This house is beyond cool. Those in Southern California should swing by the California Science Center in downtown Los Angeles to tour a solar home nonpareil.

Known as the CHIP house, for “Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype Solar House,” the home was designed and built by students of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

The project won first prize in the Energy Balance division of the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition held in Washington, D.C..

On approach, the CHIP house looks as if it’s been turned inside-out. CHIP wears the heart of its green technology on its sleeve. Most of the home’s exterior is wrapped in insulation, a flexible, quilted vinyl membrane.

It’s this exterior insulation, combined with solar technology, that creates the high R-values necessary for a net-zero dwelling. The home looks a bit like a giant pillow topped with a solar panel hat.

CHIP is equipped with 45 solar panels, enough to provide three times the amount of energy the house consumes. The intention was not only to power the home, but to keep two electric cars up and running as well. As the primary sponsor for the CHIP project, Hanwha SolarOne, from their North American headquarters in nearby Costa Mesa, provided the panels.

It’s not the solar panels that make this 750-square-foot home so distinctive, but the way that the panels, and the entire home’s green technology, are operated. The CHIP home interface uses Apple iPad apps and an Xbox Kinect system as a master command center.

Residents not only can operate the home’s lights and electronic devices, but monitor the home’s energy systems by using natural gestures like pointing and waving their arms. The home is equipped with 3-D cameras, too, that signal light to turn on and off as residents move through the space.

The interior of the home features a single, open space, with living areas defined by a series of platforms, terraces that climb upwards and inwards into the home. Private areas occupy the highest platforms. The open floor plan is arranged around the natural flow of daily activities.

It took more than 100 students, two years and $1 million in funding to build CHIP, although the project team estimates that replicating the home elsewhere would cost about $262,000. You can take a look at the CHIP home, inside and out, at the California Science Center, through May 31, 2012. Free tours are available every weekday from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and on weekends from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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We all remember sights of people lined up for clean water in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010, or in Japan last year after the great tsunami hit with horrific consequences. Large scale natural disasters will unfortunately continue to be a global threat. Beyond the initial loss of life and home, they also wreak havoc on basic infrastructures putting food, clean water, and electricity out of reach, for as long as months in their aftermath.

While preventing natural disasters is next to impossible, providing for populations in need following such disasters is most definitely not, and can mean the difference between a few casualties and thousands. One Israeli company, in particular, has developed a unique product ideal for such situations.

EZPack, formed in 2010 by Danny Cohen, Alex Harel and Ohad Zecharia, has created a unique way to transfer clean, drinkable water to disaster areas and other emergency zones, while still maintaining its quality and purity. The start-up makes use of innovative pillow bladder tanks which consist of a PVC outer layer, and “food-graded” material within. This dual-layer system creates a highly durable transportation apparatus while allowing the transferred water to remain clean, drinkable and uncontaminated for extensive periods of time.

While EZPack has not yet had the opportunity to put their product into action in disaster areas, it has already been deployed with great success for homes and remote locations (pillow bladder tanks serve as ideal low-space water storage for both homes and off-site projects such as oil rigs) and has been approved by the Israeli Water Authority for water distribution in emergency situations.

EZPack’s unique solution represents what is hopefully a growing trend in cleantech, an effort to use “green technology” to provide relief in emergency situations. As the world grows ever more connected, international crises, whether in Haiti, Japan, China, Chile, or elsewhere, must be responded to by global, technologically advanced solutions, and cleantech might be just the industry to create them.

Article appearing courtesy Israel NewTech.

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In a good news / bad news press release, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced last week that its Green Technology Pilot Program would be extended for three months but “will soon draw to a close.”

Previously set to expire on December 31, 2011, the program is being extended through March 30, 2012 or until 3,500 applications are accepted onto the fast track (read more in this post at Sustainable Marks).

As of December 5, 2011, the most recent report summary date, 2,913 petitions for the program have been granted, and 373 are awaiting decision.

To be eligible for the fast track program, the application must satisfy the following criteria:

the application is any non-reissue, non-provisional utility application for which a first office action has not been issued;

the applicant must request early publication of the application.

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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Geoff Cutmore, Squawk Box anchor for CNBC and host of Energy Opportunities highlights the thoughts of some of the key voices in energy innovation.

With a growing global population, growth in energy use is inevitable. Experts are grappling for the best way to manage resources, often adopting new technologies to increase the production of low carbon fuel sources. This is no easy task and something that is one of the principal challenges being discussed on Energy Opportunities, a global brainstorm to explore the energy options of the future.

Sachs on bringing sustainable energy to the developing world
In building for a sustainable future, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Economist and Director of the Earth Institute, Columbia University recently argued that there is no development without electricity. He noted that well over a billion people worldwide have no access to electricity and that until they do, they won’t be able to access high living standards or sustained economic growth.

Sachs finds energy solutions for the world a vast challenge – mainly because we need energy supplies that are secure, but also environmentally safe and low in carbon emissions. This transition to a low carbon economy for the world means the mobilization of new technologies and new kinds of energy sources.

Sachs does however note that there is a clear opportunity for developing countries to build systems that generate electricity from scratch in an environmentally friendly manner. Again, this is by no means an easy proposition. Mobilizing technology, re-thinking systems, global financing and social policies that bridge the gap between the rich and the poor are all pieces of a complex mix. But the puzzle needs to be solved, because it is crucial to global development.

Bazerman on clearing the hurdles to innovation
Innovation will play a key role in improving the world’s approach to energy, but as Max Bazerman, Professor at Harvard University and the Harvard Business School, recently pointed out there are many psychological barriers to action in this area. Scientists and policy makers have come up with great ideas to improve energy efficiency; Bazerman notes three problems in the way of progress :

1. Research demonstrates that people far too often focus their attentions on short term considerations, despite contentions that they want to leave the world in a good condition for future generations.
2. We interpret events in a self-serving manner that leads us to expect others to do more to solve energy problems. For example, emerging nations blame the west for its excessive energy consumption; while the US government blames China and India for failing to adopt smarter energy innovations
3. Positive illusions lead us to think that energy problems don’t exist or are not severe enough for us to action. In other words we stick our heads in the sand. These illusions are responsible for reducing the quality of the decision making in how to innovate and improve the situation through new technologies.

This calls for us to recognize and overcome barriers to action and encourage leaders to remove these challenges so that the fundamental changes can be made to the way we approach energy technology.

Lomborg on innovating the price of green technologies
The price of innovation is another key concern. With politicians incentivised to meet minimum emission targets, Bjørn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, has recently pointed out that we could be wasting large sums of money on reducing carbon emissions by only a few tonnes rather than preparing for a truly low carbon future. A small number of solar panels and wind turbines may be a step in the right direction, but do not provide a full response to how sustainable clean energy solutions can be properly applied.

Innovating the price of green technology would help prevent this from continuing. The best way to make this happen is to stop investment in ineffective policies that have been followed for the past twenty years and look at allocating more resource into scientific research that breed game changing solutions.

Understanding the barriers to innovation
There is clearly an opportunity to innovate the way energy production and consumption is managed. However the first step in making new sustainable, low carbon alternatives a reality is understanding the very barriers that are preventing innovative solutions from being adopted on a widespread basis.

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Sacred Power Corporation (SPC) was established in 2001 as Native American owned and operated small business that provides renewable energy solutions to government, commercial and residential customers. "Using the strengths of the Father to Protect the Gifts of the Mother" is our guiding principle, and it has guided us to success.

SPC has always been at the forefront of renewable energy innovation, beginning with our installation of the first solar carport structure in the State of New Mexico. Nearly eleven years later, that same carport is generating clean energy for the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM. With funding from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and the support of the Obama Administration, we have now put large-scale renewable energy installations in New Mexico Schools for the first time. This allowed SPC to hire people at a time when jobs are scarce. With hundreds of installations across the U.S, SPC now employs 59 people from all disciplines, including engineers, electricians, installers, and office and administrative staff. We're also working with teachers to help them educate and inspire students about the great potential of green technology and green jobs in our communities. And we're working with Tribal Nations on the construction of energy efficient and solar powered Housing and Urban Development homes for lower-income Americans, who spend much of their earnings on their energy bills.

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First, the bad news – China’s constrained rare earth supplies will be an “irreversible trend” and prices will remain at high levels, according to Zhang Zhong, general manager of Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co.

Zhang should know, as his concern is China’s leading rare earths producer – the Baatou mine produces more than 95 percent of China’s production, while Chinese mines currently account for 97 percent of global supplies.

The increase in global demand for rare earth metals has sent prices soaring in world markets. According to the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association, since January rare earth metal product prices jumped 200 percent, with the prices of some of the rarer commodities rising 500-1,900 percent. Since January China’s exports grew 830 percent to $1.54 billion.

Now, the good news – despite fears of Western capitalists, Beijing apparently has no immediate plans to curtail supplies.

And finally, the interesting news.

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on its website that it will conduct a broad audit of domestic rare earth metal producers in Inner Mongolia to check for production quota breaches. The audit’s intention is to uncover rare earth metals producers breaching existing regulations and continuing covert trading in rare earth metals.

Analysts nervously track Chinese policy, as since 2003 China has reduced the amount of rare earths available for export by 40 percent, while over the past decade global demand has tripled from 40,000 to 120,000 tons.

Earlier this year China curtailed its total output of rare earth oxides to 93,800 tons, up only 5 percent from 2010 production levels and also recently raised taxes on rare earth elements for the second time, leading foreign analysts to conclude that the era of “cheap” rare earths is over.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are used to produce everything from wind turbines to solar cells and low-energy light-bulbs as well as iPhones and X-ray machines. Most ominously for Washington, RREs are also a strategic component of many U.S. cutting-edge high-tech weapons systems, incorporated in the guidance systems of missiles and laser-guided munitions.

But the soaring RRE prices have led to a wild East “gold rush,” with a number of freelance entrepreneurs setting up in Inner Mongolia, a too wild and wooly capitalist endeavor the that audit is designed to curtail.

The record-high RRE prices have also sparked a flurry of exploration activity throughout Central Asia, most notably in Mongolia, where a 2009 estimate by the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that Mongolia has 31million tons of rare earth reserves. Mongolia has some of the world’s richest deposits of gold and copper, uranium, coal, fluorspar as well as RREs such as tantalum, niobium, thorium, yttrium and zircon.

Six months ago California-based Green Technology Solutions and Rare Earth Exporters of Mongolia formed a joint venture to exploit Mongolia’s RRE potential, sending out their first shipment in April to South Korea via Vladivostok.

So, the RRE race is on. What is perhaps most interesting is that Western analysts fear covert potential malevolent motives dictating Chinese policy on RRE exports when, in fact, up to now Beijing has behaved as a responsible member of the global economic community.

Of course, soaring RRE prices have nothing to do with Chinese policy.

Article by John C.K. Daly, appearing courtesy OilPrice.com.

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Ask Dr. Riccardo Signorelli, CEO of clean-technology company FastCAP Systems, what role the government may have had in getting his business off the ground and his answer is brief.

 “The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act made FastCAP possible,” Signorelli said. “Simple as that.”

Signorelli and John Cooley, the co-founder of FastCAP, came into business following six years of research and development in the MIT Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) Lab. At MIT, Signorelli and Cooley discovered they had come up with a revolutionary energy storage technology.

But one hurdle remained: transitioning the engineers’ idea into the marketplace. Signorelli and Cooley knew they needed some financial help, and they got it in 2009 in the form of a $5.5 million grant made possible by the Recovery Act.

“It created an avalanche,” Signorelli said. “We started to raise additional funding, to the point where we actually had to turn down investors.”

FastCAP – which creates durable green-friendly batteries that charge in seconds and deliver energy almost instantly, all at a price more than 50 percent less than today’s technologies – went from two employees to 20 today. If things continue at their pace, Signorelli said, FastCAP will double and hit 40 employees by the end of the year.

That hiring isn’t just salespeople and highly trained technical experts, but the all-important manufacturers as well. And this kind of employment explosion is only possible thanks to the kickstart provided by the ARRA, Signorelli said, noting that “the federal government has had and will continue to have a huge part in helping companies that innovate products.”

But it’s up to the private sector to do the actual hiring, which is why FastCAP is so committed to its internship program – especially because its work is so state-of-the-art.

“It’s not efficient to develop green technology without also developing the workforce,” Signorelli said. “Our internship program gets [young people] excited.”

“That’s how we make this revolution sustainable in the U.S.”

Article by Ari Matusiak, Executive Director of the White House Business Council

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As readers of this blog are aware, there are a number of patent offices worldwide that currently offer expedited examination regimes for patent applications directed to inventions that promise to deliver environmental benefits.

As chronicled by this blog, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has had such a program in place since May 2009.

So how has the program performed as it approaches two years in force? This two-part post will attempt to answer this question, after providing some background about the UKIPO’s program.

The UKIPO’s “Green Channel” is a no-fee added service offered by the UKIPO for accelerated prosecution of patent applications directed to inventions with alleged environmental benefits. Any pending application is eligible for the program, assuming the applicant complies with the minimal requirements for inclusion.

Depending on the prosecution aspects the applicant chooses to accelerate, the UKIPO’s “Green Channel” could result in issued patents in as little as nine months. The regular pathway to an issued patent is estimated to average between two and three years in the UKIPO.

The UKIPO does not guarantee, of course, if and when applications in the “Green Channel” will issue, but rather affords applicants the option of accelerating some or all of the prosecution process for “green” inventions (see Green Channel FAQ here).

As set forth below, the actual requirements for inclusion in the program are straightforward and designed to encourage participation.

There is no separate petition process for inclusion in the Green Channel, in contrast to the USPTO’s Green Technology Pilot Program. Applicants do not even have to file a form to have their pending applications considered under the Green Channel; a written request pointing out which aspects of the prosecution process the applicant wishes to accelerate and how the invention has an environmental benefit suffices.

The applicant can choose to accelerate any or all of the following prosecution process aspects: Search, Combined Search and Examination, Publication, and/or Examination.

With respect to the “environmental benefit” prong of the written request, the Green Channel as set up by the UKIPO recognizes that environmental benefits can be found in inventions of all types, and accordingly does not limit participation on the basis of technology areas or IPC classification. Nor does an applicant need to demonstrate that the invention meets any specific environmental standard.

Having an application drawn to an invention in an established “green” technology area, will, however, make the showing of environmental benefit in the applicant’s written request more straightforward. The UKIPO has indicated that in such technology areas, a “simple statement is likely to be sufficient.”

For inventions with less obvious environmental benefits, “a more detailed explanation is likely to be necessary to explain how the invention has an environmental benefit”, and the applicant’s written request should endeavor to meet that standard. While the UKIPO “will not conduct any detailed investigation into these assertions”, it reserves the right to “refuse requests if they are clearly unfounded.”

In all cases, participation is by applicant request, however, so even applications directed to inventions in established green technology areas, e.g. solar panels, are not automatically moved into the Green Channel by the UKIPO.

Gaston Kroub is a partner in the New York office of Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell LLP. Gaston serves as the co-chair of the Greentech Committee of the NYSBA’s IP Section and has been accredited as a LEED Green Associate. Gaston is a registered patent attorney whose practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and counseling.

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TED, an organization whose motto is ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’, is dedicated to generating high-level conversations led by visionaries in their respective fields. They talk about a variety of issues and green technology is often in the program as well.

The editors of a website called Online College Courses have compiled a list of TED Talks related to chemistry. As it happens, two of them are related to energy and fuels.

The first is delivered by biologist and futurist Juan Enriquez, who talks about the potential of bioenergy. “Our current energy sources – coal, oil, gas – are ultimately derived from ancient plants – they’re “concentrated sunlight.” He asks, Can we learn from that process and accelerate it? Can we get to the point where we grow our own energy as efficiently as we grow wheat?”, says the description of the lecture. Apparently less than a month after this talk, Enriquez’s company announced a process that could just that.

The other talk is about the worrying aftermath of the BP Gulf spill. Marine toxicologist Susan Shaw presents evidence that the clean-up process designed to spare beaches may have had a devastating effect on the health of the deep sea.

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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Germany responded swiftly to the Japanese nuclear crisis by announcing a decision to phase out its older nuclear stations. Japan followed a few weeks later saying that it intends to focus on renewable energy (although it won’t do away with nuclear power altogether). And now Switzerland is looking to hydropower to secure its energy future, also moving away from nuclear power.

Last Wednesday the Swiss government recommended to parliament that the land-locked nation’s five nuclear plants should not be replaced, according to an AFP report. This would mean they would be phased out by 2034.

As nuclear power exists the country’s energy mix stage, it would be replaced with renewable power such as hydro. “The federal council wishes to continue guaranteeing high security for energy supply in Switzerland, but without nuclear in the medium term,” the cabinet said in an official statement. It added that it was both technically and financially sustainable to do so.

Beznau I will be the first plant to be shut down in 2019 while Beznau II and Muehleberg will be shut down in 2022. Goesgen will be retired in 2029 and Leibstadt in 2034.

Parliament will begin debating draft legislation early in June and before the end of the month a final decision is expected to have been made.

The government did admit that if necessary it may have to import electricity and resort to fossil fuel generated power but it promised it will respect targets set out by the country’s climate change policy.

The Swiss government’s decision is a political one. It wants to signal that it is creating an environment that is favorable for green technology, which can generate new jobs and help the country to achieve energy independence. Swiss is also trying to protect itself against rising electricity prices as nuclear becomes more expensive in order to meet safety requirements.

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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