Archive for the ‘Green Tech Biz’ Category

In Australia and a few other locations, some communications carriers have begun to experiment with bundling utility services into their cellular and cable TV packages.

The idea is both simple and radical at the same time. Power and water are commodities delivered through monthly service contracts, just like internet service. The same back-end billing and accounting software can be exploited to handle all of these accounts. In Texas and the U.K., consumers already buy power from retailers.

But when was the last time your basement got flooded by an on-demand movie? Or that neighborhoods had to be cordoned off because of spotty cell phone coverage? In a pinch, you can live without modern communications. Life without the utility infrastructure would be like a page out of Little House on the Prairie.

The general public perception of utilities is that they are staid, almost immobile, organizations that act more like government agencies than businesses. The power and water business, however, is currently undergoing perhaps the largest transformation it has seen since the dawn of utility commissions.

Consumers and corporations have begun to install solar panels and fuel cells that effectively let them ease off the grid. Native American tribes, real estate investment trusts and others sell power generated from real estate — desert acreage, industrial rooftops, landfills — that once had little market value. Soon, microgrids could lead to autonomous communities. Power to charge your electric car will come from a parking lot.

Meanwhile, smart grid technologies have paved the way for companies like EnerNoc and Silver Spring Networks to act as trusted power intermediaries. For utilities, these companies monitor peak power and stave off the need for expensive capital upgrades. At the other end of the wire, they can unobtrusively turn down air conditioners and lights to lower their utility bills while turning a profit for themselves. It truly is one of those rare less-is-more scenarios.

Telecommunications carriers and large web companies don’t offer gas or water in the States yet, but don’t be surprised if some of them soon don’t start offering to slash your power bills by $25 a month with an internet-enabled thermostat you can lease for only $5. Is the utility the company that generates power, or the one that helps you control it?

The regional monopoly model worked well when power was cheap and plentiful and computers were things in a glass room only scientists got to touch. But now power is the valuable commodity, while communication is cheap.

But what about safety? And comprehensive coverage in a region? Cable companies aren’t required to provide hook-ups to everyone, or even to provide decent programming. People like to complain about their local utility — until there’s a blackout.

Change is coming, make no mistake. The question now is what combination of technologies and responsibilities, business models and regulatory requirements will keep the lights on.

Read more on this topic in a joint effort by General Electric Ecomagination and Greentech Media, and join in on the conversation here.

Advanced internet technologies, energy management and the smart grid are coming together in an unlikely location: a mid-sized city in the South.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, utility EPB hit two milestones in the last two weeks of 2010: It completed the final touches on one of the fastest internet pipelines in the world, and it activated the first automated switches on its electricity network. The combination constitutes the backbone for a Department of Energy–funded smart grid network that’s expected to save the utility and area businesses tens of millions of dollars annually.

The utility will go head-to-head with providers such as Comcast to offer its existing customers an ultrahigh-speed internet connection at a whopping one gigabit per second — more than 200 times faster than the average U.S. download speed. With this, YouTube uploads go from several minutes to seconds. Even in a worldwide context, it’s impressive — tech-savvy South Korea is eying one-gigabit-per-second service by 2012.

EPB will reduce outages by 40 percent with its high speed network — and pose a threat to demand-response providers and AT&T.

EPB is charging as much as $350 a month for the top-speed connections, which could limit internet service to commercial outfits, but all of its 170,000 electricity customers could benefit from the infrastructure. The network will serve as the conduit for 80 billion data points on electricity use per year that could help the utility run more efficiently, reduce outages, and give customers more control over their monthly electricity expenses.

“Chattanooga is the epicenter of energy technology,” said Harold DePriest, president and CEO of EPB. “One of our biggest jobs is to exploit this technology for the benefit of our community.”

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In 2010, the Bloom Energy fuel cell, powered by natural gas, $400 million in cash from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a 60 Minutes piece sucked most of the air out of the fuel cell market space, column-inch wise.

Natural gas fuels the Bloom Box with low-carbon emissions and efficiencies in the range of a natural gas genset.  But the pricing of the Bloom Box could be considerably more expensive if you consider the NG genset as the competition.

Bloom claims its “server” generates power for 7 cents to 10 cents per kilowatt hour after incentives, a calculation that includes fuel, maintenance, hardware expenses and, most importantly, government incentives. Sometimes the cost is even lower. Adobe installed 12 Bloom Boxes and produces power for 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour and it uses more expensive biogas. Adobe traditionally has to pay PG&E 13 cents a kilowatt hour at its headquarters.

But how do you get to that figure?

The unit cost usually mentioned for Bloom’s 100-kilowatt solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) is approximately $700,000.  The company will have shipped in the neighborhood of 100 pieces by the end of 2010 to marquee customers such as Walmart, Google and FedEx.  That’s a significant amount of revenue for a young company, possibly on the scale to get to an IPO in 2011.  An SEC filing for a proposed IPO would reveal how much the Bloom Box costs to build versus its selling price.

We’ve received a bit of clarification on the price from a trusted source who has seen a price quote from the firm.

According to the source, the price for a multi-100-kilowatt system including installation, shipping and California sales tax is $10 per watt.  Add to that a ten-year warranty that will run you $2.50 per watt for a total of $12.50 per watt before incentives.  And you’ll need a warranty because the fuel cell stack is destined to foul and need replacement in five to ten years. It is interesting that the warranty is priced separately. We weren’t aware of that.

In the U.S., fuel cell incentives include a federal tax credit for 30 percent of the cost of a fuel cell.  California kicks in another $2.50 per watt. That gets the Bloom Box down to about $6.25 per watt, or $625,000 for 100 kilowatts not including sales tax. (Wiggle room on numbers exists here — we’ve called Bloom but not heard back.) Put another way, without incentives, it’s one of the more expensive sources of energy around. With incentives, it’s more expensive than solar but can provide baseline power and run data centers, something solar couldn’t do without battery packs or other energy storage technologies.

In addition to natural gas gensets, the competition for the Bloom Box could be considered microturbines from firms like Capstone Turbine which have a sales price of less than $1.00 per watt and are about $1.25 per watt installed, according to advocates. Capstone had a backlog of orders totalling to $83 million in November, but microturbines also remain a work in progress.

Declining prices, government incentives, demand for cleaner power and improving technology have begun to revive the fuel cell industry. But until carbon is aggressively priced, it would seem that Bloom — like some other alternative energy technologies — has a long way to go on competitive pricing without incentives.

Photo: Bloom CEO KR Sridhar/Associated Press

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See Also:

• Bloom Energy
• Bloom vs. Solar: Which One Is Best?
• Is Bloom Energy’s Secret Ingredient Zirconia?
• Video: Q&A With Bloom Energy’s Founder on Next-Gen Fuel Cells and …

BOSTON – Boston’s angels are increasingly interested in cleantech. But to what end?

At the State of Massachusetts’ sixth annual Conference on Clean Energy, leading early stage investors discussed the differences between venture firms and angel investors. Whereas institutional funds focus on market-disrupting technological innovations, angels are more willing to consider smaller businesses, niche markets and service companies.

“It is very important to differentiate between what is a good business for you as the entrepreneur versus what is a good business for me as a VC investor,” said David Wells of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “I am trying to move the needle on a billion dollar fund and create a durable enterprise that will still be standing 10 or 20 years from now. That is very different from you achieving success with your venture.

“Just because I declined to invest does not mean it is not good for you. It means that I cannot achieve my objectives with my fund. Angel investors and high-net worth individuals have their bar set in a different place.”

David Miller is among those with a different set of constraints. In 2004, Miller founded the Boston-area Clean Energy Venture Group as a collection of four angels who share diligence and together invest in early stage companies. The group has since grown to 10 members and made eight investments as a unit.

“We don’t have a billion dollar fund. We don’t have that requirement that a company has to be[come] a multibillion dollar company for us to have made a successful investment,” said Miller. “But it [still] has to move the needle. We are still financial investors…. If the company ends up selling for $50 million and we have made a $500,000 investment, that might work out. That company may be more disruptive in a niche than economy-wide.”

But do such companies really exist in the notoriously capital intensive cleantech sector? A number of the companies out of the state — A123 Systems, E-Ink, Konarka, Luminus Devices and the bomb that was Greenfuel Technologies — have been held up as examples of how not to spend $70 million dollars.

Six months ago, Bic Stevens organized Boston Cleantech Angels, a group that has quickly grown to more than 20 Boston-area investors. He and his colleagues believe there are significant opportunities for angels in cleantech.

“There are different markets. Five years ago, I was raising money for a little company called Sterling Planet,” said Stevens. “I tried to raise $2 million. Not one VC would touch it. They are [now] the leading supplier and buyer of renewable energy certificates in the country. This year, they will make $11 million in profit. There are opportunities like this, but they are all different. There are places for the angel community where a $50 million exit is fabulous.”

What metrics do angels evaluate when trying to identify the next Sterling Planet?

“We are looking for sustainable competitive advantage, a company that is going to be able to differentiate itself within a market niche, address that market well, has a team that can execute and is reasonably capital efficient so that either our funds can carry the company or there is a very well defined path for the company to reach a Series A,” said Miller.

Angel investors may also be more willing that venture capitalists to invest in service companies.

“The advantage of going after service companies is that VCs don’t like them,” said Stevens. “Two or three years ago, we said we looked at technology, not service companies. But one of the best investments we have made is a service company called Next Step Living. We very rarely rule anything out.  We met the team and were extremely impressed,” said Miller.

“This company does residential energy audits. They had a very strong focus on customer service and making their customers happy. They knew how to market and execute their service well.  I saw it as the McDonald’s of energy efficiency.  They didn’t have great IP, but they were executing.”

Of course, angels and venture capitalists are similar in at least one respect: both look for exits.

“We want to see potential for an acquisition, merger, [or] IPO, the traditional type of exits,” said Miller.

“The problem as we all know is that there are few public exits to speak of,” said Stevens. “Right now, a lot of angels in Boston are licking their wounds, having been fodder to the VCs, who in turn got crushed by the fact that there are no markets.”

But even in a tough environment, Boston-area angels are increasingly interested in cleantech. Stevens’ group, Boston Cleantech Angels, has been adding two or three members a month and plans to grow to 50-60 investors.

Yoni Cohen is a JD-MBA student at the Yale Law School and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  A former college basketball writer for Fox Sports, he tweets about cleantech @cohen_yoni

Follow Epicenter on Twitter for disruptive tech news.

See Also:

• Green Tech Biz
• Top Ten Greentech IPO Candidates
• The Energy Department Has A New Commitment to Solar (And A New …
• Bloom vs. Solar: Which One Is Best?

The solar industry has risen in popularity, in part as a result of its good intentions — but soon it will have to start to play ugly.

Public opinion data from Gotham Research group provide numbers for what many of you already suspect. Solar enjoys overwhelming approval from the public, who see it as a way to wean ourselves off fossil fuels and stimulate local economies.

Eighty percent of Americans rated solar power favorably, compared to 39 percent for nuclear and 32 percent for oil. Seventy-four percent believe that solar is a “long-term solution for the country’s energy needs.” Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia have renewable portfolio standards.

The Solar Energy Industries Association, meanwhile, says that 94 percent of Americans see solar as important and 80 percent want to see subsidies transferred from fossil fuel to solar.

Unfortunately, the public also said solar is too expensive, will remain an intermittent source of power, and can’t really directly compete with coal or natural gas. Only 41 percent thought solar was affordable, and only 34 percent thought it was reliable.

Seventeen percent said solar would “never” be the largest source of new electricity for whole cities.  Most of those polled were largely in the dark about the subsidies provided to oil and gas. Just 19 percent correctly estimated that the fossil fuel industry gets more than $10 billion in subsidies.

And chances are it will get worse as fossil fuel providers pour on the money for ads and lobbyists to turn back the gains of the renewable industry. Valero, Tesero and Koch Industries have poured millions into the campaign for Prop 23 that could put California’s greenhouse gas regulations on hold for years. Natural gas has been flogging the airwaves with ads starring the Flonase woman informing us how wonderfully patriotic methane is.

The open question is whether the industry has the stomach to fight back — which is where Karl Rove comes in. The industry needs to outline in clear, sound-bite-like blurbs how solar will become the affordable best option in the future. More importantly, the spokesman needs to dig up dirt on the fossil industry.

Things like:

• The federal government lets the richest oil companies take oil out of the Gulf of Mexico for free. And then the oil companies sell it to you for $3 a gallon.
• Solar and other renewable energy companies have created 500,000 new jobs in California since 2005 according to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Most new jobs in fossil fuel have been at gas stations.
• BP may only pay one-tenth of the cost of the Gulf oil spill cleanup because of big-government rules designed to protect them.
• Solar plants built in California’s Mojave Desert over 20 years ago have had fewer down days that coal or gas plants. The last time these plants saw a dip in power production was when Mt. Pinatubo blew.
• Did you know the state of Kentucky pays $115 million to the richest coal companies in the world every year despite chronic unemployment among its residents?
• Recent studies indicate that nuclear power costs 3 to 4 times more than wind or solar power, and that’s not even counting in the cost of storage of nuclear waste. Nuclear plants also can take far longer to erect and create far fewer jobs.
• Solar employment grew by 37 percent in 2009 and will account for 60,000 jobs in 2010. Most of these jobs will come from small businesses.
• The federal government gives the coal industry more than $17 billion a year, including nearly $1 billion in tax breaks, to dig on federal lands. That’s your real estate.
• Solar, wind and other renewables accounted for more new power than coal or fossil fuel in 2009.

All of these statements are true. Exaggerated for effect, but true.

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Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who is now running as the Republican candidate for governor in California, says she doesn’t want to roll back the state’s landmark greenhouse gas emissions law.

She just wants to cut off its oxygen supply.

In a nuanced position, Whitman said that she does not oppose Proposition 23, a ballot proposition that would roll back AB 32, the greenhouse gas law signed by sitting Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Nonetheless, Whitman added that she still wants to suspend it for a year.

“This is not an easy issue. While green jobs are an important and growing part of our state’s economic future, we cannot forget the other 97% of jobs in key sectors like manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and energy. We compete for jobs with many other states, and our environmental policy must reflect that reality,” she said.

So there’s something for everyone here. She’s no longer opposed to it, but doesn’t want to embrace it either. It’s almost like shopping at eBay: everyone can find something they like.

Whitman has also promised during in her campaign — which has consumed over $110 million of her own fortune — that she will curb state spending.

Proposition 23 is heavily opposed by groups in Silicon Valley that point out that the green economy has been one of the few drivers in the state. Besides Arnold, George Schultz, the former Secretary of State under Reagan, opposes Prop 23. Polls show support for AB 32 among voters as well.

Schultz saluted the move.

“We are pleased that Meg Whitman is joining our bipartisan effort to stand up to Texas oil companies and protect California’s job-creating clean energy economy and clean air standards.  She votes ‘no’ on 23,” he said.

Much of the money for Prop 23 has come from out-of-state coal and oil interests.

Whitman has called AB 23 a job killer. That position has drawn rebuke from many in the high-tech sector, including eBay alum Steve Westly.

“Most of the people I know throughout Silicon Valley realize that to be a colossal mistake. This is the highest-growth job segment. This state’s job engine for the future is in clean technology,” Westly told us back in February.

Follow Epicenter on Twitter for disruptive tech news.

See Also:

• Top Ten Greentech IPO Candidates
• Can Sound Waves Reduce Power Consumption?
• The Energy Department Has A New Commitment to Solar (And A New …
• Intel Heads Up $3.5 Billion Green/Clean Tech Investment Fund …
• Meg Whitman’s ‘Colossal Mistake’ on Green
• Washington’s Big Money for Clean Tech

As Michael Kanellos reported, recent greentech IPOs have had mixed and less than stellar results. And we’ve looked at many of the greentech IPO prospects in the past — the public market regurgitated Solyndra, unable to squeeze that debt level and fragile value proposition down its craw. The shiny bolus of Tesla has been swallowed, although that firm’s value proposition has not been fully digested or priced.

I’ll stop with the alimentary metaphors for now.

Here are some wild prognostications of ten potential greentech IPOs coming this year through 2012. These companies have real products, serious revenue and the prospect of profits in high-growth markets.

Bloom Energy has a great story, revenue from the sales of its Bloom Boxes and marquee customers including Cypress, Google, FedEx and San Francisco’s SFO Airport. The company’s Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) are an alternative to diesel gen-sets in the off-grid world and to the electric grid in the developed world. The fuel cells run on natural gas which, in the view of some, makes the value proposition fragile. But a strong team, veteran investors and a big narrative make this a firm to watch, profitability and value proposition notwithstanding.

Bridgelux has emerged from the pack of LED start-ups with a solid product roadmap and a CEO (Bill Watkins) familiar with the scale-up issues surrounding tech companies. The firm is aiming at the commercial market, avoiding the coming residential bulb bloodbath. Still, Bridgelux must compete against Philips, Osram, GE and other companies with over 100 years of experience and mature sales channels all over the world. Reliable sources at the Director level inform us that revenue is in the high tens of millions.

BrightSource Energy is the leader in the solar thermal startup world — now that the Ivanpah CSP plant has been given the green light. That’s hundreds of megawatts of power under contract and gigawatts of power in the pipeline. An enormous $1.37 billion federal loan guarantee has been won and investors, developers and EPC personnel are in place. But revenue doesn’t flow until power flows which explains the company looking at Thermal Enhanced Oil Recovery (TEOR) as a shorter term revenue source.

Enphase has shipped more than 300,000 of their microinverters, carved out more than a 10 percent US market share in Q1, according to the CEO, and has a strong balance sheet — partially from a recent funding infusion from Kleiner Perkins. The inverter and microinverter market is growing fast and Enphase is the microinverter leader. Reliability issues seems to be well-addressed although gross margin questions remain. They have made a tentative foray into the consumer-facing smart grid with an automated thermostat, looking to leverage their platform into other markets.

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Intematix produces a product that makes LEDs work. Their phosphor materials enable LEDs for general illumination to achieve good quality light and efficiency.  Reliable sources indicate that the company is generating revenue in the “tens of millions.”  And the LED lighting market is at an interesting tipping point.

OPower is an energy efficiency company focused on customer engagement and behavior modification, currently providing tens of thousands of homes with in-home energy data and efficiency advice via paper reports or online. The platform is described as advanced customer engagement. The firm says about 85 percent of their customers will cut power consumption by around 3.5 percent. The customized data lets people know much energy they’re using in comparison to their neighbors and then follows it up with a course of action.  Revenues exceed $30 million according to sources at the firm.

Serious Materials has yet to build a commercial-scale factory for its green drywall but is selling tens of millions worth of thermal windows. Rumors are that it will try next to move into other markets for building products such as insulation and home management controls. CEO Kevin Surace has talked about this for years, and an IPO would give him the cash to expand. Last year’s revenue was reported in the $50 million range.

Silver Spring Networks‘ S-1 filing is rumored for the fall of this year. Silver Spring has won multimillion-dollar contracts in California, Texas and Australia for the mesh networking systems that connect meters to utilities. They’ve hit a few speed bumps with the PG&E smart grid backlash and there are profitability concerns but the revenue bar seems to be reached to allow serious consideration of the public offering.

Solar City has raised $60 million in tax-equity financing from PG&E, a $90 million fund with U.S. Bancorp and the backing of premier VCs. The firm started its existence looking to add efficiency to the solar installation process. It then moved into financing and leasing the solar systems for residential rooftops. And it has just added energy efficiency services to its competencies through its acquisition of Building Solutions. It has significant revenues from its operations in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon and Texas but, like other service industries, is faced with the challenge of how to efficiently and profitably scale the business.

Suniva, as reported by GTM Research analyst Shyam Mehta, began commercial production of its monocrystalline cells in late 2008 and “unlike many struggling PV startups that entered the market around that time, the company has gone from strength to strength over the last 18 months” with “one of the quickest production ramps of any Western PV company.” Suniva went from an initial 32 megawatts to 96 megawatts to a current 170 megawatts of cell capacity, and is sold out for 2010. The company has its own paste and texture recipes, is able to customize and optimize every layer of the cell design to its own specifications, and has leveraged its considerable R&D experience to optimize each processing step to a high degree. While Suniva is clearly not going to overtake SunPower or Sanyo any time soon, reports suggest that the company has a much better cost structure compared to these two players, one that is more in line with low-cost manufacturers. That, combined with its current efficiency advantage over other firms, makes it competitively positioned for right now. A 19-percent-efficiency cell is in the works and should maintain competitiveness in the near future as well. “The key question is whether the company can maintain this advantage going forward, given that major Chinese players are hell-bent on playing catch-up,” according to Mehta.

(This is an excerpt from our larger recent review of the Greentech IPO Landscape: Past, Present and Future.) Michael Kanellos contributed to this article.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• 5 Reasons Why Green Tech Has Such a Tough Time in America …
• Intel Heads Up $3.5 Billion Green/Clean Tech Investment Fund …
• The Energy Department Has A New Commitment to Solar (And A New …
• Washington’s Big Money for Clean Tech
• Google Plans New Mirror For Cheaper Solar Power
• Electrolux Shows BP How Green Marketing Is Done
• Fair and … Carbon Neutral?

As the U.S. wind industry’s installed capacity went from 6.7 megawatts to 35,000 megawatts between 2004 and 2009, its manufacturing sector expanded from a few dozen facilities to more than 240. By 2009, over 60 percent of wind’s U.S. capacity was sourced domestically.

This is a growing ecosystem supporting U.S. middle-class labor as well as capacity to generate emissions-free electricity. “For wind turbines, which have large components like towers, nacelles and blades,” according an American Wind Energy Association, or AWEA, spokesperson, “transportation is a big part of the cost.”

In fact, according to the recent report Harnessing the Potential of Open Trade … in the Wind Energy Industry from the World Resources Institute, off-shoring wind industry manufacturing to places where labor is cheap has no significant cost benefit over domestic manufacturing because of transport costs. The U.S. wind manufacturing base can, therefore, be expected to grow as long as the industry does.

California-based Clipper Windpower, for instance, opened a manufacturing facility in 2006, captured 1 percent of the turbine market in 2007, moved up to 6 percent in 2008 and, in 2009, exported its first turbines, to Mexico.

According to the just-released 2009 Wind Market Report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a contemporary wind turbine averages about two megawatts in capacity, or enough power for almost 500 U.S. homes. According to Winds of Change; A Manufacturing Blueprint for the Wind Industry (.pdf) from AWEA, the Blue-Green Alliance and the United Steelworkers, the average turbine weighs 200 to 400 short tons, 90 percent of that in steel and most of the rest in fiberglass, copper, concrete, aluminum and adhesives. It has about 8,000 components, many already manufactured domestically in smaller versions for aerospace, defense, energy and mining.

The five U.S. turbine manufacturers in operation in 2005 grew to 15 in 2009. Nine of 2009’s top 10 original equipment manufacturers — Acciona, Clipper, GE, Gamesa, Mitsubishi, Nordex, Siemens, Suzlon, Vestas — have current or announced U.S. facilities for towers, blade manufacturing, or nacelle assembly.

At least three factors, according to the manufacturing report, are driving the growth of domestic manufacturing. First, eliminating the expense of transporting very large turbine parts offsets the higher cost of domestic labor. Second, imports that require dealing with currency fluctuations can often disadvantage the U.S. dollar. Third, the high cost of inventory and rapidly developing technology makes just-in-time manufacturing necessary — and proximity preferences domestic manufacturers.

[Story continues]

The Department of Energy launched a new blog last week, the aptly named (yet uninspiring) Energy Blog. Among other announcements and musings (OK, really more statements than deep thoughts) is a call to develop three Energy Innovation Hubs, one of which will drive research to turn sunlight into fuels.

This is not the first time the Obama Administration has shelled out for sunlight fuels. Last October, ARPA-E, the advanced projects research group at the Department of Energy, gave out $23.7 million in grants to startups and universities experimenting in the relatively new field of direct solar fuels. The current award will give out up to $122 million over the next five years to one Hub for developing this one technology.

The Energy Innovation Hubs will be modeled after the Manhattan Project, the AT&T Bell Laboratories and on the three $25 million-per-year DOE Bioenergy Research Centers. The other two Hubs will research energy efficiency in buildings systems and modeling and simulation for nuclear reactors.

For the sunlight fuels, there are already various universities that are working on direct solar fuels, including the University of Minnesota, MIT, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Penn State. BioCee and the University of Minnesota wants to take sunlight, carbon dioxide and two organisms (cyanobacteria for sunlight capture and shewanella for metabolic transformation) to produce a liquid hydrocarbon, while MIT-spinoff Sun Catayltix uses sunlight to spilt water to produce hydrogen.

The DOE is hoping that these Hubs will be able to lay the groundwork with critical research to the point where the technology can be handed off to the private sector.

Among the other chatter from Scott Blake Harris, DOE blogger and General Counsel for the Department of Energy, is a call for public written comments on how to meet smart grid goals. The blog has a link to check out what’s already been gathered and also to submit additional feedback via email by August 9, 2010 to help shape a report due out this fall about modernizing the grid.

The Energy Blog feels a lot like the DOE News page, although you don’t find a lot of calls to tweet the DOE on the news page. The information, like updates on the Global Energy Efficiency Challenge (super-efficient appliances, energy efficiency for large commercial buildings, smart grid action, getting 20 million EVs on the road by 2020 — all lofty ideals with vague roadmaps and funding), is presented in the nearly same format as it would be in other sections of the DOE website.

Also, as this is not Twitter, and certainly not Gawker, there is not likely to be any real additional breaking information, insider views or gaffes that come across this blog. Not unless you count the fact that their RSS feed tab was broken today.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• 5 Reasons Why Green Tech Has Such a Tough Time in America …
• Intel Heads Up $3.5 Billion Green/Clean Tech Investment Fund …
• Washington’s Big Money for Clean Tech
• Bloom vs. Solar: Which One Is Best?
• Will The Sun Rise, Or Set, For Solar?
• Google Plans New Mirror For Cheaper Solar Power
• Why Intel Wants to Get into Energy
• Google Invests in Green with Renewable Energy Initiative …

Photo: the russians are here/Flickr

The United States has long been a leader in green technologies. It has also long been a leader in fumbling that lead. Look at the historical record:

• Charles Brush built what is considered the first automatic wind turbine for generating electricity. The turbine, built in 1888 in Ohio, had a 50-foot diameter and 144 blades. The industry has since trimmed turbines down to three blades. It has also gone overseas. While the United States has more installed wind capacity than anyone else, the only top U.S. wind manufacturer remains General Electric: They got into the business by buying the wind division of disgraced, defunct Enron. One of the most promising U.S. startups is Nordic Windpower, located in Berkeley, California, by way of Sweden.

• Calvin Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson created the first silicon photovoltaic cell at Bell Labs in 1954. It was only 4-percent efficient, but Bell raised the figure to 11 percent soon after. First Solar and SunPower hail from the United States — and we mint a lot of startups — but the United States is a far smaller market than Europe, and Suntech and Yingli have begun to demonstrate that we don’t have a monopoly on quality.

• A chemistry professor at the State University of New York Binghamton, M. Stanley Whittingham, led a research team at Exxon that resulted in the first lithium-ion battery. Whittingham’s titanium sulfide battery, however, was not a hit — Sony’s lithium-cobalt battery became the standard in the early 1990s. The battery industry is now based in Asia.

• In 1991, the Department of Energy kicked off the $90 million U.S. Advanced Battery Consortium to develop nickel-metal hybrid batteries for hybrid cars, a car design championed a century earlier by Ferdinand Porsche. The effort scared Japan so much that Honda and Toyota began to develop hybrids. Before tangible results came in, the DOE shifted funding to hydrogen.

• In 1976, General Electric Ed Hammer invented something that many thought impossible: the compact fluorescent bulb. Although GE liked the idea, CFLs would require entirely new manufacturing facilities, which would cost $25 million. “So they decided to shelve it,” Hammer told me in 2007. CFLs only came to market because the design leaked out — others copied it before GE had a licensing program. “That’s how it became widespread,” he said.

So why do we suck so much at green commercialization, while excelling at transforming science projects like search engines, microprocessors and microbes into Google, Intel and Genentech? The reasons are: