Tag Archives: innovation

PG&E is first utility client for Mainspring’s novel ‘linear generator’ | GreenBiz

Mainspring technicians workl the assembly line to build linear generators.

Mainspring Energy was founded in 2010 by a trio of Stanford Ph.D.s, born not out of the university’s legendary coding schools but rather from its thermodynamics lab. Back at a time when the startup world was growing wary of cleantech, the team targeted a tough task: to drive down emissions by reinventing one of the grid’s most fundamental technologies. 

Their target? The nearly 200-year-old design of the electric generator. Where practically all mechanical generators spin in a circle, relying on rotating magnets to generate current, Mainspring engineered a design that moves back and forth in a line. 

It’s a simple physical reorientation with potentially dramatic impact. The resulting “linear generator” delivers efficiencies that co-founder and chief executive Shannon Miller says produce electricity more cleanly, at a lower cost and more flexibly than can a multi-billion-dollar market of incumbents, including turbines, reciprocating engines and fuel cells.

And after a decade of development, the Menlo Park (Calif.) firm’s linear generator is scaling into commercial production at a time of sharply growing demand for flexible options that can support the grid sustainably. “Extreme weather events and the rise of electrification are driving increasing demands on the electric grid for affordable resiliency,” Miller said. “At the same time, we need to be moving rapidly toward a net-zero-carbon grid.” 

A utility milestone

Following a handful of corporate and institutional deployments beginning in 2020, Mainspring’s first utility project was announced this week in Angwin, California. 

The town is a crucial node on Pacific Gas & Electric’s network in Napa County, a microgrid distribution point where a generator is positioned to stabilize the daily ebbs and flows of power, as well as to supply downstream customers if transmission into the area goes down. And during California’s epic drought and record wildfire season, that’s been happening more often, as PG&E resorts to public safety power shutoff (PSPS) events to avoid sparking new fires.  

Occupying a footprint about the size of a parking space, the 240-kilowatt linear generator will initially run in tandem with a conventional diesel reciprocating engine, while PG&E commissions the unit. Multiple Mainspring units can be paired to increase output. In time, Miller expects the linear generator to take over fully, as it does things the diesel cannot.

For example, thanks to precise power electronics, the Mainspring unit can ramp up and down almost instantaneously, to better match microsecond grid fluctuations. And as renewables multiply, power supplies are growing more variable and less stable overall, so increased responsiveness is good for the grid. 

And its low emissions should be good for nearby communities. As utilities have increased their reliance on portable diesel generators to stabilize the grid, rising air pollution is hitting nearby populations, often in disadvantaged communities. 

Compared with the nearby diesel engine, Mainspring’s generator cuts nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions by more than 90 percent and lowers particulate pollutants proportionately. Fueled by biogas, it emits virtually no carbon. And in the future, the unit can run on practically any gaseous fuel, Miller said, including emerging zero-carbon fuels such as renewable propane or green hydrogen.  

The Mainspring linear generator’s core assembly.

How it works

Mainspring’s performance edge arises from the architecture of its design, combined with the benefits of its state-of-the-art power electronics, an area of technology that, thanks to the scaling of renewables, has advanced rapidly during Mainspring’s decade of development. “Those systems allow us to do all the control, to achieve fuel flexibility, dispatchability and efficiency,” Miller said.

Physically, the design reorients familiar elements of an electric generator — magnets moving through loops of copper wire. Rather than spinning in circular motion like most generators, in Mainspring’s design, the magnets slide to and fro along a horizontal axis with precision that varies by less than the width of a piece of paper.

When a mix of fuel and air enters the central reaction zone, it is not combusted. Rather, via a low-temperature reaction, pressure directly converts thermochemical energy into motion which pushes two pistons — Mainspring calls them oscillators — outward from the center. 

Power is produced as magnets mounted on the oscillators pass through copper coils embedded in the shell.

When the oscillators reach the limit of their travel, they compress air at the far end of the cylinder, creating a spring-like pressure that rebounds them back toward the center, generating more power on the return journey.

With only two moving parts, Mainspring’s design can generate more power per unit of fuel than other mechanical generators. Miller said. At the same time, its simplicity incurs lower maintenance and material costs. Unlike turbines or engines, its innovative air bearing system needs no oil or routine parts replacement. And unlike fuel cells, no costly catalysts need be replaced. 

By operating at relatively low heat, the design virtually eliminates NOx emissions and other harmful byproducts of combustion. Taken together, the design advances “can deliver the high efficiency and low emissions of fuel cells with the low cost and dispatchability of engines and microturbines,” Miller said. 

Mainspring linear generator at a test site (not the PG&E implementation).

Financing growth

This bundle of advantages has attracted a wave of blue chip investors. In May, Mainspring capped a Series D round of $95 million, led by Fine Structure Ventures (previously Devonshire Investors), the private equity firm affiliated with Fidelity Investments’ parent company FMR, along with support from 40 North Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures and Princeville Capital. 

The D round brings to $228 million the total raised by the startup to date, building on earlier commitments from Khosla Ventures in Round A and Bill Gates in Round B. The Series C included a mix of strategic energy industry partners: AEP, Centrica, ClearSky Power & Technology and Equinor. 

In March, Mainspring announced a partnership with U.S. utility and renewables giant NextEra Energy — the world’s largest private-sector generator of renewable energy. 

Via its business services arm NextEra Energy Resources, the deal commits $150 million to help Mainspring’s customers buy, finance and deploy the new generators, principally via arrangements like power purchase agreements (PPAs), where customers need not buy the asset outright and can instead pay recurring fees. 

NextEra also offers the startup a strong partner with which to scale up green hydrogen. In July 2020, NextEra announced a pilot green hydrogen project with Florida Power & Light. For Mainspring, NextEra’s expertise in deploying emerging renewables into the grid offers a leg up and a fast track to partner with new clients. “Our strategy is find partners that understand where the grid is going and can really help us scale,” said Miller.  

Mainspring’s two publicly disclosed customers, PG&E and Kroger, both opted for PPA-style financing via NextEra. For Kroger, the deal offered a way to improve the reliability of energy supply at one of its Los Angeles-area stores, while cutting costs and lowering emissions — all with minimal upfront commitment.  ​​

“We’re not spending capital on this. That’s for other companies to do. We’re not maintaining it. That’s for other companies to do,” said Denis George, energy manager at The Kroger Co. “That puts us on a very equivalent basis to buying power from the utility.” 

The grocer is facing an increasingly common bind: the squeeze of rising costs for grid-supplied electricity along with pressure to cut emissions from onsite power sources. 

“We’ve already done practically everything we can on efficiency,” George said. The linear generator helps Kroger improve sustainability by moving towards its enterprise-wide goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent.

Reliability vs. climate 

Kroger’s priorities mirror those of a growing number of big energy users for whom decarbonization goals are running up against the challenges of climate change and grid instability. 

Along with California, much of the west is in a similar predicament, as rising temperatures are driving electricity demand, just as drought is diminishing hydropower output and fire is threatening major transmission lines. 

The pressure is pushing governments, utilities and companies alike to boost spending on backup power, even when it may not meet green goals. In July, despite supporting some of the nation’s most ambitious decarbonization targets, California’s governor declared an emergency, a move that permitted rapid deployment of fossil-fueled backup solutions and sped the rollout of new clean energy projects. 

The following month, the state energy commission OK’d five temporary gas-fired generators to reduce blackout risks. As GreenBiz’s Sarah Golden noted in her weekly newsletter, “[California] officials are faced with the difficult choice of alleviating suffering today or curbing catastrophe tomorrow.” 

Mainspring offers a way to meet both priorities. Near term, it can responsively generate low-emissions, affordable energy. And into the future, its fuel flexibility enables it to handle tomorrow’s clean fuels, Miller said. Compared with a decade ago, “The tailwinds for us keep getting stronger.”

Originally published at Greenbiz.com: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/pge-first-utility-client-mainsprings-novel-linear-generator

Jigar Shah Is Making the DOE’s loans office mighty again. Here’s how | GreenBiz

By Adam Aston

Maybe you first knew him as chief executive of the Carbon War Room or as the co-founder of Generate Capital. Or maybe you came across him as a LinkedIn mega-influencerGreenBiz contributor or even as a former co-host of The Energy Gang podcast — he’s the one with the ready laugh and the sharp takes.

Chances are, you already know Jigar Shah. He’s spent the past two decades making a compelling case for the climate-fixing, profit-generating potential of clean energy, all the while batting down ill-informed skeptics and bad business models.

Now, as part of the Biden administration’s effort to jump-start economy-wide decarbonization, Shah has been granted more capital — and a bigger platform — than he might ever have thought possible. 

The total: $46 billion, according to Shah. That’s the lending capacity he can mobilize at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which he was appointed to oversee in March. 

To make the “once-mighty” office — as his boss, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, put it — mighty again, Shah faces big challenges. The office has been all but dormant for much of the past decade, due in part to Trump-era deprioritization but also hampered by a lingering reputation for bureaucratic dysfunction. 

Barely three months into his new role, Shah joined this week’s VERGE Electrify virtual event to kick off the conference and share his plans to get the loans flowing once again, in a keynote conversation with GreenBiz Group’s Senior Transportation Analyst Katie Fehrenbacher, who co-chaired the event. 

Re-booting the LPO. Following a decade of dormancy, the office has moved into a fast-forward mode, fueled by Biden’s climate agenda and Shah’s contacts — he’s reached out to over 100 CEOs since he joined. “People are starting to realize that we’re open for business,” he said. “If we got maybe three applications all of last year, we’ve gotten three a week recently. That comes from people trusting the program will be there for them.” 

A catalytic role. Deep as LPO’s loan pool may be, Shah sees his office’s role as narrowly targeted — providing catalytic funding at a key stage, before companies are able to access commercial debt. Consider the example of nuclear energy innovators such as OkloNuScale or Holtect. “Small modular reactors are going to be built across the country,” said Shah. But they’re not likely to be able to raise commercial debt until the technology is de-risked. Shah sees LPO’s role as building a bridge to bankability: “Then, we’re done.”

Streamlining the process. By pushing an easier, more user-friendly approach, Shah is tackling head-on the office’s lingering reputation for being too costly, too complex and too long-odds. “We’ve dropped all the application fees,” he said. “And we don’t charge any of the other fees that we used to until you’ve received the loan and started to draw it down.”

Energizing climate justice. Shah sees a space where the LPO has the potential to both modernize the grid and benefit historically disenfranchised communities. Virtual power plants offer an opportunity to advance grid-scale energy services while helping cities and communities upgrade energy infrastructure and cut energy costs. That could mean building solar with storage on low-income housing or affordably financing grid-responsive smart air conditioners or water heaters. Models such as these promise to “not only get essential appliances affordably into the hands of people who need them,” said Shah, “you’re also able to get higher utilization rates from the existing distribution infrastructure.” 

Swings at bat. To the vexing question of how to pick winners from among emerging technologies, Shah brings the perspective of a seasoned climate tech entrepreneur. “We have to take a lot of swings at bat,” said Shah, “and we are going to have misses.” But misses — with a nod to the failure of Solyndra, a Obama-era solar startup — can be offset by towering successes, such as Tesla, to which the DOE lent $465 million in 2010, a moment when the then-nascent EV maker was far closer to failure than world domination. Today, it’s the world’s most valuable carmaker and has sparked a competitive race to electrify the automotive industry. “That’s what the president has talked about,” said Shah. “We want to make sure from a technology standpoint, we’re leading the pack worldwide.”

Tips for loan candidates. “Don’t be scared! Come in early,” advised Shah. To be sure: There will be many forms, but Shah’s team is working to ensure that the process is easier to navigate than before. Over the past month, the office has added more than 10 people to escort applicants through the loan process. “We want every person who thinks they have a good idea that deserves funding to have a shot.”

If you’re one of those people, the initial review process takes six weeks, typically. Once qualified, getting the approval stage takes four to five months of diligence.

By that timeline, Shah’s office will announce the first batch of new loans under the Biden administration by autumn, if not sooner. 

Published May 28, 2021 at https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-jigar-shah-sees-making-energy-departments-loans-office-mighty-again.

HOW GREENER cities are leading the way | GreenBiz

Convergence is often be intangible. The technologies of data, communications, buildings and transportation are rapidly merging, steadily enhancing one another in subtle ways. But convergence can also be tangibly real. For instance, humanity is inexorably concentrating in cities, enabled by many of those invisible technologies.

Discussions of the interplay of these trends — invisible technology and visible cities — took center stage Wednesday at GreenBiz’s VERGE conference in Washington, D.C. Private and public sector leaders mapped out the scale of these dynamics, offering examples of how technologies are evolving to serve the ongoing conglomeration of we humans.

Starting a few years ago, homo sapiens officially become an urban species. Home to over half the world’s population, cities are scaling so fast that by 2050, roughly 70 percent of the global head count will live in urban areas. Compared with the developed West, where most of the population is already urbanized, practically all the growth in the coming decade will happen in the developing world, especially in China and Africa, explained Manish Bapna, Interim President of the World Resources Institute.

Bigger cities are only half the story, though. Urbanization is inextricably linked to income growth, Bapna explained. So while there are roughly 1.8 billion people in the middle class worldwide today, another three billion will join their ranks in the next 20 years. “The pressure this places on resources — water, electricity, food, fuel, and so on — will be unprecedented,” he said.

The scale of these needs, as well as the size of urban markets, are driving corporate strategy to focus new services and products offerings on cities, explained Daryl Dulaney, President and CEO of Siemens Industry. Last March, to tap this potential, Siemens reorganized key operations, totaling $23 billion in revenues, into a new unit called Infrastructure & Cities.

Cities are dense ecosystems that foster innovation and connectedness, and do so with great efficiency, Dulaney said. Pointing to ambitious urban sustainability programs in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, he said, “I like working with cities. Mayors are focused on getting things done. Politics comes second.”

It’s a similar story in China. Despite Beijing’s reputation for powerful central leadership, WRI found that city mayors were more responsive to efforts to upgrade energy and environmental practices. “The demographic pressure is front and center. Plus, mayors have a lot of authority in China, and they care about seeing their cities succeed,” said Bapna.

By that measure, the mayors of Tsingtao, China, and Philadelphia have much in common. Both see greening their cities as a competitive imperative. Tsingtao’s mayor wants the city to be the most economically attractive in China, and he knows that means he has to attract the best. To do so, he wants to be the greenest city possible.

Philadelphia is rebounding from an era when the City of Brotherly Love had a larger population than today. That’s left the city with amble infrastructure, but a challenge to maintain and optimize it. Green programs can do so, while also making the city more livable, said Alex Dews, Policy and Program Manager in the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability of the City of Philadelphia.

Public-private partnerships are playing a crucial roll in the effort, Dews explained. The city is working with The Dow Chemical Co. on an initiative to test the advantages of installing white roofs on homes.

During hot summer months, bright white roofs are substantially cooler that conventional black tar roofs. The Coolest Block program is re-coating roofs using Dow products and tracking the long-term performance of the converted homes to tally up the benefit. “We look for solutions that are beneficial to government, the public and business,” said Dews.

In another example, Philadelphia has seen recycling rates more than triple in neighborhoods where it rolled out Recycling Rewards, a collaboration with RecycleBank. Philadelphia’s program tracks household recycling by weight, using a system of barcoded bins.

Households earn rewards based on the overall performance of their neighborhoods — the more everyone in a neighborhood recycles, the more each house in that area is awarded at an online account. Credits can be redeemed through RecycleBanks’s network of affiliated brands, ranging from T-Mobile to Subway.

Getting the messaging right took time, Dews explained. Initially there was an epidemic of bin theft. Residents believed that credit was being awarded house-by-house, rather than as a neighborhood average. The city benefits by lowering the volume of waste it sends to dumps.

Looking ahead, cities will remain hotbeds of sustainability innovation. Rising affluence and growing populations will only boost the need for greener ways to house, feed, and care for urban populations.

For cities that are pioneering green programs, the challenge is maturing green efforts, Dews said. The next priority is to deepen pilot environmental programs so that they are institutionalized in city policy.

While much of Philadelphia’s sustainability work has been linked to Mayor Michael Nutter, said Dews, the next step is to make those shifts permanent, so that practices carry over to future administrations, as well as other cities.

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View the original article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/03/15/why-cities-are-leading-way-green-efforts

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple | GreenBiz

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple

In my green lexicon, “gamification” gets a special prize: it’s among the clunkiest words to enter the sustainability conversation, yet may just have some of the greatest potential to alter the behavior of consumers, employees and households.

Businesses are fast picking up on the promise. Gamification has unique synergy with green behaviors, with a knack for turning virtuous green actions — such as carpooling or switching to CFLs — from worthy but kinda joyless chores into tasks that earn rewards, gain recognition, and can turn ambivalent consumers into eager eco evangelists.

As part of Social Media Week‘s sprawling, 12-city lollapalooza of digital media events, the New York series included a panel entitled “Gamification: Combining Social Media & Game Mechanics to Promote Sustainability” that I caught late last week.

The panel brought together two recently sprouted startups with two established green brands.

Practically Green and The Mutual are both building businesses predicated on the power of gamification to alter green behavior, attract advertisers, and help organizations spur change.

Joining them were two groundbreaking companies, each born from innovative new approaches to recycling,Recyclebank and TerraCycle, each of which is increasingly using gamification to extend its reach.

Here’s a quick run down of how these companies talked about how gamification is changing their businesses.

A Social Media Approach to Greener Behaviors

Practically Green helps organizations become greener by using technology and social networking to educate, motivate and reward people for making green changes to their work and home life.

Conceived in 2009, founder Susan Hunt Stevens took her inspiration for the Boston-based company from LEED, the exhaustive guide to designing and building greener buildings.

But instead of LEED’s focus on building insulation or low-flow faucets, Stevens’ approach tallies up over 400 green behaviors, from commuting by bike to buying local produce.

Speaking on the panel, Stevens described the program as “LEED meets Weight Watchers,” for its blend of points and behavioral reinforcement through peer groups.

One of the challenges with sustainability, Stevens said, is that communicating how and why to do it is tricky. “The content can be technically complex. Some of it is political for some folks. And much of it is preachy.” Gamification breaks down the complexity into small, learnable steps, and depoliticizes the issue, she added.

Working with large organizations including NBC Universal, Eileen Fisher and the Seattle Mariners, Practically Green customizes workplace programs where staff sign in, and register their green behaviors, earning points and badges along the way.

For companies looking at ambitious sustainability programs, Stevens said, the program offers a easy-to-deploy, web-based solution that can quickly speed up employee involvement with green programs. This, by the way, is one way Practically Green earns revenue: charging a dollar or so per month per employee to companies it engages with.

(For more, Practically Green’s Stevens spoke with Chrissy Coughlin for Nature of Business Radio here at GreenBiz last September.)

‘Groupon for Good’

Not yet a year old, The Mutual is a Brooklyn-based startup that has been called “The Groupon for good.”

To join, a member picks a pledge level — say $10 per month — and a charity to steer the donations towards: options include think tanks such as World Resources Institute, conservationists such as Oceana, and climate groups like Carbonfun.org.

The Mutual, in turn, relays four-fifths of the donation to your charity, and uses the remainder — a share that’s on par, or less, than the take of a typical charity fundraiser for overhead — to grow its network of members and business partners.

Members, in turn, are rewarded with perks from business members looking to connect with a big pool of green-minded consumers.

For example, using FourSquare, I checked into a recent Mutual event at Brooklyn Brewery, and thereby qualified for a contest, discounts at the brewery, and earned points online at themutual.com.

“I describe us as a social enterprise that rewards people for donating to charity with Perks from great brands,” said founder and CEO Dan Vallejo.

The startup is scaling fast, with the bulk of early participants from the Bay Area, New York and Boston.

Green Gamification’s Greatest Success Story

Now eight years old, Recyclebank offers one of the best known success stories in the power of green gamification.

Recyclebank’s original business — and still its core offering — is an ingenious system that rewards household recycling. It does so by tracking and identifying how much recycling a given household is putting out on the curb.

In around 300 cities in the U.S. and U.K., public garbage trucks automatically weigh recycling bins, use radio tags to identify which home the material came from, and records the transaction to a web site. Consumers can then track the volume of their recycling online.

That’s all well and good, but the real carrot is the points that the recycling earns for the household. The more a home recycles, the more points they earn.

Consumers can convert those points with a network of scores of well known brands that participate in the tracking program, offering perks that can be redeemed for products and services from the likes of WalMart, Coca Cola to Procter & Gamble, to Bed Bath & Beyond.

The model has proved scalable and increasingly adaptable. Cities like it because it boosts recycling rates, which lowers their landfill costs since more trash is diverted to reuse. Consumers, and especially households where kids get highly involved, like the rewards scheme. And the marketing partners are on board for access to consumers who have proven be top quality prospects, with a high likelihood of redeeming the perks, using the products, and spending more.

That was just the beginning though. In recent years, as Samantha Skey, Recyclebank’s chief revenue officer, told attendees, Recyclebank is proving its business model works for more than just recycling.

The company is expanding its business model, marketing partnerships, and web technology to extend to many other frontiers of green behavior, such as e-waste recycling, responsible junk disposal, and energy reduction.

Growing from Worm Poop to Packaging Reuse

TerraCycle, the Newark, N.J. based brand has evolved into a $20 million-a-year operation, since it was founded in 2001 by Princeton University dropout Tom Szasky.

In a few short years, the company has pivoted but not abandoned its original focus on “worm poop” fertilizer — the innovative organic plant food, packed in recycled bottle, that was brewed from worm-rich compost piles — towards a broader focus on packaging reduction and reuse.

Partnering with schools and numerous major consumer packaged good companies, TerraCycle is capturing both pre- and post-consumer packaging waste to upcycle it: such as converting Capri sun bags into satchels, pencil cases, and other merchandise.

What’s the gamification angle here? Albe Zakes, TerraCycle’s global vice president, media relations, explained: Since TerraCycle’s community skews heavily towards kids and moms, a teachable-game fit the bill.

Partnering with Manhattan-based Guerillapps, TerraCycle developed Trash Tycoon. Played in Facebook, players earn points, and privileges by cleaning up a small town, and building sustainable businesses from the trash. It works like a mash-up between SimCity and Farmville, but with a decidedly green wrinkles. Treehugger.com, for instance, provides real-time news feeds of eco-current events that appear in the game.

Customized to help kids learn about waste and recycling, Zakes explained the game is being customized so that virtual activity mirrors and reinforces the real-world efforts of its classroom brigades, the groups of school kids who raise funds — and compete with other class groups — by recycling packaging materials.

Balancing Real and Virtual to Boost Sustainability

Threading through the discussion was a concern that converting virtual do-gooderism into real world action is a challenge. The panelists acknowledged that there’s a risk that they may be able to induce a player to click a mouse — say, to “like” a green action, or to win a badge — but may not be able to actually spur that person to do the deed.

In Practically Green, Stevens explained, finding the mix of virtual incentives and balancing them against real world programs in the workplace is as much art than science. What’s more, she said, the workplace is a powerful arena in which to educate and stimulate such behaviors, because many people are driven more by peer perception in work environments than they are in their private lives.

This spurs competitive behaviors and, interestingly, lowers the risk of false claims where folks claim to have completed a green task, such as recycling their office paper: “Their friends and colleagues know, and they notice, and will call out their friends if they’re cheating,” explained Stevens.

For TerraCycle, which built its business in part from the fabric of social dynamics at schools, Zakes explained its game actually complements and extends an existing foundation of existing actions.

Still, at the splash screen of the game, there’s this encouragement: “Trash Tycoon is great, but make sure to get outside and collect some actual recycleables once in a while.”

Held in collaboration with Baruch College’s Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity at the City University of New York (CUNY), the panel was curated by Ashok Kamal (a graduate of Ziklin’s MBA program) who co-founded Bennu, which provides social media marketing for green businesses.

For a broader look at the origins and breadth of gamification, check out Kamal’s overview of the gamification phenomenon here in GreenBiz.

Last but not least, you can watch a video of the full panel presentation from Social Media Week through the group’s website. Scroll to the very bottom of the page, where you’ll find two video links. The lower of the two is the first 90 minutes, including the four company presentations. The video above that is the final half hour, comprised mostly of Q&A.

Joystick photo via Shutterstock.

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Read the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/22/green-gamification-takes-root-big-apple

Venture capital investment in cleantech shrank by 4.5% in 2011 | GreenBiz

Why Sinking Cleantech Investment Data Aren't the End of the World

In cleantech, as in most realms of emerging technology, venture capital acts as a sort of incubator for the youngest, most promising technologies. That’s why it’s a cause for concern when venture capital investment slows or shrinks.That’s just what happened last year. In 2011, venture capital investment in early-stage cleantech companies fell by 4.5 percent, to $4.9 billion, compared with the 2010 tally, according to a round-up of full-year data by Ernst & Young published Feb. 1, based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource.Whether this downtick is cause for concern is open to argument. The question links to hot-button issues being debated in Congress, on the campaign trail, and in the media. I, for one, believe that given the headwinds facing cleantech, the numbers are cause for optimism. They’re good news, but I wish they were better.figure 1To make my half-full case, note that cleantech venture capital investment has been resilient despite both economic and political headwinds. Last year’s funding remains 29 percent higher than its 2009 total, when overall venture flows crashed in the wake of the global financial crisis.

What’s more, cleantech is nurtured by other streams of capital. As I reported last month, global investment in mature renewable energy technologies — new wind farms, solar panels, and the like — expanded by 5 percent, to $260 billion last year. That rise helped put total investment in renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid and related technologies over the trillion dollar mark last year.

Still, I’m a worrier. And there are reasons to furrow my brow at these numbers.

However promising cleantech may be, venture capitalists are finding more alluring options in other sectors. Cleantech’s decline comes despite a 10 percent rise of overall venture capital investment. Globally, for the year, investors placed $32.6 billion into 3,209 venture deals, according to Dow Jones Venture Source.

So while cleantech retreated, investment in healthcare and IT startups remained roughly steady. The big winner? Consumer information services — think Twitter, LivingSocial and Zynga — pulled in $5.2 billion, up 23 percent from the prior year.

But before I complain any further that clean technology shouldn’t be losing out to Twitter, let alone Facebook, here’s a bit more on what went down in cleantech over the past year.

• Battery technology is hot. Energy storage continues to attract interest, and growing flows of money. Venture investment in batteries rocketed up by 253 percent. And this is bound to accelerate. Growing volumes of electric vehicles, plus the graduation of wind and solar from emerging-tech status to mature technology, are all driving demand for energy storage, in a dizzying array of niches.

And while some segments of battery manufacturing are mature — increasingly subject to the sorts of commodity price dynamics driving down prices of solar PV — there is arguably bigger potential for scientific discovery to upend today’s batteries.

• Investment is tilting towards more mature plays. Cleantech companies already generating revenue garnered 69 percent of the funding, up from 50 percent in 2010.

• M&A exits dominate. Given the parlous state of IPO offerings, mergers & acquisitions continue to be the main path to maturity for cleantech players. In 2011, a total of $2.9 billion in M&A deals involved cleantech startups, some 79 deals, according to Ernst & Young’s analysis.

• IPO drought lingers. Just five companies IPO’d in 2011, not many more than the three that listed a year prior. Biofuels dominated last year’s public debuts, with Solazyme, Gevo, and KiOR. Intermolecular, a semiconductor R&D company focused on cleantech listed in the final quarter, as did Rentech, a clean energy solutions provider. The five raised a total of $688 million.

The low count of IPOs for cleantech is an indicator of a growing backlog and is one reason why new cleantech investment may be slowing. Without a clear line to exit, venture funders will steer their money to sectors where it’s easier to cash out.

Thus, Facebook. Good things may yet come of Facebook’s super-hyped IPO. Perhaps it will improve the atmospherics around cleantech IPOs?

But on balance I find the din disheartening. The very big IPOs by Twitter et al. smack of hype. To emphasize my point: Facebook’s pending IPO is likely to raise around $5 billion, more than was invested by VCs in the entire cleantech sector last year. Indeed, Facebook’s valuation is verging on speculation, maybe even magical thinking. The offering is slated to value the total company at $100 billion.

Compared with the foaming enthusiasm for all-things-Facebook, it can feel like cleantech has drifted into a period of backlash, however undeserved. Investment continues apace to be sure, but the narrative around cleantech is growing more polarized.

Long-time cleantech investor Ira Ehrenpreis put it this way, as quoted in GreentechMedia.com: “While I’ve never been more bearish on U.S. cleantech, I’ve never been more bullish about global cleantech.”

Blame domestic politics for the widening gap in cleantech prospects here compared with global markets. Leading the negative push—recklessly so—are House Republicans, who seem intent on vilifying federal support of renewable energy, using Solyndra’s failure as a political bludgeon against President Obama. Likewise, the GOP presidential aspirants have retreated on cleantech: far-right opposition of climate change is so dogmatic, even discussions of cleantech have become off limits despite the fact that practically all the Republican candidates have championed renewable investment in the past.

Meanwhile, media find it hard to resist the counter-intuitive appeal of the “cleantech is failing” tale, and are amplifying the meme. Picking up on the GOP’s talking points, the tally of stories of Solyndra’s failure far outpaces coverage of the fact that it’s been a record year for solar capacity growth in the U.S. Or that plummeting solar prices are a windfall for buyers of the technology, enabling even energy-poor regions such as India to light up.

Witness Wired magazine’s February story “Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” While its author, Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, actually offers a reasonably measured take on the impact of cheap natural gas and the Solyndra scandal, you’d have a hard time figuring that out from the headline or the explosive artwork illustrating the story (at right, by Dan Forbes).

Lurid pictures of exploding wind mills, fiery biodiesel canisters, and a shattering PV panel left me thinking that John Doerr must be on the verge of switching back coal heat for his mansion. Meanwhile, elsewhere on Wired.com, the breathless all-technology-is-pretty-much-cool coverage of green developments continues apace.

Wired’s schizophrenic take on cleantech is not unique, but it deserves special attention because the magazine has been such a vocal, effective champion for innovation as a driver of economic growth. The editors’ tabloid take on cleantech is sure to gather clicks: scores of contrary comments and irate tweets suggest the story has generated a lot of attention.

But in gunning for controversy, Wired goes off target, loosing sight of the bigger, better idea that cleantech is a near-ideal innovation catalyst for U.S. economic growth. That’s why we should keep our fingers crossed that venture capitalists will keep steering more money into the sector too.

See the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/06/why-sinking-cleantech-investment-data-arent-end-world

Meet the Change Makers: PUMA’s Sustainable Track Record | OnEarth

The sportswear giant is first out of the starting block with an aggressive effort to track environmental performance

PUMA has a long history of winning in dramatic style. At Beijing’s 2008 Olympic Games, Jamaica’s Usain Bolt savored his world record-setting victories in two sprints by holding up his golden PUMA track shoes in a victorious archer’s pose. In 1970, Brazilian soccer legend Pele drew TV close-ups when he interrupted the opening whistle of the World Cup to bend down and tie his PUMA soccer shoes. For the exposure, PUMA reportedly paid $120,000. Decades earlier, some of the first-ever spiked track shoes helped Jesse Owens sprint to quadruple gold-medal success at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The shoes came from PUMA’s forerunner, founded in Germany in 1924. All along, PUMA has remained a formidable contender in the devilishly competitive business of sporting gear. While continuing a tradition of high-profile athletic endorsements, a steady stream of alliances with leading designers — including Jill Sander, Philippe Starck and Alexander McQueen — has helped the German company resurrect its brand in the U.S.

The man credited for its resurgence, and for driving sales to $3.6 billion last year, is Jochen Zeitz. Appointed to run PUMA in 1993 at age 30 — at the time, this made him the youngest-ever chairman of a listed German company — Zeitz, a German nativehas also distinguished the company as a sustainability pioneer, especially in the self-assessment and publication of its environmental impact. In 2008, he established a foundation to support innovative, sustainable solutions that balance conservation, community, culture and commerce. Last year, 48-year-old Zeitz worked with Anselm Grün, a Benedectine monk, to co-author Prayer, Profit & Principles – Monk and Manager, a book about how to confront pressing social and environmental issues.

Earlier this year, PUMA published the results of the first ever “environmental profit and loss” statement (EP&L) released by a major corporation. Building on the convention of corporate sustainability reporting, triple-bottom-line assessments, and more recently initiativesto report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, PUMA’s EP&L attempts to put a dollar value on environmental damage not typically captured by standard financial measures. For the exercise, PUMA assessed the cascade of impacts caused by producing shoes and sportswear: from raw material production, such as cotton farming and oil drilling, to raw material processing, involving leather tanneries, the chemical industry and oil refineries.

Working with accounting giantPricewaterhouseCoopers and data firmTrucost, in May PUMA pegged the ecological costs of its operations for GHG emissions and water use at $124 million for 2010. Of the total, $9.5 million is due to PUMA’s direct actions, and the remaining $115 million are incurred in the chain of suppliers that deliver finished goods to the company. The approach is controversial. Critics have argued the system is too abstract to trigger meaningful change. But by putting a dollar value on the environmental impact of its production process, Zeitz contends PUMA is playing a “catalytic role” in helping to shift the way companies measure and record their costs, and ultimately reduce them. OnEarthcontributor Adam Aston recently spoke with Zeitz, who now serves as chief sustainability officer of PUMA’s parent company, PPR Group, as CEO of its Sport & Lifestyle Group, as well Chairman of the Board of PUMA about how the EP&L can help improve sustainability.

The corporate sustainability report is, for most companies, the most detailed assessment of their environmental impact. At PUMA, you took the process considerably further. What’s the benefit?

We’re moving away from the traditional sustainability report. Such reports are fine for senior management to chart broad efforts. But from the perspective of designers or buyers trying to understand the impact of their decisions on the environment, that approach isn’t specific enough.

That’s where the EP&L comes in. Used across the entire supply chain, it offers a better tool to look at product development and design decisions, to understand the impact of what raw materials we use, how the materials are processed, where our products are made, how they’re shipped, how we package, stock and sell them, and how we dispose of or recycle them.

What variables did you measure in your first EP&L?

The first two we focused on were carbon and water. In the next phase, to be announced shortly, we aim to add other environmental indicators, such as the precursors of smog and acid rain, waste reduction and land use impacts. Eventually, our goal is to track about 90 percent of our environmental impact. Beyond that, the final 10 percent, I think, will just get too complicated.

In phase two, we plan to assess the social impacts in sustainability, such as changes in standard of living, security and health of the communities where we and our contractors have impact.

Finally, in phase three, we want to broaden the scope to look, holistically, at the economic positives of business. If we’re truly comprehensive in this effort, we shouldn’t just look at negative things. The fact is that companies also do good things — creating jobs, paying taxes, fuelling economic growth, increasing wealth and improving quality of life. That’s also something that we want to start valuing.

What surprised you in your evaluation?

The real eye opener was how much of our impact happens so early in the supply chain. That’s when most of the carbon emissions are created and most of the water is consumed.

We estimate that over half of our carbon emissions happen in the production and processing of raw materials, in the raising of cattle for leather and treating that leather, for example.

That means that the second you decide what raw materials to use in your product, you’ve set in stone the bulk of that products’ environmental impact, no matter what happens later.

How are you using the EP&L findings to alter the way you do business?

These numbers show you where you can start to turn your product development in a better direction, by looking for alternative materials, investigating how they’re made, where and by whom. So the findings are influencing product design and development day-to-day, as well as manufacturing, sourcing, even marketing to a point. We’ve begun to share these findings with our suppliers, to help them understand why we’re strict about certain materials or processes.

Are consumers starting to see these changes?

In some cases, yes. For example, to cut the amount of cardboard in our shoe boxes, we worked with Yves Behar to create Clever Little Bag. It’s a design that cleverly combines a reusable bag with a cardboard frame. The approach does away with about two-thirds of the paper used in regular boxes — this saves trees, of course, but also huge volumes of electricity and water, given how paper is made. And since it has a built in handle, the design also eliminates the need for an extra bag at checkout. That makes it more convenient for the consumer. The process of designing this required that we coordinate with our suppliers in Asia to ensure the new approach didn’t cause troubles with how our shoes are packaged at the plant, then shipped and distributed.

Given that you don’t own most of the factories that supply PUMA sportswear, is it a challenge to push through these kinds of sustainable design decisions?

While we don’t own the factories or suppliers, we are deciding who our manufacturers will be, who our raw material suppliers are, where we buy our raw materials from, and so on. We have the ability to tell a factory: “Stop buying from that supplier.”

But, of course, there are cost implications. The full costs that we identified in our EP&L exercise are borne by all of the participants in our supply chain. Though we’re at the end of that chain, PUMA doesn’t pay the full cost of that EP&L.

That’s a reason we’re working to educate our suppliers. If we identify that the footprint of cushioning in our shoes, for example, is predominantly with the chemical industry, we can say to that industry and its suppliers: “Okay, guys, what can you do to shrink your footprint?” It’s got to be a joint initiative.

Do you worry that these efforts will drive up prices, and that higher price tags could turn off consumers?

Look, very little that we buy today is truly sustainable, but this effort has to start somewhere. I believe that brands have significant power to change consumer behavior. Consumers are starting to understand that, ultimately, we’re living on one planet and we have to look after it. There’s a natural survival mode that kicks in, where we are starting to realize that things are broken and we’ve got to change it.

For PUMA, the key is that we don’t over promise, and are very transparent and true to what we do, with honest communication about what we’ve accomplished and what we haven’t. Communicating these efforts is important: we don’t want to lose our customers’ trust by getting it wrong. Nor do we want to sell a greener product that is ignored.

We’re trying to sell a solution that is desirable in many ways­ besides its environmental impact — its design, materials, and its style. This effort has to include the consumer. Otherwise it’s not going to change things.

What have been the greatest challenges in deploying this method?

It’s not totally black and white, for sure. Data collection is a challenge, given how many suppliers feed materials into our products. But it can be done if the rules are set, and everybody plays along.

Then, of course, is the question of valuation. For example, there is not just one method of measuring the value of water or the cost of carbon.

For us, this meant being on the cautious side when it came to valuing environmental costs, generally opting for the higher cost estimate. So, for carbon, we take its social cost, around $90 per metric ton, many times the cost of a ton of carbon offsets in EU markets. The higher social cost of carbon reflects estimates of the future costs of climate change. [For background on how this value is calculated, check PUMA’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions Valuation Model.]

Are you open to sharing these methods with your peers, to help them spread?

Yes, absolutely. For those that are serious and want to associate themselves with what we are doing in an open manner, we will also be open with them. We have already had a number of requests from the automotive, chemical and beverage industries, as well as from one of our competitors.

Sidebar – Truth Squad: A more environmental balance sheet

Why would a public company such as PUMA bother to report costs it isn’t required to? After all, tracking down water-use and carbon-emissions data for far-flung factories manufacturing countless products is a costly, complex effort, demanding time from top management at PUMA and its partners.

The goal is to turn transparency into a competitive advantage. In fact, while PUMA’s particular EP&L methodology is unique, it’s one of an emerging set of related standards for corporations to recognize, measure and report the non-financial impact of their activities. “Call it triple bottom line or sustainability accounting or CSR [for corporate sustainability reporting], dozens of standards are being developed that attempt to capture elements of companies’ environmental impact,” says Alisa Valderrama, a finance policy analyst at NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation. Some of the leading players in these efforts include Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Carbon Disclosure Project and CERES.

PUMA’s first effort, recording water and carbon costs on a profit and loss statement, may sound like a trivial bookkeeping shift, but the company is going a step further than most: Puma is not only disclosing impacts, but working to integrate what they learn into their bottom line. This means going beyond getting management to trim disproportionately high environmental costs. In the long term, such efforts can also help reduce the “material” risks to financial performance that companies are required to report. Energy shortages or toxic spills at a sub-contractor are examples of risks that could dent the annual returns of a company like PUMA. Lastly, share price could eventually benefit since some studies suggest that fuller disclosure of non-financial factors correlates with better investment returns.

“PUMA’s efforts sophisticated, a really holistic example,” Valderamma says. “This is costly, hard stuff: assessing your toll on the environment is not as easy as counting widgets coming of the assembly line.”

Yet she is frustrated with the broader state of reporting, because until such voluntary standards are incorporated into mainstream accounting and financial practices, their impact will be limited. “You want to get to the point where this is no longer rare and voluntary, but commonplace and expected, where Wall Street analysts are asking about EP&L in quarterly calls,” she says. “That will be the bellwether of real market change.” — Adam Aston

Green Pinstripes: Wharton School of Business Dean Thomas Robertson Talks About Sustainability | OnEarth

Stroll through practically any business school in the country — or any of the fast-multiplying U.S.-style B-schools overseas — and there can be little doubt that an MBA remains a hot commodity. With the start of classes now upon us, business schools are prepping for another near-record year. During this recession, as in past downturns, applications have surged, with candidates looking to use the slowdown to upgrade their credentials.

Just a couple of years ago, this bumper crop might have seemed unlikely. In 2009 the financial meltdown exposed the outsize role played by financial MBAs and math-whiz PhDs in crafting the house-of-cards investment vehicles that all but crashed Wall Street.

Critics pointed to another, deeper cause: a culture of profit at all cost that had been incubated in business schools. “The really grim news for the MBA…is about more than short-term trends,” wrote Matthew Stewart in Slate back in March 2009. “The economic crisis has exposed long-standing flaws…in the very idea of business education.”

If the recession hasn’t dimmed the prospects of B-schools, the crisis of confidence has spurred a flurry of curriculum makeovers at top institutions. Ethics, of course, have come into greater focus. In parallel, there’s been a rising appetite on the part of students and faculty alike to study more sustainable approaches to business. The number of programs emphasizing social, environmental, and ethical issues has been rising steadily in recent years, according to Beyond Grey Pinstripes, an independent, biennial survey of business schools managed by the Aspen Institute.

For a look at how sustainability and post-crash ethics are evolving at an elite business school, there’s no better laboratory than the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, one of the nation’s oldest and largest B-schools and an important nursery for Wall Street talent.

Thomas Robertson took over as dean of the school in August 2007. As the dust from the financial crisis has settled, he has worked to boost the profile of sustainability in Wharton’s curriculum and among its staff. To be sure, Wharton remains strongly focused on finance, even as highly ranked competitors such as Michigan’s Ross School or Berkeley’s Haas School have made sustainability a core commitment. Notably, none of the nation’s top three B-schools — Chicago’s Booth, Harvard Business School, and Wharton, according to Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest rankings — appear in Beyond Grey Pinstripes.

Robertson says Wharton is hoping to change this. Adam Aston, a freelance writer and former energy and environment editor for BusinessWeek, spoke recently with him about sustainability and the greening of Wharton at his office on the school’s leafy campus near downtown Philadelphia.

Sustainability as a business strategy is still the exception, and there haven’t been many successful, mass-market “green” brands. Why do you think that is?

Green business is still quite young. Yet even in that fairly short time, there are some serious questions about whether you can brand green any longer, because the public is so suspicious. To some extent it has reason to be. It’s easier to recall fallen green champions who have failed terribly than it is to come up with green success stories. BP is a poster child for this. The company emphasized for years how green it was, even as the environmental concerns about its operations were mounting, and then the problem spiraled out of control with the Gulf oil spill. Companies have to be careful. They should first ask, do green claims really differentiate our product, and should we be emphasizing that? If so, are those claims credible? Will consumers believe us? There’s a lot that can go wrong, so it’s no surprise that companies remain shy.

Are you hesitant to brand Wharton as a greener business school? You don’t appear in the Beyond Grey Pinstripes rankings, for example.

Wharton has had a funny love/hate relationship with rankings in general. A predecessor of mine, along with the deans at Harvard and a few other institutions, decided some years ago to stop participating. But the ranking services rate us regardless, using information from outside sources. Beyond Grey Pinstripes is among the most demanding, because it requires that we survey the content of individual courses to identify which ones have green content. However now we’re cooperating again for the first time in a long while, and we have full-time people substantially dedicated to answering these requests. The Aspen Institute is probably the most reputable place out there ranking green initiatives in schools. It’s a good place for us to be, whether someday we come in first or thirtieth.

Did you pick up any shift toward greener goals since the financial crisis?

The aftermath of the crisis has reinforced one of the longest-standing strategic pillars of the curriculum at Wharton: social impact. From environment to labor and other social dimensions of business, there’s very much a belief here that business schools must be a force for good in the world. Even so, this is the biggest school in the country. We have 4,900 graduate students plus a few hundred undergrads. And some of our alumni do still go astray.

Do you have any star faculty members working on green issues?

One is our vice dean of social impact, Len Lodish, who also leads Wharton’s Global Consulting Practicum. Among other things, this sends groups of MBAs overseas to apply business skills to solving social and environmental problems. One team recently went to Botswana, for example, to help develop a sustainable funding model for a health partnership. I’d also mention Eric Orts, the director of Wharton’s Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership. Eric is a lawyer and tends to come at these issues from that perspective. He argues that business as usual is quite likely to lead to major environmental catastrophes, and he’s pushing for Wharton to get ahead of the curve on these issues. It’s clear that sustainability is here to stay. I think it has come into its own as a business priority. We all realize that we’re going to destroy the planet if we don’t get on board.

In many business schools, the interest in sustainability is coming from the bottom up, from the students.

It’s true. A lot of student efforts are bubbling up here. Emily Schiller graduated with an MBA from Wharton in 2009 and chose to stay here to become the school’s first associate director of sustainability and environmental leadership.That role grew out of her involvement, when she was a student, as co-chair of Net Impact’s North America Conference, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit events focused on sustainability. She also works with our Student Sustainability Advisory Board, which takes student suggestions and so far has turned them into real savings of more than $100,000. One of their ideas now is to switch to natural cooling of our data center in winter, rather than using air-conditioning. If it’s cold outside, why not take advantage of that?

Sidebar: NRDC FOCUS — Peter Malik, Director of NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation

If business schools could choose one thing to enhance their focus on sustainability, what would it be?
Mortgages. The housing market has to be one of the drivers of economic recovery, but it’s still under severe pressure. Unsound lending practices were partly responsible for the mess, and we need to scale down the role of government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in underwriting private-borrower risk. Banks should also incorporate sustainability criteria into mortgage scoring and pricing. Live in a mansion and drive a Hummer, and you’ll pay more. Live in an energy-efficient apartment and walk to work, and you’ll pay less.

Learn more about Location Efficient Mortgages.

UPS Boosts Mileage 40% with Prototype Plastic Delivery Vans | GreenBiz

UPS Boosts Mileage 40% with Prototype Plastic Delivery Vans

United Parcel Service is rolling out a prototype delivery van that gets 40 percent better mileage than its familiar big, brown boxy predecessor.

The twist here is less high tech than you might guess: It’s not a new recipe for electric batteries or some new exotic fuel. Rather, to deliver big fuel savings, UPS put one of its standard package vans on a strict weight loss program.

By replacing aluminum sheet body panels with rugged, lightweight ABS plastic, UPS engineers have lowered fuel consumption by about 40 percent. Using less sheet metal cut the truck’s weight so much that UPS could then opt for a smaller, lighter engine, saving still more weight. All together, the changes have carved off 1,000 pounds, or about 10 percent, from the weight from the original 5-ton truck design, says Dale Spencer, UPS’ director of automotive engineering.

Five of the slim-line trucks are going through a trial-by-fire at a mix of urban, suburban and rural facilities across the country. The design, known as CV-23 among UPS’ engineers, was created in collaboration with diesel engine-provider Isuzu and Wakarusa, Ind.-based Utilimaster, which executed the composite body makeover.

The design team approached the makeover holistically, examining how one change affected others. For example, switching all of the vehicle’s lights — except headlamps — to efficient LEDs further cut demands on the engine. In the final design a 150-horsepower, four-cylinder diesel with a six-speed transmission was able to replace the 200-horsepower power plant used in the older design.

The plastic body panels also offer maintenance savings. Rather than coating them with a layer of brown paint, the composite material is colored all the way through. This saves the weight of paint — which can be 100 pounds or more — but also hides minor scratches and dings. In today’s trucks, if a ding exposes underlying metal, the truck requires a costly trip to the touch-up shop.

And if damage is worse than a ding, the panels are easy to swap out. In the case of a serious dent, current metal-body trucks would need a shop visit, to either patch or replace the damaged body panel. The CV-23 can avoid many of these service calls. Its panels are designed to snap on easily and are light enough to be stored in the garage for a quick makeover…

Continue reading at greenbiz.com

 

What GE Has in Store for Round 2 of the Ecomagination Challenge | GreenBiz

What GE Has in Store for Round 2 of the  Ecomagination Challenge
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GE is going back to the innovation well. Encouraged by the success of its $200 million Ecomagination Challenge — a crowdsourced contest, which yielded scores of grid-scale technology and investment opportunities — the Connecticut-based conglomerate is turning up the heat on the hunt for innovative home energy solutions.

The search includes both today’s and tomorrow’s technology. Starting with upgrades to existing gizmos — kitchen appliances, washing machine and dryer and other domestic energy hogs — innovative ideas are also sought for future solutions, such as electric car recharging systems or software apps to help cut power use.

Announced earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show, GE’s decision to extend the Ecochallenge was spurred by the huge volume of home-related ideas submitted in the first phase of the competition. Of some 4,000 submissions, more than a quarter focused on home energy use.

“Powering your home” is seeking submissions across two broad categories: energy efficiency, including appliances and air conditioning, as well as software systems to manage home energy; and renewable power, including familiar solar and wind systems but also residential-scale hydro and biomass solutions.

Select winners will be offered the opportunity to develop a commercial relationship with GE through:

Investment: $145 million of the $200 million pool from GE and its partners remains to be committed.
Validation: GE technical and commercial experts will evaluate entrant’s business strategy through in-depth discussions.
Distribution: The company will also explore partnership opportunities to scale the product or service globally.
Development: Winners can tap into GE’s technical infrastructure and GE Global Research Centers to accelerate technology and product development.
Growth: They can also explore opportunities for utilizing existing GE customers to take winning products to market.

The panel of expert judges — which includes GE execs and leading academics and technologists — will also pick five ideas that represent pioneering entrepreneurship and innovation. Winners of these Innovation Awards will score $100,000.

Launched in July 2010, the ecochallenge is a collaboration with leading venture capital firms Emerald Technology Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and RockPort Capital, and Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired magazine. Also joining this stage of the project is Carbon Trust, a London-based not-for-profit with a track record of commercializing low carbon technologies.

This phase of the challenge seeks will re-examine ideas already submitted as well as new proposals submitted before the deadline of March 1, 2011. The contest is open to proposals from around the globe. Learn more at www.ecomagination.com/challenge.

Investing in Clean Energy: A Sputnik moment for America? | The Fiscal Times

In balmy Cancun, at a U.N. conference on climate change, China and the U.S. remain the elephants-in-the-room of all discussions. Both are more focused on the commercial potential of climate-related technology than on any environmental goals that could impair economic growth. Such a focus should sell better in Washington, but it’s an area where the U.S. is lagging, and China’s lead is growing.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, speaking at the National Press Club earlier last week called China’s mounting successes in clean energy a “Sputnik moment” for the U.S.

In 1957, a refrigerator-sized sphere transmitting a steady radio signal was lofted into orbit by the Soviet Union, sparking a generation of U.S. technical and scientific discovery. But it took decades for satellite technology to become a commercial market.

Now, in clean technologies, China is racing into well-established, fast-growing markets U.S. players are eyeing hungrily. Chu named the most vulnerable areas, where the U.S. must innovate quickly, or risk falling behind…