VentureBeat

Most of the heavily-funded solar panel makers out there have let the public know what they’re working on, if not all the specifics of their technology. So it’s somewhat remarkable that Solyndra has managed to stay stealthy for over three years, all while accumulating over half a billion dollars in funding.

Some details have emerged, to be sure. But the company has now opened up for the first time to give hard details on its product, a panel for commercial rooftop installation that it says drastically undercuts its competitors in price.

Solyndra is currently in the expansion stage for one large plant to make the panels, and in planning stages for a second plant, both in the company’s home of Fremont, Calif., with a planned total capacity of over 500 megawatts. But its panels aren’t exactly the industry standard; where almost all others on the market look like a flat sheet of dark material, Solyndra’s panels resemble a row of long fluorescent light tubes, each an inch wide and an inch apart.

What’s inside the tubes is what makes the difference. Solyndra makes thin-film CIGS, a chemical composition similar to big startups like Miasole and Nanosolar. However, instead of laying it flat, it wraps it into the inside of the tube. Optics around that inner core then help focus about half again more sunlight onto the core than it would otherwise receive.

The design allows Solyndra to lay its panels flat against a rooftop, where just about every other company has to tilt their panels to receive sunlight at the best angle. That might seem like a niggling difference, but it’s actually a major change. Without all the racks and careful alignment required of a regular solar installation, Solyndra can take advantage of far more space on a single roof.

Another important distance is that the gaps in Solyndra’s panels and their flat alignment to the roof make it far less likely that strong winds will damage them, which allows for somewhat less rigorous precautions against storms. In all, the differences cut the cost of installation by about half.

Considering that installation is around half the total cost of a Solyndra solar deployment, that’s a major difference. A $400,000 commercial installation on a big box store, for example, might only be $300,000 with Solyndra, and it would allow for use of more of the rooftop.

That all helps explain how Solyndra has lined up over $600 million in funding, according to CEO Chris Gronet, and a $1.2 billion order log. The company began testing out its panels earlier this year, having finished development. Now, “the whole focus of the company is ramping production,” says Gronet.

However, all may not be as perfect as Solyndra is making it out to be. Also emerging this evening is a report by Greentech Media that a $350 million funding round Solyndra was seeking didn’t attract enough attention, and remains incomplete.

Although I didn’t ask Gronet specifically about that round, he did tell me that if Solyndra can’t tap into more equity funding, it will have access to a Department of Energy’s guaranteed loan program, for which it was one of eight finalists. The company could also try to take out bank or private equity loans to continue scaling up, although this is likely a challenging time to do so.

The major investors that have poured money into Solyndra so far include Virgin Green Fund, Rockport Capital, Argonaut Ventures, RedPoint Ventures, CMEA Ventures, US Venture Partners and the Masdar Clean Tech Fund. Finally, there’s Madrone Capital, the Walton family fund that also funded First Solar, the thin-film solar industry’s biggest success to date.

Yesterday evening’s vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin was at times short on substance, but a few nuggets did give hints of what America’s political landscape might look like after November. One of the best exchanges of the debate came when the two were asked by the moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS, about climate change.

Palin, responding, suggested that global warming is partially manmade, and partially natural. Biden countered that climate change is entirely manmade. But both candidates seemed in line with creating carbon caps, which will give a serious push to clean technology like solar, wind, geothermal power and electric cars by raising the cost of coal and other traditional energy sources.

This is important, because politicians to date have been somewhat shy about wholeheartedly supporting a carbon cap. And since it’s fairly easy (although not necessarily accurate) to argue that a cap could hurt the economy, it’s even more notable that the consensus is clear, given the current economic crisis. Here’s a small excerpt from the transcript (the whole thing is here), edited to show the statements together:

PALIN: … Alaska feels and sees impacts of climate change more so than any other state. And we know that it’s real … And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts? … even in dealing with climate change, it’s all the more reason that we have an “all of the above” approach, tapping into alternative sources of energy and conserving fuel, conserving our petroleum products and our hydrocarbons so that we can clean up this planet and deal with climate change.

IFILL: Senator, what is true and what is false about the causes?
BIDEN: Well, I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting.

IFILL: Let me clear something up, Sen. McCain has said he supports caps on carbon emissions. Sen. Obama has said he supports clean coal technology, which I don’t believe you’ve always supported.
BIDEN: I have always supported it. That’s a fact …

IFILL: We do need to keep within our two minutes. But I just wanted to ask you, do you support capping carbon emissions?
PALIN: I do. I do.

Some sparring occurred with a number of comments by Palin, not shown above, suggesting that more domestic drilling is needed. Biden, for his part, could have easily used the opportunity to push cleantech sources. However, it seems that the political hot issue is now clean coal, which was mentioned more than once. Biden was careful to show his support:

PALIN:I was surprised to hear you mention that because you had said that there isn’t anything — such a thing as clean coal. And I think you said it in a rope line, too, at one of your rallies.
BIDEN: …My record, just take a look at the record. My record for 25 years has supported clean coal technology. A comment made in a rope line was taken out of context. I was talking about exporting that technology to China so when they burn their dirty coal, it won’t be as dirty, it will be clean.

Biden is considered an intelligent, well-educated man, so it’s indeed likely that he has said, at least in private, that clean coal isn’t “real” — because, for the most part, it’s not. But at the moment, political support for it seems to be mandatory; clean coal now fills the role that corn ethanol did several years ago, before it was repeatedly debunked as a cure-all.

Biochar: Remember that word. While it may not be part of most investors’ vocabulary, biochar, a form of charcoal produced when organic matter is burned in the absence of oxygen, can store carbon and increase soil fertility — making it a more ideal alternative to some costly and complex carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. Ecovolve has the idea of pairing the production of biochar with the development of small-scale distributed energy systems.

The New York City, NY-based company, founded a few months ago by a group of ambitious Princeton graduates, uses the above-described burning process, called pyrolysis, to produce energy from waste wood, agricultural residues and other non-food feedstocks. In addition to producing gases that are readily converted into electricity, Ecovolve’s systems also make biochar as a by-product.

To avoid the need for expensive equipment, the company first turns its raw biomass into bio-oil, a mixture of hydrocarbons produced during the flash pyrolysis, or rapid heating, of biomass. Though not a real substitute for oil, Ecovolve is working on improving its quality and stability to make it useful for stationary power generation applications, which could allow it to tap into the existing diesel fuel market.

The company claims its systems are simple, customizable and cheap enough to be deployed in both developed and developing countries. Unlike other renewable energies, such as solar and wind, which are sporadic, pyrolysis provides a continuous, on-demand source of power.

One more unique aspect of Ecovolve’s technology is its capacity to produce what is called “carbon-negative” energy. You’ve probably heard of “carbon-neutral” energy before — generating electricity without emitting carbon dioxide; the idea behind “carbon-negative” energy then is to make electricity while also sequestering carbon dioxide. This is accomplished by storing the carbon accreted in biomass as biochar, an inert form of carbon — which means it doesn’t release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Jason Aramburu, one of Ecovolve’s co-founders and its technology developer, told Biopact in an earlier interview that his firm’s systems typically convert around 20 percent of raw biomass by weight into the carbon-rich material, which is 85 - 95 percent pure carbon. Processing the biomass thus actually results in fewer emissions being produced than if it were left to combust naturally or decompose, Aramburu says. Because of its high carbon content, it also becomes a highly desirable fertilizer substitute.

Ecovolve’s real ace in the hole, Aramburu told me, is its reliance on distributed, or on-site, energy generation — the ability to produce electricity from many small energy sources very near to where it will be used. Right now, most countries generate their electricity in large centralized facilities — coal plants and nuclear plants, for example — which makes sense when you’re supplying the energy to large populations over long distances due to economies of scale. But what if you only need to supply power to a small village or community?

Read the rest of this entry »

As badly as the rest of the business world seems to be doing, renewable energy just keeps picking up steam. There has been a string of recent financings going to solar panel makers, financiers that help consumers and businesses buy solar installations, and now solar thermal company Ausra.

Ausra is one of several large, heavily funded startups that use arrays of mirrors to concentrate sunlight on a central receiver containing water, which quickly reaches the boiling point to produce steam and drive a turbine. It just took $60.6 million from KERN Partners, Generation Investment Management, Starfish Ventures and founding investors Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The company last year signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric for a 177-megawatt plant in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., and also began construction on a production facility near Las Vegas that is now churning out components like Ausra’s cheap, flat mirrors, which are called Fresnel reflectors.

Those mirrors are cheaper than the curved heliostats other companies use, as are some of Ausra’s other components. Chief executive Bob Fishman says those are some of the factors that will make Ausra the first solar thermal startup to plug a full-scale electricity generation plant into the grid (in the middle of next year), although Ausra’s plans are far outsized by Brightsource’s contract for 900 megawatts of thermal solar.

Given the current banking problems, I also interviewed Fishman to ask about how the credit crunch will impact large-scale renewable energy.

VB: You just took an equity funding. Will the credit crunch affect project financing — that is, bank and private equity loans to build large, utility-scale plants?

BF: In general, project debt is done on the merits of the individual project. That’s what determines whether you can get it. And you’re going to see people willing to put money into things they perceive as having a lot of long-term value.

As part of our market we also have the ability to just sell steam to industrial customers, who are looking at it as a way to save energy. There are a variety of ways we take our product to market, whether as electricity, steam or an augmentation to an existing power project.

VB: Your investors have pointed out rising materials costs, for steel, glass and so forth, as a challenge. How are those affecting Ausra’s plans?

BF: If steel goes up, the cost of our facilities go up. But the cost of a coal or gas plant goes up even more. If we’ve already signed a contract, we have to absorb the cost, but we take measures to accommodate that. But one of the few advantages to the crisis right now is that it’s actually weakening commodity prices.

VB: As a former natural gas plant operator, what do you predict happening to the costs of non-renewable fuels and energy?

BF: I think we’re already at parity with natural gas. There are other options, but if you want to talk about California, if you need power in four to five years, nuclear is 10 years off for the first plant. Clean coal doesn’t exist yet, so let’s also call that 10 years. What you have left to do, in the United States at least, is natural gas and renewables. Right now, we’re at par with natural gas, and as energy prices increase, I think it will pass us [in price]. I think what you’ll see getting built in California for the next 4-5 years is gas-fired plants and solar thermal.

VB: Are environmentalists still raising objections to the amount of land used by solar thermal plants? What about water?

BF: With respect to land use, we’re the most land-efficient solar technology there is. We use half the land that Brightsource uses, and a quarter of what solar PV uses. In terms of disturbing the land, if you look at our stuff, we have small foundations on the ground and the mirrors are about eight feet up. And this is a facility that uses almost nothing that’s remotely toxic. It’s glass, steel and water, and we recycle all the water. There are always people who oppose anything, but people have to get their mind around it. If you want energy, there are choices. Unless you want to sit in the dark.

A new solar technology that creates hydrogen as well as electricity is on the horizon. Sundrop Fuels, a stealthy New Mexico company with an innovative dish design, has licensed structural ideas from larger and better-known startup, eSolar, to create something unprecedented.

Sundrop has been secretive about its technology since its inception, but word of a $20 million investment from Kleiner Perkins slipped out earlier this year. With some digging, I turned up a few details on Sundrop’s “solarec” technology, which produces several byproducts using energy from sunlight.

Solarec, short for Solar Reduction of Carbon Dioxide, can not only produce hydrogen, but also desalinate water and create methanol, a useful fuel. With the disclosure of this information, Sundrop may finally be poking its head from its shell, but details on its actual process are few and far between.

We do know that eSolar’s contributions relate to the mirrors, or heliostats, that aim sunlight into a central receiver, as well as the tracking technology that keeps dishes at an optimal angle. Both are vital to the operation of the overall package, which must remain cost-competitive with solar thermal devices, solar panels and other renewable sources.

Google-backed eSolar, meanwhile, is on the path to build out utility-scale electrical plants, first across California and eventually the country. The fact that Sundrop is borrowing technology from the startup suggests that it has a non-competitive technology — likely intended for off-grid, government and institutional use — and is also rapidly approaching commercialization.

Would you base your next vacation on how environmentally friendly, economically beneficial, socially conscious or economically beneficial to the surrounding community a resort is? Do you ever want to plan a trip based on activities or atmosphere, rather than destination?

The idea of doing any of the above, admittedly, conjures up images of granola-crunching hippies, rather than the Bermuda short- and baseball cap-clad throngs of American tourists famous for spreading their lucre worldwide. But Whole Travel, a new site launching today, is betting that the pool of thoughtful travelers is growing rapidly.

While most people are familiar with the idea of searching for, say, plane tickets and a hotel in Las Vegas, Whole Travel presents a search box with a question prominently displayed above it: “What’s your grand adventure?” Entering a word — “mountains“, for instance — brings up results that can then be narrowed by metrics like rating, cost, amenities or the “Whole Ranking.”

That last, a measurement of various environmental and social considerations for each vacation destination, is the keystone of the site. CEO Matthew Davie says that 42 percent of online travelers consider themselves “green.” That’s a nebulous category if there ever was one, but the statement is at least somewhat accurate, based on the rapid growth of ecotourism over the past few years.

Whole Travel thus hopes to be the nexus of environmentally-conscious travel, a place that people come to find that special spot in West Africa or Peru where they can, perhaps, atone for the tons of carbon their jet spewed out while carrying them to their vacation paradise.

Sarcasm aside, Whole Travel seems like a good idea, and the site already has some 4,000 hotel and resort listings who will, in the future, pay referral fees to the company (it doesn’t directly sell anything). It’s the site’s bad luck to be launching during what looks like it may be the start of a global downturn, a negative handicap to a tourism site if there ever was one.

So far, Whole Travel has been funded by angel investors. The company is based in Palo Alto, Calif.

In case you’re tired of reading about the markets imploding, here’s some unrelated news:

Warren Buffet invests in Chinese battery maker — He’s called the Oracle of Omaha for his ability to spot long-term trends. Take note, then, that Warren Buffet has bought almost 10 percent of a Chinese battery maker whose cells go into electric cars, BYD Company, via one of his existing companies.

Web radio bill passes House — Companies like Pandora and Last.fm may survive after all, following the passage of a bill in the House allowing web radio companies to negotiate their own terms with copyright holders.

Is cloud computing a marketing hype campaign? — Free software campaigner Richard Stallman really hates the idea of cloud computing, warning of a future increase in fees for others to own your data.

One of private equity’s worst deals ever — TPG’s $1.35 billion investment in Washington Mutual, part of a $7 billion syndicate, was entirely wiped out late last week. It was one of the largest private equity deals in history, although representing less than 10 percent of TPG’s total capital, so it won’t (immediately) wipe the firm out.

ShuffleBrain readies photo game for Facebook — CNET has a good profile of ShuffleBrain, a game startup that will allow players to create their own photo-building game in a yet-to-be released Facebook app.

Apple TV update may be coming tomorrow — A mysterious message sent to Apple resellers, and picked up by The Unofficial Apple Weblog, suggests that an updated Apple TV may be coming Tuesday.

Nintendo may offer DS Lite follow-up by year’s end — The successful DS Lite may have a successor by the end of this year, according to Crave, with better wireless, a camera and music playback.

Multimedia chip maker NeoMagic dies — The Santa Clara, Calif. company’s shares were once listed for $125 on Nasdaq. Its remaining 52 employees are now being set free.

Privacy-protecting version of Google Chrome released — Iron, a German spinoff of Google’s new Chrome web browser, promises to protect people who are concerned about the browser’s data policies.

Etelos CEO Jeff Garon fired — Business application maker Etelos, which recently maneuvered itself onto the over-the-counter bulletin board (OTCBB) stock exchange, has fired CEO and president Jeff Garon. Valleywag, as usual, has the gritty details.

The new pathway of innovation — Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham ruminates on the new flow of innovation from consumers to business, versus the old, opposite way.

Another solar-as-a-service company, part of a growing industry that helps to install and operate solar panels, is ballooning in size. Solar Power Partners, a Mill Valley, Calif. startup that only had $6 million in funding a year ago, is announcing that it has reached $100 million in funding with some $60 million more available for project financing.

Solar Power Partners specializes in power purchase agreements (PPA), which mean that the beneficiary of the solar panels doesn’t pay for them. Instead, SPP buys and installs the panels where they’re needed — for instance, on a warehouse roof — and retains ownership, handling their maintenance and upkeep. They then sell power from the panels to the buyer for a fixed rate.

PPAs have become popular because both businesses and consumers are reluctant to dig into their own wallets to buy panels outright. With a PPA, they get the panels, while installers like SPP get a margin from the electricity they sell. In turn, the business that signed the PPA can expect to benefit from having a fixed electricity rate for a decade or more as utility power prices rise.

We’ve written about similar companies. SunRun, for example, just took $12 million to sell PPAs to consumers. SPP’s own model markets PPAs to agriculture, businesses and government, so it’s more competitive with companies like Recurrent Energy, which is building a 5-megawatt plant in San Francisco.

SPP has a number of investors, including Globespan Capital Partners, Dry Creek Ventures, Silicon Valley Technology Group, Energy Investors Fund, and the banks who lend money for construction of solar plants.

I’ll admit it: Ponoko excites me. In the virtual world of of web startups, it’s unusual to see one that not only sells, but produces real-world items. Prior to today, Ponoko was only accessible to people with at least some familiarity with computer aided design (CAD) software, but it has just released a tool, Photomake, to let anyone design small items.

Ponoko, in case you haven’t heard of it, makes small items from a variety of materials, based on user designs (see right for some examples of finished products). The company uses computer-guided laser cutters, which work without human direction, simply following the instructions provided to them by CAD files. CAD expertise, unfortunately, is generally restricted to professions like architects, designers and engineers.

Now you can create your own design by simply drawing it on a blank piece of paper, taking a picture, and uploading the picture to Ponoko. From there, it’s converted to a simple CAD format, from which the cutters can follow their directions.

The trade-off of the tool’s simplicity is just that. CAD allows for some pretty complex designs. With this tool, you’ll only get to work in two dimensions, unless you’re clever enough to make something that can be bent, folded or slotted together into a three-dimensional object. Also, the margin for error is appreciably larger when scribbling by hand, rather than precisely measuring out a software design.

And it also requires at least a little understanding of how the machines work. Below, I tried to make things difficult for Photomake by drawing a lumpily-outlined elephant with freckles on its behind (I’m distantly related to Van Gogh). The design didn’t fully make it through, although the software tried valiantly to follow the outlines. Note that the elephant would come out as a solid piece, and the freckles and eye would pop out to leave holes.

But mostly, you can see how your design will turn out before you order it, and you can choose from 19 plastics and 11 woods of varying thickness if you choose to order it. The tool is fun to play with, any really, when was the last chance you really had to make something, if you’re not a crafty person with tools and know-how?

Ponoko is still in an early stage, so it remains to be seen how well they’ll pull of their ideas. But with 3d printers and rapid manufacturing tools becoming cheaper and more accessible every year, it’s only a matter of time — and my feeling is, not much time — until someone strikes it big in this category, much as happened with Threadless in custom t-shirts (although that site was smart enough to run design contests).

For now, Ponoko is one of the only games in town, and it seems to be growing pretty well — chief strategy officer Derek Elly tells me sales are up 111 percent in the last month. It also released another tool earlier this month, which allows people to commission designs. For another idea with a somewhat more limited scope, check out Fabjectory and FigurePrints, which print out 3D versions of avatars from Second Life, World of Warcraft and other games. Shapeways also prints 3-D versions of artistic designs. (We wrote about Shapeways here).

A large tax package pushed through the U.S. Senate today promises to finally renew a set of incentives for the cleantech industry that many had feared would run out at the end of this year, leaving growing industries in wind, solar and other alternative energy segments to wither on the vine.

The Investment Tax Credit (ITC) returns money to buyers of alternative energy, whether residential or commercial, and also provides money for the companies manufacturing cleantech products. Additionally, this latest version will add credits for utilities, which should help push adoption by a large buying segment that has so far been reluctant to pour money into renewable energy, outside of states like California.

As we covered earlier this year, the problem with the ITC was not convincing political leaders to fund cleantech, but instead, getting past partisan in-fighting. The problem so far has been that the Senate would reject whichever version the House passed, and vice versa. However, this time around the Senate’s plan is in a form similar to one the House previously approved. The White House, also, has already given a grudging nod of approval.

Aside from specific benefits that the bill, the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008, provides, the most important detail is probably the length of time the credits lasted. The group of cleantech companies who were optimistic that a bill would be passed this year for the most part only expected a single year extension.

The full breakdown provides more time for some segments of renewable: Wind gets a single year, but wave and tidal will get two years, while home and business investment in alternative energy get a full eight years. An additional credit will give people who buy plug-in electric vehicles from $2,500 to $7,500 back.

The incentives should keep cleantech on a growth track even during a recession, as companies will now be able to approach banks (if any survive) to request funding for projects, and be able to provide assurance that Federal benefits will be in place when they’re needed.

GridPoint, one of the largest of the smart grid startups, who aim to more intelligently distribute energy across the electrical grid, has more than doubled up on its prior funding with $120 million. Along with the new money, it has bought out V2Green, which makes software for electric vehicles to efficiently plug into the grid.

This latest move shows a company trying to get a leg up on a bevy of well-funded competitors, who include Silver Spring Networks, SmartSynch, Trilliant and a number of others. All of them offer variations on a communication platform that hooks up home and business electrical connections to utilities, allowing a two-way flow of information.

GridPoint already tries to differentiate itself by providing close measurement of devices in a home or business, like air conditioners and refrigerators, for utilities to better manage their networks, and also helps to tie in alternate energy sources like wind and solar. By picking up V2Green, it will gain the additional edge of smart charging for electric vehicles, which generally means filling their batteries when electricity is cheap and plentiful.

The acquisition also points to a potential opportunity for other entrepreneurs around electric cars. V2Green is an early entrant to the market — for the most part, the vehicles it hopes to serve don’t even exist yet. The company, in fact, only took angel funding for its platform three months ago. Now that it’s off the market, other companies with a similar plan will almost certainly be needed.

GridPoint’s previous funding, capped most recently by a $15 million add-on to its fourth round, had reached $102 million. This $120 million fifth round was provided by previous investors Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Susquehana Growth Equity, Perella Weinberg Partners and Robeco.