Author: mattwvd

It’s down to Ken Salazar now.

The Interior Department’s Advisory Council on Historic Preservation report, released Friday, claims that the impact of the $1 billion, 130-wind-turbine Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound will be “pervasive, destructive and… permanent”. The report read as though it was written by Cape Wind’s most prominent opponent, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

Now Interior Secretary Salazar, who is expected to make a decision on the Massachusetts wind farm later this month, is left with two equally unappetizing choices.

The first option is for Salazar to make sympathetic noises about the importance of The Kennedy Compound in Hyannis, which is prominently mentioned in the advisory report, and talk about his respect for the Wampanoag tribes, whose sacred rights will be trampled by Cape Wind.

And then he can approve the project, which will put wind turbines in a 24-square-mile area roughly five miles offshore.

No project, he could argue, is going to be free of conflict and there is a case to be made that the objections to Cape Wind amount to cultural and historic preservation run amok.

The advisory report, for example, raises “the potential for undiscovered submerged archaelogical sites” on the proposed site of the wind farm, Horseshoe Shoal.

Who, exactly, was angling to dig in these underwater archaeological sites prior to Cape Wind’s proposal, one might ask?

More to the point, a broad push for the greening of the country’s electrical supply has to begin somewhere.

Cape Wind will bring 420 megawatts of clean energy to New England consumers and is a showpiece project for an administration that is eager to show the viability of renewable energy. The developer claims that it will “launch a whole new industry… of clean offshore renewable energy development”.

Or will it?

The project, viable or not, has turned into a public relations boondoggle for offshore wind that could set the industry’s public image back years.

So begins the argument for why Salazar should send Cape Wind back to the drawing board.

The federal government, unsure of how to handle such a project when it was first proposed about a decade ago, made up the permitting rules as it went along.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proved itself to be incapable of looking at claims about the cultural importance of Horseshoe Shoal.

Later efforts by the Interior Department to consult with the Indian tribes were, the adviory report found, “tentative, inconsistent and late.”

The Interior Department does not need the centerpiece project of the new green energy era to spring from retrograde trampling of Indian claims and rights.

Green energy has enough problems with affordability and immature technology that it can ill afford disputes over project developers and the government running roughshod over critics.

It would be nice if there was a middle ground between these two positions.

Audra Parker, head of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound suggested  to G.E.R. that a site called South of Tuckernuck Island, would be a good alternative to Horseshoe Shoal.

In truth, that would be a loss for Cape Wind and the company would in all likelihood scrap the plan rather than build there.

So again: it’s down to Salazar.

Photo: Courtesy Cape Wind

Suniva’s future certainly looks bright this morning.

The Norcross, Ga., solar company Chief Executive John Baumstark told Reuters that Suniva is sold out of solar cells and modules through the end of 2010.

Suniva also announced that it is being considered for a $141 million loan from the Energy Department that will be used to built a new 400-megawatt capacity manufacturing plant in Saginaw County, Michigan.

The $250 million plant will create 500 jobs at the company.

The loan guarantee will also allow Suniva, which makes high-efficiency monocrystalline silicon solar cells, to triple exports in five years and bring its total capacity to about 600 MW.

The company sends 90 percent of its products to Asia and Europe.

Suniva has been awash in good press recently, topping several lists of top cleantech companies.

The company also thrived in difficult times, raising $75 million in venture capital funding, led by Warburg Pincus, in July.

Baumstark told Reuters that the company would pursue an IPO when conditions are favorable.

So, did Obama thread the needle today in giving the oil and gas crowd what they want but not alienating environmentalists and liberal Democrats? The scorecard is still being tallied.

Florida’s Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, who authored a 2006 law that keeps oil rigs 100 miles offshore, said he had been worried that Obama’s plan would damage Florida’s economy and environment but the administration “heeded that concern”.

South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who is working with Sens. John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman to craft an climate change bill, offered a detailed critique of Obama’s performance.

“[T]his is a good first step,” Graham said of the offshore proposal. “But there is more to be done to make this proposal meaningful and the game-changer we all want it to become.”

He asked the administration to encourage states to allow exploration by sharing revenue raised from oil and gas drilling, open more areas of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico to exploration and include other viable drilling sites.

Graham helpfully pointed out that offshore drilling is only part of the solution — a solution that includes pricing carbonn.

We need a comprehensive energy strategy for our nation that breaks our addiction to foreign oil.  We need a robust expansion of nuclear power.  We need to price carbon in a consumer-friendly manner to help speed along the exciting, new technologies out there.

The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire has the environmental reaction. To summarize:

Greenpeace: Hated it.

Environmenta America: Ditto.

World Wildlife Fund: Happy that Alaska’s Bristol Bay is exempted.

President Obama called for greater domestic oil production, including a five-year plan for offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard, at a speech this morning on energy strategy.

The strategy, widely seen as an attempt to garner Republican votes for upcoming climate legislation, brought praise from American Petroleum Institute Chief Executive Jack Gerard said “we stand ready to work with them to make this a reality.”

But some of Obama’s traditional Democratic allies, such as New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, condemned the move as a “kill, baby, kill policy” that will harm marine life and coastal economies.

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) was more conciliatory. In a statement emailed to G.E.R.Kerry spokeswoman Whitney Smith says the Senator is ready to compromise if it gets him the 60 votes he needs to pass his climate change bill.

She writes:

In the difficult work of putting together a 60 vote coalition to price carbon, Senator Kerry has put aside his own long-time policy objections and been willing to explore potential energy sources off our coasts as part of a suite of alternative solutions. He and his colleagues are committed to find acceptable compromises on onshore and offshore oil and gas exploration, conducted in an environmentally sensitive manner that protects the interests of the coastal states.

Another high-powered techie has turned to the green side.

Tony Fadell, “The Godfather of the iPod,” is leaving Apple to work with consumer greentech companies, The New York Times reports. 

Fadell told The Times’ Bits Blog:

My primary focus will be helping the environment by working with consumer green-tech companies. I’m determined to tell my kids and grandkids amazing stories beyond my iPod and iPhone ones.

The nexus between silicon valley techies and green tech has always been strong but recently the two industries seem to be sharing the same talent pool.

Just last week, Geoff Tate, formerly of AMD and Rambus, took the CEO spot at Nanosolar

Fadell was among the first to come up with the idea of a music player with a hard drive and he brought the idea to Real Networks before turning to Apple in 2001, The Times reports.

The rest is history.

Not only have TV weathercasters been made mostly irrelevant by free iPhone apps, it turns out that many of them are also wrong, wrong, wrong about the most pressing issue of our time, The New York Times reports today.

The Times cites a study that finds 25 percent of weathercasters don’t believe  global warming is happening, while two-thirds believe it is caused by natural environmental changes. Do you really want your grandma getting her information from (and falling in love with) these people?

*Except Sam Champion

The study, by George Mason University researchers, also found that 27 percent of survey respondents found agreement with the statement “global warming is a scam.”

It turns out that it boils down to a simmering feud between meteorologists, who look at the atmosphere for short-term changes, and climatologists, who look at it long-term.

Bob Henson, a science writer for the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research puts it this way:

In a sense the question is who owns the atmosphere: the people who predict it every day or the people who predict it for the next 50 years?

Henson also claims that meteorologists, who generally have bachelor’s degrees, resent climatologists with doctoral degrees pushing them around.

We’ll pause here and note that some weather anchors, like Good Morning America’s Sam Champion, are concientious reporters on global warming and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But many other weathercasters are following pioneering GMA weather anchor John Coleman, profiled here in the Columbia Journalism Review, in rejecting all those pointy-headed, liberal scientists who are pushing the global warming line.

Coleman was the one who declared climate change is a scam.

This shows once again, that much of the global warming dispute boils down to a dislike of Al Gore and questions about what IPCC head Rajendra K. Pachauri does with his consulting money, not science.

The 881,000 green jobs in the UK today could grow to over 1.27 million by 2015 if investment in low carbon technologies continues, according to a parliamentary report.

The report, titled “Low carbon technologies in a green economy,” calls on the government to streamline planning and approval processes for wind farms, new nuclear plants and CO2 pipelines.

Not America, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, which released its G-20 Clean Energy Factbook today. And while we shouldn’t be surprised that China is surging into the green energy lead by key measures – with Europe right behind – the evidence is mounting that the U.S. is hobbling itself by moving slowly.

The Pew report, which sees $200 billion in clean energy investments in 2010, lays out the America’s problems in stark terms:

In all, 10 other G-20 members devoted a greater percentage of gross domestic product to clean energy than the United States in 2009… The United States is on the verge of losing its leadership position in installed renewable energy capacity, with China surging in the last several years to a virtual tie.

The report goes on to lament the stalled legislation in the U.S. Congress and notes that China, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain have “strong national policies aimed at reducing global warming pollution and incentivizing the use of renewable energy”.

Still, there is hope in the “America’s entrepreneurial traditions and strengths in innovation.”

General Electric announced plans today to invest €340 million ($453 million) to develop and expand its wind turbine operations in the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden and Germany in its biggest bet to date on offshore wind in Europe.

The core of the plan is a €110 million investment for a new offshore turbine manufacturing plant in the U.K. aimed at tapping the government’s multibillion sterling offshore wind plan.

Victor Abate, vice president of renewable energy for GE Power & Water, said:

These announcements lay the foundation for us to begin scaling our offshore business, technology and supply chain locally in Europe where we see the greatest growth opportunity.

The investments will be made by 2016 in anticipation of huge growth in the offshore wind sector. European Union countries are trying to reach a goal of  20 percent of energy coming from renewable resources by 2020.

The move is also a bet on GE’s new 4-megawatt wind turbine, designed with technology from 2009 acquisition ScanWind of Norway.

The turbines will be tested in Norway, where GE will create a new Offshore Technology Development Center in Oslo and expand its advanced demonstration unit production and service facilities. The move will bring a €75 million investment.

In Sweden, GE will also expand its offshore testing facilities with a demonstration unit in Gothenburg Harbor. GE will also join the Chalmers Wind Energy Center in Gothenberg resulting in a €50 million investment.

GE plans to invest €105 in a new engineering center in Hamburg, Germany along with an expansion of its turbine manufacturing facility in Salzbergen and the Global Research Center in Munich.

Finally, GE plans to put application and service engineering facilities in the U.K. and will bring its partners and suppliers to the manufacturing facility, making the country a turbine manufacturing hub for Europe.

Solar Millennium AG has appointed Chief Financial Officer Thomas Mayer chief executive as it undergoes a financial audit.

The appointment today follows a tumultuous two weeks that have seen newly appointed CEO Utz Claassen flee the job after only 75 days and, subsequently, an audit of the company’s financial statements going all the way back to 2004-05.

Oliver Bamberger, who was previously worked in financial roles for the Solar Millennium. will replace Mayer as Chief Financial Officer.

Commerzbank AG analyst Robert Schramm is quoted in BusinessWeek/Bloomberg saying that investors will be in wait-and-see mode until the audit, which is being conducted by Deloitte, is complete.

The company’s shares have taken a beating since Claassen’s announcement, dropping from a 28.87 Euros on March 15 to 21.20 Euros at 3:15 today.

Shell and Virent Energy Systems, Inc., announced today that production has started at the world’s first biogasoline plant.

The Madison, Wisc., facility converts plant sugars into gasoline instead of ethanol, making it usable in standard gasoline engines. The technology isn’t ready for primetime but it’s another major biofuel investment by Shell that could yield fruit in coming years, said Luis Scoffone, Vice President of Alternative Energies at Shell.

Scoffone said:

Moving from lab-scale to a demonstration production plant is an important milestone for biogasoline. ‘There is some way to go on the route to commercialisation, but we have been delighted with the speed of progress achieved by our collaboration with Virent.

Shell is the world’s largest distributor of biofuels and has been bullish on the prospects for the fuel.

Oil majors like Shell and Chevron, which announced the creation of a solar panel test facility yesterday, have been bringing their R&D expertise and cash to green energy projects with increasing frequency.

Virent, which is backed by Cargill and Honda, uses a patented “BioForming” technology to convert beet sugar into hydrocarbon molecules resembling gasoline, according to the news release.

The biogasoline molecules also have higher energy content than ethanol and provide better fuel economy.

The Madison demonstration plant has the capacity to produce 10,000 gallons per year.

Virent’s biofuel, which is made with non-food feedstocks, could eliminate the need for specialized infrastructure, engine modifications and blending equipment required for mixing gasoline with more than 10 percent ethanol.

Virent’s Chief Executive Officer, Lee Edwards, said the collaboration with Shell brings low-emission, high quality renewable fuels closer to reality.

The game of CEO musical chairs continued today as Nanosolar announced that Geoff Tate, formerly of AMD and Rambus, will take over the company from co-founder Martin Roscheisen. Nanosolar, which keeps costs low by printing its thin-film copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells, offered no reason for Roscheisen’s departure.

The last few weeks have seen some sudden changes in solar companies’ executive suites, notably the departures of Solar Millennium’s Utz Claassen and Q-Cells’ Anton Milner.

Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher notes that it’s not uncommon for green energy company founders to make way for professional managers as the enterprise ramps up its production efforts.

Tate was the chief executive of Rambus, which designs high-speed chip interfaces, between 1990 and 2005, and worked in multiple executive roles at chipmaker AMD for ten years prior to that.

Greentech Media reports that Tate was “once one of the most feared guys in Silicon Valley” because Rambus was a “pure intellectual-property company” that licensed its memory to other manufacturers and sued several companies.

Chevron is grabbing green energy headlines again this morning with its plans to put 7,700 solar panels in an 8-acre brownfield test facility called Project Brightfield in Bakersfield, Calif.

The LA Times first reported that Chevron announce its plans to test seven photovoltaic solar panel technologies as candidates to power its facilities worldwide. Even before today’s announcement, Chevron had emerged as an unexpected supporter and tester of up-and-coming solar technologies.

This is exactly the kind of partnership — Chevron using its R&D might and considerable cash to shepherd new technology to the mainstream — that green energy enthusiasts fream about. Chevron officials tell the LA Times that they plan to invest $2 billion over the next three years on renewable power ventures.

Last month, Chevron announced that it was putting a 1-megawatt concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) solar facility, a hybrid technology made by Concentrix Solar, on the site of an abandoned mine in New Mexico.

The oil major is also using solar steam technology from BrightSource Energy, a company it has invested in, to improve oil production in the Coalinga field in California. The company has also converted a former Texaco refinery site in Casper, Wyo., as a wind farm.

The company plans to test the technologies in Project Brightfield under different conditions and compare their performance against an unnamed benchmark solar technology.

The thin-film technologies being tested at are MiaSolé, Schüco, Solar Frontier, Sharp, and Solibro, and crystalline-silicon photovoltaic technology comes from Innovalight.

Des King, president of Chevron Technology Ventures, said of Project Brightfield

By bringing together seven emerging solar technologies, Project Brightfield represents one of the most comprehensive solar energy tests of its kind and is an innovative approach to evaluating new technologies.

The field were generate 740 kW of electricity, which will go to the local grid and the oil production operations at the Kern River field.

The new and improved (?) senate climate bill is being rolled out in secret meetings  and, it seems, being strategically leaked to test the reaction.

The headline numbers are familiar (17 percent reductions below 2005 levels in 2020; 80 percent by 2050) but the rest of the bill seems intended to confuse opponents of prior bills by incorporating cap and dividend and a carbon tax. The deck chairs, as they say, are being rearranged. How does the ship look now?

Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room has a rundown on how Obama’s proposal looks against the Waxman-Markey measure that passed the house last year and the rumors of the senate bill.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) have been trying to line up industry support for the measure.

To that end, they’ve turned to Washington’s Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell’s CLEAR act, borrowing from it a cap and dividend plan that puts the government in charge of auctioning emissions then returning the money to consumers.

The senate bill would preempt regional cap and trade agreements and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provisions.

The plan would have a “hard price collar” that limits emissions prices to between $10 and $30 per ton tied to inflation, according to ClimateWire.

The plan functions as more of a carbon tax, which is something that Exxon’s Rex Tillerson could get behind.

The bill would also attack climate change on a sector-by-sector basis and has eight different headings – refining, America’s farmers, consumer refunds, clean energy innovation, coal, natural gas, nuclear and energy independence.

Kerry, Lieberman and Graham seem to have gambled that the only way to get the process moving is to start the industry giveaways early. But the sectoral approach seems awfully  confusing and it hasn’t even been watered down yet.

We should avoid passing judgment before the bill is actually out but, frankly, this seems like a mess.

Image: iStockphoto

General Electric is focusing its considerable R&D might on building the most efficient solar modules on the market and announced today it is working with startup PrimeStar Solar Inc., on thin film photovoltaic technology.

The cadmium telluride solar cells are being developed at the Arvada, Colo.-headquarters of PrimeStar, which is majority owned by GE.

GreenTech’s Martin LaMonica writes that the move represents a major shift for GE, which has used traditional silicon for its cells, into technology that is dominated by First Solar.

GE’s solar R&D leader Danielle Merfeld tells LaMonica that the cadmium telluride cells, while less efficient at producing electricity than crystalline silicon, have the most potential for cost savings.

GE plans to role out a product in 2011.

In a news release from GE, Merfeld said

After having completed an exhaustive survey of the PV landscape, we determined that thin films were the optimum path for GE.

GE has been putting a full court press on the technology, working on the product in Germany, China, India and at the Niskayuna, N.Y. facilitiy, as well as in Arvada.

Terra-Gen Power has scored $394 million in financing for the 150-megawatt Alta Wind I project in California.

The financing will be used to complete construction on the project in Tehachapi, Calif., which is using General Electric 1.5 SLE wind turbine generators and is slated to start delivering energy to Southern California Edison customers in 2011.

The lender group includes Union Bank N.A., Prudential Investment Management, Cooperative Centrale Raiffeisen-Boerenleenbank BA and Banco Santander SA. Credit Agricole CIB and Natixis acted as bookrunners and structured the financing.

The project is the first phase of the planned 3,000 MW Alta Wind Energy Center.

The financing includes a seven-year construction and tem loan, ancillary credit facilities and a bridge loan to the investment tax credit (ITC) from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Terra-Gen is owned by Boston-based ArcLight Capital Partners and GIP, the Stamford,Conn.-based infrastructure fund headed by Adebayo Ogunlesi.

Jens-Peter Saul has been appointed head of Siemens Wind Power Business Unit in Brande, Denmark, replacing Andreas Nauen in the role.

Nauen, who earlier this week spoke confidently about Siemens Wind Power’s prospects for becoming one of the top three turbine makers, is leaving the company to become CEO of REpower Systems AG on Oct. 1. The move was described in one trade publication as “a coup” for REpower, which is owned by the Indian company Suzlon, as it tries to build credibility in the European market dominated by Siemens.

Saul, who is 43, had been the director of Siemens Energy in the UK and was also responsible for energy in North and West Europe.

He joined Siemens Fossil Power Generation Division in 1996 as project manager, then left the company to take a consulting post in the automobile sector.

In 2002, he rejoined Siemens and managed power plant sales and marketing in the Middle East. He was appoint head of the power plant business for Siemens Power Generation Group in the UK in 2005.

Nauen had been with Siemens since 1991 and was appointed head of wind power, a €3 billion ($4.10 billion) business, in 2004.

First Solar Inc. has joined the DESERTEC Industrial Initiative as the first pure photovoltaic solar partner in the green-power-in-the-Sahara venture.

First Solar signed on today as an associated partner for a three-year period and will offer utility-scale PV expertise to DESERTEC, a 400 billion Euro proposal backed by German reinsurance company Munich Re.

The project aims to generate electricity in the Sahara Desert from the sun and wind and send it to Europe. The first joules are slated to reach European and African consumers by 2015 but complete buildout is not expected until 2050.

However, much of the electricity is expected to come from Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plants, so First Solar’s involvement suggests a multifaceted approach. First Solar has built utility scale projects in the deserts of the United States and Middle East and is building a 2 gigawatt plant in Inner Mongolia, the company’s release notes.

DESERTEC has been expanding its list of partners to include companies in North Africa and Southern Europe in recent months.

Stephen Hansen, managing director of the company’s European operation, First Solar GmbH, said the company’s thin-film technology will fill a niche in the giant project:

As a high-performance, low-maintenance technology that can be deployed in stages and deliver clean energy quickly, PV is the ideal complement to other renewable energies already represented in Desertec.

Should a green energy chief executive officer haul in a large bonus while his company struggles?

Evergreen Solar Inc.’s head Richard Feldt is spending some time on the hot seat today for receiving a $479,991 bonus for 2009 while his Massachusetts-based company posted a $98 million operating loss, The Boston Globe reports.

The debate over executive compensation at struggling companies raged throughout 2009, particularly in the financial sector.

But people expect better from green energy company executives because:

1) many companies, particularly in the solar sector, have not yet posted consistent profits

2) a large chunk of the money coming into renewable energy firms in 2009 came from government sources

3) another large chunk of money is came from venture capital, who don’t want to see executives rewarding themselves before VCs get their payday

4) these companies are trying to save the world from global warming, and many executives use altruistic language to describe their companies’ goals. Outsized bonuses are not altruistic

Evergreen, which makes String Ribbon silicon wafers, meets most of these of these criteria.

The company has received $58 million in state loans and aid to build its solar plant in Devens, Mass., The Globe reports. Evergreen will likely get another $5 million from a quasi public agency soon.

Evergreen has also been hurt, like many solar companies, by falling prices and an oversupply in the market.

But Feldt, whose overall compensation was about $1.8 million last year, has a contract that puts heavy emphasis on other metrics – such as operating cash flow and margins.

It’s interesting to compare Feldt’s treatment with that of Anton Milner, the former CEO of German solar company Q-Cells, who resigned last week after the company reported losses of 1.36 billion Euros.

Andrew de Pass, a senior advisor with cleantech-focused investment bank Greentech Capital Advisors, tells GER that the firm could  launch a cleantech-focused investment fund early next year.

The investment fund  would not provide early stage venture capital. “We are looking to do later stage private equity investments,” de Pass tells us.

Investments would support companies across the whole green / sustainable space, including  renewable energy projects.

No word on expected size of capital commitments or the fund’s potential investors.

Jeffrey McDermott, a former i-banker with UBS, launched Greentech Capital last Summer as an M&A advisory business. The firm has been on at least four deals. Most recently,  advising solar power developer Ausra as part of its acquisition by Areva, the French nuclear reactor maker.

But from the start New York-based Greentech Capital has set out to become a full service shop for the green industry. As part of this strategy last week it announced that Heather Smith, Deutsche Bank’s former head of structured private placements, would join the firm to build its own private placement group. Former Goldman Sachs banker Timothy Vincent oversees project finance for the  firm.