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A San Francisco-based company with plans to help the developing world snuff out its kerosene-burning lamps and replace them with cheap, solar-powered LEDs and compact fluorescents has finally unveiled its production models and announced the details of its for-profit business plan.

We’ve followed the progress of D.light Design from a Stanford design competition in late 2006 through its launch in the non-academic world, to the present moment. Started by two Stanford MBAs, D.light has been working on light designs cheap enough to be affordable for families making as little as a dollar a day, but with a big enough market to create a sizable company.

The problems with kerosene are numerous: It’s polluting and harmful to the health of those who regularly use it for light, it can start fires that injure or kill people, and surprisingly, it’s also relatively expensive — according to co-founder Ned Tozun, kerosene is a $38 billion market that can suck up to 30 percent of the income of families that have to use it regularly.

Unfortunately, that’s quite a lot of people, in part because areas that are ostensibly powered by electricity actually only get a few hours a day of current. D.light, along with similar companies like Mightylight, uses the figure of 1.6 billion people, although its initial target market in India includes “only” 72 million families.

D.light is unveiling three light designs. The one they brought to show me (far left, below) is most faithful to their original design: A nearly unbreakable plastic casing enclosing a bright, ultra-efficient LED, with a connection for a single-watt solar panel that can charge it throughout the day. The light has several settings, allowing it to last between 12 and 500 hours on a single charge. There are two other designs: A CFL-based light that charges if there’s electricity available, and a small lamp that also has a solar panel. The various parts, including the sealed lead-acid battery, are all replaceable with standard parts.

The basic idea D.light has is almost identical to Mightylight. Because of target consumer group, though, price, rather than innovation, is the most important point. D.light’s units range from $12 to $25 for an individual buyer, far below Mightylight’s $45 lights. (Another company, Selco India, is also making solar powered lights, as well as various overseas startups.)

However, Tozun said D.light still might not be cheap enough for some. “We’re cognizant of the fact that there are some families that just can’t afford the lights, no matter how low you price them,” he told me, suggesting that there’s potential for a micro-finance model to help the extremely impoverished gain access to light. There are also non-profits helping to buy the lights.

But for the families that can afford the D.light’s products, Tozun says there’s no shortage of demand. He told me that two people sent to India to scope out the target market were nearly mobbed by villagers who had been tipped off to their arrival — only to find out that they had brought none of the lights with them to sell.

Now, about that “for profit” part. It’s easy to be skeptical that D.light can make money, even on its bare-bones design — even with the founders moving to China and India to help with manufacturing and distribution. Tozun says they’ll make money, but didn’t want to discuss specifics. However, a little basic math isn’t too difficult. If D.light manages to sell 10 million units for an average of $18, using a conservative, ultra-slim 2 percent profit margin, it will have made $3.6 million. For the company’s target market of over a billion people, just multiply by a hundred; and, as with every startup, there will be opportunities to diversify.

Tozun says there’s plenty of room for other entrepreneurs, provided they’re able to understand the particularities of developing markets. He pointed out income generation, or “anything that can help these people make money,” as well as mobile phones and communications as especially hot areas.

D.light’s founders are headed out in the next week or two, and the company will be based out of China and New Delhi, India. Its investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, Indian firms Mahindra & Mahindra and Nexus India Capital, social investment firms Acumen Fund and Gray Matters Capital, and Michael Marks, the chairman of Flextronics, but the company has not disclosed how much money it has taken.

Following in the theme of great-but-unusual cleantech startups I talked about last week, I recently took some time to talk to Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures about a couple of his firm’s latest investments in the field.

Garage is the firm that Reichert heads up with Guy Kawasaki and Joyce Chung. An early-stage investor, the fund also had one of cleantech’s first IPO exits with its investment in Hoku Scientific, which makes materials and equipment for the fuel cell and solar markets.

The two more recent investments, however, don’t even sound like cleantech. One, ThermoCeramix, has a special material that heats up easily. The other, D.light Design, makes lamps for the developing world.

Thermoceramix
It’s a well known fact that energy is lost every time it’s converted from electricity to machinery, and vice versa. Cars don’t run at anything near peak efficiency (hence hybrid designs) and the electrical grid leaks energy at every stage from generation to consumption.

Much of the problem is heat loss. Heat leaks from car engines, lightbulbs, any kind of machinery, wasting precious energy. Many startups aim to lower heat loss — for example, by replacing incandescent lightbulbs, which dump out as much heat as light, with LEDs. The easiest way to explain ThermoCeramix is to say that it’s exactly the opposite: It wants to lose as much heat as possible.

The standard method of heating everything from hot water tanks to stoves is using a metal wire that emits heat. However, these wires tend to lose as much as a third of the energy that goes into them without converting it to heat.

ThermoCeramix makes materials with a much higher “emissivity”, meaning they’re more efficient at heating up. These materials have some obvious uses in everyday household appliances like those I just mentioned, as well as commercial processes.

However, there’s a bit more to the business. The materials are actually coatings that the company can apply to nearly any surface. So imagine, instead of having a centralized water heater in your house, having a bit of ThermoCeramix material wrapped around the pipe in your faucet. When you turn on the hot water tap, it heats up instantaneously.

The company hasn’t tested out that application yet (Reichert says his house will be the first to be fitted with such pipes), but it’s a fun mental exercise to count up the number of stages at which energy would be saved by doing that. Here’s what I came up with:
1) The material itself has better emissivity than the metal used in a hot water heater
2) Even the best-designed water tanks leak heat constantly; no need for a tank here
3) A great deal of heat is lost from water that’s flowing through, or sitting still in pipes
4) No need to have both cold- and hot-water lines in future plumbing arrangements.

On the other hand, the electrical wiring would need to be a bit different — I’d imagine it wouldn’t be long before a plumber ended up electrocuting himself trying to install a ThermoCeramix system. The company is working first with some large manufacturers on making appliances, including General Electric.

D.light Design
It’s nice to return to D.light, because we’ve covered the company since its beginnings at a Stanford entrepreneurship competition. The basic idea behind D.light is to replace dirty, polluting kerosene lamps used in developing countries like India with an LED lamp charged daily by a solar panel.

D.light has now finalized a design and begun to distribute the lamps, which, as we mentioned in our more extensive coverage of the company, sell for far less than some competing options like Mightylight.

What’s interesting about D.light is that it sounds more like a philanthropic mission than a highly profitable company. But its founders, a pair of Stanford MBAs, think that having a good business is actually the secret sauce — a more profitable company has a better chance of having an impact than a money-starved non-profit.

Reichert says he had the same reaction. “When we looked at it initially, we said OK, it’s not really a venture investment. But they’re driven by the idea that the best way to make a big contribution is to make a huge for-profit company, and that’s absolutely aligned with the venture capital model,” he said.

Three green technology companies emerged as among the more interesting companies at the Launch Silicon Valley pitch-fest yesterday.

Several hundred entrepreneurs and investors gathered in Mountain View, Calif. for the annual ritual, where 30 hand-picked companies gave a ten-minute pitch.

D. Light Design Wants to Eliminate Kerosene Usage

Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, both second-year Stanford MBAs and co-founders of startup D. Light Design, want to eliminate the use of kerosene lanterns in developing countries with a product called Forever-Bright.

The product’s working prototype is a white box about half the size of a loaf of bread with bright LEDs for interior home lighting and hookups to charge cell phones and power radios. The device can be charged with solar photovoltaic cells, or, for villagers capable of traveling to grid-connected power sources, they can charge the device and bring it back to their homes.

Goldman (right in picture above) says one quarter of the world’s population, or about two billion people, rely on kerosene lanterns for interior home lighting at night. With most of these people subsisting on average incomes of about one dollar a day, they’re paying up to 15 percent of their income on kerosene, not to mention exposing their families to toxic pollutants and the risk of fire.

Goldman tells VentureBeat Forever-Bright’s manufacturing cost is low enough to retail the product for as little as $10 a unit and still generate a profit for the company. The young startup is seeking patents for its proprietary circuitry.

We first mentioned these guys in December, when we heard Ned Tozun (left in picture) pitch at Stanford, and he won the pitching competition. At the time, comments on that story pointed out competitors, such as Mightylight. Mightylight’s LEDs (see story in Time) sell for $50, so are more expensive than D. Light’s planned price. We’ll have to wait to see whether D. Light delivers.

Indeed, D. Light Design is one of a growing number of startups to attempt to leverage Silicon Valley technology know-how to eliminate kerosene usage in developing countries via alternative power generation sources. Back in April, VentureBeat covered another interesting startup, Potenco, which offers a yo-yo-like device that generates storable power with the pull of a string.

ReadySolar: The Model T of Solar Panels?

Installing residential solar power systems is too expensive, says Meredith McClintock, CEO of Petaluma-based ReadySolar, and her small startup wants to change that.

Solar power, installed, currently costs around $10/watt. Approximately half of that expense is related to the cost of professional installation, says McClintock.

ReadySolar believes it can eliminate 30 to 50 percent of the installed cost with its Solar-in-a-Box systems, which come prepackaged and, the company claims, install more easily and cheaply than competing systems from big photovoltaic (PV) installers such as Akeena Systems or Solar City.

Following in the footsteps of Henry Ford, who believed consumers should be able to purchase their Model Ts in any color as long as that color was black, McClintock believes that she can mass-produce a one-size-fits-all solar panel that is so easy to buy and install that consumers won’t need expensive solar integrators.

ReadySolar has its work cut out for it, however. The company’s easy-to-install modules must still be installed by a contractor, which, while not as pricey as the specialist PV installers, is still expensive. And the PV specialist integrators are also working to drive down their installation costs. Publicly traded Akeena has been telling its investors for several quarters that it is developing proprietary solar power installation technology that will allow it to significantly reduce its customers’ overall cost of installed solar power.

New technology from ReadySolar and others that promise to cut installation costs will let PV solar get closer to achieving grid parity — the holy grail where cost of PV-generated electricity is the same or less than grid-supplied electricity.

ReadySolar hopes to close a $3.5 million funding round from venture capitalists and strategic partners within the next three months, CEO McKlintock tells VentureBeat. The company has been funded to date with $350,000 in seed financing from angels such as Gary Kremen (founder of Match.com) and Peng Ong (founder of Interwoven), plus $140,000 in debt financing.

Redwood Renewables: Integrating the Solar Directly into Roof Tiles

Tom Faust, managing director of Corte Madera Calif.-based Redwood Renewables thinks conventional solar panels don’t make economic sense, considering their need for expensive protective glass panel packaging and complicated fixtures that attach them to roofs.

Instead, his company is developing photovoltaic solar that integrates directly into the roofing shingles.
Like ReadySolar, Redwood Renewables is aiming to deliver its products for $5/watt, installed.

If you believe Faust’s vision, one day your roof’s shingles will power your home and your electric plug-in car.

Faust says his shingles are made by laminating solar cells directly onto a recycled polymer substrate. The lamination, he says, adds strength and enables 30-year durability. He says his manufacturing process yields integrated solar roofing that is signifantly less costly than not just solar panels, but other roofing-integrated competitors as well.

The company says it has received two patents for its technology and has another patent pending.

Faust claims to have received a $20 million purchase order from a roofing wholesaler, though he declined to name the firm or the details of the agreement. He also declined to provide an exact ship date for his product. So this falls into that increasingly large category of companies that are promising new, cool solar technology, but where caution is merited because many so far have delayed or otherwise failed to deliver. We say this also because Faust struck VentureBeat as an eccentric character, obviously passionate about his product’s ability to change the world, but frustratingly evasive and inarticulate on many questions.

Faust says he’s looking for venture capital, but would not confirm the amount is company is seeking. Documents provided by the company indicate that the company has received total funding to date of $1.4 million from a syndicate of 12 private investors.

Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker