In a previous post, I wrote about the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s (CIPO) proposal to implement an expedited examination program for green tech patent applications.

Last month CIPO launched the program. Now applicants can have their green patent applications advanced out of turn for examination with a simple written request and declaration that the application relates to clean technology:

An applicant wishing to take advantage of the expedited examination process must do the following:

2. Submit a declaration that states the application relates to technology the commercialization of which would help to resolve or mitigate environmental impacts or conserve the natural environment and resources.

Under the fast track program, the applicant will receive a first office action within two months instead of about 2-3 years in the ordinary course. More information on the CIPO fast track program can be found here.

Canada joins several other national IP offices around the world in offering a green tech fast track program, including the UK, the US, Australia, Korea, Japan and Israel.

Eric Lane is a patent attorney at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego and the author of Green Patent Blog. Mr. Lane can be reached at elane@luce.com.

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Richard Bruton TD, Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, announced recently that An tSlí Ghlas – The Green Way, Ireland’s first Green Economic Zone, has been accepted as the Irish representative of the Global Cleantech Cluster Association(GCCA).

Membership in GCCA will provide Irish companies with greater opportunities to major sources of international funding and expertise in the growing green tech sectors, such as energy efficiency, renewable energies, green transport, building materials and waste management. Membership will also attract foreign investment in clean tech to the country.

Clean-tech companies employ new technology and related business models to offer resource-efficient solutions to global problems, and at the same time provide competitive returns for investors and customers.

GCCA links more than 20 top clean-tech clusters across the globe, connecting more than 300 universities and 10,000 companies.

The 10 Irish Companies shortlisted for GCCA
An tShlí Ghlas – the Green Way has chosen the following 10 Irish companies to represent Ireland in the Best in Class GCCA ‘Later Stage’ awards. The winning companies will be actively promoted to a leading hand-selected investment community across the globe.

Crowley Carbon Ltd is based in Delgany, Co Wicklow, and takes the guesswork out of saving money. It answers the following questions: What energy efficiency products are available? Will they work for us? How much will we save? How much do they cost? What does it take to install? How can we be sure we got the projected savings?

Imperative Energy is a Maynooth, Co Kildare-based company which provides purpose-built biomass plants to provide heat, steam and power at a client’s site.

Liberator.aero is located in Swords, Co Dublin, and aims to reduce fuel consumption by 2pc for airlines, reducing associated carbon emissions at the same time.

The Rediscovery Centre, based in Ballymun, Dublin, upcycles materials, such as textiles and furniture.

Treemetrics is a Cork-based company which informs foresters which trees are ready to be cut down in a forest.

Solarprint, which is based in Dublin, has patented technology to produce better energy efficiency within buildings, by exploiting energy output from indoor light to power wireless sensors. It can reduce a building’s energy bill by 25-40pc.

Openhydro, based in Dublin, designs and manufactures marine turbines to generate renewable energy from tidal streams.

Ecocem Materials Ltd is a carbon-neutral company located in Ringsend, Dublin, which manufactures and supplies eco-friendly cement to the construction industry. It is a carbon-neutral company. Ecocem’s green cement has been used on the Dublin Convention Centre (the world’s first carbon-neutral convention centre).

Wavebob Ltd, based in Maynooth, Co Kildare, is considered one of the heading wave-energy companies globally, with offices in US. Analysts suggest 10pc of entire global energy demand could be met by wave energy.

Ikonsemi Ltd (Ikon Semiconductor) is a fabless semiconductor company based in Dublin focused on developing innovative, highly integrated and efficient solutions for the rapidly growing LED lighting industry.

An tSlí Ghlas – The Green Way combines existing businesses, academic institutions and local authorities in north Dublin, with the hope of expanding nationally and cross-border. Its founders include Ballymun Regeneration Ltd, Dublin Airport Authority, Dublin City Council, Dublin City University, Dublin Institute of Technology, Fingal County Council and North Dublin Chamber.

Article by Doireann McDermott, appearing courtesy Silicon Republic.

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Oregon is fast becoming the North American green tech hub. SolarWorld already operates the continent’s largest solar manufacturing plant just west of Portland, Nano solar cell maker Solexant recently announced plans for a manufacturing plant east of the city, and now Vestas, one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers, has chosen the heart of Portland for its own North American headquarters.

The 172,000-square-foot HQ project will entail a LEED-Platinum renovation of an historic warehouse downtown. Set for completion in 2012, plans by local LEED-certified designer Gerdling Edlen will include a 22,000-square-foot addition housing an eco roof terrace and gardens. It will also play host to the largest roof-mounted solar energy system in Portland’s central business district, reports Reuters.

The building will host a number of other eco-friendly attributes as well, including a rainwater catchment system for reuse inside the building, raised-access flooring with under-floor mechanical ventilation, insulated exterior walls, thermally insulated operable windows and a central, multi-story atrium to provide natural lighting, and thus reduce energy consumption.

“I am so pleased that Vestas is making a long-term commitment to grow their business here in Portland,” said Portland Mayor Sam Adams in a press release. “Today’s announcement shows the success of working strategically to grow quality jobs by building on our competitive advantage as a leader in clean technology and sustainable industries. Moreover, our joint efforts mean that local architects, construction workers and engineers will get to work now converting a Portland landmark into one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the United States.”

Vestas already employs nearly 400 people in Portland, and its new headquarters will have the capacity for 600 employees, including the consolidation of existing operations in the city. The second floor — presently designed for parking — could be remade into office space if necessary, enough to house another 250 employees.

The $66 million necessary to build Vestas’ new headquarters comes through a public-private partnership, which, according to Mayor Adams, helped the city retain 400 living wage jobs, put 450 construction workers back to work, as well as create up to 200 new jobs over the next five years.

The LEED-Platinum building will be the sixteenth in the city of Portland, which already has minimum regulations stating that all buildings constructed with government money must achieve LEED certification.

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In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply systems. But the next agricultural revolution needs to get local — and must start to see rising populations as potentially part of the solution.

I bring good news from Machakos, a rural district of Kenya, a couple of hours drive from Nairobi. Seventy years ago, British colonial scientists dismissed the treeless eroding hillsides of Machakos as “an appalling example” of environmental degradation that they blamed on the “multiplication” of the “natives.” The Akamba had exceeded the carrying capacity of their land and were “rapidly drifting to a state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to a parched desert of rocks, stones and sand.”

Since independence in 1963, the Akamba’s population has more than doubled. Meanwhile, farm output has risen tenfold. Yet there are also more trees, and soil erosion is much reduced. The Akamba still use simple farming techniques on their small family plots. But today they are producing so much food that when I visited, they were selling vegetables and milk in Nairobi, mangoes and oranges to the Middle East, avocados to France, and green beans to Britain.

What made the difference? People. They made this transformation by utilizing their growing population to dig terraces, capture rainwater, plant trees, raise animals that provide manure, and introduce more labor-intensive but higher-value crops like vegetables. For them, “multiplication” of their numbers has been the solution rather than the problem. They have sprung the demographic trap.

The story of Machakos convinces me that humanity is not done yet — our ingenuity may still save us from succumbing to planetary limits, and we can feed a growing world population.

For most of human existence, the land appeared limitless. Whenever populations grew too large for comfort, societies occupied new land. But by the 1960s, most of the best land was taken and the frontiers were being
pushed up inhospitable mountainsides onto poorer soils, and into the last tropical rainforests.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Paul Ehrlich famously declared in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, in which he predicted widespread famine because of overpopulation.

But human ingenuity stepped in. In the past half century, thanks to the “green revolution,” the world has added just 10 percent to farmland but more than doubled food production.

What next? The world was brought up short in 2008 by soaring food prices on international markets. Politicians were unnerved as food riots broke out in more than a dozen countries. Prospect magazine headlined “The Return of Malthus.” We may now be able to feed nearly 7 billion people. But world population is expected to reach 9 or 10 billion later this century. Can we feed them all?

Pessimists have a point. We are undermining agriculture by damaging water and soils. We use more than half of the world’s river flows each year, mostly to irrigate crops. We are recklessly mining irreplaceable underground water reserves. By some estimates, a third of the world’s fields are losing soil faster than natural processes can create it. And now comes the threat of climate change.

But bleak though the figures are, they are no worse than those in the 1960s. Just as then, they reveal not natural limits but the current limits of our competence, both political and technical. Feeding the world in the 21st century requires doing things dramatically better.

The “green revolution” is still keeping pace with population. The trouble is that consumption of grain is growing faster, driven by the world’s growing appetite for biofuels and for meat and dairy products. Of the two billion tons of grain grown around the world, less than half is eaten directly by people.

Paradoxically, this is good news, says U.S. demographer Joel Cohen. “We know we can feed 10 billion people, because we are already growing enough — if they have a vegetarian diet.” The real threat is consumption patterns, not “overpopulation.” But at least we know the world can be fed.

A second cause for optimism is that farm yields in most of the world are a small fraction of the potential using existing seeds. Africans typically grow one ton of grain on a hectare, Asians grow three tons and Europeans and North Americans upwards of five tons. Futurologist Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University in New York says that “if during the next 50 years or so, the world’s farmers reached the average yield of today’s U.S. corn grower, ten billion could be fed with only half of today’s cropland, while they eat today’s U.S. calories.”

That may be far-fetched. But the flipside of our reckless management of water and soils is that we could do things so much better. Conservation farming has vast potential to protect soils. And simple drip irrigation systems could halve global water use by farmers. It’s not rocket science. It’s just tubes with holes in.

Of course, it is one thing to ensure there is enough food on the global dinner table, but quite another to make sure everyone has a seat at the table. Subsistence farming communities make up the majority of the world’s hungry. It matters little to them whether the global grain warehouses are full if their village granaries are empty.

The next agricultural revolution needs to get local. It needs to help these poor farming communities find ways to manage their own soils better by using livestock to fertilize soils, conserving rainwater in case of drought, breeding and exchanging local crop varieties, and finding natural predators for troublesome pests.

In particular we are talking about Africa. Malthusian thinking holds sway here. Many would agree with British demographic doomster Maurice King of Leeds University, who argues in an editorial he co-authored that “large parts of sub-Saharan Africa are demographically trapped… committed to a future of starvation and slaughter.”

But such pessimism is dangerous. It echoes the Malthusian fatalism that the British used to excuse their inaction during the Irish potato famine a century and a half ago: “nothing to be done… too many people… brought it on themselves… better let the carnage play out.”

More importantly, the idea of overpopulated Africa simply is not true. The continent contains 11 of the world’s 20 least-densely populated nations and only one of the 20 most densely populated. Africa’s problem is bad agriculture, not too many people.

Robert Watson, chair of the UN’s International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, which reported in 2008, says of Africa: “Today’s hunger can be addressed with today’s technology. It’s not a technical challenge, it’s a rural development challenge. Farm yields across the continent can be raised from a typical one ton per hectare to four or five tons.”

It can be done. Good news is not hard to find in Africa. And often — as in Machakos — it is more people, not fewer, that can be the key.

Machakos is certainly not unique. In the highlands of western Kenya, the Luo people showed me how they were replacing their fields of maize with a landscape richer both commercially and ecologically. They had planted woodlands that produced timber, honey, and medicinal trees. I saw napier grass, once regarded as a roadside weed, sold as feed for cattle kept to provide milk and manure.

In West Africa, Dutch geographer Chris Reij has charted a similar revival since the famines of the 1970s. Again, he says, it is labor-intensive management of the land that often holds the key. “The idea that population pressure inevitably leads to increased land degradation is a much repeated myth,” he says. “It does not. Innovation is common in regions where there is high population pressure. This is not surprising. Farmers have to adapt to survive.”

There will be exceptions — distressing situations where farmers are unable to rescue their declining environments, and places where fast-rising populations trigger a dangerous tailspin of decline, and where land disputes, war, and bad government leaves communities incapable of harnessing their human resources. But to suggest that Africa is doomed is a dangerous lie. Demography may help drive communities to crisis, but it does not define how they respond.

And as with Africa, so perhaps with the planet. I bring good news: human ingenuity. Rising populations may bring more mouths to feed, but they also bring more hands to work and brains to think. We are not done yet.

Article by Fred Pearce appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: murkas

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After making his fortune with Idealab and a host of technology start-ups, Bill Gross has turned his attention to renewable energy. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Gross talks about the solar power plant technology his company eSolar is developing and about the future of solar.

Bill Gross is not your typical solar energy entrepreneur. In a business dominated by Silicon Valley technologists and veterans of the fossil fuel industry, Gross is a Southern Californian who made his name in software. His Idealab startup incubator led to the creation of companies such as eToys, CitySearch, and GoTo.com. The latter pioneered search advertising — think Google — and was acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion in 2003.

That payday has allowed Gross to pursue his green dreams. (As a teenager, he started a company to sell plans for a parabolic solar dish he had designed.) Over the past decade, Gross has launched a slew of green tech startups, including solar power plant builder eSolar, electric car company Aptera, and Energy Innovations, which is developing advanced photovoltaic technology.

But it has been eSolar, backed by Google and other investors, that has been Idealab’s brightest light. In January, the company signed one of the world’s largest green-energy deals when it agreed to provide the technology to build solar farms in China that would generate 2,000 megawatts of electricity — at peak output the equivalent of two large nuclear power plants. And last week, eSolar licensed its technology to German industrial giant Ferrostaal to build solar power plants in Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa. Those deals followed eSolar partnerships in India and the United States.

ESolar’s power plants deploy thousands of mirrors called heliostats to focus the sun’s rays on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a slender tower. The heat creates steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. Last year, eSolar built its first project, a five-megawatt demonstration power plant, called Sierra, in the desert near Los Angeles.

This “power tower” technology is not new, but what sets the company apart is Gross’ use of sophisticated software and imaging technology to control the 176,000 mirrors that form a standard, 46-megawatt eSolar power plant. That computing firepower precisely positions the mirrors to create a virtual parabola that focuses the sun on the tower. That allows the company to place small, inexpensive mirrors close together, which dramatically reduces the land needed for the power plant and cuts manufacturing and installation costs.

“We use Moore’s law rather than more steel,” Gross likes to quip, referring to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s maxim that computing power doubles every two years.

Now 51, Gross retains his teenage enthusiasm for all things solar. In an interview with journalist Todd Woody, Gross talks about the future of solar energy, his relationship with Google, and how to avoid battles over building large solar farms in the deserts of the Southwest.

Yale Environment 360: You’ve spent much of your career in software and digital technology. What was the transition like going into power plant building?

Bill Gross: It was an amazing transition to go, first, from a company that deals mostly in bytes to one that deals with atoms.

You’ve been to the [Sierra] plant, but to get 24,000 mirrors covering 50 acres — that’s a whole new scale of operation because you’re not just shipping things out the door, you’re actually going on the ground in the desert, working in hot conditions and getting them installed.

e360: Were there any particular lessons you were able bring from the Internet industry to the solar industry?

Gross: The biggest lesson that we brought was — I don’t know if it was a lesson, but it was a philosophy — which is Internet-enable everything and put monitoring into everything.

So we have a microprocessor in every mirror and we have statistics second-by-second on the status, position, reliability, pointing accuracy — everything — of every single mirror. We structured ourselves almost like an Internet company from the beginning to have logs of everything — every revolution of the turbine, every control from the control room, every Web cam image captured — so we could do data mining and data analysis on everything.

We want the ability to make software upgrades and impact every power plant around the world. That’s probably one of the biggest differences between our technology and all other solar technology. If you [have] a big field of [photovoltaic] panels, those PV panels are there for 25 years. They’ll have that same performance, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

We can make a software upgrade and every power plant in the world can suddenly put out 3 percent more power potentially. And we found already a

If we want to renewably power this planet, it’s going to take a lot of capital.”

number of software improvements that we can make even over the past six months, which significantly boosts performance of an already-constructed power plant. There’s new improvements we can make to the actual hardware, too, but even without changing the hardware there are software changes that can make more power, so we’re really excited about that.

e360: What have you found to be the most challenging aspect of the solar power business?

Gross: The most challenging aspect is the capital required. Here’s the unique thing about renewable energy, but it’s true of the power plant business in general: When you make a coal plant you still have to pay for the [capital expenditure] upfront, even though it’s going to make power for 20 years. But for a coal plant the [capital expenditure] is only about 20 percent of the lifetime cost of the plant because most of the cost of the plant — 80 percent — is the cost of coal over 20 years.

For renewable energy, about 80 percent, maybe 90 percent, of the cost is upfront and there’s no fuel costs and the only cost over the years is operation and maintenance, which is small. The biggest bottleneck is that these things cost big dollars, and you’re limited how fast you can grow by how much money you can raise to build plants.

Our particular strategy to deal with that is to not have us be the bottleneck for raising that money. Our customers raise that money. If we want to renewably power this planet, it’s going to take a lot of capital, and that capital has to be spent upfront.

e360: In fact, you just announced a deal with [German] power plant builder Ferrostaal to deploy eSolar’s technology around the world.

Gross: They have access to capital and they have enough of a balance sheet that they can put a guarantee on a plant that a bank will trust and come up with the money. We’re looking for partners all over that have that kind of strength to make these plants go forward. So [Ferrostaal] can take the experience they have being in the field, in the desert building these kind of plants, and apply it to our [technology].

e360: It was just two months ago that you signed a deal with China for 2,000 megawatts of solar power plants.

Gross: That deal is a big landmark for the company because of the magnitude of the deal, the speed at which they want to deploy, and the fact that they have the capital to do it. That they don’t need to beg, borrow and steal to get the money is what makes it exciting.

Our deal in China is not exclusive so there’s many, many other people who have come to us from China since then who would like to build similarly

I think you can build enough solar thermal without going into pristine desert.”

large plants in China. We think China is an enormous opportunity. China right now is sitting on top of the world. They have lots of money, lots of growth rate, lots of demand for power. They’re not doing this out of altruism, they’re doing this out of necessity. They realize their cities are going to be too polluted and their power is going to be too spotty if they keep going the way they’ve been going.

e360: Are you seeing the international market eclipse the U.S. at the present time given capital constraints?

Gross: We do. The international market is much stronger than the United States, and we hope the United States will catch up soon. But right now the international market is incredible. We are building in the United States also, just not anywhere near the pace we’re building internationally. I’m hoping that will change. The [U.S. Department of Energy] will start giving out loan guarantees for solar thermal plants later this year. We think there might even be announcements coming up soon. We’re applying for some of our plants, and we hope that we and other solar thermal players can be beneficiaries of that.

The other factor is the economy just has to get better and banks have to start lending again and they’re just not doing that here. They are doing that in some other places. And finally, if there is any carbon legislation of any kind — which is not looking great at this moment but might in the future — that will make the plants even more economical. So it actually makes this market — even though we have great sunshine — a little more challenging than other markets.

e360: At a time when some big solar power plant projects are bogged down in disputes over their environmental impact on desert ecosystems and their water consumption, eSolar so far has avoided such controversies.

Gross: We have a strategy at eSolar to never impact pristine land. And the way we address that is several-fold. First, we have a higher output per acre, so we take a smaller footprint. Second, we’re economical at a smaller size. We can be fully economical at our 46-megawatt size. Those two things combined let us use a small enough footprint that we can locate on private land closer to population centers.

So rather than needing 2,000 acres contiguous to make the economics work — which you almost only can find far away on pristine land or [federal] land — we can locate on only 200 acres very close to a city and we can buy previously disturbed farmland or other properties that’s already been developed so we’re not causing any disturbance to natural habitat. And that’s an important part of our philosophy. It gives us an economic advantage because we’re locating closer to transmission. That’s probably even a bigger factor.

It takes years and years to build the transmission out to the pristine lands. [But] the power plant, for example, in Lancaster [California], is across the street from a transmission line. We didn’t have to build miles and miles of transmission, which takes years and years to get people to approve.

e360: Some environmentalists argue that there’s no need to put big solar farms in the desert because there’s plenty of disturbed land available for such plants. What’s your view? Is there still a need for these plants in the desert?

Gross: I think you can build enough solar thermal without going into the pristine desert. There’s enough private land close to population centers, and it’s not that much a percentage of the cost of a project. That land is not the expensive thing. The solar field and the power plant dwarfs the cost of the land. There’s no reason why you can’t locate on disturbed land and not have to deal with affecting wildlife habitat.

e360: Where do you see the next big innovations in solar thermal technology coming from?

Gross: I feel we still need to get almost another factor of two in the reduction of energy costs to potentially compete with coal. We’re already close to competing with natural gas. It depends on the sunshine and the region. Another factor of two is going to require two things to make that happen: Approximately 25 percent of that can be gotten by adding [energy] storage, and 25 percent can be gotten by increasing efficiency and lowering costs by volume production.

We produced 500 mirrors two years ago, 24,000 last year, and this year we’ll produce a million. So we’re going to get a quantity break just by going to a million mirrors from 24,000.

And everything gets more efficient in the supply chains as you get up to those volumes. Anything that we buy in our lives that has dramatic cost

I want to compete against fossil fuels with no subsidies.”

reduction has seen a million — a million cars, or a million iPhones, or a million laptops. So far there’s only been thousands of heliostats. So finally this year we’ll cross the million number and that’s when we can get the price reduction to really be competitive with fossil fuels.

e360: Idealab has experimented with a number of solar technologies over the years. What non-solar thermal technologies do you think have the most potential?

Gross: I do feel that thin-film [which prints solar cells on flexible materials] is a great solar product and it won’t power the whole planet because it will never have storage. But for distributed power in under 10 megawatt installations, and even under one megawatt installations, it’s really hard to beat.

What I’m saying is that there are many solar markets — in different markets, different technologies will win. ESolar is going after the large, utility-scale market and I think we can be a big winner in that. But in other markets outside the large utility scale, I think there are going to be many other winners.

e360: Google is an investor in eSolar. How has that relationship gone?

Gross: Google has been a great investor. I think Google has been a big supporter for a few reasons. First, they have a renewable energy-less-than-coal-initiative [to develop technologies to make the cost of renewable energy cheaper than coal]. They’re a huge electricity user with their data centers, and they’d like to power that renewably some day. And some day maybe we can locate data centers in sunny locations and have solar power to provide for them. But most importantly, they really believe in software and algorithms, so when they saw our technique and technology, they specifically endorsed the idea of throwing more software and less steel at the problem. And if you can do that, that can be a great victorious solution.

After their investment in us, that changed our profile as a company and opened up some of these opportunities. I don’t think Acme in India would have heard about us or NRG would have heard of us had it not been for Google’s investment.

e360: I met with Dan Reicher, Google’s climate change and energy director, recently and he talked about Google’s work on building a better heliostat. Will that be something that will potentially benefit eSolar?

Gross: Oh, absolutely. Google is doing research and development and it’s amazing that a company like Google is doing this because you’d think that’s not their core mission, but they believe in this so strongly. Not only have they invested in us, because they want to see us do R&D to keep driving things, they’re doing their own R&D. Not only for heliostats, but they’re working on other technologies to improve receiver designs, and improve the steam turbine — all kinds of work to make the power plant more efficient.

They want to work on things that are even more far-fetched than we can work on. I don’t think Google is ever going to make power plants, but their intent is to help advance the state of the art.

e360: What other green technologies are you interested in beyond solar?

Gross: I’m really interested in [energy] storage, and both storage for solar and storage in general, because storage can be a big factor in making renewables have a bigger impact on the world. I’m really interested in more efficient transportation. We have a company called Aptera that is making a super-streamlined vehicle. One way to need less energy is not to burn it up in the first place with aerodynamic drag. With that car we can achieve the equivalent of well more than 200 miles a gallon.

I’m also excited about solar energy for the developing world and ways to make solar power and other energy just cheaper and more distributed even on a small scale. We have a small company working on that in India called Distributed World Power. They make a small village-sized unit, or a family-sized unit. I’d love to find a way to drive the price of that down to make it really, really affordable for people, because I think that could really impact the standard of living for a lot of people on the planet and drive the cost of solar down even on a small scale.

e360: What metric do you use that will indicate when eSolar has been a success?

Gross: Well, I want eSolar to be a dominant form of solar energy, and my feeling of more immediate success is we want to get this next group of plants built and have hundreds of megawatts in the ground in 2010 and 2011 to show the world that this technology can work really at scale. We’ve shown people that we can make our demonstration facility work and it produces commercial power for Southern California Edison. But to show that it really works at scale and people are continuing to deploy it, that would be one great measure of success.

The other one is we want to get the company profitable as soon as possible so it has a long-term sustainability that it will have the chance to continue to iterate the technology and drive the price down to someday compete with coal. I want to compete against fossil fuels with no subsidies, whether those fossil fuels have a carbon tax or not.

If we can do that in three to five years, then eSolar will be the company of my dreams, and the thing I sort of feel I worked my whole life to achieve.

Article by Todd Woody appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: rsepulveda

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Whether you’re looking to share your expertise or just curious about the cleantech space, the CleanTechies Events and Conferences Calendar may feature a must-see event in your part of the world.

Among the highlights in the coming weeks:

• U.S.-Japan Clean Tech Symposium, Feb. 18, San Francisco, CA

What’s big in Japan’s cleantech sector? This four-hour session explores the state of the overseas market as well as ties between U.S. and Japanese companies. It’s organized bythe U.S. State Department and Japan’s trade ministry officials.

• Texas-Israel Cleanovation Conference, Feb. 22, Austin, TX

The launch of this conference promises to bring together some 200 attendees including from utility and clean energy companies, investors and technologists. Dr. Eli Opper, Chief Scientist of Israel, is among the keynote presenters.

• Cleantech Forum, Feb. 24-26, San Francisco, CA

This annual forum is among the blockbuster events in this sector, attracting close to 1,000 attendees. Luminaries on the list include Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, Waste Management CEO David Steiner and former New York Governor Pataki.

• MIT Energy Conference, March 5-6, Boston, MA

This yearly student-run show brings together technology, policy, industry, and finance leaders to explore cutting-edge approaches to change how the world produces and consumes energy.

• Clean Technology World Africa, March 5-18, Johannesburg, South Africa

What clean energy and tech solutions hold promise in Africa? This convention includes Africa’s largest energy exhibition and features 50 free technical workshops.

This is just a taste; plan ahead into the fall by exploring more cleantech confabs on this page.

To add your own events to the CleanTechies calendar, please click here for a submission form.

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At a factory in Wuxi, China, workers lift solar panels onto conveyor belts, while others in white lab coats move between machines as they check on a process for etching and engraving silicon wafers to form solar cells.

This scene in itself isn’t remarkable. But there is a new sort of excitement about the work. China’s production of solar panels has grown quickly in the past two years; it is it now the world’s leading exporter. When Matt Lewis, a representative of the California-based nonprofit ClimateWorks, visited the factory in October, he said it reminded him of his native Silicon Valley: The workers, even ordinary line workers, had a sense that they were part of building the future, the hot new industry.

This comparison makes some in the United States, and especially in Washington, nervous. Thomas Friedman has used the bully pulpit of his influential New York Times column to warn that the United States is engaged in a global green-tech competition with China, whose potential dominance represents a “new Sputnik.” (“How do you say ‘clean your clock’ in Chinese?” he wrote.) This notion, conjuring residual memories of the days in which U.S. rivalry with Soviet Union was crystallized in the space race — when the word “Sputnik,” the name of the Soviet space program, inspired quivers of anxiety about America’s political and economic prowess and its existential place in the world — has today struck a resonant chord in Washington, drawing upon existing fears and mistrust of China.

While some U.S. politicians and commentators still paint China as the global pollution villain, especially after the disappointing outcome at Copenhagen, others are beginning to take green China seriously — as a threat. Last fall, for instance, when Senator Charles Schumer got wind of a planned wind farm in west Texas, announced by a partnership of American and Chinese companies, that would use some wind equipment made in China and potentially create new jobs across the Pacific, he recommended blocking stimulus money from the project, rather than help boost green China. The stimulus money “is supposed to create jobs in America,” he wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu. (The new wind farm would also have created 300 jobs in Texas, but Schumer was worried that a greater number could be created in China.)

Last month, a front-page Sunday piece by Keith Bradsher of the New York Times took the competition metaphor a step further and declared that China was in fact already winning the green-tech race. The article, “China Leading Race to Make Clean Energy,” made the rounds in Washington with its assertion that China had passed the U.S. and several western European countries to become the word’s top manufacturer of both solar panels and wind turbines; it quoted the CEO of a private equity firm in Beijing saying, ominously, “Most of the energy equipment [of the future] will carry a brass plate, ‘Made in China.’”

The Times article also raised another spine-tingling geopolitical comparison — this time not likening Beijing to the latter-day USSR, but to the modern-day Middle East. “[China's] efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies,” Bradsher wrote, “raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.”

In other words, China might become the Saudi Arabia of alternative energy; the implication seems to be that not only might green China pose an economic threat, but the sheiks of Beijing might soon wield undue political influence over a “dependent” United States.

Few business stories have ever been imbued with so much gravitas, so many fears, so many metaphors, so much geopolitical speculation, as the recent articles and coverage of China’s growing green-tech manufacturing sector.

Behind these fears, there is something worth probing — and some myths worth dispelling. Just what are Americans afraid of? To distill the cloud of anxiety, there seem to be three chief fears. The first is very tangible — jobs. The second is about America’s place in the world — will the U.S. remain a global leader in innovation? And the third is about leverage — will the U.S. control its future, or be beholden to a foreign energy gatekeeper, one that exerts undue pull on its economic or foreign policy?

“Even when you are looking at these big numbers that are coming out of China today, I think it really pays to give a close look at what is actually happening on the ground,” says Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The River Runs Black. “Then you begin to get a different, more nuanced picture than what is blasted on the business section of the New York Times.”

The first essential fact to be aware of is that most news stories about China’s green tech gains are about manufacturing. China is becoming the wind-turbine factory to the world for much the same reasons it has long been the TV and t-shirt factory to the world: lower wages, lower land prices, fewer regulatory and other requirements, etc. This isn’t particularly surprising, and it shouldn’t be seen as a reversal of the status quo. What’s changed most dramatically in the last five years has been growing global demand. With significant government investment, Chinese factories have planned for and stepped up production accordingly.

Yes, this is bad news for U.S. cities like Detroit, where planners have recently been retrofitting old hot-rod factories into wind-turbine factories, such as an old Ford Thunderbird plant in Michigan that’s being converted into a green-tech manufacturing center in a bid to boost the local economy.

Manufacturing in China, especially low and medium-tech manufacturing, has certain clear economic advantages. But it’s also worth considering a few other facts. Most of the green manufacturing jobs that the U.S. stands to “lose” haven’t in fact been created yet; China will gain thousands of new jobs, but not necessarily at America’s expense. Moreover, the United States will still gain many new green-collar jobs, in installation and maintenance, which can only be locally based, as well as sales teams, conference planners, and other positions already arising to support the growing green-tech field.

Besides green-tech hardware, there’s also the question of the technology that enables it. Who will be responsible for the innovation that drives the low-carbon future? At present, America still has significant advantages — including the world’s leading university system and the entrepreneurial culture and venture-capital spigots of technology hubs, particularly Silicon Valley.

“Intellectual property rights have done a lot to hamper China’s development of green technology,” says Linden Ellis, U.S. director of nonprofit China Dialogue. “People would rather come to Silicon Valley and develop a technology where they know it will be protected by the law, right down to every line, than go to China and try to develop a technology there where maybe the components will be cheaper and there is a lot of interest, but people do not trust that their findings will be protected.”

Similar concerns have, for the past two decades, grounded Beijing’s attempts to build a domestic airline industry, considered the pinnacle of high-tech manufacturing. Foreign companies and top-notch engineers have simply been unwilling to share technology with China (Boeing has even avoided building factories in China, for fear of commercial espionage). The result: Planes that fly from Beijing to Shanghai today are still built by Boeing and Airbus.

Of course, most green-energy equipment won’t match the complexity of assembling something like Boeing’s new Dreamliner, but the airplane situation sheds light on two points: that cheap labor is hardly the only factor driving business decisions, and that, despite substantial government support, China’s domestic aerospace engineers have not yet produced research to rival that of Western competitors. (China’s university system and research labs are famously politically constrained, limiting their ability to attract top global talent.)

Of course, China would like to change this. Beijing is doing its best to both allay the fears of international partners and to nurture its own homegrown innovators. A program known as the “State High-Tech Development Plan,” launched by Beijing in March 1986 and nicknamed the “863 Program,” aims to develop top scientists in China and to incubate cutting-edge technology projects in energy and other sectors.

So far, its results have been modest over two decades: birthing a family of computer processors known as Loongson, and some technology used in the Shenzhou spacecraft. While the 863 Program’s track record should certainly dispel Western assumptions that no good research can come from China, it also disproves the notion that money alone can clone a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Sergey Brin.

This should allay some anxiety in Washington about America having fallen behind, but it is not a reason to become complacent. America has neither relinquished, nor is forever assured, her innovation crown.

Meanwhile, folks in the green-tech and environmental frontlines — as opposed to politicians and commentators — don’t see a “race” at all. “I do not see such a pattern exists,” says Wen Bo, a Beijing environmentalist. “The clean-tech war is overblown from the start,” says Richard Brubaker, an American environmental entrepreneur in Shanghai. To them, the green-tech “race” is not one that one side wins and the other loses, but a scenario where partnerships are sought out and the final equation doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

“For now at least, there is a great symbiotic relationship with California and the east coast of China on green technology,” says Linden Ellis. “Where California has the know-how, the technology, the universities and programs dedicated to developing technology, people who are interested in piloting it on a very expansive scale, or trying new combinations, often seek out research partners in China.”

Similar partnerships can exist even when the focus shifts from research to commercial activity. Kevin Czinger, the CEO of a Santa Monica-based electric car company that partners with a Chinese battery company, noted in a New Yorker article that if the U.S. would stop feeling threatened by China’s progress on clean technology, it might begin to recognize its own strengths in this field.

It is telling what is left out of the increasingly dominant “U.S. versus China” green-tech “race” narrative. For starters, there are a lot of other countries at work developing green-tech and becoming significant green-tech markets — the low-carbon future, after all, isn’t solely a G-2 aspiration. Yet because the politics are different (there’s not the anxiety of the reigning superpower nervously eyeing the new kid on the block), the green aspirations of any country not named China are viewed through an entirely different prism by U.S. commentators. Germany, for instance, is home to the world’s top two solar manufacturing companies. Yet we don’t read headlines about Old Europe “cleaning our clock” to the 21st century.

“You haven’t seen this green-tech race raised over last 10 years while the Europeans have been innovating in this space more than the U.S.,” says Charles McElwee, an international environmental lawyer for Squires, Samson, and Dempsey based in Shanghai, “although that would have made more sense [than a U.S. versus China frame].”

Even as China’s solar panel exports grow, it continues to purchase clean locomotives from an American company, GE. Germany has developed world-class “green” metro cars, with China being a top customer. And French companies are among the world’s top innovators in water solutions. In other words, green-tech encompasses a lot more than windmills and solar panels — and progress in developing it can be a two-way street.

Article by Christina Larson appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: kevinthoule, Miss Loisy

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Tom Friedman spent most of 2009 beating the China-is-winning-the-green-race-drum, and he has started 2010 with the same focus.

In Sunday’s New York Times, the news side of the house joined their editorial page colleague, writing in a front page story that Chinese “efforts to dominate renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.”

To his credit, Friedman’s push has been all about policy. He wants the United States to go all-in in a space-race-like push to match Chinese innovation in energy technology (“E.T.,” as he has glossed it). But, what has eluded his attention – and is absent again in Sunday’s news piece – is the recognition that in order to match Chinese innovation, the policy changes that would be required in the U.S. electricity markets would necessarily have to go far beyond decoupling, one of Friedman’s personal causes.

China may be a leader, but it cannot be a model for the United States (nor can Europe, where a long-standing “welfare state” mentality and shrinking population and electric demand confound comparisons with the United States).

The Sunday New York Times only alluded to several reasons that China has an edge, now and for the foreseeable future. Below are three of the most important, all having to do with social, economic and policy considerations that go far beyond “E.T.” and the analyses of Friedman and his Times colleague Keith Bradsher:

1. Currency, Subsidies and Capital – “Green premiums” are a common feature of renewable energy policies worldwide. The money ratepayers cough up goes to utilities to offset the increased cost of buying renewable power. In turn, more renewable power is sold, and the subsidies pass directly through to the independent power producers who own renewable facilities. And, because they have to harvest the wind or sun, the trickle continues on to the manufacturers and fabricators of blades and panels.

According to Bradsher, China’s premiums are from .4 percent on the residential side to .8 percent commercial. U.S. lawmakers and business interests balk at increasing the cost of electricity to subsidize green power – whether it is done through a cap-and-trade program, national renewable portfolio standard, or otherwise. But, Chinese industry is running on such high margins when compared with Western competitors that the Chinese can afford a steep premium and still remain – and excel – in global competition.

The United States does not have the benefit of a political climate that can tolerate premiums at the level that could actually drive market-based growth in renewable energy, help drive innovation up, push the relative cost of manufacturing down, and complete the cycle by encouraging private investment.

2. Capacity Comes First – Friedman and others may be right that China is doing an exceptional job putting forth a very green face to the world — and, indeed, they are delivering. As Bradsher reports, “China intends for wind, solar and biomass energy to represent 8 percent of its electricity generation capacity by 2020….[t]hat compares with less than 4 percent now in China and the United States.” Bradsher continues, noting correctly, “China’s biggest advantage may be its domestic demand for electricity, rising 15 percent a year.”

In other words, while U.S. lawmakers – and even those in the green movement – continue to jostle over where money should be directed (subsidies for green power purchase, green tech research and development, energy efficiency) and debate whether we can stem the anticipated tide of growth in demand for environmental benefit, the Chinese have one directive: more capacity, now! And, a lot of it, from anywhere. They are not shy (nor ambivalent) about capacity growth. After all, it means economic growth.

In fact, in spite of the green push that Friedman heralds, Bradsher does note that most of the capacity growth to meet increasing demand will come from coal.

In the context of green tech competitiveness, the United States cannot be comforted by one of Bradsher’s final numbers on Chinese capacity: “To meet demand in the coming decade…China will need to add nearly nine times as much electricity generation capacity as the United States will.”

With so fevered a push for capacity growth, the Chinese government will take it any way they can get it, and if it means creating a new global industry, all the better. Remember, investor certainty is much less an issue in the Chinese context already, where the government makes the rules and the investments. U.S. companies have no certain market for their products – be it energy equipment or green power – and have no incentive to “bet the house” on E.T.

3. Starting from Scratch Has its Advantages – The most remarkable part of the climate bill fight in the United States in 2009 was watching how battle lines were drawn over how proposed changes would impact vested interests and sunk costs. But, notwithstanding these political and business concerns are the technological and logistical questions that surround proposed expansion of the green grid. For example, there is already a transmission glut in the US, and building new high-voltage lines has proven to be challenging. But, any new large-scale renewable collection points would have to be integrated with the existing grid, and it is unclear – with opposition to the erection of turbines themselves still a hurdle – that building out an extensive new transmission work would be politically feasible.

Vested interests also have self-interest at stake. Indeed, U.S. utilities have a fiduciary duty to shareholders under American law, and current proposals do not accommodate those concerns to allow for buy-in.

Bradsher at least touches on this problem, noting that “in the United States, power companies frequently face a choice between buying renewable energy equipment or continuing to operate fossil-fuel-fired power plants that have already been built and paid for. In China, power companies have to buy lots of new equipment anyway, and alternative energy, particularly wind and nuclear, is increasingly priced competitively.”

This is the element of the equation that Friedman has consistently ignored in calling for the “space race” in green energy. Without immense accommodation being made to utilities and other interests who will have to decommission and divest themselves of existing equipment and infrastructure, Friedman’s challenge is a pipe dream. Electricity is still a regulated business, and it is possible to conceive of ways to change the regulatory climate so that utilities, their customers and their shareholders could absorb and recover the costs of a transition like this. But, it will be a political bloodbath.

The Chinese can take the required steps unilaterally. As Friedman notes in his Sunday column, China operates in a “Confucian-Communist-Capitalist‘ hybrid under the umbrella of a one-party state, with a lot of government guidance, strictly controlled capital markets and an authoritarian decision-making process that is capable of making tough choices and long-term investments, without having to heed daily public polls.” Political problems, solved.

But, that notwithsanding, building out a renewable network from scratch – right alongside capacity growth – is a lot easier than trying to replace a dynamic existing system that is historically balkanized by state commissions, franchise territories and regional transmission organizations, while balancng the competing interests of reliability, capacity, efficiency and affordability.

Beat China? Or, First Among Equals – In his State of the Union address, President Obama exchanged some of his global credibility for an unexpected refrain of American exceptionalism. Specifically, in the energy context, he noted that China, Germany and India are ”making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs…I do not accept second place for the United States of America. ”

What the president did not acknowledge is that – perhaps for the first time since World War II – the United States is engaged (however passively) in a contest where its social, economic and political infrastructure puts the country at a distinct disadvantage.

It’s easy to chalk up the Chinese advantages to the obvious. Friedman is right, they are making a proactive “E.T.” policy push; and, yes, low-cost Chinese labor makes it nearly impossible for U.S.-made photovoltaic panels and turbine blades to compete on the open global market (hence the beginnings of tariff discussions and rules preventing federal spending on imported equipment).

But, favorable political and economic conditions are critical to the success of those initiatives. The United States cannot become an authoritarian, communist regime. Labor costs will not come into parity with China anytime in any living person’s lifetime.

Without significant re-regulation of our electricity markets, there is no formula for gaining ground anytime soon. We can dabble around the edges – and, yes, $11 billion in stimulus is just dabbling in this context – but, China’s E.T. edge only figures to expand in the near-term.

When we find a way to give utilities skin in the efficiency and green game, we will have taken a large first step toward leveling the playing field. Until then, as long as the entities that everyone in the country buys their power from are not incentivized to really get on board, we cannot expect the United States to bring E.T. home. And, going up against green energy’s Goliath, we need all the help we can get.

photos: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Slimmer Jimmer

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Many green industry professionals and career changers are interested in clean tech conferences and alternative energy events. You can find many upcoming green tech events and clean energy conferences in the United States and worldwide in the CleanTechies Events Calendar, but how do you make the most out of your attendance? No matter whether it’s an event on energy efficiency, solar energy, wind energy, green building or sustainable transportation, there are a few things common to each that will help YOU make your participation a success.

Just in time for your next clean tech event or alternative energy conference, here are our tips:

1) Have a game plan. Most events are overwhelming, and trying to find someone at the event is often impossible. That’s why it’s imperative that you reach out at least two weeks in advance of the event to target the top three people you’d like to have ten minutes with.

2) Talk into the microphone and identify yourself.  When you ask a question from the audience, it’s time to brand yourself and your company. Nothing makes a worse impression than someone who doesn’t give their name and company, mumbles and has not formulated a question. Oh, and make sure you ask a QUESTION. Leave the monologues to super villains.

3) Swallow the microphone. Many people are afraid of the sound of their own voice. They believe that holding the microphone around their waist or leaning back in their chair while talking on a panel somehow insulates them from the impact of their words. Wrong. If you have something to say, make sure everyone hears it.

4) Make friends with the people running the conference. They have a master list of emails and phone numbers, and probably know a lot of the attendees on sight. They can make connecting with the right person so much easier.

5) The most powerful word is “hello.”  It’s usually all you need when meeting someone to get their attention. We’ve seen it work wonders with strangers.

6) Have a business card conveniently ready. Digging through your briefcase, purse, satchel or suit sends a message about how you’ll handle a project. And it’s not a pretty message.

photo: octal

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Thank billions in government funding for helping to lift clean technology investment in the third quarter, said the Cleantech Group and Deloitte in a report Wednesday.

The quarterly analysis reiterated that the recession has kicked but not killed investments in this sector, which remain down 42 percent from the third quarter of 2008. Biotech and IT combined receive less funding than clean tech, which continues its climb from the second quarter, the report noted.

“The two largest venture deals (Solyndra and Tesla Motors) and the largest IPO (A123Systems) this quarter were all recipients of U.S. government funding,” said Cleantech Group managing director Dallas Kachan in a statement.

The report also credited renewable energy tax credit extensions and renewable energy portfolio requirements with emboldening venture capitalists and utilities, which continue expanding wind and solar projects.

Solar comprised 28 percent of clean tech venture dollars in the more recent quarter, although such spending sank to $451 million down from $1.2 billion a year ago. Next best were the transportation sector, which recently received $383 million, and green building startups with $110 million.

Additional big funding news in the third quarter involved Solyndra, SolFocus, Think Global and Serious Materials.

North America led the pack with 67 percent of investments, followed by Israel and Europe with 29 percent, then China at 3 percent. Indian-based startups raised $21.5 million.

The most active funds were Intel Capital; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; New Enterprise Associates and Braemar Energy Ventures.

IPOs included Indian Energy and Euro Multivision of India for its photovoltaic manufacturing arm.

Members of the Cleantech Group’s Cleantech Network can learn more about the report’s findings in a webinar on Oct. 6.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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