Gregoire's CleanTech Blog

Finavera Renewables : wave energy projects in South Africa

Finavera Renewables, a company developing wind and wave energy projects, has committed to build a 20 megawatt (MW) wave energy power plant off the coast of South Africa over the next five years.

Finavera Renewables CEO Jason Bak made the commitment at the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference last week in New York.

Southern Africa suffers from intermittent power disruptions and a serious power crisis is expected to affect much of the region by 2007. Regional demand for electricity has already begun to outstrip supply and the disparity is expected to increase.

Finavera Renewables, through its wave energy division (former AquaEnergy Group Ltd), plans to build a phased 20MW wave energy power plant in the Republic of South Africa for a total investment of more than US$40 million over five years. The project will save US$2 million per year in fuel and avoid approximately 20,000 tons of CO2 emissions. A material percentage of the return from the project will be used to alleviate energy poverty and will provide economic benefits to local communities through the creation of jobs.

Finavera is in the process of acquiring 100% of AquaEnergy Group, Ltd (AE), developer of the AquaBuOY technology.

The AquaBuOY wave energy converter is based on proven buoy technology (previous post). AquaBuOY offshore plants consist of clusters of these modular devices, similar to navigational buoys, moored several kilometers offshore where the wave resources are greatest. A cluster of AquaBuOYs has a low silhouette in the water and from shore looks as noticeable as a small fleet of fishing boats. Features of the AquaBuOY include the following:

·  A unique hose-pump power take-off system that uses only water as its hydraulic liquid

·  A point absorbing omni-directional wave energy converter

·  A non-toxic, environmentally friendly material composition that meets the Kyoto Protocol Standards

·  A low riding silhouette that conforms to aesthetic sensitivities

·  An offshore power plant configuration that avoids interference with marine traffic and fishing

·  An economic alternative to fossil fuel power plants

·  A green energy power plant with construction and components supplied locally.

Energy transfer takes place by converting the vertical component of wave kinetic energy into pressurized seawater by means of two-stroke hose pumps. Pressurized seawater is directed into a conversion system consisting of a turbine driving an electrical generator. The power is transmitted to shore by means of an undersea transmission line.

The expected output from each AquaBuOY is 480V AC current, with power levels between 0 and 200 kW, and an estimated average output of 50kW (with an average wave resource of 30kW/m wave front).

It is claimed that these power plants are scalable from hundreds of kilowatts to hundreds of megawatts and are suitable for distributed generation to coastal communities, or central generation for large population centers.

In a project announced in July, the European Commission may contribute up to €1.37 million toward the deployment of a wave energy power plant off the coast of Portugal, subject to successful contract negotiations and completion of the internal, formal selection process. The monies would be used as a contribution to the deployment of a 2MW full scale wave energy conversion power plant in Portugal. The proposed power plant will be situated in

60 meters

of water approximately

10 kilometers

off the coastline midway between the Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Porto. Once successful operation of the plant has been demonstrated, the plant generating capacity is expected to be increased to 100MW.

AquaEnergy has also formed a consortium for the installation of a two megawatt demonstration power plant at Makah Bay, WA, USA,. The company recently completed oceanography surveys, and samplings. Surface measurement devices were also deployed to determine wind and wave intensities over a period of several months.  The company is currently designing and permitting the project and has encountered significant delays in the permitting process.

Finavera Renewables is a private, Irish company dedicated to the development of renewable energy resources and technologies. The Company is in the process of listing, through a reverse take over, on the TSX Venture Exchange. The Company's objective is to become a major renewable and green energy producer by developing and operating its assets in the wind and wave energy sectors.

Finavera Renewables has twelve wind projects under development in the Peace River region in British Columbia, Canada with potential capacity of over 1,500MW on approximately

52,000 hectares

of land. In addition, the company is developing a potential 180MW of wind energy projects in Ireland, enough to power 108,000 average European homes.

Source : The Energy Blog

Firefly : technologie de batteries plomb

After a long time without any news, Firefly Energy (previous post) has received a Frost and Sullivan award in the field of advanced lead acid battery technologies for developing an innovative graphite foam lead acid battery that could cause disruptive changes in the market. The following is directly from Frost & Sullivan's press release:

"While somewhat newer battery technologies like Lithium Ion and Nickel Metal Hydride offer alternatives to traditional lead acid cells, they have their own set of issues including higher costs," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Sivam Sabesan. "Even though these advanced batteries have certain features that improve upon the traditional lead acid cell, they cannot match all its features and consequently, innovators such as Firefly Energy believe they can improve the lead acid cell to match lithium ion and the nickel metal hydrides."

The approach used by Firefly Energy, a spin-out of Caterpillar, is radical but simple. The company’s new battery removes past obstacles such as heavy weight, extensive corrosion and sulfating positive and negative lead metal grids by substituting them with carbon-graphite foam, increasing the surface area, to enhance the chemistry taking place. The result is a battery that can rival the advanced chemistries in performance, take advantage of an existing manufacturing base and address environmental concerns through the removal of one-half to two-thirds of the lead content.

By "taking the lead out" and replacing the plates with carbon foam, it is possible to obtain longer battery life while enhancing the battery’s desirable characteristics, particularly in terms of fast discharge and recharge conditions. Additionally, by replacing most of the lead with a much lighter material, Firefly has drastically lowered the specific weight of the battery, which can help by either increasing output from the same weight or in creating a smaller package but with normal power output.

Firefly’s battery runs cooler than normal lead acid cells, giving it longer life and a significant stealth advantage in military applications, particularly in desert environments. On the commercial side too, there is significant potential. With a large number of automobiles and trucks in America running on short-lived batteries, manufacturers that can deliver a cost-effective yet better battery technology stand to gain the most.

"Apart from these, there are markets for hybrid and electric vehicles that also require high performance batteries," notes Sabesan. "And while Firefly is initially looking to focus on select commercial and military markets, it is reasonable to expect that this novel technology will find equally viable markets elsewhere if the company should choose to enter them, given that the overall size of the worldwide lead acid market is over $16 billion per year in sales."

Firefly Energy (www.fireflyenergy.com) is a Peoria, Illinois-based company which has developed a next generation lead acid battery technology that has the opportunity to address major portions of the $30 billion worldwide battery marketplace. Firefly’s graphite foam-based battery technology can deliver a unique combination of high performance, extremely low weight, low cost and, all in a battery which utilizes the best aspects of lead acid chemistry while overcoming the corrosive drawbacks of this same chemistry. This product technology delivers to battery markets a performance associated with advanced battery chemistries (Nickel Metal Hydride and Lithium), but for one-fifth the cost, and can be both manufactured as well as recycled within the existing lead acid battery industry’s vast infrastructure. The company was formed after its technology, technical founder, and initial seed funds were spun out of Caterpillar, Inc. (www.cat.com), a Fortune 90 company, in May 2003, and is headed by co-founders Edward Williams (CEO), Mil Ovan (Senior VP), and Kurtis Kelley (Chief Scientist). Investors include Caterpillar (www.cat.com) (NYSE: CAT), BAE Systems (www.baesystems.com) (London Stock Exchange over the counter symbol: BAESY), Chicago-area Venture Capital firm KB Partners (www.kbpartners.com), the State of Illinois’ Illinois Finance Authority, and Electrolux (www.electrolux.com) (SSE: ELUX-B).

A visit to the Firefly website found significant changes from a few weeks ago, but not much new information.  The following is a short excerpt from the advanced battery page:

Firefly's Advanced Composite Battery technology will deliver a performance level associated with advanced materials (Nickel Metal Hydride and Lithium) but for 1/10 the cost and can be manufactured within the existing lead acid battery industry's"s infrastructure.

Source : The Energy Blog

Développements du MIT autour du nucléaire

From MIT press release ... MIT researchers are working on several innovations that could make existing (nuclear) plants more efficient and safer to run. These include a new fuel and a way to boost the cooling capability of ordinary water. New fuel In a three-year project completed recently for the U.S. Department of Energy, MIT researchers Hejzlar and Kazimi teamed up with Westinghouse and other companies to look at how to make a fuel for pressurized water reactors (PWR), 30 percent more efficient while maintaining or improving safety margins. Uranium fuel typically is formed into cylindrical ceramic pellets about a half-inch in diameter. The pellets look like a smooth, black version of food pellets for small animals. They changed the shape of the fuel from solid cylinders to hollow tubes. This added surface area that allows water to flow inside and outside the pellets, increasing heat transfer....

Source : The Energy Blog

GridPOint : Energy Storage applicances for the home

GridPoint, the provider of energy storage appliances for the home, announced $21mm in funding, mostly from Goldman Sachs. Also announced was a demand response co-marketing arrangement with Goldman's subsidiary Cogentrix. This could be an indication that Cogentrix is going to be more directly taking on existing demand response players such as Comverge, EnerNOC and ConsumerPowerline -- a fast growing market segment that has attracted a lot of cleantech VC interest.

Source : CleanTech Investing

Zinc Matrix Power : silver-zinc battery technology

Camarillo, Calif.-based battery startup Zinc Matrix Power has developed a silver-zinc battery technology with twice the run time of lithium-ion and a much safer operation and environmental profile. The technology apparently makes its debut at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco next week (Sept. 26 to 28), and manufacturer testing will be conducted next year. The company is financially backed by Intel Corp. and the U.S. Army, which obviously sees a number of military applications.

Timing couldn't be better for this little company. Given the recent safety (fire) concerns over lithium-ion batteries, and the fact that Sony batteries used in laptops from Dell, Apple and Toshiba have been recalled by the hundreds of thousands, the search is on for a battery technology that is not only safer than lithium-ion but offers better performance as well.

Source : Clean Break

Encelium Technologies : building automation technology

Encelium Technologies is a supplier of building automation technology with a special emphasis on lighting. It's incredible how much electricity is consumed by the lighting in big office and industrial buildings, and even more incredible how much of it is unnecessary. A company like Encelium will go into a building and rig rooms with sensors and lighting fixtures with switches and dimmers that allow them to be remotely controlled, either through a pre-established program or through a Web interface. Savings range from 50 per cent to 70 per cent on electricity bills, and the payback can be as little as three or four years depending on the installation. Looked at this way, you begin to realize that the province would get the biggest payback in terms of conservation if it dumped money into building retrofits, or at the very least provided interest-free loans to retrofit projects that could repay the loan within five years.

Source : Clean Break

Group IV : silicon-based solid-state lighting

One of Vinod Khosla's first investments under Khosla Ventures has come out of stealth mode. Ottawa-based Group IV Semiconductor, which is supposed to be making some kind of announcement later this week, now has a Web site and is talking more openly about its technology. The company is developing solid-state lighting based on 100 per cent silicon that would ultimately replace the standard incandescent light bulb. It believes it can match the efficiency and run-life of LEDs but with better light quality and at lower cost. Here's a link to the story I wrote up back in May.

Source : Clean Break

La pile à combustible pour l'automobile : c'est pas forcément pour dans très longtemps

General Motors, which still believes it will start selling fuel cell cars within five years, plans to complement such vehicles by offering homeowners their own hydrogen fueling station. News of this follows a recent announcement that it will be making 100 hydrogen fuel-cell versions of its Chevrolet Equinox SUV. The company says the home stations give homeowners a stable supply of hydrogen and overcome concerns that a hydrogen refueling infrastructure would not be in place to support larger-scale introduction of fuel cell vehicles.

GM, of course, wouldn't be the first automaker to head in this direction. Honda has been working on a similar product, and last fall announced a third-generation prototype of its hydrogen station, which would run on natural gas and would be able to provide hydrogen for a vehicle as well as electricity for a home. Ion America, another secretive Kleiner Perkins' investment, is also developing such a system, and the former Stuart Energy (now part of Hydrogenics) had one in development for years. Hydrogenics calls it the HomeFueler, but there hasn't been much news about it recently, and one must wonder whether GM -- which owns a minority stake in Hydrogenics -- plans to base its home fueling station on the HomeFueler design.

In any event, the home station concept makes sense if you can provide fuel for a vehicle, electricity for a home, and capture waste heat from the process to help heat your home. Price will be key, and it's also important to remember that such a system would rely on natural gas. While it would be a very efficient use of natural gas, you've got to wonder whether you're getting around Peak Oil only to confront Peak Natural Gas...

Source : CleanBreak

Une autre série de commentaires sur la conf. de CleanTech Venture Network

Coming out of last week's Cleantech Venture Forum, it's pretty clear that cleantech (and relatedly energy tech, which is not a 100% overlap, as regular readers of this site will understand) is fast becoming a mainstream investment area for VCs, in part driven by LPs' interest.

In terms of energy technology investing, Rodrigo Prudencio of Nth Power was kind enough recently to share some of the data that his firm is tracking. As part of a recent presentation he gave at Rice University, Rodrigo showed how US energy technology VC investments are at $1.7B so far in 2006 -- compare this with $0.9B for all of 2005, or with the $500mm expected this year in VC investments in Web2.0.

That the energy technology sector (and cleantech in general) is a booming investment area is well understood, but what was really fascinating was Rodrigo's breakdown of the numbers by subsector, which showed that some subsectors are getting a lot more investor interest than others.

Within Distributed Energy Technology, for example (btw, this subsector was 28% of the total), investments in fuel cells and solar dominated the subsector, while other technology areas such as new engine technologies and hydrogen generation were small or nonexistent in the data. This means that solar tech has received more than 10% of all energy technology VC investments so far this year. Interestingly, while investments in fuel cell technology have been generally flat or dropping over the past year, battery-related investments have been growing very quickly. For those who argue that batteries and fuel cells are competing technologies, this is interesting data.

Even more interestingly, in the Fuels subsector, ethanol-related VC investments have received more than $400mm, or just about one quarter of all energy tech investments. Some (including yours truly) would argue that much of this hasn't really been venture capital investment, but has instead been project finance and/or mezz financing that happened to include VCs in the mix. But the more important comparison is with other fuels-related investment areas -- biodiesel, fuels-related biotech, and new drive train technologies have collectively received less than $100mm so far this year. Such investments clearly are not receiving the same level of attention in the rush to invest in ethanol-related opportunities.

Encouraging to those who have been proponents of technology-enabled energy efficiency technology is the fact that 21% of energy tech investments this year were directed to Energy Intelligence, and of that, the vast majority has been directed to IT & software, end-use management, and sensors. This is good validation that such scalable technologies are primed for rapid market adoption -- or at least that investors think so. Such investments have more than doubled over the past two years.

Thanks to Rodrigo for sharing this very interesting look. As Rodrigo points out, there's a lot of deals concentration in certain technologies, and "the opportunity is to find neglected but valuable subsectors." Amen, and especially true for those investors with a broader cleantech mandate as well.

And it's all strong validation of the increasing interest in these industries, and in the cleantech investment thesis in general. Further such indications can be found in this article in PE Week, which points out that a lot of former IT/etc. venture investors are now looking to expand their efforts in the sector. Oftentimes because LPs are asking for it to happen. 

Source : CleanTech Investing

Le compte-rendu d'Expansion Capital sur le dernier forum de CleanTech Venture Network

I had the pleasure of spending the second half of last week at the 14th Cleantech Venture Forum in New York. The group continues to do a terrific job and there was notable excitement among the participants (disclosure: Expansion Capital Partners is an investor in the Cleantech Venture Network).

If I were to summarize the conference in a few sentences, they would be:

• Cleantech as an investment thesis and asset allocation is now mainstream. Some institutions are still skeptical, but they're becoming rare.
• More money is coming into the space, but the quality of dealflow being tracked still exceeds this nicely.

When I think hard about it, I could have said the same thing after the previous CTVF in San Francisco. But since the east coast events tend to focus more on the capital markets (i.e. Wall Street) and policy, vs. venture capital on the west coast, we heard from more folks outside the investment community this time. So the change felt more apparent.

Notable appearances included (in no particular order):

• Andy Rueben (Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability, Wal-Mart)
• Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures)
• Andy Karsner (Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy)
• Vijay Vaitheeswaran (the Economist)
• Kevin Walsh (MD, Renewable Energy, GE Energy Financial Services)
• Joseph Boren and Win Neuger, both from AIG (Joseph from AIG environmental and Win is the CIO of the parent company)
• Several journalists from major publications and news sources were either covering the conference or on the panel (see agenda)

Most panels seemed well received by the participants, and while I did not have a chance to participate in many of them (as I, like most participants, was in and out of meetings -- networking is always a key benefit of these events), I did sit in on the Vinod, Andy, Vijay fireside chat as well as parts of the bio-fuels panel, to note two.

And conveniently, both sessions covered the same topic: Biofuels (ethanol).
Not too many new thoughts for regular readers of this blog came out of this, but here’s a quick summary of what was discussed in the sessions:

- Ethanol is currently replacing MTBE as a fuel additive; this alone will likely put demand above 7.5B gallons by 2012.

- There is some debate around the energy and environmental balance in ethanol produced using current technologies; there is really no debate around the energy or environmental balance of cellulosic ethanol. Hence interest in earlier stage cellulosic ethanol technologies.

- Still early days for cellulosic ethanol; the cost still needs to come down significantly.

The gamble appears to be whether or not ethanol is adopted more widely than as simply an additive (i.e. E85 – 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline). This is what Khosla believes should happen and is pushing very hard for. He argues for three things:

• Mandate that 70% of all new cars be “flex-fuel” by 2014
• Mandate that 10% of gas stations owned by major oil co’s offer E85 in the same time frame
• Reduce current subsidy of ethanol to $0.25/gallon, but increase it to $0.75/gallon if oil drops to $25/barrel

He also noted that we should have a good indication of where policies regarding this are headed, since all candidates for the ’08 election have to go through the Iowa primaries. And Iowans care a lot about ethanol.

Andy Karsner was expectedly non-committal beyond what we already know through the recent energy bill.

But it should also be noted that if one takes current projections, some argue that there is already enough capacity in place and under construction to meet the projected demand. So not everyone is excited about jumping on new investment opportunities with Biofuels or Ethanol noted in the company name…

Noteworthy was also Andy Rueben’s presentation during the gala dinner, where he practically pleaded with the audience to share our knowledge about products that can help Wal-Mart save money (I.e. better/cheaper/more durable lighting; better/cheaper/more effective indoor control; smaller/more economical packaging etc). Considering the audience generally views Wal-Mart as a strong potential customer for their portfolio companies, my guess is someone will give him a ring…

I also found the quality of presenting companies to be significantly higher than in previous years, another sign of the maturing investment sector. And in keeping with the above commentary, the winner of the most promising presenter award was Targeted Growth – a Biofuels company.

Source : Cleantech Investing

Hope to see everyone at the next CTVF in San Francisco, at the end of February.