July 2010 Archives
Jul 30 2010
Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:
Global warming is undeniable, according to the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA). NOAA’s annual “State of the Climate” report takes into account data from a variety of climate indicators. Some of the indicators, such as ocean heat content and temperature over land, are increasing. Others, such as sea ice cover and snow cover, are decreasing. The report also suggests that more than 90 percent of that heat trapped by greenhouses gases over the past 50 years has been absorbed into the oceans.
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson effectively told 10 groups challenging regulations based on the science behind global warming... you’re wrong. “Defenders of the status quo will try to slow our efforts to get America running on clean energy,” said Jackson. “A better solution would be to join the vast majority of the American people who want to see more green jobs, more clean energy innovation and an end to the oil addiction that pollutes our planet and jeopardizes our national security.”
A recent report claims big coal companies will dig into more than just mines to protect their business interests, preparing to spend big to defeat political candidates they consider “anti-coal.” New rules allow companies and labor unions not directly coordinated with politicians to set up political non-profit organizations that do not have campaign spending limits. They also do not have to report their political financial activities. One such group in West Virginia has identified three Democrats as “anti-coal” and is sending letters to companies asking for funding to support advertising that would “let their (the coal industry’s) voices be heard.”
The United Kingdom passed a law making it impossible for new coal-fired power plants to be constructed without the use of technology that captures and stores their carbon emissions. The British government also changed rules to encourage the biomass industry and announced that the first nuclear power station is expected to be built by 2018.
Jul 30 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
A catamaran made of 12,500 used plastic bottles completed a four-month, 8,000 nautical mile San Francisco-to-Sydney voyage across the Pacific Ocean to draw attention to plastic waste in the world's oceans and landfills. The six-man crew of the 60-foot "Plastiki" was led by David De Rothschild, a descendant of the Rothschild banking family and an adventurer and ecologist. He named the craft in honor of the original Kon-Tiki, a raft made from balsa wood, that launched a 4,300-mile Pacific voyage in 1947 by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, from South America to French Polynesia.
The long-awaited plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt will carry a sticker price of $41,000 before a federal tax credit pushes the cost down to $33,500. The Volt goes into production in September and will initially be sold in California, New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Texas, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The rival all-electric Nissan Leaf, which will also go on sale this year, starts at $33,000 before a $7,500 tax credit. General Motors says the Volt has an all-electric range of 40 miles before a small gasoline engine starts up to run a generator to power the electric motor for a total range of 340 miles. Nissan says the Leaf will run 100 miles on a battery charge. Both GM and Nissan will also offer leasing the cars.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), headquartered in oil-rich Abu Dhabi, has signed up 148 countries and the European Union to develop new energy supplies around the globe. Thirty-one nations -- Albania, Samoa and Mexico are the latest signatories -- have ratified the treaty that formed IRENA in 2009 to work for more bioenergy, geothermal, hydropower, and wave, solar and wind power resources. Most of the Middle East oil producers and U.S. have signed but not ratified the IRENA treaty, while Saudi Arabia, Canada, China, Russia and Venezuela have yet to join the group.
Jul 29 2010
Scientists, government agencies and ski resorts have been “seeding” clouds over land for more than half a century with silver iodide or dry ice to produce more rain or snow. Now controversial moves are afoot in
The concept—described previously on NEXT100—is akin to Energy Secretary Chu’s favorite idea to paint roofs and pavement white so they reflect the sun’s rays and cool the earth. Only this scheme would effectively paint the skies white over the ocean.
As first proposed by British meteorologist John Latham, fleets of special oceangoing ships would spew fine drops of seawater into the atmosphere, creating nuclei around which white clouds would form.
According to Latham, if these clouds reflected just 1.7 percent of incoming sunlight, the greenhouse effect would be offset for many years, giving the world time to find a more permanent solution.
A renowned Stanford-based climate scientist, Ken Caldeira, told me he thinks enough of the idea to give it a serious research boost. Caldeira and a colleague, who administer a chunk of research money donated by Bill Gates for the study of climate risks and “geoengineering,” recently donated $300,000 to a team led by Armand Neukermans, a serial technology entrepreneur and “Silicon Valley Inventor of the Year” in 2001, to test a novel design for a nozzle that won’t get gummed up by impurities in the ocean.
Neukermans knows a thing or two about fine nozzles, having managed HP Labs, which helped develop the technology in the company’s ink-jet printers.
The grant has aroused great controversy among groups opposed to global climate engineering, who fear that reckless scientists, mad billionaires or rogue regimes will destabilize the earth’s environment with their experiments.
Warns another Stanford energy policy expert, David Victor, "A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the Gates bank account could force a lot of geoengineering on his own."
But Caldeira emphasizes that he's only funding lab experiments, and believes field tests should await the “development of appropriate governance structures.”
What he hopes to settle in the lab is the question of whether spray technology can work at all in a harsh ocean environment. If not, he says, “all the attention to climate issues might be irrelevant.”
Caldeira just published a paper with two colleagues in Climate Dynamics, which suggests that ocean cloud seeding, unlike some other geoengineering proposals, might have the beneficial effect of increasing rainfall over land rather than causing droughts.
In fact, Caldeira speculates that local cloud seeding off the coast of Southern and
Caldeira cautions that his computer model is subject to error and, in any case, cloud seeding is no magic bullet. For one thing, even if it counteracts global warming, it will still leave the oceans more acidic as CO2 levels continue to rise. And if the atmosphere is pumped full of greenhouse gases, any breakdown of in cloud seeding could lead to quick and catastrophic warming.
Still, he says carefully, the idea “merits further investigation.” Who knows, between white roofs and white clouds, maybe we'll buy enough time for cooler heads to prevail in the critical climate policy debate.
Jul 28 2010
As a kid, I used to love poring over world almanacs, with their rich collections of lists, tables and facts on every subject imaginable, from baseball statistics to life expectancy by country.
OK, call me a nerd, but it’s with the same sense of discovery that I greet the publication every year of PG&E’s Corporate Responsibility Report—this year with the words “and Sustainability” added before “Report.”
It’s packed with information on the utility’s renewable energy contracts and investments, energy efficiency achievements, diversity and training programs, corporate governance issues and a host of other details.
Unusually well written (full disclosure: I contributed a few paragraphs, equal to about 0.001% of the total), the report is an invaluable compendium for those like me inside the company who need to lay their hands quickly on verified facts. As anyone who’s worked in a big organization knows, that’s no easy task.
This year’s report breaks new ground by adding a section on sustainability, an important but sometimes tenuous concept that “is more than the sum of caring for our environment, doing right by our employees, serving our customers and communities and delivering for our shareholders,” the report says. “‘Sustainability’ reflects the reality that PG&E’s environmental challenges and business challenges are increasingly intertwined, and that we can optimize our success by developing integrated and balanced solutions to these challenges.”
PG&E enhanced its focus on this issue last year by creating a new position, Chief Sustainability Officer, which reports to the Chairman and CEO of PG&E Corporation. This officer develops, coordinates and helps measure the ultimate success of PG&E’s sustainability strategy and initiatives.
The other big innovation is the incorporation of videos and slideshows into the online report.
The report’s first video features a customer, Eileen Tutt, who has driven a clean, quiet electric vehicle for the past nine years. She takes full advantage of PG&E’s little-known E-9 electric rate, which gives a big price break to those who charge their vehicles at night, when demand is low.
The video also shows the state-of-the-art solar-powered charging station in Vacaville, which was the subject of a previous NEXT100 posting.
Other videos feature PG&E’s energy training center in Stockton, which teaches people the basics of home weatherization and energy efficiency techniques; a discussion of the need for collaboration to achieve California’s renewable energy goals without harming endangered species or sensitive habitat; and a profile of PG&E’s daredevil-looking, but safe, helicopter-assisted maintenance techniques.
The report is not just a PR puff-piece. For example, it reports that although the company caused fewer serious environmental violations resulting in penalties last year, the total number of violations cited jumped from 12 in 2008 to 21 in 2009. The report says the utility “completed a Lean Six Sigma process improvement project” to analyze the root causes and “and apply systematic corrective actions to prevent reoccurrence.” PG&E is shooting this year for a violation rate less than half that of 2009, as one of several ambitious environmental sustainability goals.
Jul 27 2010
"If you care about addressing the climate issue…or about clean air…or putting the country on a path to energy independence…or about reviving investment and job creation…then you have to be revved up about the electric car," said Chris Johns, president of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) at the outset of today’s Plug-In 2010, an international conference centered on bringing electric vehicles (EVs) to market.
Automakers, electric car component manufacturers, utilities and drivers have converged upon San Jose to discuss all things relevant to electric cars. Industry movers and shakers are sharing information and sizing up the competition before EVs start arriving in American neighborhoods. By the time the conference opens next year, folks owning vehicles like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf should be quietly pulling into their driveways and garages.
Based on the high adoption rate of hybrid vehicles in the last few years, Johns predicted that the Bay Area alone will see somewhere between 220,000 and 845,000 vehicles "plugging in" over the next decade. That’s both exciting news for an electric utility, and a huge responsibility given that a single EV can suck as much power from the grid as three homes in San Francisco.
"At the end of the day, we’re the entity charged with making sure there’s enough clean, affordable power on the grid," Johns said. ". . . And, in our customers’ eyes, we’re responsible for the quality of their experience when they bring that new vehicle home and plug it in for the first time."
PG&E isn’t new to this challenge. The utility has been working to advance clean transportation for the last 20 years or so. The company currently operates the largest utility fleet of clean vehicles in America. It was the first utility to add a Smith all-electric bucket truck to its fleet, will be the first to add Raser Technologies’ all-electric extended range pickup trucks and is awaiting delivery of nearly a dozen Chevy Volts later this year.
For current EV owners, the utility offers a special pricing plan, which gives customers a steep discount in exchange for charging their cars during off-peak hours. Making sure that new owners charge at night will be critical to avoiding the need to build new power plants to meet their demand, Johns noted.
PG&E just began a pilot project with the Electric Power Research Institute that will allow the utility to better understand the infrastructure necessary to support the future of EVs. The program will allow PG&E to examine how long different vehicles take to charge and their impacts on the electric grid at different times of the day.
"The goal is to prove that this works at scale, that it functions seamlessly for the customer and that it’s secure," Johns said. "The pilot is running this year and next year, and we see it as a critical step that can help commercialize the new technologies needed to serve the mass EV market."
As Johns underscored, "there’s an entire ecosystem that has to develop in order to support electric vehicles." And the electric utility, like the gas station of old, is a critical part of it.
Jul 26 2010
Driven by the global warming clock, the promise of energy security and the lure of untold profits, investors are betting billions of dollars on the race to find the ideal alternative fuel for cars, buses and trucks.
The list of contestants is long and growing. Corn ethanol? Cellulosic ethanol? Biodiesel? Compressed natural gas? Liquefied natural gas? Octanol? Hydrogen? Electric?
Three researchers at Argonne National Laboratory suggest in a new report that the transporation fuel of the future might be propane, the same stuff used for heating and cooking in cabins and trailer homes.
To my surprise, they report that propane is already the biggest selling alternative fuel in the world, powering more than 13 million vehicles worldwide. In the
Propane has several virtues. It works well with only minor modifications to internal combustion engines. Although it has only 86 percent the energy content of gasoline, it has none of the range limitations of all-electric vehicles. It can be produced from ample supplies of domestic natural gas. And it’s nontoxic, noncarcinogenic and noncorrosive, according to the researchers.
The
Apparently ongoing research into applications of propane fuel is still being funded by the Propane Education and Research Act of 1996. Federal stimulus funds awarded by the Department of Energy last year will support a buildout of propane fueling infrastructure in 20 cities as part of a Clean Cities program. But the overall shortage of propane stations in the
The California Energy Commission calls propane “a low-emission, economic, and easily used fuel that can play an important role as an alternative, non-petroleum fuel for our state and the nation.” Everything hinges on whether the propane industry manages to change “can” to “will” in the near future. One thing’s for sure: the alternative fuels market can’t and won’t support more than one or two winners.
Jul 23 2010
Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:
United Nations officials believe a changing climate is to blame for massive food shortfall and looming famine in Africa's Sahel region. A UN representative is now requesting aid to help the region deal with multi-year droughts. Area harvests are failing, leading to rapidly rising food costs and diminishing incomes for millions of families. Long time ranchers and farmers are selling everything they have, and the region may not be able to recover for decades. The last major drought to hit the area stretched from 1972 to 1984, killing more than 100,000 people and putting 250,000 on international food aid for several years.
The heat is on in Eastern Europe and the former Russia. Recent reports say few there have air conditioning and millions are suffering due to record breaking heat. Many are drinking alcohol and taking ill-advised swims in the Moscow River. Officials report that nearly 1700 people in Moscow have drowned in June and July alone. Russian crops are taking a beating from the heat wave, with millions of acres of Russian wheat being destroyed. Wildfires are also taking their toll on the country. Forest fires have recently destroyed roughly 944,000 acres.
A group of climate scientists made their way into the news last year after leaked emails led to accusations that they cooked the books in an effort to prove that human activity is causing global warming. Since then, five separate independent investigations have cleared the scientists but the exonerations aren’t generating the same buzz as the scandal the media dubbed “Climategate,” and many fear the damage has already been done by helping opponents block global warming legislation.
Jul 23 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
Google Energy will buy 114 megawatts of wind energy from a wind farm in Iowa for 20 years at an undisclosed fixed rate beginning on July 30. The deal is the first for the Google subsidiary after it received federal approval earlier this year to trade clean power on wholesale power markets. The company says it will sell the electricity on the regional spot market for renewable energy certificates to offset Google's carbon emissions. The Iowa wind farm is owned by NextEra Energy Resources LLC.
London is launching a $177 million program to develop bicycle "superhighways" to connect 
central London with towns outside the city. Fully developed, it would be the world's second-largest urban cycle hire system after Paris. London Mayor Boris Johnson, Barclays bank and Transport for London have opened the first two pilot routes now drawing 5,000 cycle journeys daily and aiming for 27,000 trips a day by 2013. Highly visible blue cycle lanes will have safety mirrors at junctions, stop lines at traffic lights, segregated lanes, and realignment of traffic and bus lanes to create more space for cyclists. "You have got to have a powerful and visible statement on the roads that asserts to every Londoner, whether on two wheels or four, that the capital is a cycling city," says Johnson.
Shopping for a college with a sound environmental studies program? The 2011 Fiske Guide to Colleges reports its top 10 list for undergraduate environmental degree programs: Colby College (Maine), College of the Atlantic (Maine), UC-Davis, University of Colorado, Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), Eckerd College (Florida), Evergreen State College (Washington), University of North Carolina-Asheville, Tulane University (Louisiana), and University of Washington. Some of these colleges have appeared in other green college lists, including the Princeton Review, College Sustainability Report Card and Sierra magazine's Cool Schools list.
Jul 22 2010
It’s time again for “guess the country,” our quiz on energy developments around the world. See if you can match the news to the country (China, Germany, Kenya, Pakistan, South Korea):
A. This country’s renewable energy sector exports more than doubled in the first half of 2010, led by a doubling of foreign sales of solar products and a jump of 37 percent in sales of items for the wind power industry.
B. The U.S. Signature Energy Program in this country is financing two new hydropower projects to serve about 50,000 households and feasibility studies for a 50 MW wind farm, a biomass plant, an integrated Smart Grid in one of the nation’s leading cities, and solar photovoltaic installations at hundreds of schools.
C. Canadian Solar and Green City Energy have just completed a 1 MW solar installation in one of this country’s sunniest regions in record time—a mere two months of construction.
D. This country slashed power demand by 58 megawatts—the size of a major hydro plant—after replacing 1.1 million incandescent light bulbs with energy-saving lights at no cost to consumers.
E. Working with a leading foreign engineering company, this country installed the world’s first commercial ultrahigh voltage, direct current transmission line, a year ahead of schedule. The 800 kilovolt line can carry up to 7,200 megawatts of power from a giant hydroelectric plant to one of the country’s largest cities.
Answers: A - South Korea; B - Pakistan; C - Germany; D - Kenya; E - China.
Jul 21 2010
Graphene, a super-material discovered only six years ago at the
Consisting of a honeycomb of carbon atoms a mere one atom thick, it’s one of the strongest and stiffest substances known. Researchers are investigating its possible uses in an amazing variety of applications, including ultracompact integrated circuits, touchscreens, light-emitting diodes, ultra-high-capacity energy storage devices, and even the detection of microbes.
Within just the past few months, teams of scientists have published papers on the use of graphene in structural components for fuel-efficient, ultralight cars and aircraft, as super-small electrodes to measure electrical signals from single cells, to read the sequence of DNA molecules, to produce transistors with more than twice the switching speed of the fastest silicon devices, and to “dramatically improve the power and cycling stability” of lithium-ion batteries.
But here’s the rub: graphene won’t really qualify as a super-material until it becomes less super-hard to make.
The British and Russian researchers who first discovered graphene did so—I kid you not—by ripping layers of carbon atoms off blocks of graphite with Scotch tape. That doesn’t qualify as a high-volume production technique.
As late as 2008, according to Wikipedia, a sample the size of a human hair cost more than $1,000, making graphene one of the most expensive materials on the planet.
Since then, several companies have begun limited commercial production, but supplies are still hard to get. That’s why recent announcements of new production breakthroughs are as exciting as new discoveries about the material itself.
For example, a team at
Meanwhile, a dispersed group of researchers from
Finally, engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology last month announced a “simple, robust and reproducible technique” for creating conducting nanowires in graphene, a great advance in its use in electronics.
And to think it all started with a piece of Scotch tape.
Jul 20 2010
One of the hottest issues on the
Opponents of AB 32 call it a job killer and say
Acknowledging the “daunting challenges” posed by the economic recession and the state’s high unemployment rate, the 118 signers declare that “Delaying action now and waiting for the future before initiating accelerated action to reduce global warming gases will be more costly than initiating action now. Acting now is more likely to limit further environmental degradation, lower the cost of mitigation, and spur innovation in renewable energy and conservation technologies.”
And by reducing the burning of dirty fossil fuels, they add, “policies that reduce global warming pollution are likely to provide immediate benefits to the health and welfare of residents by reducing local pollutants.”
Signers include Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow at
Speaking to NEXT100, Borenstein said both sides of the AB 32 debate have overblown its impact on California jobs. The real importance of the law, he maintained, is to provide impetus for national action on climate change and ultimately for an international agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
A spokesperson for the Prop. 23 campaign, Anita Mangels, took issue with the economists. “"There may be some of the benefits in the long run," she said. "But in the beginning and in the interim, there is going to be a lot of collateral damage along the way."
But some well-publicized studies warning of big job losses from AB 32 haven’t fared well under close academic review. If the California Air Resources Board—which has authority to implement AB 32—pays close attention to achieving the law’s goals most cost-effectively, the impact should be manageable and the state should be well positioned to for growth in clean-tech industries.
If governments here and across the globe do nothing, on the other hand, the economic losses to California alone will likely run tens of billions of dollars a year, according to one study at the University of California.
That’s why support for AB 32 is coming not only from economists, but from Gov. Schwarzenegger, former Secretary of Treasury (and State) George Shultz, many business groups across the state and, yes, PG&E.
Jul 20 2010
On June 24, the California Public Utilities Commission issued guidelines to structure planning and reporting by the state’s investor-owned utilities on their coming deployment of Smart Grid infrastructure.
At PG&E, the guy who gets to develop the utility’s Smart Grid roadmap—a task I for one would much rather talk about than manage—is 29-year PG&E veteran Kevin Dasso. As senior director of electric strategy and regulation, he’s been the company's lead representative with regulatory agencies and policymakers on important issues for the transmission and distribution business, including major new reliability programs. He’s also been quietly co-leading PG&E’s initial Smart Grid planning. Now, to accompany his daunting responsibilities to meet the CPUC’s planning timetables, he gets a formal new title—Senior Director, Smart Grid and Technology Integration, reporting to PG&E's lead Smart Grid officer, Senior Vice President Edward Salas.
As readers of NEXT100 know, Smart Grid encompasses a wide range of communications, computing, sensing and control technologies that will work together to improve service reliability, lower customer costs and minimize the environmental impact of generating, distributing and using electrical power.
Since Smart Grid spans so much of the utility’s electric operations, that means Kevin will have to coordinate with a host of other business lines to get everyone on the same page with respect to our vision, priorities and deployment plans. To say the least, that's no easy task at a huge utility.
He’ll have to work especially closely with the information technology group, which plays a critical role in capturing and processing the tidal wave of data gathered by smart meters, distribution grid sensors, power storage devices, smart charging stations for electric vehicles and other Smart Grid components.
A critical role for the IT group—and a requirement set by the CPUC—is to ensure the security and privacy of Smart Grid communications and computing networks. It goes without saying that Smart Grid will attract its share of smart villains who will try either to break it or break in. Fortunately, PG&E can draw on a number of robust industry security standards to keep them at bay.
Last but not least, Kevin will have to make his best stab at answering the $64 billion question: How much will Smart Grid benefit customers?
A lot of industry boosters, from the U.S. Department of Energy to various utility associations, have no doubt that the benefits will be enormous. “The societal business case for grid modernization is compelling,” declares a report by the National Energy Technology Laboratory. “The benefits to society will be $638 to $802 billion. . . . While not free, the collective value of these grid modernization benefits far exceeds their cost.”
But a lot of consumer and regulatory groups aren’t so sure. The Maryland Public Service Commission recently shocked the utility industry by rejecting a proposal by Baltimore Gas and Electric to install smart meters, saying the company hadn’t proven the benefits to customers. The decision put at risk a $200 million award from DOE under the Smart Grid stimulus funding program. (BG&E has filed an application for a rehearing of its proposal.) And earlier this year,
California's PUC has long been scrupulous about requiring careful business-case justifications for utility investments; PG&E and the CPUC used independent experts to analyze the costs and benefits of the SmartMeter™ program in great detail before moving ahead with deployment in 2006.
So it’s no surprise that the commission has asked the utilities it regulates to prepare high-level cost estimates of the Smart Grid technologies and investments they expect to undertake over the next five years, as well as the many benefits, which include lower electric bills, increased reliability and improved compliance with the state’s mandates for greater use of renewable energy. The commission recognizes how tough this request may be given that many critical technology standards are not even settled.
“Putting all these pieces together—our vision and strategy, deployment roadmaps, security programs and estimates of costs and benefits—will be like doing a jigsaw puzzle,” Kevin told me. “The challenge is that the Smart Grid will evolve over time so we don’t yet know exactly what the picture looks like or even the shape of the individual pieces. But if we do it right, we'll have a chance to significantly improve the lives of our customers and lead our industry into the 21st century.”
Jul 19 2010
At the end of the day, the color that saves the environment may not be green, but white.
Last year, at a brainstorming symposium of Nobel laureates in London, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu recommended dealing with the world’s climate crisis by painting “white roofs everywhere.” (See update below.)
The idea—first explored by his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—would reflect enough of the sun’s energy back into space from white roofs and pavement to “be the equivalent of . . . reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars in the world [for] 11 years,” he said.
Now a Peruvian inventor is taking the idea to the next level—he wants to save Peru’s shrinking Andean glaciers by painting them white, too.
The visionary Eduardo Gold was one of 26 winners of a World Bank competition to honor the best “Ideas to Save the Planet” with seed grants of up to $200,000.
Even before the money comes through, he’s enlisted men from the
Gold said his aim is to increase the mountains surface reflectivity to decrease microclimate temperatures and reverse glacial melting. His other goal is to have the project qualify for carbon credits in order to finance future initiatives.
The locals are happy to help paint their mountain, since their water supply and pasture for their livestock depend on restoring the glacier.
“When I was around 15-20 years old, Chalon Sombrero was a big glacier, all white, then little by little it started to melt," said one supporter. “Forty years on and the river's never been lower, the nights are very cold and the days are unbearably hot. It wasn't like this when I was growing up... it was always bearable. So we're happy to see this project to paint the mountain.”
The World Bank reported last year that more than a fifth of
Update: Energy Secretary Chu today announced a series of initiatives "to more broadly implement cool roof technologies on DOE facilities and buildings across the federal government. Cool roofs use lighter-colored roofing surfaces or special coatings to reflect more of the sun's heat, helping improve building efficiency by reducing cooling costs and offsetting carbon emissions."
Jul 19 2010
Last week, San Francisco nonprofit Next 10 released a study showing that the electricity consumed by commercial buildings makes up a staggering 37 percent of California's total electricity consumption -- a ringing endorsement for telecommuting.
For all of California's green creds, it seems like commercial buildings may be our weak spot. In fact, according to Next 10, only 60 percent of all new commercial building construction meets California's own energy efficiency standards.
More than a few relatively simple retrofits could put us back on track. In fact, energy efficiency improvements could cut usage by 80 percent, according to the report.
Last week's study, upon digging a little deeper, was produced by Collaborative Economics, which also concluded in its annual Index of Silicon Valley for Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network that office vacancy rates in San Jose are at their highest since 1998 -- and were up 33 percent in 2009 over 2008.
As the study rated the various economic drivers for Silicon Valley -- foreign talent, investment capital, venture capital -- I began to wonder how energy efficiency would've been graded. Is the region a leader or a laggard, and how is that affecting its economic prospects?
Besides privately owned commercial buildings, many commercial buildings are owned by the State of California, which is in need of the savings projected in the Next 10 report. Plus, energy efficient buildings retain higher real estate value, command higher rents (six to seven percent) and maintain higher occupancy rates than less efficient buildings, according to the report.
The California Building Industry Association said it believes California's energy efficiency standards for new construction should apply to older developments as well. Indeed, the Next 10 report confirms that California has no energy efficiency standards for existing building stock, which it cites as a substantial opportunity for energy savings.
But, new commercial buildings are missing out on energy savings of their own.
With a minimal two percent increase in construction costs, new buildings can be designed to use one-third to one-half less energy than they use today. For example, the report notes that simply improving lighting technology could reduce energy usage by 20 percent.
While there is much opportunity, energy efficiency projects in commercial buildings also face serious challenges. The report goes on to suggest that such challenges can be overcome through actions taken at the federal, state and local levels that raise energy efficiency standards and support the broad application of high-efficiency products and practices.
Jul 16 2010
Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:
A group connected to the fossil fuel industry claims climate scientists and those who believe carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant have got it all wrong. The organization "CO2 is Green" is taking out advertisements urging people to call their senators and seek a vote against the cap-and-trade bill. "The bill is based on the false premise that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change," the ads say. But a spokesman for Clean Energy Works, a coalition of about 60 groups that want climate legislation, maintains the ads cannot be taken seriously. "This Big Oil front group wants people to think Congress is going to raise taxes, kill jobs, spill more oil, take our children and charge us for the pleasure," he said. Some climate scientists claim a limited amount of CO2 means increased plant growth but warn it will also lead to further unknown environmental damages and ocean acidification in addition to greenhouse warming.
A new study concludes protecting sea otters could become a viable strategy in the fight against global warming. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz found that by munching on sea urchins, the animals remove around 0.40 pounds of carbon from the atmosphere for every square meter of occupied coastal waters. In other words, if sea otters were restored to healthy populations along the coasts of North America they could collectively lock up 10 million tons of carbon, which is currently worth more than $700 million on the European carbon-trading market.
Last month was the warmest June on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). A new report released by the organization cites combined land and ocean surface temperatures as the basis for that claim. The report also claims this June yielded the lowest amount of arctic sea ice since record keeping began in 1979. Scientists, researchers and government leaders say they use NOAA’s monthly reports to help track trends in the world's climate.
Jul 16 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
Now that the 2010 FIFA World Cup has departed South Africa, so have those vuvuzelas that trumpeted a steady din at every soccer match. Where did they go? To the recycling world, reports PRW.com, which covers plastics news. The vuvuzelas -- 800,000 were sold in South Africa -- are likely to be recycled into plastic park benches and buckets. Many will be kept as souvenirs, of course, but those discarded will be collected for recycling before they enter landfill sites because the material is too valuable to waste, says a consultant for the Plastic Convertors Association. Cup winner Spain, however, may still be celebrating with its vuvuzelas.
Raceways are a new testing ground for the latest electric vehicle technology. Last Sunday, racers, designers and innovators put EVs and motorcycles through their paces before engineers and entrepreneurs, reports Earth2Tech on the REFUEL EV race and time trials at the Laguna Seca track near Monterey. Infineon Raceway north of San Francisco also put on the first zero-emissions motorcycle race in the U.S. in May, the Time Trial Xtreme Grand Prix U.S. Championship. With Tesla Motors' new electric roadster stirring a lot of interest among fans of performance cars, perhaps it won't be too long before the Indianapolis 500 launches an all-electric race at the old brickyard.
The big box IKEA chain is the first U.S. retailer to drop incandescent light bulbs from its U.S. stores, beginning August 1, and says it will be incandescent-free by next January 1 and ahead of federal legislation to phase out incandescent bulbs beginning in 2012. The company said compact fluorescent bulbs are the most popular bulb at IKEA and the chain also offers more expensive LED lamps, which are 70 percent more efficient than incandescent bulbs. The company says that beginning this fall it will also carry a halogen bulb to be used in a standard light socket.
Jul 14 2010
For the last week, temperatures in
But you’ve got to admit, the place is a natural for solar energy. In fact, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
More than a few big solar companies have already figured that out. In fact, the world’s largest producer of solar photovoltaic panels, First Solar, is based in
At today’s Intersolar conference in
As Barry Broome, president and CEO of the GPEC, ticked off the many subsidies (“incentives”) that Arizona offers solar, the strong university support for solar research, the state’s low costs, and the promise of speedy project permitting, I began to realize that
Broome boasted, “We will establish ourselves overwhelmingly as the national leader in this market.” That might prove to be hot air, but I don’t think government and industry officials in the
Besides more sun than it knows what to do with, Arizona has a long tradition of semiconductor manufacturing, dating back to Motorola’s operations in the 1950s. And
At least one solar developer, Tessera Solar North America, has said it plans to shift new jobs to Arizona because of the high cost of doing business in
But
A couple of weeks ago, one of Arizona’s two senators, Republican Jon Kyl, issued a report blasting the concentrating solar power industry—which focuses solar energy to run steam generators—for threatening to use too much of the state’s limited water supply. As one reporter noted, the report “stunned both the solar industry and policymakers” in the state.
Jul 14 2010
The good news first: Americans are paying less in gas taxes per 1,000 miles driven, and per $100 of income, than at anytime since 1929, according to USA Today. In fact, in inflation-adjusted dollars, gasoline taxes were more than twice as high in the early 1970s.
Now the bad news: There’s no free ride. Because gasoline taxes haven’t kept up, there’s not enough money to fix potholes and repave roads. And because gas taxes are so low, American drivers may be among the slowest in the world to adopt cleaner, more efficient electric vehicles as they begin hitting the market toward the end of this year.
The federal gas tax, only $18.4 cents a gallon, hasn’t increased since 1993. Inflation has whittled away its value. USA Today’s Dennis Cauchon notes that despite driving 7 percent more miles each year, Americans will be paying almost 20 percent less in federal, state and local gas taxes in 2010 than in 2000 (adjusting for inflation).
As those funds dwindle, don’t count on general taxes picking up the difference. Degraded roads and bridges will mean slower and bumpier rides, shorter lifespans for our vehicles, more risk of accidents and higher costs of doing business. Nonetheless, political support for an increase in gas taxes is slim.
Meanwhile, a new study by Pike Research shows that because U.S. fuel prices are among the lowest in the world—about half to a third those of other developed countries—the savings to drivers from switching to electric vehicles will be much lower here than in other markets. That’s true even accounting for the fact that gasoline and diesel cars in
Using a simple model for illustration, they calculated annual fuel savings of about $2,000 in
“Smaller annual savings means a longer time to pay back the premium that EV buyers are likely to pay,” a Pike analyst notes. “While many of the early EV owners will be thinking more about the environment (and showing off to their neighbors) than about their wallets when buying, a shorter payback period would help to convince consumers who are more price-sensitive to purchase an EV.”
Jul 14 2010
Here's another "eco" to add to your list of buzzwords about the Smart Grid, as demonstrated in GE's Ecomagination event in San Francisco yesterday: ecosystem. As in, it will take one to build the Smart Grid.
At the event, Vice President of GE Ecomagination Steve Fludder described the "eco" in GE's idea of Ecomagination as compelling eco-nomical solutions for customers with eco-logical benefits.
GE didn't just talk about these solutions yesterday. It announced plans to commit $200 million globally to accelerate power grid technology through open collaboration -- open collaboration by a community of players that make up a sort of Smart Grid ecosystem.
Players in this Smart Grid ecosystem span technology companies, energy utilities, venture capitalists and government agencies. Representatives from each of these areas participated in a panel discussion at yesterday's event about accelerating clean energy deployment. They covered topics from what technologies and power sources "count," to the roles of government and capitalism in deploying clean energy solutions, to models of deployment used by other countries.
When the topic turned to deployment, PG&E Corporation's CEO Peter Darbee said the company has deployed six million SmartMeters to date, with the goal of deploying 11 to 12 million total. PG&E's SmartMeter deployment lays down the necessary infrastructure for the Smart Grid ecosystem.
From here, technology companies can layer the infrastructure with additional offerings. Director of Energy Initiatives for Google Dan Reicher talked about how the Google PowerMeter allows customers to see their real-time energy use remotely. He indicated that this technology can even be used with GE's Nucleus Home Energy Monitor. Many others are working on this kind of software, such as Microsoft's Hohm, which is a free Web-based beta application.
Enter the venture capitalists that fund the Smart Grid technology companies. General Partner of Foundation Capital Paul Koontz discussed the amount of capital needed to bring forward proven technologies that are also scalable. The concept of scale, which is key to affordability and widespread deployment, also makes venture capital a requirement for many small, start-up companies.
Finally, government agencies such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)have a role in helping to ensure that innovators take enough risks to get technologies to the Smart Grid ecosystem. To that end, Director of ARPA-E Dr. Arun Majumdar explained that his agency provides hundreds of millions of dollars in grants every year. In fact, just yesterday, the agency announced 43 grants totaling $92 million for the grid.
Looking ahead, all panel participants agreed that electric vehicles could be a game changer for Smart Grid if we can acheive widespread adoption. It will take an ecosystem.
Jul 13 2010
The average person takes for granted that the lights go on when he or she flips the switch. But during the record-breaking heat wave that hit the East Coast earlier this month, as millions of people cranked up their air conditioners, it took some unheralded heroics to prevent overloaded circuits and widespread brownouts.
One of the key factors that kept lights on and air conditioners running was the steller performance of the region’s 26 nuclear power plants. On July 4, for example, 25 of the plants ran at full capacity, with the 26th at 94 percent capacity, according to figures tallied by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The Nuclear Energy Institute notes that 85 of the country’s 104 nuclear reactors ran at 100 percent of capacity that week and only two were offline altogether for refueling and maintenance work. Collectively, they generate more than 100,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve some 60 million Americans.
PG&E’s
Equally important to stabilizing the East Coast grid was the performance of demand side programs to moderate energy consumption. The wholesale grid operator PJM Interconnection called in its demand response contracts and at one point last Wednesday managed to lower electricity usage a total of 2,500 megawatts—the equivalent of more than two nuclear plants.
In addition to preventing grid overload, this demand reduction lowered the cost of electricity purchases, saving customers money throughout the entire region.
Jul 12 2010
Here’s another reason to support utility-scale solar energy, besides all the usual environment benefits: It will help balance the federal budget.
The best sites for capturing solar energy in the
BLM isn’t just giving away the public’s land to solar developers. It plans to charge them rent—high enough, in fact, to raise millions of dollars annually from larger projects.
The new rent schedule, which took effect last month, will charge developers anywhere from just under $16 an acre (
BLM also plans to charge annual capacity fees ranging from $5,256 to $7,884 per megawatt, depending on whether the project uses solar photovoltaic cells or solar-heated steam generators. (It takes roughly 10 acres to generate a megawatt of power.)
Compare that to the usual alternative—renting the land out to ranchers who graze cattle or sheep. BLM’s website says the agency charges ranchers all of $1.35 per cow per month for use of public lands. (The same money will buy you grazing rights to five sheep.)
The solar fees can add up to real money, much to the dismay of some developers. Energy Prospects estimates that Solar Millennium’s huge 484 MW solar thermal project in
BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah project in San Bernardino County, which will supply power to PG&E, will pay estimated fees of about $3 million a year.
BLM says it has about 23 million acres suitable for solar energy production and 200 project applications already in the hopper. If a significant number of those projects ever get built, the federal government could have a financial gusher on its hands.
Jul 09 2010
Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:
Temperatures on the Eastern Seaboard have soared above 100 degrees in recent days, wearing out air conditioners, stressing the electrical grid, and prompting the swift creation of cooling centers to give people some relief. People in other regions of the world are sweating as well as China, Central Canada and portions of the Middle East have all recorded heat waves as of late. "We can't say that one individual or even two heat waves are due to global warming," said David Easterling, a climatologist with NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. "But what we can say is that warming temperatures do increase the probability of a heat wave."
A recent Stanford University study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters claims targets set by policy makers to slow global warming are too soft to prevent future heat waves and extreme temperatures in the United States. The study goes on to predict that the trend will have an adverse affect on human health and agriculture. Climate experts cited in the study stated that moderately constraining global warming to above pre-industrial conditions may not be sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change. "In the next 30 years, we could see an increase in heat waves like the one now occurring in the eastern United States or the kind that swept across Europe in 2003 that caused tens of thousands of fatalities," said the lead author of the study.
Global warming may have an impact on crocs - the animals, not the shoes. According to a study done by Australian scientists, global warming could make it harder for crocodiles to find food and take refuge from predators. The scientists claim crocodiles are finding it more difficult to dive due to water temperature increases in the warmer months.
Jul 09 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
Employees planting tomatoes and squash on their break? Companies across the country are creating vegetable gardens, with employees taking home fresh produce, serving vegetables in the cafeteria, helping local food banks, and holding team-building activities in the gardens. Google and Yahoo in Silicon Valley put in gardens some time ago, and more companies are joining in. Kohl's department stores in Milwaukee provide vegetables from organic gardens for a food bank and a child care center. In New York, PepsiCo set up a large plot to grow peppers and tomatoes, while in Minneapolis a PR firm sponsored an employee garden and helped start a movement called Employee Sponsored gardens which have websites and information on other gardens.
Envision Solar, the leading U.S. developer of 1,000-square-foot solar carports generating energy from photovoltaic panels, aims to install solar canopies with charging stations for plug-in hybrids and electric cars. "Parking lots are this wasteland -- they're the last thing that gets attention," says Robert Noble, an architect specializing in sustainable design and founder of San Diego-based Envision Solar. "Here's a market the size of Alpha Centuri that's never been tapped." The company is working on a pilot project with the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab and also working with Coulomb Technologies, developer of charging stations.
More shareholders this year voted for proxy proposals encouraging U.S. companies to lower greenhouse gas emissions and improve disclosure of their carbon footprints, according to a survey by Ceres, an activist investor group. Of 42 climate-related resolutions voted on at 2010 shareholder meetings, 16 received 30 percent or more of the vote, compared with 6 of 28 that got that level of support in 2009. On average, the resolutions received 24.6 percent of shareholder votes, up from 21.7 percent in 009. "If our portfolio companies are to provide long-term shareholder value, they need to be proactive, not reactive, in addressing climate change and other ESG (environmental, social and governance) matters," says Jack Ehnes, CEO of No. 2 U.S. pension fund California State Teachers Retirement system.
Jul 08 2010
Market researchers are great synthesizers, but sometimes you have to take their claims with a few grains of salt. A perfect case in point is a recent report by Frost & Sullivan, which declares that “the market potential for the wave (power) industry is about $1 trillion worldwide.”
Given that the current size of the commercial wave industry is roughly zero dollars, that’s a bold estimate to say the least. It appears to be based not on commercial realities, but on an extrapolation of the physical energy potentially extractable from the world’s oceans, which the report summary estimates at up to 6 million gigawatt-hours per year. (That's about equal to the energy in all the oil consumed worldwide in 2006.)
Frost & Sullivan’s news release goes on to say, with breaktaking confidence, that “ocean (wave and tidal) technology is much more reliable and predictable than other kinds of renewable energies, such as wind or solar. Coupled with vast worldwide resources . . . ocean energy may be the key to answer the world's escalating energy needs.”
More reliable than wind or solar? Hardly. As the news release admits farther down, “The extremely harsh weather conditions of the ocean require the technology to be very robust. Pelamis Wave Power has halted its 2.5 MW wave farm in
Or consider this news item from GreenTechMedia last month:
The prospect of extracting nearly unlimited renewable energy from the tides suffered a blow this month when OpenHydro announced it would pull its experimental underwater turbine from the
When I queried the Frost & Sullivan analyst by email, it turned out that what he really meant was that ocean energy, not technology, is more reliably available than wind or solar energy. That’s a rather big difference.
Fortunately, the ocean power industry is making progress despite inevitable setbacks. As noted in NEXT100, PG&E is promoting pilot testing of new technology off the California coast through its WaveConnect™ program. And in
As the Frost & Sullivan study rightly notes, in contrast to its optimistic flights of rhetoric, “The future of wave and tidal energy depends heavily on financial funding from public, private, and government entities. Deployment of wave and tidal technology will not be easily achievable due to large initial installation cost.” And even once the technology is proven, challenges will remain of moving to the next phase of commercialization.
All that said, unlocking the power of ocean waves and tides is a goal well worth pursuing. The energy potential is staggering and the resource lies near population centers that need it. Above all, ocean power is clean and renewable. So let’s go for it—with determination, not hype.
Jul 07 2010
Unlike frogs in a pot of boiling water, humankind has no place to jump as the earth warms. We have no choice but to find a way to turn down the greenhouse thermostat until we can phase out fossil fuels in favor of clean, renewable energy sources.
One widely discussed option is to capture the CO2 from utility and industrial flues, pipe it to a remote location, and pump it deep underground for permanent storage. Pilot projects suggest the approach can work, at least in limited scale. But critics complain about the potentially high cost, danger of leakage and the possibility of insufficient underground storage capacity.
But what if CO2 could instead be converted chemically and stored in the form of cement, liquid fuels, or other valuable materials? That could be a win for the environment and a win for the economy—if the energy required for the recycling process doesn’t defeat the purpose.
The U.S. Department of Energy yesterday announced grants to support six promising projects for converting CO2 into marketable chemicals, including substitutes for Portland cement and even methane gas, using a variety of novel catalysts and chemical reactants.
But similar research is already underway in a wide variety of laboratories:
- Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology announced a “breakthrough” method to convert CO2 into methanol—a valuable chemical feedstock and liquid fuel that can power relatively clean vehicles—at room temperature.
- A chemist at Newcastle University announced the discovery of an aluminum-based catalyst that slashes the energy needed to turn CO2 into organic compounds called cyclic carbonates, with many industrial applications, including gasoline additives. These applications could use up to 30 million tons of CO2 annually in the
- At the University of Illinois, an engineering project team is developing a novel membrane to separate CO2 from power plant flue gases, then take waste heat from the plant to convert CO2 cost-effectively into methane, methanol or carbon monoxide. “The energy produced from the fuel cell using any one of these three fuels could then be used to supply additional electricity to the power plant, thereby creating a near zero-loss power cycle,” the team notes.
- Many researchers are also exploring the use of bioenegineered algae to absorb carbon dioxide and produce molecules that can in turn be synthesized into biofuels. So far their success has been limited. Another promising biological process, pioneered by a UCLA engineer, is the use of genetically modified bacteria to produce liquid isobutanol fuel from CO2.
Exciting as these announcements appear to be, it’s worth heeding the words of John Sheehan, former head of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (now defunct) algae research program.
“There aren’t any silver bullets,” he said. “The energy problem is the most fundamental, most difficult challenge we have faced for a long time. After 150 years of punching a hole in the ground and getting fuel to come out as a liquid, it is not going to be easy.”
Jul 06 2010
While legions of engineers and scientists pursue high-tech breakthroughs in clean energy, a small investment in low-tech stoves might buy the world precious years in the fight against global warming.
That’s one message that can be drawn from a new study by two
Their work lends powerful support to a study published in Nature Geoscience in 2008, which fingered black carbon as the second most potent source of global warming, behind only carbon dioxide. It blamed carbon soot for half the total increase in Arctic temperatures from 1890 to 2007.
One major source of black carbon is the burning of wood and cow dung for cooking by poor households in
Inefficient burning has a host of health and environmental consequences in addition to global warming. According to UC Berkeley energy expert Daniel Kammen,
Half the world's population of nearly six billion people prepare their food and heat their homes with coal and the traditional biomass fuels of dung, crop residues, wood and charcoal. . . . In rural areas, women and children may spend several hours a day collecting wood for cooking or making charcoal, tasks that contribute to deforestation and soil erosion. Worse, the choking smoke from indoor wood fires causes respiratory disease--mainly pneumonia--which is the leading health hazard in developing nations and annually kills four to five million children worldwide.
Fortunately, international development organizations and NGOs are working to promote widespread adoption of more efficient stove designs to cut down on the use of fuel and, as a byproduct, reduce soot output.
Kammen notes that traditional open fires, used by millions of rural homes, direct only 10 percent of their heat to cooking. A metal stove may be at most twice as efficient. In contrast, a high-efficiency stove like the Kenya Ceramic Jiko, which adds an insulating liner, is up to 40 percent efficient—dramatically reducing fuel use and household costs. In mass production, the stove costs a mere $2.
Many efficient stove designs now exist, but one size doesn't fit all. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who developed the noted Berkeley-Darfur Stove, discovered when asked to create a stove for
Just as there’s no single solution for stove designs, so there’s no single solution for global warming. Attacking the problem will take high tech, low tech, marketing, sociology and even anthropology. But helping desperately poor people find healthier, cheaper and more environmentally benign ways to cook sounds like a great place to start.
Jul 02 2010
Several stories on the science and politics of global warming caught our attention this week:
Representatives from some of the world’s biggest polluting countries gathered in Rome to talk about ways they can curb their emissions. The meetings come as part of periodic negotiations of the Major Economies Forum, a group created last year by the United States to prod along the slow-moving U.N. negotiations on a global climate change agreement by bringing together leaders of 17 key countries in a private, relaxed setting. The talks have been expanded to include five more countries, including Bangladesh and Ethiopia, who could be severely affected by droughts and floods brought on by global warming.
Thirteen of the 14 leading climate scientists believe the earth’s climate is in grave danger. A study done by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows climate experts predict the Earth will hit a “tipping point” before 2200 in which global warming’s effects would become imminent. "Even if we manage to turn things around and dramatically reduce emissions or concentrations over the next couple of centuries, most of the experts still think there is some modest probability that ... once stressed, certain processes will be started on a course that's not reversible," said Granger Morgan, an expert in risk analysis who heads Carnegie Mellon University's department of engineering and public policy. "That's somewhat troubling."
Ancient redwood trees may help climate scientists understand what global warming is doing to some of California’s forests. Over the next three years, researchers funded by Save the Redwoods League in San Francisco, are climbing immense redwoods and sequoias at 13 locations as part of a $2.5 million project. Their goal is to see how the trees respond to changes in temperature and rainfall, along with a reduction in fog; a trend they claim is already is under way. The study's locations extend from the remote corners of Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park near the Oregon border to Big Basin in Santa Cruz County to the groves of Sequoia National Park in the central Sierra Nevada.
Jul 02 2010
Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy and the environment caught our attention this week:
San Francisco start-up SunRun Inc., the leading U.S. provider of home solar financing, has raised $55 million from investors led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, one of the largest rounds for a solar leasing firm and a sign that solar developers are eyeing expansion beyond California, the New York Times Green blog reports. The investment follows a $100 million tax equity project to fund SunRun's solar installations by Pacific Energy Capital II, LLC, a non-utility subsidiary of PG&E Corporation. "We're seeing early signs of an inflection point in the market where the cost of offering a solar solution is becoming cheaper than utility pricing," said Warren Hogarth, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "We're moving from people buying solar because it's a nice thing to do to buying solar because it makes economic sense."
The investment drum was also pounding this week with shares of electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. surging more than 40 percent on its initial public offering of stock on the Nasdaq exchange. Tesla's closing share price of $23.89 pegged its market capitalization at $2.22 billion on its first day of trading. So far, Tesla has sold more than 1,000 of its $109,000 electric Roadster and plans to introduce a $50,000 four-door electric sedan for sale in 2012. But Tesla may run into stiff competition from Nissan's electric car, the Leaf, priced at $25,000 after tax credits, and the $35,000 Chevy Volt to go on sale by the end of this year. Tesla doesn't expect to see a profit for at least two years.
Electric cars may turn up en masse in Paris next year if Mayor Bertrand Delanoe can launch a car-sharing program available at 1,000 locations in the city and suburbs. The plan, said to be the largest in the world since Amsterdam scrubbed a car-share project in the 1980s, would offer 3,000 plug-in vehicles. Four companies are bidding to run the program, and the French automaker Renault may offer its first electric cars, the Fluence Z.E. and Kangoo Express Z.E. models expected to go into production next year.
