Power Pal

I just read a good article in BusinessWeek titled " The Biofuel Bubble ".  The gist of the article is that biofuels start-ups (particularly those focused on ethanol) are going to fail or be absorbed by oil and gas majors.  Ethanol will be limited by the infrastructure that can absorb it (i.e. current automobiles can't take much more than 10% ethanol in the gasoline mix).  Firms, like LS9, that are more focused on diesel or gasoline-like fuels will be better off.  The article also discusses some of the limitations around feedstock.  The article highlights: Producing 30 billion gallons of fuel takes 300 million or more tons of plant material. That's more than the total weight of cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. over the past 10 years. Growing this much cellulose would take at least 30 million acres of land. "I think the biggest problem for everybody is how are we going to grow, gather, store, and treat the biomass," says Brent Erickson, lobbyist for the ...

I read in VentureBeat that a start-up called Better Place is going to partner with California to build a $1B electric car infrastructure for the Bay Area.  It sounds like a pretty ambitious plan.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Someone recommended I read the NY Times Magazine article from a few weeks ago called " Capitalism to the Rescue " about how venture capital money is fueling the so-called green-tech economy.  The article almost entirely focuses on Kleiner Perkins.  The article includes quotes from John Doerr and Aileen Kim (one of the Green VC Stars ) among others.  The article talks at length about how KPCB finally made its foray into green-tech in the last few years and why they did so.  Surprisingly it was Bill Joy that led the way with a "map of grand challenges" in the energy space: Then, in late 2006, at one of Kleiner’s corporate retreats, Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems and a new partner at the firm, displayed what later became known within Kleiner as “the map of grand challenges.” This was a matrix of colored squares that itemized the firm’s progress in locating potential investments in about 40 different categories: water, transportation, energy efficiency, electri...

I watched this 7 min video from the McKinsey Quarterly and thought it was pretty good. It focuses on the urbanization that China will undergo over the next decade as hundreds of millions of people flock to urban centers. It also deals with how China should build those urban centers - lots of mega-cities of 10 million+ vs. some mega-cities surrounded by mid-size cities in a hub-and-spoke model vs. proliferation of small townships. Here's the video: The accompanying article on the topic covers the same material in a little more analytic detail.  Beyond the exact format the urbanization will take, what I think is more interesting is the implications that any mass urbanization will have on the economy there.  Here are some areas of concern: Land - with urbanization and development comes urban sprawl and the loss of arable land - which means heightened concerns over food security Energy - the demand for energy and energy resources will more than double (from 60 quadrillion Brit...

I saw this on BigThink. Soros talks about how consumer spending has been America's engine of growth over the past decade. The current financial crisis has basically shut that engine off. So, what's the next engine that's going to take us out of the recession/depression we're heading into? Soros thinks it's energy - alternative energy and energy savings technology. video platform video management video solutions free video player

I read a few articles about the proposed cap-and-trade system in the U.S. and thought it'd be a good opportunity to read up on the Kyoto Protocol. According to a press release from the United Nations Environment Programme (from Wikipedia): The Kyoto Protocol is an agreement under which industrialized countries will reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2% compared to the year 1990 (but note that, compared to the emissions levels that would be expected by 2010 without the Protocol, this limitation represents a 29% cut). The goal is to lower overall emissions of six greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide , methane , nitrous oxide , sulfur hexafluoride , hydrofluorocarbons , and perfluorocarbons - averaged over the period of 2008-2012. National limitations range from 8% reductions for the European Union and some others to 7% for the US, 6% for Japan, 0% for Russia, and permitted increases of 8% for Australia and 10% for Iceland. An additional summary from Wikipedia o...

I read a few articles lately about energy created by wind turbines placed in offshore, deep water locations. One article was in Forbes called Deepwater Wind . The other article was in the WSJ called Winds Shift in Energy Debate . It doesn't seem like you can get much cleaner in terms of energy production than wind. But due to problems with the energy grid and transmission capacity, one of the problems with wind turbines is that they need to be close to the markets that will actually consume the energy. For a major city, one of the solutions that has been proposed is to place wind turbines just offshore. The conditions offshore offer consistent, steady wind. But the problem is that the wind turbines obstruct the ocean view. An excerpt about this from the WSJ: Because of favorable wind conditions and the relative ease of siting, much of the U.S. construction to date has been in areas far from big population centers. In many cases, transmission systems lack the capacity to move...

As a Cal lifetime alum, I get a free subscription to Forefront, a quarterly publication the College of Engineering puts out. The Fall issues cover was titled " Green Future ". There were a few really cool ideas in there that researchers in the engineering department are pushing forward. There were two that I wanted to comment on. The first was a project to recapture waste heat by creating nano-scale devices that convert heat to elecricity. The premise is to use the " Seebeck Effect " (thermoelectric effect) in cheap organic materials to produce electricity from all of the wasted heat that's created in burning fossil fuels. Apparently, for every 1 watt of power, you waste 1.5 watts of energy in waste heat. That's a ridiculous amount of waste. The world's power output is somewhere in the 10 trillion watt range, so that means there's 15 trillion watts being wasted. If you could recapture even a small fraction of that with these types of thermoelectric ...

Read an interesting article a couple weeks back in the WSJ on how biofuels may actually increase carbon emissions in the medium to long-term. Apprently the shifts in land-use necessary to support the production of bio-materials like soybeans, corn, or palm could in fact release more carbon emissions. The time it takes to get carbon-neutral on some of these projects is pretty crazy - 319 years for soybean biodiesel from Brazil (assuming you're clearing rainforest), 93 years for corn ethanol from the U.S. (assuming you're clearing grasslands), 86 years for palm biodiesel from Indonesia (assuming you're clearing rainforest). I suppose biofuels really aren't meant to reduce carbon emissions, but just crazy that they potentially exacerbate the problem so much.

Finally getting around to commenting on this old WSJ article . Think back 15 or 20 years and the idea of buying tap water in a bottle (except for sparkling water) would have seemed pretty ridiculous. But that's exactly what most people do these days. To put just how ridiculous that is in perspective, I did a few back-of-hand calculations based on the following paragraph from the article: Coca-Cola Co., with a 36% share of the $106 billion-a-year U.S. nonalcoholic ready-to-drink beverage business, says it plans to build a plant that will be able to recycle as many as two billion 20-ounce bottles a year. Atlanta-based Coke won't say exactly where the plant will be located or when it will open. The company already has invested $41 million to build recycling plants in Australia, Austria, Mexico, the Philippines and Switzerland. But the move reflects a wider push by Coke to boost the amount of recycled material in its U.S. bottles to at least 10%, up from just under 5% in 2006. So, ...

I read an interesting article in California Magazine (magazine for Cal Alumni) about how much investment is flooding into Berkeley (via BP and venture capitalists) to do research into and to commercialize sustainable energy solutions. So what is the new "triple bottom line" I mentioned in the title of the post? Here's a quick excerpt that explains it from the article: Its members combine tech savvy with business skills in pursuit of a “triple bottom line” of social change, environmental benefits, and profit. Basically, you can bring about 1) social change, produce 2) environmental benefits, and make 3) profit while doing that. Lawrence Berkeley National Labs director Steven Chu believes the top two solutions to the energy problem are 1) energy efficiency and 2) harnessing the power of the sun. There are a range of solutions that fall into the "harnessing the power of the sun" solution. Here are the excerpts: LBNL director Steven Chu looked at controlling greenh...

Read an article in Forbes about how Jack Goeken is working on a company to popularize the LED lightbulb. The company Borealis Lighting (by PolyBrite International) currently have LED bulbs priced at $10 - $14 that will deliver six times the light per unit of electricity that an incandescent does. A 60-watt incandescent send out 13 lumens per watt, a comparable fluorescent 50, the LED 85. I can't wait until these are cheaper and hit the stores.

Read a few articles in the WSJ today about cars and it also reminded me of a show I saw on cable this past weekend. Here they are in no particular order: $3000 car - Nissan and Renault are teaming up to build a $3000 car in India. It should open up the opportunity for many Indians to buy cars that were only previously able to buy motorcycles. It will likely mean more congested roads and more pollution though. Sulfur Fuels in China - China is likely going to delay enforcing more stringent auto-emissions standards because its refineries don't produce enough low-sulfur gasoline. Energy in China - I saw a recent University of California Journalism show ( Frontline: Undermined ) on cable that talked about (among other things) the increasing appetite for automobiles in China and the impact it will have on the environment. Despite that impact, buying behaviors are not effected by "green" messages. The increased cost isn't justified in most people's minds. The segment ...