Chris Morrison | posted on December 29, 2008

Home heating and cooling has always been done by brute force. Vents blow regulated air throughout a house, and somewhere, a thermometer tells the entire system when to stop or start. But houses should be able to make smart decisions on when and how to run their heating or cooling systems, thinks a company called Suntulit; they just need technology to sense humans and predict when to start changing the temperature.

The main barrier to installing smart temperature control systems, of course, has always been the ease of setting up a dumb ones. It’s very simple to just build ventilation tubes throughout a house and push through cold or hot air depending on the direction of the central thermometer. Adding a little intelligence doesn’t just require careful planning, it also typically takes a lot more money, so the most common system controls are people physically opening and closing vents, and manually raising or lowering the temperature controls.

To do a better job, Suntulit’s setup thus has to involve devices that can open and close vents on their own, sensors to tell when people are around, and a computer brain with predictive abilities. And all of the above has to be done cheaply. …read full discussion

DEAN TAKAHASHI | posted on December 19, 2008

Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at Silicon Valley stalwart venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, talks so fast I always have to use a digital recorder to capture his rapid-fire thoughts. Jurvetson is an investor who ventures deep into the technology of his subjects. He was passionate about investing in nanotechnology a few years ago and has since poured his energy into cleantech. He has had some big hits with investments in Hotmail, Interwoven, Kana, Tradex and Cyras — the last of which was acquired for $8 billion. He spoke with us earlier this year and we caught up with him again at the recent AlwaysOn Venture Summit West.

VB: What’s your own reaction to the change in the economic environment?
SJ: We believe that there is opportunity in the crisis. We recently had an event with our CEOs where we talked about working in the environment. We spent time talking about the financial risk. If you’re running a company, you can’t count on financing from your usual sources. Certainly not the debt markets or equity markets. But it doesn’t change anything about your ability to make your mark and change the world. We’re not alarmist. We see cycles come and go. We take solace in the fact that the fundamental drivers of innovation such as Moore’s Law (the prediction that chip capacity doubles every 18 months) aren’t interrupted by the vicissitudes of markets. There is a 100-year view of Moore’s Law. The was really no impact on innovation from the Great Depression, World War II – you name it.  Innovation continues. The ability to capitalize on it in an economy varies. There are difficult things to work through. But the big picture is you shouldn’t lose faith in the juggernaut of value creation that comes from the disruptive force of innovation and start-ups. That makes me, as a geek, very happy. We can’t tell you when there will be a recovery. We can be prepared for maybe two years before there is one. …read full discussion

Matt Marshall | posted on December 16, 2008

A new company called Laurus Energy, which recently received $9 million in backing from a Silicon Valley venture firm, claims it has found the cheapest way to deliver clean power in North America.

The Houston-based company says its energy is even better than natural gas as a source, because the gas is generated with a superior method that no one else is using in North America: Underground coal gasification. …read full discussion

Chris Morrison | posted on December 8, 2008

A developing situation in South Africa may hint at what lies ahead for the world’s nations, a future holding no easy choices when it comes to making and using electricity.

State-owned utility Eskom has abandoned a plan for an $11.5 billion nuclear generator that would have boosted the country’s electrical capacity by about 10 percent. Eskom says the price was too high, in part because the global recession has made financing more difficult.

Unfortunately, the cancellation leaves a hole that must be filled. In general, the country is open to building new coal plants, and several are already slated, but the local energy mix is already heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

South Africa is also strained to the max when it comes to its energy supply, with several shortfalls already projected for the coming year. That makes building more cheap and easy coal or gas plants a tempting fix, especially with prices temporarily low. …read full discussion

Chris Morrison | posted on November 26, 2008

A common idea for making solar cells more effective is to concentrate sunlight on them with lenses and mirrors. But for thin-film solar, which is made up of cheaper materials than typical silicon-based photovoltaic cells, these focusing techniques are hardly mentioned. Optony hopes it can bridge this gap with a new technology.

At first glance, the disadvantages to concentrating sunlight on thin-film seem to outnumber the advantages. Thin-film solar is not only dirt cheap, it is also fairly inefficient at converting sunlight to electricity. That means there’s little cost benefit to adding equipment like mirrors, which may well cost more than the thin-film itself. Also, known thin-film compositions tend to degrade under intense sunlight. …read full discussion

Chris Morrison | posted on November 24, 2008

Better Place (formerly Project Better Place) has scored a coup in the California Bay Area. The electric vehicle startup has struck a deal with the region, including the cities of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, to set up a $1 billion charging network for electric cars, with car availability beginning in 2012.

Unlike its charging network in Israel, it looks like the Better Place network in the Bay Area is a plan to support electric car development throughout the state. The deal in Israel involved a tie-up with Nissan-Renault to make the small cars that work with the stations, which swap out depleted batteries for new ones. …read full discussion

Chris Morrison | posted on November 20, 2008

We may be in the depths of a credit crunch, but some banks still seem willing to give loans to renewable energy projects. This morning, solar services firm SunRun is announcing a $105 million commitment by U.S. Bancorp(USB) to buy about 2,000 of the residential projects it installs.

Keep in mind that this isn’t equity or debt money that SunRun itself will receive. Because the company leases out solar arrays that it installs on customers’ roofs, the financing is more like a guarantee that SunRun can keep working at full speed without worrying about how to pay for the installations. For USB, the investment will provide predictable returns over the next several years as customers pay for the power they receive from their solar panels.

To date, only a few companies like SunRun have brought in similar financing. “This is a specialty asset class,” says Nat Kreamer, the company’s chief operating officer. “It’s not like getting a home loan — it takes real expertise.” But as with any type of asset, if it supplies steady returns, experts will appear. The USB commitment is a significant show of confidence during hard times. …read full discussion

Chris Morrison | posted on November 18, 2008

Another significant funding deal for the energy conservation crowd was announced this morning, with ReGen Power Systemstaking $5 million for an engine that converts waste industrial heat into power. That may sound a bit boring, but the investment and technology are a harbinger of big changes to come.

Everyone has experienced waste heat from electricity-driven machines — take your common electrical oven for example. The oven exists to cook things, whether atop its burners or inside. Either way, the majority of the heat bypasses the food and escapes into the air and environment around the oven. Unless you need a warm kitchen, most of the electricity you just used was wasted. …read full discussion

Chris Morrison | posted on November 13, 2008

The recession may not prove as much of a barrier to a national carbon cap and trade scheme for the United States as pundits thought, according to the lead energy and environment advisor for Barack Obama’s campaign.

Although President-elect Obama has promised major environmental reforms for his tenure, many assumed that enacting a costly capping system would be put on hold while he works on restarting the economy. And besides Obama, there a number of potential hold-outs in Congress and the Senate, especially those in states like Michigan and West Virginia that could be hurt by carbon legislation. …read full discussion

Chris Morrison | posted on November 11, 2008

Environmentalists like to point out that a person’s carbon footprint is about more than just the CO2 they emit through daily activities like driving or surfing the Internet. It extends to the goods they own, and even the food they eat. The same holds for most companies, Planet Metrics’ core user group for a new carbon information platform.

Companies’ hidden CO2 emissions tend to come from their supply chains, long tails of vendors and manufacturers that modern multinationals tap into for everything from individual parts in a device — Apple’s iPhone being one famous example — to outsourced labor and customer support. Most companies can’t even begin to estimate the amount of CO2 they’re indirectly responsible for. …read full discussion