Category: Energy

MAY 31, 2013 – Research conducted with a large new battery unveiled today in Oregon will help make the Northwest’s and the nation’s electric system smarter and more efficient, officials said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Portland General Electric‘s 5-megawatt, lithium-ion energy storage system was shared with the public today at the utility’s Salem Smart Power Center in South Salem, Ore. The energy storage facility is part of PGE’s contribution to the Battelle-led Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project. Half of PGE’s $23-million portion of the regional project was paid for with U.S. Department of Energy funds. The regional demonstration is a five-year, $178-million project that launched in 2010.

“The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project is a successful public-private partnership involving 17 organizations across five Northwest states,” said Patricia Hoffman, assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, which oversees regional smart grid demonstration projects. “It is a highly innovative project demonstrating transactive energy management, which is a promising, cost-effective way to integrate variable renewable energy, energy storage and demand response at scale. The celebration of the Salem Smart Power Center makes it clear that Oregon is helping to lead the way on energy storage commercialization and grid modernization.”

Hoffman was a featured speaker at today’s ceremony, as was Ron Melton, who directs the regional demonstration project for Battelle.

The battery is part of a highly reliable, localized power zone called a microgrid that will enable about 500 southeast Salem customers to tap into a power reserve during electricity disruptions such as blackouts. The battery and microgrid are examples of the innovative technologies and methods being tested through the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project.

The energy storage system will respond to regional grid conditions with the help of a key aspect of the demonstration called transactive control. Transactive control is based on technology from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is managed by Battelle. The technology helps power producers and users decide how much of the area’s power will be consumed, when and where. This is done when producers and users automatically respond to signals representing future power costs and planned energy consumption. The cost signals originate at Battelle’s Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center in Richland, Wash. They are updated every five minutes and sent to the project’s participating utilities, including PGE.

The automated signals allow project participants to make local decisions on how their piece of the smart grid project can support local and regional grid needs. Participants are now gathering data to measure how the signal can help deliver electricity more effectively, help better integrate wind power onto the power grid and more. The Salem battery will use the signal to coordinate its charge and discharge cycles with the power grid’s supply and demand.

“Two-way information exchange in the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project allows grid operators to make the existing electric grid more efficient, while also exploring how using other technologies such as PGE’s energy storage system, smart appliances and wind power can bolster the reliability of our system,” said Carl Imhoff, who manages Battelle’s Electricity Infrastructure Market Sector in Richland.

PGE’s role

As an investor-owned utility that serves about 830,000 customers in 52 Oregon cities, PGE is testing several smart-grid technologies in the Salem area for the demonstration project. Beyond the energy storage system unveiled today, PGE is working to integrate renewable power sources to the power grid. It is also implementing a demand-response program with residential and commercial customers to help meet peak demand. All these resources will be optimized with the automated transactive control signal.

“Together with our project partners and customers, we are demonstrating smart grid technologies to help Oregon and the nation learn how to build intelligent energy resources for the future while continuing to deliver long-term value for customers,” said Jim Piro, PGE president and CEO. “We are proud of the collaboration, hard work and ingenuity that went into this project, and thank our Salem customers who volunteered to participate in this important study.”

Click here for more information from PGE about the Salem Smart Power Center.

Building the business case

As a primary partner in the project, the Bonneville Power Administration is leading the development of a regional business case for investing in smart grid infrastructure and technologies.

“New, smarter technologies can help us make the most of the region’s renewable resources, improve how we operate the power system and bolster its resilience,” said Elliot Mainzer, BPA’s deputy administrator. “We’re looking closely at the benefits and economics so we can tell Northwest electric utilities and ratepayers which ‘smart’ investments will provide long-term value.”

BPA is working to support utilities in the project as they unite to address both regional and utility requirements. Communication and collaboration between utilities is key to making this all work, especially considering that five states are involved, with everything from large investor-owned utilities to smaller publicly-owned utilities. They have varying goals, but are working together to enhance the economics, reliability and integration of renewables for the power system. BPA has taken a lead role in assuring that the utility perspective is addressed as well as the regional perspective so the needs of electricity consumers throughout the Northwest are met.

A regional collaboration

The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project was co-funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through DOE, as well as the project’s utility and vendor partners.

As part of the project, Battelle leads a collaborative group that includes the Bonneville Power Administration and 11 Northwest-based utilities:

• Avista Utilities — Spokane, Wash.
• Benton PUD — Kennewick, Wash.
• City of Ellensburg — Ellensburg, Wash.
• Flathead Electric Cooperative — Kalispell, Mont.
• Idaho Falls Power — Idaho Falls, Idaho
• Lower Valley Energy — Afton, Wyo.
• Milton-Freewater City Light & Power — Milton-Freewater, Ore.
• NorthWestern Energy — Butte, Mont.
• Peninsula Light Company — Gig Harbor, Wash.
• Portland General Electric — Portland, Ore.
• University of Washington/Seattle City Light — Seattle, Wash.

The demonstration project also involves a diverse team of technology providers, including Alstom Grid, IBM/Netezza, 3TIER Inc. and Quality Logic Inc. Washington State University and Central Washington University are also directly involved.

---

Over the past at least six years Google has poured more than $1 billion into a Hoover’s Dam worth (2 GW) of clean energy projects, as well as funded a few early stage cleantech startups (and even acquired one recently). Earlier today, as part of its first clean power investment in Africa, Google announced that it has invested $12 million into a solar panel farm in South Africa.

We mapped out Google-backed clean power projects, with links to our coverage to see how much the company is investing, in what and where.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Home Energy Management: Consumer Attitudes and Preferences
• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

Cisco announced on Wednesday its intent to acquire IT engergy management company JouleX. Cisco says the Atlanta-based company complements its existing portfolio by using capabilities of its network to gain visibility into and control energy usage across global IT environments.

Under the terms of the deal, Cisco will pay about $107 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of JouleX.

“JouleX’s technology will strengthen Cisco Services’ Smart Offerings and complements our evolving services strategy. It extends our ‘Internet of Things’ capabilities and is a good alignment to Cisco EnergyWise,” said Faiyaz Shahpurwala, senior vice president, Industry Solutions. “With network-enabled devices increasing exponentially, our partners and customers are asking for this solution today to operationalize their energy management capabilities in the network and reduce cost. JouleX’s cloud-enabled, agent-less architecture will allow our partners and customers to quickly deploy this solution at scale in addressing their IT energy management needs.”

Cisco VP and Head of Business Development, Hilton Romanski had this to say on in a blog post:

IT energy consumption is one of the largest unmanaged expenses and as a result organizations are seeking effective solutions to measure usage, improve optimization, and produce sustainability reports. Up to 50 billion objects are predicted to be connected to the Internet or interconnected machine to machine by 2020 as part of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology transition. Many of those devices will be in constrained environments, where space, bandwidth and power will be at a premium. Cisco networks are differentiated by how we securely scale this type of environment and power consumption will be a key attribute of that differentiation in the future. JouleX is a natural extension of IoT, one of the many technology transitions that make up the Internet of Everything.

The acquisition of JouleX exemplifies Cisco’s innovation framework and supports Cisco’s five foundational priorities by enhancing our service offering across all customer segments and advancing our business and technology architecture. The JouleX acquisition is aligned to Cisco’s goals of developing and delivering innovative energy management solutions that streamline data and work flow across a unified network.

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013.

 

In Nepal, it’s not unusual for there to be 16-hour electricity blackouts in the dry season. The Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) simply cannot meet rising demand. Sadly, no power has been added to the national grid for the past 2 years, even though demand has grown 20% in that time and Nepal is considered to have huge potential for hydropower.

Five hydro projects are expected to start operation in the next 5 months; but they will add only 40 MW to the grid when the winter shortfall is estimated to be over 700 MW. Meanwhile, The NEA generates only half of Nepal’s electricity needs and the amount of power it imports from India is not enough to make up the shortfall.

As a Nepali, what worries me even more are the signs that Nepalese are getting comfortable adapting to the inability of the state to deliver basic necessities. This was exemplified by the hundreds of instant ‘retweets’ and ‘favorites’ when the then Prime Minister proclaimed on twitter that power cuts would be limited to ‘only’ 12 hours a day. Thereafter, the country promptly went about reorganizing their daily lives based on the new power cut schedule.

Now, I can personally tell you that this troubles me. More so when I have glanced around my neighbourhood and have been struck by the fact that every other house in my neighbourhood has left very bright porch lights on, no doubt fueled by imported generators and relatively cheap (by the city’s living standards) fuel.

I don’t know how worrying the energy situation really is. I don’t know how much we are risking our futures by being so indulgent in our consumption. But I can tell you this. Last month I spent a good deal of time driving and hiking in western Nepal where I observed the houses in the rural villages were well lit despite lack of access to the national electricity grid. Western Nepal may be one of the most remote regions in the country but the Alternative Energy Promotion Center (AEPC), a government institution supported by DFID that develops and promotes renewable and alternative energy technologies, has been successful in promoting the use of solar energy in these regions. Otherwise isolated households in rural villages have invested in solar energy, subsidized by AEPC, to make it more affordable. As a result, while the capital Kathmandu Valley endures daily scheduled power cuts, households in the remote regions of the country have 24 hour access to electricity.

However, if the demand for energy in Nepal continues to increase in the next few years as some experts have predicted, it may be difficult even for AEPC to keep up.

I think that’s worth turning off a few bright porch lights, don’t you?

Turkey’s elevation to investment grade last week may or may not be a game changer for its stock and bond markets, but the country is really hoping for a boost to FDI – bricks-and-mortar foreign direct investment  into manufacturing or power generation. Its peace process with Kurdish separatists should help.

Speaking last week at Mitsubishi-UFJ’s annual Turkey conference, Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek cited data showing an average 2 percentage-point pick-up in FDI in the two years immediately after a country moves into investment grade.

Sticky, job-creating and not prone to sudden flight, FDI is the kind of investment that Turkey, with a massive balance of payments deficit, desperately needs. Turkey does worse than most other countries on the FDI front.  Its combined deficit of the current account and net FDI is around 5 percent, Commerzbank analysts note –  wider than most emerging market peers.

By itself, an investment grade rating may not lead to a surge in FDI.  But Turkey has an ace up its sleeve. Having fought a deadly three-decade war against Kurdish separatists, Ankara has managed to negotiate a withdrawal of PKK militants from Turkey to bases in Iraqi Kurdistan. That peace gambit, if successful, has the potential to transform the impoverished Turkish provinces that border the Kurdish areas.

Simsek told the conference:

The reconciliation process has boosted morale and interest in investment in southern and eastern Turkey has gone up five- and 10-fold. The regional development gap is going to be one of the main engines of growth in the next decade of two. Convergence between the regions of Turkey will be key.

The Kurdish conflict has led to 40,000 deaths.  In material terms, the cost to Turkey has been $350 billion, Simsek estimates. Indirectly though, the cost is more like $1 trillion, he reckons, referring to lost investments and livelihoods in these regions.  That, according to Simsek, would have paid for 3 million classrooms or 10,000 km of high speed rail lines. It should also cut spending on the army — the second biggest within the NATO bloc after the United States.

While it is hard to quantify how much FDI may flow to Turkey as a result of the withdrawal, there is potential. Both labour and land costs in Turkey’s southeast are far cheaper than in the western provinces nearer to Europe.  The government plans to grant tax breaks to companies setting up business in the border provinces, with exports to oil-rich Iraq an inducement, Simsek said:

We export $11 billion worth of goods to Iraq and 80 percent of this  goes to Kurdish regions. When these regions develop there will a huge further advantage for Turkey…there will be an absolute boom in investment.

Part of the prize is cheaper oil and gas (Turkey’s biggest import). Turkey is a customer and a transportation outlet for oil exports from the Kurdish region but Ankara recently joined the Kurdistan regional government and Exxon Mobil to explore for oil in northern Iraq.  Most pipeline projects in the region are dogged by high insurance costs because of the ever-present risk of conflict. If that eases, Turkey could reap an investment bonanza.

It’s been a busy week here at BlackBerry Live 2013 — you’ve heard from the executives, you’ve heard from the experts and now, you get the chance to hear what attendees thought about all of the amazing things that happened at the show.

The energy is there… you could feel the electricity!

Watch the video below to get a feel for the vibrant and palpable energy from attendees at BlackBerry Live 2013.

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

It’s always one of my favorite parts of the week, when I get to see this video for the first time. Hearing the feedback first-hand is a great feeling. Don’t be shy! Leave us a comment of what you thought of BlackBerry Live 2013 and let us know how we did covering all the action.

A new series of European summits will begin in London in September, with the organizers hoping to put scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs in the same room and come up with fixes for some of the world’s great challenges. The program is called RE.WORK and, if it reminds you a bit of Google’s Solve For X initiative, then you won’t be surprised to learn that the first instalment is being done in partnership with that scheme.

That first RE.WORK summit will take place on 19 September, which is fortunate timing for those attending GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference in London on the preceding two days. The RE.WORK program will kick off with a focus on the areas of: the internet of things, 3D printing, nanotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, computing systems and sensors.

“We’re trying to showcase emerging technologies and breakthrough ideas,” summit founder Nikita Johnson told me. “It’s all about reworking big challenges that we’re facing in the future. We want to bring the technology and science aspect, but with mission of positive impact.”

While the first of these summits will focus on technology, others will have different themes: one in December will deal with urbanization, RE.WORK Health will take place next year, and others will handle energy, education and the environment. The first three meetings will take place in London, with others set for Dublin, Berlin and other European cities. Events will also be followed up with smaller meet-ups, Johnson added.

Apart from Solve For X, other initiatives in this space include TED, to a certain extent (RE.WORK looks to be a bit more collaborative and interactive) and the engineering-led Global Grand Challenges Summit.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Key technologies for the smart city
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013

Energy startups Nest and Opower are members of an elite club: venture capital-backed companies that have managed to find some success building software and hardware around managing home energy consumption. Several years ago when the companies launched, they focused on very different products and business models. However, over the years the companies have moved ever closer to becoming direct competitors, and now stand in the interesting position of being two of the leading startups competing in a variety of ways to reduce consumers’ home energy use.

Evolution of the home energy market

That Nest and Opower have emerged as the leading companies fighting over this business says something about the small and slow-moving industry. Over the years the market for devices, websites and services that attempt to get consumers to reduce their energy use — a largely unsexy and unappreciated task — has been riddled with struggling startups and failed clunky product launches.

Home energy dashboards never made a dent with consumers. Various startups from Tendril to EnergyHub realized early on that high-end energy dasboards were not the way to go. People don’t care enough about energy and didn’t want to spend money on an energy-specific device.

At the same time, residential-focused energy efficiency services from utilities have taken years to roll out in any meaningful way. Utilities are notoriously slow moving and cautious. Companies that tried to work in these markets got frustrated, too. Google and Microsoft both shut down their energy efficiency web tools after failing to gain much interest or develop any partnerships.

Opower’s entrance

When Opower launched almost six years ago, it found early success with an energy efficiency product that provided immediate value to utilities: mailed energy reports. While Opower has always been an energy software and data company, it were these mailed reports that were initially valuable to utilities that (particularly back then) had unsophisticated digital presences.

The Opower reports came in envelopes that looked like bills (so were almost always opened) and they used behavioral techniques (smiley faces, peer competition) to gently convince the utility customer to reduce consumption. The mailed reports were also relatively inexpensive compared to home energy devices and dashboards.

But over the years Opower has had to morph into a company that largely sells digital energy data products to utilities. There’s only so much business — and so much effect on consumer behavior — that paper reports can have.

Opower now largely interacts with utility customers through email, text messages, and websites. Its newer digital products include a Facebook app and more recently software for connected thermostats, in partnership with thermostat giant Honeywell.

Opower’s work with Honeywell and its connected thermostat product was one of the first indicators of how competitive Opower and Nest could become. The thermostat has emerged as the great hope for creating a gateway into home energy efficiency following the demise of the energy dashboard. In addition, Honeywell saw Nest as a pretty direct threat, having previously sued Nest over patent infringement around the learning thermostat.

It’s unclear how much success the Honeywell/Opower thermostat is having, given that it’s such a new product. PG&E was the first utility that piloted it and some early results suggested that customers liked using the smart thermostats and particularly liked being able to remotely control the thermostat using their iPhone.

But one of the key differences between Opower and Nest’s business models is clear through that partnership. Opower’s utility products are almost always white-labelled for utilities, so, for example, if it creates a website and system of emails and texts for PG&E customers, then Opower’s alerts are branded with PG&E’s logo. In contrast, Nest has long been focused on selling directly to consumers and building a consumer brand.

Nest emerges

Nest was officially launched toward the end of 2011, though the company had been building its technology for a year and half before that. Its core business philosophy involves the production of a well-designed thermostat that users would covet and that could also collect data about the user and learn their behavior. The thermostat can use that knowledge to shave off between 20 and 30 percent of the user’s monthly heating and cooling, and Nest has mostly focused on selling the thermostat directly to consumers.

But Nest has more recently started to move into offering utilities and energy service providers energy efficiency services. Last month Nest launched a variety of energy services, including demand response, and also this week acquired a startup, MyEnergy, that aggregates and analyzes utility data. It’s clear that one of the most important aspects of the Nest thermostat is the services that can be run based on both the consumer’s individual and the collective Nest users’ data.

Nest appears to want to maintain its brand and its ability to connect directly with customers. When it launched its energy services last month, the company told me that its services sit between the consumer and the utility. It also approves eligible customers and monitors how the services are performing and how the customers are reacting.

This direct-to-consumer approach could also prove useful if (and when) Nest launched any more connected home products in the future.

Power in the data

Essentially, both Nest and Opower are cloud-based data analytics companies that are using various — and increasingly competitive — ways to access home energy data. Nest calls its cloud-based big data algorithms Auto-Tune, and the data that is collected is from its increasingly large amount of thermostats being installed throughout the world.

Opower has built out its big data platform, Opower 4, which collects data from at least 75 utilities, processes data from more than 50 million homes, and has 15 million homes fully connected into the Opower platform. Opower is analyzing 16 percent of all of the smart meters in the U.S.

Each company’s approach has unique benefits and hurdles. Opower has been widely successful with utilities using the approach of starting out with a basic data analytics service, and adding on more complexity and control over time. Utilities are hard customers to win over, so the benefits of winning their business early is invaluable. Nest, with its direct to consumer approach, could be slightly threatening to some of the more conservative utilities.

Nest, on the other hand, has the capacity to build a consumer brand that can make money from direct consumer electronics sales as well as working with energy service providers. Opower has little consumer brand presence and mostly subverts its brand to its utility customers.

Which method will prove more successful over time? It’ll be interesting to see, but in reality there will be room for both. It’s also refreshing to see different types of innovation and execution in the home energy efficiency space — an industry that has been neglected for quite a long time.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Cleantech, meet connectivity: a new era of energy efficiency

Taylor Wilson has been called “The Boy Who Played With Fusion” by Popular Science magazine. At age 9, Wilson stunned tour guides at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with his complex understanding of rocket science. At 12, he set out to make a “star in a jar.” By 14, Wilson had become the youngest person to achieve nuclear fusion with a working reactor. Built in his parents’ garage, the deuterium-hurling device is now housed in the physics department of the University of Nevado, Reno.

At TED2013, Wilson made his second appearance on the TED stage, above. Now 19, he arrived with a bold new idea — a way to make nuclear energy safe and portable, on a scale where it has the potential to address the global energy crisis. In today’s talk, Wilson shares his latest innovation — Small Modular Fission Reactors. These reactors are small, meaning that they can be built in factories and shipped around the globe. They run on already-molten material, so meltdowns won’t be an issue. They’re installed three meters underground, making them hard to tamper with, and yet, in the event of a disaster, the core can be drained to a tank underneath, stopping the reaction. And while traditional nuclear power plants run for 18 months before needing refueling, the small-scale versions could run for up to 30 years, after which they could be sealed for discarding.

To hear how these reactors work — and a few potential applications, from bringing carbon-free energy to the developing world to propelling rockets into space — watch this talk.

A year ago, at TED2012, Wilson took the TED stage to talk about the nuclear fusion reactor he created in his basement. “I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be … our energy future,” he says in this talk, “Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor.” “I’d also like to make the case that kids can really change the world.”

Wilson isn’t the only teenager who has shared an energy innovation on the TED stage. At TEDGlobal 2007, William Kamkwamba answered questions about his incredible creation – a homemade windmill he built at age 14.

Kamkwamba set out to make a windmill to bring electricity to his family’s home in rural Malawi. He got the basic plans from a library book, reimagining the design out of spare parts, like a bicycle frame and plastic pipes. Kamkwamba made significant alterations in the design to improve upon it, adding an extra blade to increase the windmill’s power production. In the end, the windmill created 12 watts of energy – enough to power four lightbulbs and two radios in his family’s home.  At TEDGlobal 2009, he returned to the stage to tell the story in more detail in the talk “How I harnessed the wind.”

After his TED experience, Kamkwamba set his sights on building a bigger windmill to pump water and power irrigation for his entire village. Kwambama’s story was recently the subject of the documentary William and the Windmill, which won the Grand Jury Award at SXSW.

Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, is an adult now. But in his talk from TED2003, he revealed that he started his first energy company — called Solar Devices — when he was 15 years old, building on what he learned in school about how parabolas could concentrate rays of light onto a single point. At the height of the gas shortage in 1973, Gross developed his own design for a Stirling engine in metal shop.

“I sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of Popular Science magazine, for $4 each,” he says in this talk, “Bill Gross on new energy.” “I earned enough money to pay for my first year of Caltech.”

Want more talks with ideas for energy (regardless of the speaker’s age)? Watch the TED playlist “The End of Oil.” It begins with Wilson’s talk about his nuclear fusion reactor, continues with Donald Sadoway sharing the missing link to renewable energy, and continues with eight more great ideas for moving beyond our reliance on oil.

This week I attended Bloomberg’s annual energy conference, and the audience favorite seemed to be the keynote by Bloomberg New Energy Finance CEO Michael Liebreich. If you’re interested in the trends of global finance going into clean energy and energy efficiency, it’s a must watch. Here’s the video:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• After Solyndra: analyzing the solar industry
• The opportunities for the Internet and clean power

Alabama has lower energy prices than the national average. Its gasoline price is the 12^th lowest among the states and 5 percent below the national average. The state’s lower gasoline prices are due in large measure to the state’s …

I just read a statistic that jolted me out of my cleantech hangover. Despite low cleantech VC funding, the limelight-hogging shale boom, and an avalanche of anti-cleantech advertising during the 2012 U.S. election, renewable energy enjoys a notable trust premium over other forms of energy.

In new data provided by the Edelman Trust Barometer survey of 31,000 global respondents, 68 percent of respondents trust the “renewables” business to do the right thing, as compared with 58 percent for natural gas, 53 percent for utilities and 49 percent for oil (see image below).

That’s a license to lead, folks. Despite significant perceptual headwinds, renewables emerge with a 10 point lead over its nearest energy competitor. As a marketer, I’m reminded of why I originally found this sector so energizing and inspiring during the cleantech boom of 2007-2008.

Note the high trust in places like China and India. Not surprising, considering the clear messages sent by those governments about cleantech deployment, and the ability of those nations to leapfrog traditional energy systems to meet electricity demand for growing middle classes. Both countries boast cleantech leaders like Hanwha Solar, Suzlon and Tata.

Note the low numbers for Japan (66 percent) and Germany (63 percent). These are consistent with both countries’ lower trust in business and energy.

The German numbers shocked me the first time I saw them. But for this country, renewables have graduated to the “big energy” establishment, which I expect engenders less trust than the sheen of new technologies in emerging markets.

For Japan, trust in the entire energy industry is lower than other countries post-Fukushima, but renewables are trusted most within the Japanese energy sector.

Broadening focus to the entire energy industry, this data corroborates another trend: so-called “purpose-driven” energy innovators enjoy a trust premium over other energy professionals. This not just a cleantech thing, it’s an advanced energy thing. This is for two reasons:

When asked to rank attributes that shape trust in a company, respondents ranked “purpose” – protecting the environment, partnering with NGOs – as most important, and being an “innovator of new products” close behind (see image below and note the orange and purple attributes that respondents rank as more important for the energy industry as compared with general business).

Clearly, energy companies can earn more credibility by better communicating real global citizenship and helpful innovation.

On the flipside, communicating about the success of business “operations” (dark blue) was valued only as table stakes for being an energy company, not as a major trust-builder. I would argue this is true if we’re talking about large companies, but I think the opposite is true for advanced energy start-ups where the onus is much higher to prove operational success.

The data also shows how technology is trusted more than energy. In my opinion, the marriage of technology and energy is a net gain for energy company trust building. See the image below, which depicts how much higher technology is trusted than energy (78 percent vs. 67 percent). I interpret this as further proof that innovation gives the energy industry license to lead.

This is reflected in the strong Silver Spring IPO on Wednesday. Silver Spring is an innovative energy IT company, not just an energy company. Energy IT is a highly credible sector populated by other promising companies like OPOWER and FirstFuel, and a primary focus for venture capitalist still focused on cleantech. The public trust data corroborates the investor enthusiasm.

Would you like more data on trust in the energy industry? Don’t hesitate to contact me.

Joey Marquart is the global cleantech sector lead for Edelman, the PR firm. He is based in Silicon Valley and oversees communications programs for solar, bio, EV, materials and smart grid companies.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The opportunities for the Internet and clean power
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world

Last night at SXSW, William and the Windmill was awarded one of the festival’s top two honors, taking home Grand Jury Award for Documentary Feature. William Kamkwamba: How I harnessed the wind The film tells the story of TED Speaker William Kamkwamba, who has come to be known by the title of his memoir, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. At age 14, Kamkwamba built a windmill out of junk parts, adapting a design he saw in a library book in order to provide electricity for his family in rural Malawi. This incredible feat of engineering caught our attention, and he was invited to speak at TED Global 2007. His 6-minute talk, called “How I harnessed the wind,” was life-changing and catapulted him from regular teenager to international energy superstar.

William and the Windmill, directed by Ben Nabors and starring TED’s own Tom Rielly, who became Kamkwamba’s mentor, follows Kamkwamba’s journey from his home in Malawi to Dartmouth College, reflecting on the highs and lows of living between two very different cultures. As IndieWire writes in its rave review of the film, “Kamkwamba’s scientific achievement speaks for itself, but the attention he received in its wake is a thornier issue that Ben Nabors turns into a fascinating look at the tricky balancing act of third-world activism.”

William and the Windmill received recognition last night at SXSW alongside Short Term 12, winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature. Below, check out stills from William and the Windmill, courtesy of Nabors. And stay tuned to the TED Blog for a Q&A with Kamkwamba.

Here, watch the film’s trailer:

And head to the Tribeca Film Institute website to read about 5 films that influenced Nabors as he made this doc »

Arkansas has some of the lowest energy prices in the country. It has the 7^th lowest electricity prices, almost 25 percent lower than the nation’s average electricity price. Its gasoline price is the 12^th lowest among the states. …

Have you checked your email today? Your finances? What about your energy use? Alex Laskey thinks that with just a shift in attitude toward our energy use, we can all save a lot.

Laskey introduces an experiment he ran with his team at Opower. People received one of three different messages on their doors about why they should try to save energy:

– You can save $54 this month
– You can save the planet
or
– You can be a good citizen

Which one won? None. No one message showed a marked difference. So Opower added a fourth message: Your neighbors are doing better than you.

That one worked. The locals who heard the message that 77% of their neighbors turned down their A/C, Also turned down their AC, creating a marked difference in energy consumption. As Laskey says, “If something is inconvenient, even if we believe it, persuasion won’t work. But social pressure? That’s powerful stuff.”

Every year in the U.S. alone $40 billion of energy is wasted. Laskey projects that by thinking not just about material sciences but about behavioral sciences, we could save 2 terawatts a year — more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City for more than a year.

We can be doing so much better, says Laskey, starting by tapping into the power of social behavior.

The fifth most powerful business woman in America according to Fortune, DuPont’s CEO Ellen Kullman, has spent the last few years restructuring the two century-old company around using science to help meet the needs of a world population that will balloon to 9 billion by 2050. One of those crucial needs will be access to energy, and in particular energy that doesn’t contribute to changing the world’s climate, which is why Kullman found herself on Tuesday giving a speech before thousands of energy geeks at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Summit.

DuPont, which has a market cap of $44 billion, “is not an energy company, it’s a science company,” Kullman reminded the audience. But with its industrial material products, high-yield agriculture strains, and bio-based chemicals, DuPont is a major supplier of materials for solar manufacturers, and is building a ground-breaking cellulosic ethanol plant in Iowa. “No industry needs innovation more than energy,” said Kullman.

Following Kullman’s remarks, we sat down with the 57-year-old, who is DuPont’s first female CEO, to ask her about working with startups, how they’ll overcome the hurdles of biofuels, and just how bullish she is on solar. The following is an edited interview:

How can startups work with DuPont? What are you guys looking for?

It depends on the area. We work with a lot of startups and small companies and we do a lot of collaboration. We’ve long transitioned to a belief that our ideas aren’t the only great ones out there and we are openly looking to collaborate — we call it inclusive innovation. Some of the problem’s we’re facing are so complex that you can get there faster and smarter if you do it with others that have skill sets that align with where we’re going or with what we need.

We’ve been working with Genencor, a Palo Alto startup, since the 90’s and the idea was to use agriculture to create industrial materials and fibers. We had certain parts of it and they had other parts of it.

There can be great synergy, but you have to get really specific. We tried before to paint the world with a large partnership with a university or a company without that definition and it doesn’t really go anywhere. A lot of times we think we know what we want, and when we engage we find out that there’s a whole other side of this that they [the startup] can bring that we hadn’t really comprehended before.

We bought Innovalight, which is helping us from the standpoint of silicon inks for solar photovoltaics. We don’t buy them all, right? The relationship is really dependent on the needs of each company and can span a contract to a JV to a purchase or a minority equity investment. The more inflexible we are the less successful we’re going to be.

Is there a strategy for acquiring startups? The reason I ask is because it seems like a lot of the IT and web ecosystem has been built around companies like Cisco or Google aggressively acquiring startups, but the science sectors don’t seem to have this kind of acquisition ecosystem.

It has to be, to what end. You want to put out real money and the question is how will it create value for our shareholders? So it tends to be very specific to an area. Like the solar area we might be looking broadly at novel materials, or novel processes, that we can bring in that can enhance our position. So it’s not a strategy to acquire, but an open strategy to create the strongest future whether its acquisition or JV or licensing. It’s about creating shareholder value. Areas that we’re very active in is agriculture, nutrition, and industrial biosciences and advanced materials.

A lot of people, including myself, are watching the ground-breaking of the cellulosic ethanol plant in Iowa with great interest. But many companies have tried to do this and have struggled. Why will DuPont succeed in this area when others have not?

We’ve been working at this for awhile — a decade. We had very specific milestones we had to meet from a tech standpoint and a scale up standpoint. We had a 150,000 gallon plant that had to meet certain criteria before we would go to the next step. This was the second major project we did from that standpoint. The first was the Bio-PDO that goes into fibers and carpets. We had an understanding and a lot of experience that told us we could get this done. But we don’t start putting a shovel in the ground until the milestones are met.

We already have the relationships with the farmers in the communities that will provide the raw materials for the plant. And we understand how much it’s going to cost to collect and store, and that’s all part of the economics. I was really impressed with the work that the team did in laying that all out five years ago. I think we have a much better shot at being successful because we have all of these areas moving at the same time. We keep building on our learnings from previous projects and it’s helping us do it faster and understand what we need from others and I think it’s going to create a huge potential for success.

Has the process of moving the cellulosic ethanol plant along taken longer than expected?

It’s never short enough for me. They [her executive team] would probably tell you that it exceeded their expectations. It’s this tug of war.

DuPont is a major supplier for materials and that makes it susceptible to the vulnerabilities of the solar cell and panel market right now. Are you still as bullish on the solar materials sector as the $2 billion DuPont was planning on selling for 2014?

I think we’re bullish on solar PV. We believe that the progress that has been made around efficiency has been tremendous in the last few years. I remember thinking when crystalline silicon got to 12 percent efficiency that it was impressive and now they’re pushing 20 [percent].

I think that materials matter. It’s not only the efficiency of the cell when it starts, it’s the efficiency 25 years later. So weatherization, things like that, become very important and materials matter in that.

I think we’ll get there. I think we’ll get to parity on average in 2015. If you look at what China’s announced for their 5 year plan to install 21 GW is helping right.

But I think it’s going to be bumpy. Any new technology transition is bumpy. And you’ve just got to be able to put it in perspective for those bumps. How much we sell in 2014, or 2015, will depend on how many modules are built, right? But I think the science is there and we just have to continue to make the progress.

What would you want to see from the government in the energy and clean power sectors?

Stable government policy. I think stability around that is very important. Consistent government policy is a really important part of a secure and a more diverse energy future.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The opportunities for the Internet and clean power
• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
• Cleantech and investment in 2013

 

Taylor Wilson graduated from high school in May. And Popular Science has already dubbed him “The Boy who Played with Fusion” and Forbes has suggested that he may just be “The Bill Gates of Energy.”

Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactorWilson first received attention at the age of 14, after building a nuclear fusion reactor he’d dreamed up in his parents’ garage. He spoke at TED2012 about that experience, and he’s back this year at TED2013 to talk about a new project.

“I realized that the biggest problem we face — what all these other problems come down to — is energy,” says Wilson. “This is a talk about fission — about taking something old and bringing it into the 21st century.”

Wilson has invented Small Modular Fission Reactors. These reactors are small, meaning that they can be built in factories and shipped wherever they need to go. They are installed three meters underground — making them far safer from a counterterrorism standpoint than something aboveground. And these are molten salt reactors, which means that they have the potential to run on the waste from old nuclear weapons — making the wide distribution of this technology a potential way to secure the material from weapon stockpiles.

As Wilson explains, one of the problems with traditional nuclear power plants is that they only run for 18 months before needing refueling. Small Modular Fission Reactors, on the other hand, will run for about 30 years before they run out of juice. This means that they will be a closed system while they are in use, making them safer. And after the 30-year mark, these reactors can be sealed up and discarded.

“Everybody after Fukushima had to reasses the safety of nuclear,” says Wilson. “When I set out to design a reactor, I knew it had to be passive and intrisically safe.”

As Wilson explains, because the material in Small Modular Fission Reactors is already molten, meltdowns won’t be a factor. And in the case of a disaster, the core can be drained to a tank underneath, stopping the reaction.

Wilson is excited about the potential of Small Modular Fission Reactors because they could provide carbon-free electricity for homes and businesses, helping to combat climate change. And because they are produced in factories, for cheap, they may be a way to bring power to the developing world. Wilson excitedly tells TED curator Chris Anderson that he hopes to have Small Modular Fission Reactors to market in five years.

But Wilson sees other potential for these reactors — to fuel scientific exploration in other areas, perhaps even space.

“Imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50-100 megawatts. That’s the rocket designer’s dream,” says Wilson. And it isn’t inconceivable, considering that plutonium batteries have been sent into space aboard rockets. ”I think there’s something poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars. Because the stars are giant nuclear power reactors themselves.”

The cofounder of PayPal, Elon Musk has become one of his generation’s most aggressive, not to mention successful, entrepreneurs. As CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, his interests clearly lie in transforming transportation and creating an economy built on sustainable energy. Now he takes the TED stage to tell us more.

First, he talks about the genesis of Tesla, his realization while still at university that the development of a sustainable energy system is critical to the ongoing existence of humanity — and therefore a problem worth tackling. And while, yes, these cars require being fed by current electrical systems, his belief is that given the inevitability of electric transportation, perhaps Tesla cars will help to kickstart the genuinely sustainable system necessary to support it. “All modes of transport will become electric, with the ironic exception of rockets. There’s no way around Newton’s third law,” he says. “So the question is how you create a really energy efficient car.” In Tesla’s case, the key is to make it incredibly light, with an aluminum chassis and body made in North America. “We applied rocket design techniques to make the car light, despite the large battery pack.”

Musk clearly isn’t going to talk about his recent spat with the New York Times, but he does want to talk about the range of the car. “Customers of the Model S are competing with each other to get the highest possible range,” he says. 420 miles is apparently the record, though he acknowledges that 250 miles on a single charge is a more likely number. But what he truly loves about the Tesla is the driver experience. “The responsiveness is incredible,” he says. “We want people to feel a mind-meld with the car, that you and the car are one. As you corner, accelerate, it just happens. It’s like the car has ESP.”

But Musk isn’t just here to talk about Tesla. Another string to his energy bow: SolarCity, a company harnessing the power of the “giant fusion generator in the sky,” the sun. Why solar? “I’m confident solar will beat everything hands down, including natural gas. If it doesn’t, we’re in deep trouble.” With this company, Musk is attempting to create no less than a giant, distributed utility, leasing solar panels to homes and companies. “Utilities have been this monopoly and people haven’t had a choice. It’s the first time they have had competition,” he says. “It’s empowering.”

And so to SpaceX, a project Musk jokes might well prove to be the fastest way he can lose his fortune. Despite setbacks, they persist, and when he says the goal of the company is to advance rocket technology and convert humanity into a spacefaring civilization, it’s hard to laugh him off. Especially when he challenges us to consider which we’d prefer: Exploring other planets, or confining ourselves to earth and eventual, inevitable extinction.

The real innovation of SpaceX is to build a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was an attempt at this, he says, but it took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish a rocket for a flight, at a cost of about $1 billion per flight. That’s not a sustainable business model, and in the past few months Musk and his team have made good progress in designing a rocket that can take off — and land again safely. He shows video of a test, a 12-story-high rocket taking off, hovering at 40 meters, and then magically landing again. The audience is appropriately impressed. Even more so when he tells us that none of the design innovations in the rocket are patented. “Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable,” he says wryly.

As to how he manages it all, he has three tips for would-be innovators. First, work a lot. Secondly, study physics and learn how to reason from first principles rather than reason by analogy. Finally, he says, pay attention to negative feedback, particularly from friends. “That may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that,” he concludes.

This interview with 60 Minutes from June 2012 is well worth a watch:

Tonight President Obama will give his fifth State of the Union address, and the first of his second term. Among the topics the President is widely reported to discuss tonight are climate change, renewable energy, and various administration programs to spur economic growth and job creation. The Institute for Energy Research provides the following reading list to address claims the President may make about these topics:

 

Beyond the Congressional Budget Office
By Dr. Joseph Mason 

We have recently seen a boom in US oil and gas development on private and state lands and waters. The success of this development could be expanded greatly if the President were to open up federal lands for energy development. This report explains the benefits of pro energy growth policies in terms of tax revenue, job creation, GDP growth, and wage increases.

Recapping the Obama Administration Green Energy Stimulus Failures
By IER

Companies such as Solyndra and Abound Solar were touted as the future of energy in America. However, not even hundreds of millions of dollars in government loans could save them from their inevitable failures. The President and his administration have shown that they are incapable of picking winners, but the question remains if this will change their policies moving forward.

The Myth of Wind and Solar Energy: They Are Not Free
By IER

Proponents of wind and solar energy like to refer to them as “free” energy sources. Due to the intermittency of these sources, this is just not the case, as they need more reliable sources such as coal and natural gas to back them up. California, a state that has put much of its energy focus on wind and solar, is a great case study of how wind and solar energy actually increase electricity costs.

Economics of the Bakken Oil Boom: What the Rest of the Nation is Missing
By IER

North Dakota has been booming economically, thanks in large part to the Bakken shale formation. Energy development in this area has led to lower unemployment and overall economic growth.  The success of the Bakken should be seen as a model for the rest of the nation and something that the President should strive to emulate in his second term.

Approving Keystone XL Pipeline Would Be a Big Win for Obama
By Daniel Kish, IER. US News and World Report

In light of Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman’s approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, the decision now rests squarely on the President’s shoulders. The President’s first term was marked by recession and energy regulation, but he has an opportunity to change this in his second term by approving Keystone XL.

Germany’s Green Energy Destabilizing Electric Grids
By IER

The President often points towards other countries as models the United States must follow. One of his favorite examples has been that of Germany and its push for more wind and solar power. This push has led to a destabilization of the German electric grid, thus turning Germany into a shining example of what not to do.

Obama’s CAFE: Efficiency over Safety
By IER

The President’s decision to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 indicates his preference of efficiency over safety. The aim of this new standard is to combat carbon emissions, but this strategy could lead to lighter and less safe vehicles.

Carbon Tax Would Raise Unemployment, Not Swap Revenue
By David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D. and Nicolas Loris. Heritage Foundation

A carbon tax has been mentioned as a possible option to curb carbon emissions. This tax would have a damaging effect on the economy without the proposed environmental benefits. Going into his second term, the President will have to choose between policies that will damage our economy or ones that will help foster growth.

PTC Extension Passes; Layoffs and Cancellations Continue
By IER

An expansion of the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) was passed as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal. Despite the expansion, which will cost taxpayers $12 billion, the wind industry continues to experience layoffs and cancellations due to a multitude of issues. Will the President and his administration continue to prop up the costly and ineffective wind industry in his second term?

Analysis of US and State-by-State Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Potential “Savings” in Future Global Temperature and Global Sea Level Rise (PDF)
By Paul C. Knappenberger

The President has made it clear that he wants to take actions to curb carbon emissions. If the U.S. as a whole stopped emitting all carbon dioxide emissions immediately, the ultimate impact would be a reduction of only 0.08°C by 2050. In fact, the increase in CO2 emissions from other countries around the world will make any reductions here irrelevant.

 

###

David Sandalow, the acting U.S. Under Secretary of Energy, says the Department of Energy’s programs to invest in energy innovation are about “trying to replicate the rate of IT innovation for energy.” He made the remarks at the Cleantech Investor Summit on Wednesday to a few hundred entrepreneurs, and investors who no doubt wished the technologies they’ve been supporting would get cheaper and more powerful at the same rate as Moore’s Law.

Alas the cleantech sector has yet to see its own Moore’s Law, though the closest might be that solar cells and panels have dropped dramatically over the past 18 months. But even if Sandalow couldn’t promise a Moore’s Law for energy, he laid out some of the most important trends that the DOE is paying very close attention to in the energy sector in 2013.

1). Grid resiliency and modernization: Both the Superbowl blackouts and hurricane Katrina have highlighted how important it is to make the grid much more resilient to blackouts as well as cyber events. The threat of cyber attacks “is real,” and it’ll be the private sector who mostly will lead the response against these situations, said Sandalow. Having a much more robust grid will also be needed as utilities add more clean power, like wind and solar, onto the grid.

2). Low cost natural gas: Cheap U.S. natural gas, which has emerged through horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, is the “hottest topic in the energy area,” said Sandalow. The DOE is accepting comments right now for whether or not the U.S. should export liquid natural gas. We have 16 applications for companies that want to export it, said Sandalow.

3). The dropping cost of solar: The DOE has its SunShot program, which looks to lower the cost of solar panels, but there’s a lot more work left to do. Germany has a 50 percent lower cost to install solar panels because it removed a lot of the red tape, said Sandalow. He explained, “I want to know when solar will become viral in the way that cell phones did, and what will it take, energy storage?”

4). Electric vehicles: The DOE has done a lot of work with electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, and we plan to do a lot more, said Sandalow.

5). High performance computing and big data: The trend of big data analytics and the most powerful computers in the world will no doubt help crack the problems with energy innovation. They are already being used heavily in the energy and climate change monitoring sectors.

6). Clean energy financing: There’s a lot more work to be done to finance clean power projects, though some milestones passed recently like the tax credits for wind projects. For startups clean power financing is actually a pretty hot area for investment.

7). China: Sandalow says he’s been to China 13 times while he’s been in office. The relationship between the U.S. and China over energy has at times been challenging, says Sandalow, but the trend of Chinese investments being made into cleantech companies in the U.S. is really interesting, and “I expect to see more of it.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Locating data centers in an energy-constrained world
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Key technologies for the smart city