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A couple weeks ago I asked Mike Lichtenfeld, a deal associate with MMA Renewable Ventures what the impact was on the Project Finance business was after the first bailout package wasn’t approved. Here is a synopsis of his written response:

“Credit contraction, if sustained, will hurt the clean energy sector as much as any other industry – our projects, our manufacturing capacity, our corporate development and expansion all depend on access to debt capital. That much is clear. In addition, we know that the bailout debacle has stalled negotiations on an energy bill that would include extension of critical tax incentives for clean energy. However, even under a scenario in which the credit markets open and tax incentives are extended, the financial distress experienced market-wide to date has probably changed the landscape of tax equity investors for the worse, not only by reducing the numbers of players through outright institutional failure, but also by drastically reducing the tax equity appetite among those players still standing.

Financial institutions large and small that have been active in renewable energy from a tax advantaged equity position have recently underperformed or experienced losses in the economic maelstrom. The outlook for the US economy – even under a bailout scenario – is at best a mild and short-term recession, so a constricted tax equity universe could continue for 12-18 months or more….

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Today is the first day I´m blogging for Cleantechies and in fact, the first day I´ve ever blogged on my own so anybody reading this with a highly developed sense of blogger-etiquette please be patient while I learn which fork to use.

I´ve been living in Barcelona for 5 years now and for the last 2 and a half years after graduating from IESE Business School, I have been working with a renewable energy firm based in Barcelona called Blue Green Capital. We are solar developers working in Spain, France, Israel and other feed-in tariff markets. While we may not drive a pick-up truck and wear aviator sunglasses, we often have muddy shoes and drink a lot of beer, both of which are useful social lubricants in our line of business.

So after completing and exiting our first two projects in Spain with a US trade investor and a Spanish engineering firm, we´ve been dedicating most of our resources to building up a solar portfolio. The feed-in tariff system in Spain has been enormously lucrative in the last 2 years, hovering around €0,40 to €0,44/kWh. Many promoters and players, ourselves included, took advantage of the juicy subsidy to close on projects whose IRRs were 12% or more. But as could be expected, the Spanish government got nervous at underwriting solar projects at such a high cost, and radically revised the subsidy system downward; attaching a performance bond of €500/kW for all new ground-mounted systems in addition to pushing the feed-in tariff to a more-manageable €,32.

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Still in love with the “old school” design of the classical light bulbs, or the form factor of the new CFL light bulb does not fit the light socket you would like to use it with?
Check out the latest case study from frog design about a LED based bulb, below you’ll find a short excerpt about their LED light bulb:

[...]
We examined high-powered LEDs instead. They use significantly less power than a CFL, can be tuned to give a pleasant color output and contain no mercury. The drawback is that high-output LEDs create heat (although not nearly as much as incandescent lights) that needs to be dissipated, or the life of the LED is greatly affected.

As our ideas began to focus on combining LEDs with a fluorescent, we sketched several forms that tried to create harmony between the two technologies. The idea of creating a separation between work and home life through the modulation of the color output drove some of our early forms. As soon as we chose to use only high-output LEDs, our forms changed significantly, rendering the old concepts no longer valid.

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Tuesday I had the chance to visit the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces at EPFL. At the invitation of Carole and Michael Grätzel, I toured the lab and learned all about Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSC).

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Everybody is talking about “green energy” these days. It seems, anywhere in the world, the “green movement” has taken hold of individuals, companies and organizations. Individuals are making efforts to shift some of their consumption to renewable energy sources, companies are eagerly trying to develop or employ innovative clean technology and organizations are lobbying the green idea. Even governments are actively promoting and supporting the development of renewable energies.

With 64,500,000 search results for “green business”, 30,100,000 for “green energy” and 14,500,000 for “clean technology”, Google provides some insights into the dimensions of this movement.* Other sources give a clear picture: The International Energy Agency (IEA) indicates that investments in renewable energy will nearly triple from the current €40 billion to €115 billion by 2020. At the same time, employment in the overall sector will increase by 54% and even double in the solid biomass and photovoltaic fields, according to the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU).**

There are many centers of activity in this worldwide movement for a better (greener) world, and I don’t want to take sides for one or the other. However, I would like to share an observation:

The United States has been criticized for its high levels of energy consumption, lack of adequate governmental policies to curb usage and insufficient promotion of alternative energy sources. At the same time, it might be the country with the largest and most dynamic “green energy” movement in the world.

Truth of the matter is: There is a large and ever growing group of dedicated people out there in the United States who believe in a “green future”. These are people who want to make a difference, people who are fed up with the current legislation’s stance on energy. These people rally all over the country in a quest for change. And they are pretty good at it.

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Working in Africa requires patience, local friends, patience, and patience. I forget what the World Bank rating is for Tanzania on ease of setting up a business, but it takes a certain luxury of time and money. The process is mostly transparent, although it helps to have a good advocate or lawyer (there is a difference in Tanzania) to assist in creating the necessary documents and then submitting them to the government. Lines in Dar to submit the paperwork can be long and confusing, so again it helps to have local assistance. The basic costs start to finish is about $1000.00 USD.

dissigno’s Tanzania project may begin by setting up the entity. We have several recommendations for lawyers garnered from local contacts and networking in-country. Face to face meeting helps immensely as telephones and e-mails are either ignored or used only to set up a time and place for a meeting.

A. Immediate – Implementation

1. Setting up an entity – notes from several lawyers include:

a. Having a TZ national on the board, with a share stake makes formation easier and faster. The number of foreign versus TZ nationals determines whether the company will be identified as a
national or foreign company. A wholly foreign company is deemed as removing value from the country. There are many ways to accomplish this, but the final solution includes using someone that you trust.

b. The recommendation that we incorporate as a national versus a foreign company (more board members that are TZ than foreign) seemed less important to us. The US and Tanzania do not have a tax treaty. Thus, if a US company simply registered to work in TZ (rather than create a TZ entity) the TZ government would be allowed to examine the US company’s books.

c. A registered company can then register with the Tanzania Investment Center (TIC) The TIC was created to encourage investment in TZ, and offers many incentives. 0% VAT on capital goods, low or deferred income taxes, easy work and living permits, easy repatriation of profit, protection from nationalization, are among the many financial incentives to encourage investment. However, the incentives are different between foreign and national companies.

d. The cost to form the entity is about $1000.00 including the lawyer fees, forms, state fees, and stamps. There are other indirect costs, such as office space that must reflect a three-year commitment and employees among others. It can take anywhere form 1-3 months to complete. If articles of incorporation are prepared ahead of time the time may be shorter.

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That was the question I put to Nat Bullard – Senior Solar Thermal Analyst at New Energy Finance.  He brushed off the question as stupid – so in case you feel like asking him here is his response:

A) they require at least 9 months of permitting
B) they have a building time horizon of many years after that, and
C) they sell to Utilities not to consumers.

Unlike Nat, I don’t think that these are necessarily reasons for not presenting – but he did come up with a good point: where was FirstSolar?  “If you are established, then you are established,” he said.  Well then Nat… what about SunPower’s huge party? Or are they not established enough for your liking?  How about Q-Cells’? Was their party just for fun? (it was!)

I don’t know about his analysis on the absence of the big guys in STEG (Solar Thermal Electrical Generation) either – there are more and more companies coming on line, and while I saw some BrightSource executives and at least one former Ausra exec neither of these companies, nor any from the other recognized solar thermal players had a presence on the Expo floor (SkyFuel was there). Why would they skip out on a chance to tell the world what they do? The natural response to my question is, why should they have been there if the whole world already knows about them? I say because there were plenty of utilities there from outside of California and the United States.

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… brought to you by CleanTech Human Capital and Renewable Analytics. Since we had such a good time last time, we’re doing it again. Expect the same: great beer and even better company, from 5:30-8:00.

The weather promises to be nice (around 75 degrees) and we should have another nice sunset. Relaxed and casual – we’ll have plenty of beer, some light eats and a good group. Like last time – it is short notice, but it is free beer on a roof deck to punctuate quitting time on a Wednesday – what is there not to like?

605 Market @ 2nd – take the elevator to the 14th floor and follow the signs out to the roof deck. See you starting at 5:30, we’ll be up there until around 8:00. Boont Amber Ale is the beer of choice (it is solar powered!)- if you have a particular preference for something else let us know, I’m telling BevMo what we want at 5 PM on Tuesday.

We’d hate to run out of beer, so if you are planning to come send us a note: RSVP @ this domain (cleantechies.com).

Cheers for now,
-Ian Thomson

PS: CleanTechies LinkedIn Group

SEIA and SEPA’s event was a tremendous success if measured by attendance. The Expo was full, the displays were exciting and the crowd was expected to be around 15,000.  Not too shabby!

The weather was a tribute to the event – San Diego’s sun was blaring down on us between events.  Business was coming together everywhere I looked, from big companies taking their conversations to private rooms in adjacent hotels to side bar conversations in the conference rooms and terraces.  The big guys were all there, and some new comers were pitching their wares, and of course there was the occasional entrepreneur scribbling an elevator pitch on loose pages to potential investors.

The conference topics and expo presenters ranged from policy discussions to financial concerns to technology, though to be fair – the unveiling of new market entrants and technology was pretty limited.  The well attended events revolved around regulation and market expansion concerns, and quite a bit of attention was paid to the international crowd as German and Spanish companies eyed the US market in response to the tightening of the European Feed in Tariffs.

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