Author: Richard T. Stuebi

by Richard T. Stuebi

The concept of an “audit” is something that is inherently, well, unsettling. The word itself implies that you might have done something wrong, and someone is coming to catch you and punish you. For sure, no-one wants to face the prospect of an IRS audit.

Of course, that’s not the sole or even main reason that I’ve never undertaken an energy audit for my house. It’s not an excuse, but an explanation to say that I’ve simply been too preoccupied with other matters to go through the effort of finding a qualified firm to perform an energy audit. And, frankly, I had no idea whether an audit would cost $100 (easily acceptable) or $1000 (too much!).

So, it was with a bit of relief actually that a firm called GreenStreet Solutions sent me a mailer offering an energy audit for $199. No longer burdened with finding a firm to do the work, and knowing that the price was one I could afford, I gave them a call to schedule a visit.

I was very pleased. A two-man team from GreenStreet came to my 1978-era house for a 3-hour tour (sing along: “a 3-hour tour”), and found some pretty interesting results. I wasn’t surprised to discover that certain of the walls and ceilings were underinsulated. However, I was shocked to see that the biggest source of thermal leakage was out of my basement, through the front stoop.

Armed with a host of data collected from the building envelope, thermal images from scanning, and my prior year’s gas and electric bills, the GreenStreet team went off to prepare an assessment . A couple weeks later, the lead analyst returned for an evening debrief with me and my wife, handing us a bound report summarizing the findings and suggesting measures to implement.

The results: at 50 Pascals of pressure, 5135 cubic feet of air per minute were leaking through the building shell of my home, relative to a target of 2299 for a reference home of comparable size. To combat this, GreenStreet proposed three packages of solutions — Bronze, Silver and Gold — to reduce the leaks. To my wife and me, the Silver package looked the best — the most bang for the buck — entailing $9738 of outlays to save an estimated $2288 annual heating costs (surprisingly, savings on air conditioning expenses are not calculated), for a projected average payback of 4.3 years.

In addition, GreenStreet provided a bag full of goodies to further help reduce energy. For instance, we were given a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure appliance consumption rates and phantom loads. Though I haven’t yet gone around the house to develop a list, it sounds like a pretty fun project some rainy afternoon.

Also, GreenStreet gave us a bunch of thermal insulating gaskets for outlets and light switches. I installed these the other day, and in removing the covers, it’s really amazing to see how much thermal leakage is likely to occur through these huge uninsulated gaps. Parents: installing these gaskets would be an excellent project to give to your teenager to undertake.

As for implementing the audit results, we were prepared to authorize a go-ahead — until the GreenStreet salesperson noted that a bill was winding its way through Congress to reimburse up to $8000 (with no ceiling on income levels) for weatherization efforts, and since the bill wouldn’t be retroactive, we would be better off waiting for the bill to pass (expected this summer). We thanked him for his divulging this important opportunity, and asked him to have GreenStreet call us when the bill passed.

He further noted that a bill was moving through the Ohio legislature to reimburse the $199 we paid for the energy audit too, and informed us that we would be notified if this were to pass as well.

I was really impressed with the audit by GreenStreet — very professional, and not pushy. The GreenStreet agent noted that their parent company was Vectren (NYSE: VVC) — a gas and electric utility based in Southern Indiana — which leads me to wonder if all energy audits should be performed by companies that have a corporate parent that is a utility possessing sufficient financial wherewithal and expertise on energy-related issues.

However, unless the utility has revenue/profit decoupling mechanisms in place, it’s clear in my mind that an audit can’t effectively be done by the local utility, who may be subject to conflicts of interest by threatening to cannibalizing their core business from reducing energy consumption.

In all respects, my wife and I actually enjoyed this audit, and recommend a similar type of audit for anyone who wants to make their personal contribution to the cleantech challenge.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of NorTech Energy Enterprise, the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

While it is increasingly recognized that subsidies for corn-based ethanol are bad policy, a nod must be given to C. Ford Runge, a professor at the University of Minnesota, for his pithy and merciless analysis in his note “Biofuel Backlash” published in the May/June issue of Technology Review.

In the space of just a few short paragraphs, Prof. Runge cites the work of Earth Track (a firm dedicated to exposing subsidies detrimental to the environment) projecting $400 billion of U.S. subsidies to ethanol between 2008-2022, notes a recent estimate by the Earth Policy Institute that the 2008 U.S. corn crop diverted for ethanol production would have been sufficient to feed 330 million people for a year, and provides a reference to modelling that indicates a near-doubling of greenhouse gas emissions due to changes in land-use patterns associated with corn-for-ethanol production.

It’s amazing that such awful policies, which are so adverse on so many dimensions, can survive. But, in the gameboard that is U.S. energy, environmental, and agricultural policy, only grand compromises supported by the big boys can get enacted — which are then extremely difficult to overturn when they are seen to be nothing more than gifts to their well-positioned and deep-pocketed sponsors and supporters.

Reiterating a point I’ve made before: I have nothing against ethanol per se. Cellulosic ethanol, if it can be accomplished cost-effectively, is a promising prospect for reducing greenhouse gases and reliance on Middle Eastern petroleum without chewing up valuable foodstuffs. But corn-based ethanol plainly sucks. And, the notion of using corn-based ethanol as a bridge to cellulosic ethanol is dubious at best.

The old adage says that a camel is a horse designed by committee. Would it were that U.S. biofuels policies were as lovely as a camel.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of NorTech Energy Enterprise, the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

As a class, new energy technologies have proven to be quite difficult to successfully commercialize. Often, they must surmount substantial technical, scientific and engineering risks to get from concept to the market. And, to prove at scale and expand to broad application, very large sums of capital are typically required.

Accordingly, many private sector capital sources — venture capitalists, private equity firms, corporations, and banks — are wary of funding new energy technologies on their own. Put another way, for the clean energy economy to emerge in a major way in the coming decades, the public sector will have to participate in new and significant ways in financing the development and deployment of new energy technologies. Innovative public-private partnerships in the capital arena will be essential. And, given the massive amount of dollars required, these programs will have to be Federal to score any major successes.

For the most part, Federal engagement in the financing of new energy has been historically limited to various subsidies embedded in the tax code, such as the production tax credit for large-scale renewable energy projects or investment tax credits for customer-sited renewable energy or energy efficiency investments.

More recently, stemming from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the Department of Energy has been authorized to provide loan guarantees underlying private sector loans for projects employing new energy technologies.

Although somewhat effective, clearly the Federal programs to complement the private sector in financing new energy technology development and deployment have not had impact anywhere near the magnitude that pretty much everyone but guardians of the status quo desires.

To that end, both the Markey-Waxman bill that passed the House last year and the Bingaman bill being floated in the Senate include the creation of a Clean Energy Development Administration (CEDA), whose purpose would be to provide debt capacity that is otherwise inaccessible to innovative energy technologies.

Ordinarily, I’m not a big fan of new government bureaucracies. Indeed, a CEDA might not be necessary if the pricing signals for clean energy were set in a manner that induced the appropriate level of investment in RD&D. However, without political will to take on energy pricing — i.e., taxes and carbon policies — it’s clear that finance capacity for clean energy is currently inadequate, and that only a player of the heft of the Federal government can make any meaningful dent in improving the situation.

Perhaps Wall Street agrees as well. Two finance industry leaders — Eric Fornell, the Vice Chairman of Investment Banking for J.P. Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), and Mark Heesen, the President of the National Venture Capital Association — recently wrote a thoughtful article providing both support and words of wisdom in establishing a CEDA.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of NorTech Energy Enterprise, the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

Remember the white soul group on the Motown label, Rare Earth? If you do, sorry: this posting isn’t about them….

Nope, it’s about the fact that rare earth metals represent a unique problem — and opportunity — in the cleantech realm.

As PBS reported on “Newshour” a few months ago (transcript here), rare earth materials are important commodities essential to the production of many environmental technologies — from batteries to wind turbines to solar panels. Unfortunately, many of these materials are highly toxic and thus pose significant environmental hazards if mis-managed.

Regrettably, since most of the world’s endowment of these rare earth materials is found in China, the extraction of these materials from the ground is often done with little concern for environmental protection.

In addition, to the extent the world becomes reliant on technologies that depend upon rare earth materials, substantial geopolitical issues emerge as these elements become strategic inputs for economic activity. (In other words, replace “Saudi Arabia” with “China”, and “oil” with “rare earth metals”, and you get the idea.)

So, cleantech innovators would do well to find economical, widely-available, and environmentally-friendly substitutes for rare earth metals — or to re-engineer cleantech widgets so that they don’t require these scarce and nsaty materials. There’s a lot of money to be made, and a lot of headaches to be saved, if we don’t become stuck over the rare earth barrel.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of NorTech Energy Enterprise, the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

One of the better business books I’ve ever read is The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School.

The core message of the book is that disruptive technologies — ones that ultimately change an entire industry — only penetrate a marketplace by first serving tiny niches that aren’t big enough to attract the interest of the incumbent mainstream players. In other words, disruptive technologies can’t and shouldn’t attack a huge market head-on, but rather in underserved little ways that eventually accumulate into big successes.

Solar photovoltaics (PV) has often been touted as a disruptive technology, allowing humans to move off of centralized fossil fuel powerplants to distributed renewable generation sources. As I’ve watched the PV industry for the past decade, I’ve always been amazed at how many advocates try tackling “mainstream” solar, trying to compete head-to-head against the grid. At its current stage of maturation, PV represents a very expensive way to generate electricity, so the only way to make such business models work in places where electricity isn’t very expensive is to gain large subsidies from the public sector (such as the lucrative feed-in tariffs in countries such as Germany).

So, it’s been fun watching the emergence of little niche applications for PV, where the technology can make a difference right away, without requiring the helping hand of government. One such niche has been in compacting public trash recepticles, which was nicely profiled in an article in last Friday’s USA Today.

The secret to the success of PV in this niche is its obviously compelling economics. Sure, at $4000, the solar-powered trash compacter is much more expensive than a generic can. But then again, these compacters require many fewer visits by trucks to pick up full containers. In Philadelphia, trash pickups have been reduced from 17 visits per week to 5 per week, saving $13 million in cumulative trash collection costs over the next 10 years.

Not exactly a sexy application for PV, but the dollars make sense. It’s these types of success stories that will continue to increase demand for PV modules, driving the technology down the learning and scale curve, continually reducing its costs, and in so doing opening up ever more segments of application, until PV becomes cheap enough for virtually all grid-connected applications without subsidies.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of NorTech Energy Enterprise, the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

Thanks to my friend and fellow blogger Ed Beardsworth for making me aware of this gem:

As discussed in overview in this article, researchers at the University of Cincinnati have found that frogs of a certain species, the Tungara frog to be exact, secrete a foam that seems to turbocharge the photosynthetic effect — thus offering the tantalizing prospect of removing carbon dioxide in the air while increasing the productivity of converting organic matter into biofuels.

The paper, “Artificial Photosynthesis in Ranaspumin-2 Based Foam” in the journal Nano Letters, cannot be found at your local newsstand and is not likely to become a bestseller. But, maybe some synthetic foams with the same properties as the Tungara frog’s might become commercially-interesting in both carbon sequestration and biofuel production.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of NorTech Energy Enterprise, the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

Content provided by and all rights reserved to CleantechBlog.com. Also check out http://www.cleantech.org

by Richard T. Stuebi

Shawn Lesser of Sustainable World Capital recently posted on the CleanTech Group‘s website his list of Top 10 CleanTech Cluster Organizations. I was pleasantly surprised to see that four of the ten listings were from the U.S. — in the places you’d probably suspect: Boston, New York (Upstate), California (both Northern and Southern). Interestingly, no place in China made the cut.

As Lesser notes, “creating a cluster is no simple task.” In my research, I really haven’t found any predictable formula or recipe for nurturing along a cluster’s formation. I recall once asking a serious student of regional economic clusters, Ned Hill of Cleveland State University, for his insights. In his view, there are three necessities that must be in place for a cluster to emerge in a given geographic area:

• First, there must be a critical mass of people and organizations within and between which leading-edge knowledge transfer occurs.
• Second, the people and organizations that set the standards for the industry must be present.
• Third, an extensive set of pilot and demonstration projects must exist at which experimentation can be conducted to develop real-world improvements.

Without these three factors in place, it’s very much an uphill push to create an industry cluster.

Here in Northeast Ohio, NorTech — the economic development organization leading efforts to nurture technology-based clusters in our region — has recently launched an initiative in partnership with The Cleveland Foundation called Energy Enterprise to help spur subclusters of activity in our region in various segments of the advanced energy technology spectrum.

In planning the activities of Energy Enterprise, we’ve often talked about what it takes to build a cluster, sometimes getting frustrated at all of the factors beyond the control of any agency aiming to be a catalyst for cluster growth. Although we at Energy Enterprise don’t have a definitive playbook, we take some solace that cluster-building is inevitably a struggle for everyone. We have no illusions that we can enter such a top-10 list very quickly, having come a bit late to the game relative to others, but aspire that we can eventually get there in the years to come.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of Energy Enterprise, the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

It’s axiomatic among the cleantech community that energy efficiency represents the cheapest/easiest way to address our energy and environmental challenges. Indeed, as illustrated by some analysis by McKinsey & Company, many energy efficiency measures actually have net negative costs to implement.

So, why is it so damned hard for customers to adopt energy efficiency technologies? Consider the recent article from the Wall Street Journal, profiling the challenges faced in Boulder, Colorado — one of the most environmentally-inclined communities in North America — in encouraging energy efficiency measures. The WSJ article spurred some navel-gazing among the green-conscious Boulder citizenry, as witnessed in this blog post.

One way of looking at this issue is that it is indeed hard to change people’s habits and behaviors, but that eventually people do change. Another way of looking at this issue is that people are economic animals: they do make changes, pretty quickly, like it or not, when something hits their wallets and pocketbooks.

In other words, it’s really pushing water uphill trying to encourage a shift to using less energy, when energy is so bloody cheap for most people. Unless/until energy becomes more expensive (taxes anyone?), the only way to spur many customers to use less energy is to change codes such that inefficient devices — whether they be lightbulbs, refrigerators, air conditioners, TVs or computers — can no longer be bought.

In the absence of price signals that strongly encourage behaviors to reduce energy consumption, restricting what customers can buy is the only brute-force method available that really works. And, as can be seen in our current political environment, many Americans don’t like being strong-armed by their government.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

For as long as I can remember, Lake Erie — and by extension, all of the Great Lakes of North America — symbolized water pollution. Sure, it was much worse 40 years ago, when the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland caught fire, but the reputation lingers. (Remember the “Swill” skit on Saturday Night Live in the late ’70s?) Although the Great Lakes are a boater’s and fisher’s haven, for many people (myself included), the thought of bathing in the waters or drinking them untreated remains pretty unappealing.

This is truly a pity for the Midwest, because the Great Lakes represents one of the most fundamental assets that a region can offer: fresh water in enormous quantities. For those who’ve never seen the Great Lakes, they are misnamed: these are inland seas, not lakes. The Great Lakes hold 20% of the world’s freshwater. Pause and think about that for a minute.

In recent decades, there has been an increase in attention paid to remediating the Great Lakes. A unique multi-government collaboration launched in 1955, the Great Lakes Commission was formed to oversee issues spanning the multiple U.S. states and Canadian provinces depending upon the Great Lakes. Founded 40 years ago, the Alliance for the Great Lakes was an early voice advocating environmental improvement in the Great Lakes. Most substantively, the U.S. EPA leads the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which targets “the most significant problems in the region, including invasive aquatic species, non-point source pollution, and contaminated sediment.”

Recently, the Obama Administration announced a five-year $2.2 billion blueprint for cleaning up the Great Lakes, which aims by 2014 to (1) finish work at five “toxic hot spots” that have been known as problematic for two decades, (2) reduce the rate of new invasive species by 40%, (3) decrease phosphorous runoff measurably, and (4) protect about 100,000 wetland acres. (See article from Chicago Tribune.)

As the central feature of the industrial North American Midwest, which gave birth to the industrial era of the 20th Century, the Great Lakes were long taken advantage of — often without much respect — to achieve economic growth, increase standards of living, win wars, and establish the U.S. as the unparalleled leader in the world. $2.2 billion may sound like a lot of money, but it’s due time we give back to the Great Lakes, for all that they’ve given us.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

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by Richard T. Stuebi

Of all the cleantech technology sectors, the one I can least keep track of is batteries. For those of you who want to keep pulse of this dynamic arena, a new blog called This Week in Batteries is just what you might be looking for.

The host of this blog is Venkat Srinivasan, who is part of the Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies (BATT) Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, so he should be pretty near the center of the action in the battery world — at least as it pertains to electric vehicle applications.

Srinivasan’s most recent post is a nice riff exposing the absurdity of extrapolating Moore’s Law for semiconductors to other realms of technology advancement — as if forever-continuing exponential improvements won’t bump up against the laws of physics.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

Content provided by and all rights reserved to CleantechBlog.com. Also check out http://www.cleantech.org

by Richard T. Stuebi

Frank Luntz is an influential pollster in Republian circles. So, it’s notable when Luntz releases findings that support movement on the climate front.

That just what happened in late January, when Luntz’s firm The Word Doctors collaborated with Environmental Defense Fund to announce recent polling data that suggest that a majority of Republican voters continue to believe that human-induced climate change is a real phenomenon and want action to address it.

Some of the more interesting findings in the report “The Language of a Clean Energy Economy” include:

• The concept of “carbon neutral” does not resonate well with the American public. “Energy efficiency” and “healthier environment” carry more weight.
• The statement “it doesn’t matter if there is or isn’t climate change; it is still in America’s best interest to develop new sources of energy that are clean reliable, efficient and safe” is the most compelling framing of the issue.
• National security tops every other reason to support climate action — particularly among Republican voters but also among a large segment of Democratic voters.

As Luntz summarized in his own words, “Americans want clean, safe, healthy, secure energy. That’s why Republicans and Democrats alike strongly support action to address climate change. Sure, Republicans are more concerned about the national security component and Democrats the health component, but support for action right now spans all partisan and ideological lines.”

It’s a fine and pleasant synopsis, but I’m not as sanguine as Luntz, only because energy independence is a strained rationale (not to mention probably more unattainable than major carbon emission reductions) for dealing with climate change. Why? Two reasons:

• One, if you want to maximize domestic energy production immediately and cheaply, you’ll rush right to coal — which only exacerbates the climate concerns.
• Two, until America’s vehicle fleet becomes electrified — a long way off — you can’t run America’s vehicle fleet on coal or any other lower-emitting form of domestically-produced electricity. For the foreseeable future, we’ll have cars and trucks running primarily on (mostly imported) oil, and producing carbon emissions to boot.

I’m not the only observer to be concerned about an unrealistic or even ill-advised pursuit of energy independence — see “Oil Independence: Realistic Goal or Unrealistic Slogan?” for a good summary of the literature, and a nuanced and balanced view of the notion of “energy independence”. This reinforces how unfortunate it is when the seemingly only basis for bipartisanship on climate policy is a principle that is very slippery at best and easily warped at worst.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

Content provided by and all rights reserved to CleantechBlog.com. Also check out http://www.cleantech.org

by Richard T. Stuebi

The distinction between “green power” — electricity without any carbon emissions, usually from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind — has been clearly drawn vs. “brown power” — electricity generated from fossil fuels.

In a recent article in The Nation, author Lisa Margonelli writes about “The Case for ‘Gray Power’”. “Gray power” is the term that Ms. Margonelli uses for a concept called “energy recycling”, wherein electricity is generated from capturing waste heat from burning fossil fuels. So, gray power is not as “green” as renewables, but given that the fuel is being burned anyway, generating more electricity from the same amount of fuel burn is surely a good thing.

Ms. Margonelli makes the point that there are huge untapped opportunities for capturing waste heat to generate electricity in the U.S. — especially in the Midwest and South, with the plethora of coal-fired powerplants in the region. This message has been pounded home loudly and frequently by such people as Thomas Casten of Recycled Energy Development.

So what’s preventing this opportunity from being captured? Ms. Margonelli argues that there are two main impediments. First, various electric utility and state regulatory practices impair the economics of those who might pursue gray power opportunities. Second, the U.S. Clean Air Act is written in such a way to discourage major modifications of powerplants — even if they are modifications that improve economic and environmental performance.

Her proposed remedy is the creation of a federal Clean Power Authority, analogous to an organization like the Tennessee Valley Authority or Bonneville Power Administration, whose mission would be to recycle wasted energy from powerplants in the South and Midwest.

While I agree that the two issues she identified are in fact real impediments to recycled energy, Ms. Margonelli misses a third critical one.

In Europe, waste heat recapture is much more prevalent than in the U.S. Why? Because the waste heat often can’t be economically converted into electricity, but must remain as heat — and Europe’s infrastructure is much more optimally configured to economically use this heat.

Given that Europe is so compact and densely populated, pretty much every powerplant is within 20-30 miles of a sizable town, and many of these towns have central district heating systems that can make direct use of the waste heat piped in from the powerplant. In contrast, most major powerplants in the U.S. heartland are situated hundreds of miles away from any city center with a district heating system that can use waste heat. Lacking an economically proximate market for waste heat, it just goes up the stack — poof!

No question that opportunities to capture gray power in American urban centers are non-trivial, and they should be diligently pursued. But what’s needed to make gray power in the U.S. more of a widespread reality is not so much a federal Clean Power Authority, but technology that can economically convert low-grade (and low-value) waste heat into higher-value electricity. And that is exactly what firms like Akron-based ReXorce Thermionics are working to develop.

Richard T. Stuebi is a founding principal of the advanced energy initiative at NorTech, where he is on loan from The Cleveland Foundation as its Fellow of Energy and Environmental Advancement. He is also a Managing Director in charge of cleantech investment activities at Early Stage Partners, a Cleveland-based venture capital firm.

Content provided by and all rights reserved to CleantechBlog.com. Also check out http://www.cleantech.org