhillips Energy Prize, and has received funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the California Energy Commission, and the Maine Technology Institute.

Magenn Power is another company developing high flying wind turbines.

Here's Altaeros Energies website:

Website: www.altaerosenergies.com/

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

by Susan Kraemer

Halotechnics, an early-stage solar-thermal startup and ARPA-E recipient, has developed two radical new materials for storing solar heat energy, using new kinds of salts and even a new kind of glass.

These allow much higher temperatures than have been used to date to store the heat in solar thermal power plants so they can produce power at night. This will greatly improve the efficiency and lower the costs for solar thermal power.

This is a first. While practically every other day we hear about efficiency innovations that will lower the costs of PV solar, this is a major innovation for solar thermal.

Unlike solar PV which makes electricity directly, solar thermal makes heat that runs turbines driven by steam. So, unlike solar PV, it has the potential for night time solar generation, because thermal is steam-turbine-driven energy, so it can store the days heat in molten salt solutions for tapping later as needed. This evening peak hours flexibility is its advantage over (now) cheaper PV.

Improving energy storage would reduce the cost per kilowatt-hour of the electricity produced by a solar-thermal plant, because the turbines and generators can produce power for more hours, more cheaply, if the temperatures can be kept high enough. Being able to store energy at higher temperatures is the key to cutting the costs of solar thermal, and that is what Halotechnics has pioneered.

“To hit that six-cent goal, or get close to it, you have to go to a higher-temperature system,” says Mark Mehos, manager of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Concentrated Solar Power program, in Golden, Colorado. ”The systems that are commercial today are limited to about 565 °C—that’s the molten salt tower plants,” says Mehos. “The tower and optics themselves can hit higher temperatures, but you’re limited by the salt temperature right now.”

Halotechnics was a spin-out from a chemical screening company Symyx (now a part of Accelrys). And that is key to its success, because to find the perfect material to allow the heat to be raised in solar energy storage, Halotechnics was able to comb through nearly 18,000 mixtures using this type of high-throughput chemical screening process. It was an ARPA-E grant recipient ($3.3 million) last year as a result.

“Without an amazing ability to screen samples, it’s an intractable problem. That’s what we’re trying to do with our high-throughput technique,” says Justin Raade, CEO of Halotechnics.

The materials they have devised, which include new mixtures of salts as well as new forms of molten glass materials, could be key to making solar-thermal power plants cheap and reliable enough to compete with fossil fuels on a large scale.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative has the goal of reducing solar costs to six cents per kilowatt-hour. Last year it gave the start-up a $1 million NREL subcontract with the goal of developing thermal energy storage that could operate at 700°C.

Halotechnics not only met but surpassed that 700°C goal: one of their new molten glass materials can work at temperatures up to 1,200 °C, says NREL’s Mehos.

According to MIT:

“This is a form of glass that melts at 400 °C (typical window glass melts at about 600 °C) and can operate up to 1,200 °C. It could be used to heat up air to drive a gas turbine, with the leftover heat used to drive a steam turbine, much as is done in a natural-gas combined-cycle plant. Such a system could be about 52 percent efficient using existing turbine designs. (Natural-gas combined-cycle plants can reach 60 percent efficiency, but the natural gas burns at temperatures higher than 1,200 °C.)”

Operating at such high temperatures, however, will bring engineering challenges, including finding relatively inexpensive materials to contain the extremely hot molten glass. Commercialization of this technology could be many years away.

Or perhaps its time to go searching through anouther 18,000 combos to devise that perfect material to build the container!

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica

Two more solar companies have filed for bankruptcy, Q-Cells and Solar Trust.

Q-Cells, once the largest solar cell maker in the world, helped usher in the solar industry in Germany. The company, which has been heaving under the weight of low-cost Chinese manufacturers for the last few years, and now severe subsidy cuts, says it will attempt to restructure.

At its peak in 2008, Q-Cell's stock reach $150 - now it's $0.16.

The company has been trying hard to reduce costs and diversify its business into project development and into both PV and thin-fillm solar cells.

The other company to go bankrupt is Solar Trust of America, the developer of the world's largest solar project, the 1,000 megawatt (MW) Blythe project in California.

When its parent company Solar Millennium, filed for bankruptcy in December, Solar Trust said it would continue. But with so many project development costs, it couldn't go on without funding from Solar Millennium.

Another casualty of very low solar PV prices, Blythe, which was originally planned as a solar concentrating plant, changed to a solar PV plant because prices were so much lower.

Solar Trust has some 2,000 MW of projects in advanced stages of permitting in California and Nevada. It's likely that a buyer will step in.

Last December, Solon, Germany's first publicly traded solar company, going public in 1998, filed for bankruptcy. Another early leader, Evergreen Solar, and SpectraWatt also filed last year.

Here are more details on Solar Trust and the Blythe project:

Website: www.solarindustrymag.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.10037

Photo by jinterwas/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

by Andrew

Waste Management management’s says the estimated $12.3 billion in revenue it collects from hauling some 112 million tons of trash to landfills could be worth more than $40 billion a year…if it were to be used as a source of electrical power, transportation fuel and source of specialty chemicals. The potential to more than triple total revenue has lead management to aggressively pursue opportunities in the waste-to-energy space, an effort that’s being lead by Organic Growth unit senior vice president Carl Rush, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.

Waste Management’s competitive advantage is that it effectively controls the US waste stream, which, given its size, already is a very sizable and lucrative asset. A host of present, interrelated trends is converging to drive the valuation of that asset much higher, however. Drives to increase global energy and resource efficiency, including cradle-to-grave product development, recycling and waste reduction, as well as transition from fossil fuels to clean energy resources and reduce greenhouse gas emissions are under way. Their convergence in the present time spells opportunity for established and aspiring waste industry participants across the value chain, a development Waste Management executives clearly recognize.

Waste Management’s Waste-to-Energy Drive

Waste Management since 2009 has invested in eight waste-2-energy-and-specialty chemicals companies that are employing a range of methods and technology to turn waste into energy, including ones that use gasification, fermentation and bio-digestion.

“We don’t think the future, long term, is going to be continuing to put everything in the landfill,” Rush told Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s going to be recovering more value from this material. The customers will demand it, the struggle for resources will demand it, and quite honestly, economically, it’s the thing we should be doing.”

Waste Management doesn’t have any particular expertise in developing in new waste-to-energy technology, or investing in companies that do, for that matter. To date, it has acted primarily as a silent investor in companies that are developing waste-2-energy technology, Credit Suisse Group analyst Hamzah Mazari told BloombergBusinessweek. That opens up potentially lucrative opportunities for those that are doing so, if they can develop and prove the type of waste-to-energy systems Waste Management is looking for.

Waste haulers aren’t the only types of businesses that see “green” in the waste industry. Willingly or unwillingly, power companies and utilities are also active in the waste-to-energy market space.

SSE Capitalizing on Waste-to-Energy Opportunities

UK utility SSE this week entered into a 50:50 joint venture with Wheelabrator Technologies to develop a 300-million-pound (~$480 million), 68-MW multi-fuel waste-to-energy-and-heat facility at SSE’s Ferrybridge power plant in West Yorkshire. With construction slated to begin late this year and end in early 2015, realizing the project will create hundreds of jobs during construction and more than 50 new full-time jobs when operational.

‘Multifuel technology is a tried and tested way of generating clean, base-load power. This new multifuel plant will provide additional diversity to SSE’s generation portfolio and make a useful contribution to ensuring we have reliable energy supplies for the future,” commented Paul Smith, SSE managing director of generation.

The SSE-Wheelabrator joint venture, Multifuel Energy Ltd (MFE), will own and operate the multi-fuel waste-to-energy facility, selling the electricity generated on to SSE. Hitachi Zosen Inova (HZI), which has successfully built other multi-fuel power plants, is carrying out the construction.

For the plant’s feedstock waste, MFE is turning to 3SE, another SSE joint venture, this one with Shanks Plc. SSE and 3SE have entered into a long-term fuel procurement contract that will provide processed waste-derived fuels for the Ferrybridge multi-fuel waste-to-energy plant using waste taken from nearby communities. To convert the waste collected into fuels “3SE intends to develop a new Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) and Anaerobic Digestion (AD) facility,” which is expected to be operational come 2015, according to SSE

Photo by Buck/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Cleantechnica

by John Gartner

The failure to reach the sales targets for the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf has led to considerable finger pointing about so-far disappointing attempts to mass market plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). PEVs have increasingly become fodder for politics as every misstep reinforces what opponents call their inevitable failure.

But the real problem was in the original lofty expectations for PEV penetration by both the auto makers and the government, which were unreachable given the cost of the vehicles. As we’ve said all long, the government’s projection of 1 million PEVs on US roads by 2015 was too aggressive given the short timeframe to get new vehicles to market and the nascent state of the technology . (You can listen to the reasons why in this recorded webinar.)

The automakers failed to consult their history and economics textbooks when projecting how many PEVs they could sell during the first few years of production. Hybrid vehicles are the closest recent precursors of today’s PEVs, and they didn’t sell in close to the numbers that auto manufacturers hoped to achieve.

The below chart shows the actual sales figures for hybrid sales in the US from 2000 to 2006, compared with the actual sales of PEVs in 2011 and then Pike Research’s projected sales through 2017. As we can see in the chart, during the first full year of US sales of the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight 9,350 hybrids were sold, while PEV sales in 2011 were near double that. When you consider that PEVs cost much more than a hybrid and require significant changes in consumer education and behavior (e.g.,understanding the charging of the vehicles), the PEV launch can be viewed as a relative success. Lest we forget, the US light duty vehicle market was actually smaller in 2011 (13.7 million) than it was during the 2000s, which makes the PEV launch that much more impressive.

Pike Research forecasts that during their respective first seven years on the market, PEVs will outsell hybrids (in the corresponding years of their launch) every year, and by a whopping 90 percent in total units sold throughout the seven year period. Despite a higher price tag (that must and will come down), PEVs have many advantage over the hybrids from more than a decade ago: Gasoline cost about half as much in the early 2000s as it does now, and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see $1.30 gas again. Thus, the potential for saving money by plugging-in is much greater than was switching to a hybrid during the previous decade.

- The twin motivators of national energy security (for both military and economic reasons) and reducing global greenhouse gas emissions are much stronger now for governments around the globe.
- The selection of vehicle models and number of automakers participating will be much greater for PEVs than it was for hybrids.
- PEVs have the potential to benefit the grid by helping to offset the variability of renewable energy generation, and business models that pay for that benefit will evolve.

All of these reasons add up to PEVs successfully taking hold in the market, while not reaching the stratospheric sales originally envisioned.

by Peter Asmus

The success record of smart grid renewables integration is a mixed bag, with European countries boldly plowing forward while many utilities in the United States exhibit what a former California state regulator called “electrotrophobia” – the fear of change linked to greater reliance upon intermittent renewable energy resources.

Massive amounts of new transmission lines will be necessary in the U.S. to access the best wind resources, yet the biggest buzz is about advances at the distribution level. The truth of the matter is that the integration of renewables is not a reliability issue, as these resources are integrated around the world at penetration rates 10 to 20 times higher than in the United States, without major catastrophes. It is really all a matter of costs to ratepayers and of reducing the environmental impacts of the current reliance upon natural gas fired generation — along with a massive build-out of new transmission infrastructure — to solve the integration problems. As renewable deployments increase, integration costs are expected to go way up (see Figure 1.1 below) – at least from the perspective of U.S. utilities.

In isolated cases, such as Denmark, real and rapid progress on smart grid renewables integration is already reality. While Europe (especially Germany and Spain) appears to be in the lead, the U.S. and Asia Pacific are also making big strides forward. Instead of integration costs going up with higher solar PV penetrations, smart grid experts in Germany suggest the opposite could occur with the right low-voltage distribution network technology, highlighting the lack of consensus on how increased renewables will impact utilities.

The synergy between smart grid and renewable energy seems intuitive, but where the rubber meets the road, much more validation needs to be done. Technologies have come a long way over the past five years. Today microgrids, demand response, and wind and solar forecasting technologies are all reaching commercial status. As a result, the tools on the grid side to better manage the variability of renewables are now increasingly available. These technologies will begin displacing the current reliance upon gas-fired generation at the transmission level over the next six years. This, in turn, will minimize the environmental impacts of grid integration of solar and wind, reinforcing the value of the smart grid.

On the renewables side, equal if not greater progress has been made with new and improved technology and innovative business models. The fact that state-of-the-art wind turbines and solar PV systems with sophisticated micro-inverters can self-provide many of the ancillary services that utilities and grid operators worry about speaks to how far this industry has come in responding to integration issues. Determining the business case for the integration of these renewables through the smart grid is, by necessity, a matter of speculation. Safe to say Pike Research believes the world will be a very different place six years from now.

San Diego-based Sapphire Energy, which is commercializing algae-based crude oil, raised the final tranche of its $144 million Series C investment round, bringing its total backing from private and public sources to over $300 million.

Sapphire is working on a commercial demonstration of a Green Crude Farm in Luna County, New Mexico, which it calls the world's first commercial demonstration scale algae-to-fuel facility for transportation.

The facility integrates the entire value chain of algae-based fuel, from cultivation to production to extraction of ready-to-refine Green Crude.

The company, which CEO Jason Pyle says started from an idea scribbled on the back of a napkin, makes fuel from photosynthetic microorganisms (algae and cyanobacteria), using sunlight and CO2 as their feedstock.

Sapphire is on Forbes "Most Promising Companies" list for 2011. Since 2007, it's been working on algae-based oil that can be refined into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

All previous investors participated along with Arrowpoint Partners, and an interesting addition, Monsanto, just voted Corporate Fool of the Year, among others.

Sapphire and Monsanto are working together to discover genes from algae that can be applied to agriculture.

Sapphire previously received $100 million from Bill Gates' venture capital firm, Cascade Investments, along with Welcome Trust, Venrock (Rockefeller Family), and ARCH Venture Partners, plus another $100 million in funding from the federal government.

Last month, Sapphire announced it will integrate Earthrise Nutritionals' spirulina strain into its inventory of cyanobacteria and algae strains to expand resources for algae-to-energy production.

In May 2011, Sapphire announced a multi-year agreement with The Linde Group to co-develop a low-cost system to deliver CO2 to commercial-scale, open-pond, algae-to-fuel cultivation systems, now underway at the Green Crude Farm.

Website: www.sapphireenergy.com/

Photo by Sapphire Energy

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

by Eric Woods

The success of the cleantech industry will ultimately be measured by two yardsticks. One, of course, is its ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deliver environmentally friendly and sustainable forms of energy. The other is its economic impact and its ability to generate new businesses and new jobs.

This second facet has become an increasingly important measure as the global economy struggles to recover from the economic downturn. My colleague Richard Martin has written about how this debate is evolving in terms of the industry as a whole and the likely impact on U.S. jobs.

A recent blog piece by Scott Nicholson, a data scientist at social media site LinkedIn, provides a different type of evidence for continued growth in cleantech jobs. LinkedIn was engaged by the White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) to help broaden the Council’s understanding of what’s happening in the U.S. jobs market as part of its annual Economic Report of the President.

LinkedIn currently has around 150 million members, but the study focused on U.S. members who have been part of the network since 2007 in order to avoid bias related to the rapid growth in membership in recent years. The study analyzed job movements of tens of millions of members between 2007 and 2011.

The analysis showed that the fastest-growing industry sector, based on members’ profile information, was Renewables and Environment at +49.2 percent, ahead of Internet (+24.6 percent) and Online Publishing (+24.3 percent). In comparison the fastest-shrinking industries included Newspapers (-28.4 percent), Retail (-15.5 percent), Building Materials (-14.2 percent), and Automotive (-12.8 percent). The study also looked at the volumes of job gains/losses by industry. Again Renewables showed one of the largest growth rates, alongside Internet, Hospitals & Healthcare, Health, Wellness & Fitness, Oil & Energy, and IT. Retail, Construction, Telecommunications, Banking and Automotive had the largest volume of job losses between 2007 and 2011.

The LinkedIn study is interesting in its own right – even if it can only give a very partial glimpse into what is happening in the jobs market. It’s also fascinating because it provides further evidence of how our connectedness in a global world is itself becoming an important means of understanding how the economy and our society are changing. That’s another reason why utilities, government and other organizations involved in the cleantech industry need to see social media as not only a communications platform but also a valuable source of insight in a complex world.

Photo by Nan Palmero/flickr/Creative Commons