High atop Barrows Hall on UC Berkeley’s campus, the 16 semi-finalists in the Venture Lab Clean Technology Innovation Contest this week made their final pitches. Each of the competitors had a brutally enforced 3-minute window for the “American Idol”-style session.

Finally the judges — which included reps from SunPower and Solazyme, as well as several cleantech VCs — narrowed it down to four. The first-prize winner took home $10,000, second prize was $5,000, and $2,500 each was awarded to two additional teams, who tied for the third-place prize. The winners were a bit different than our faves, but oh well. Here’s the skinny:

1st Place — Low-Cost Fuel Cells: This team of four working out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wants to take fuel cells to the developing world. While much of their research has been funded by high-tech companies like Siemens, Canon and Mitsubishi Chemical Corp., the group’s goal is fairly modest: Make a cheap fuel cell that can efficiently convert hydrocarbon fuel into electricity.

What the team has come up with is a small, pencil-sized steel fuel cell that can convert kerosene, a common fuel in developing nations, into electricity for indoor lighting. The team estimates that each cell would cost about $10 and last between six months and a year. Team leader Craig Jacobson says the next step is to take the $10,000 and build the prototype. After that they aim to raise $250,000 more so they can turn their fuel cell into a business (attn: VCs!).

Continue reading this story

There’s nothing like cash and travel prizes to help motivate innovation. The Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley is hosting the Venture Lab Clean Technology Innovation Competition, which offers up a $20,000 kitty and a trip to Copenhagen to attend Copenmind for the winning team. The contest is looking for innovations in power generation, energy efficiency and sustainable IT solutions, and the competition’s judging panel includes reps from SunPower, Solazyme, PG&E and several Sand Hill Road venture firms.

The entrants have been whittled down to 16 finalists and the winners will be announced this evening. The finalists’ projects range from an accelerated evolution track for cellulose-chomping microbes to an “instant leak feedback system for toilets.” No one said cleantech innovation was a glamorous business.

We checked out the finalist list and here are our top five picks from among the finalists:

Banyan Energy Inc.: In order to help solar power reach grid parity, the Banyan Energy group has designed a super-focusing lens that can be integrated into the existing photovoltaic cell supply chain. Their product, “SCALE” (Simple Concentration and Aggregation of Light Energy), is supposed to concentrate sunlight up to 10 times. The group estimates that while today $100 million can deliver about 100 MW of PV energy, with SCALE technology the same money could buy 1,000 MW worth of PV power. It’s not entirely clear how the group devised its superior optics.

Continue reading this story

Scotland was referred to as “the Saudi Arabia of Wave Power” in the headline of a recent Fortune article. And while that might be a bit of a stretch, the Scottish government said today it will offer a $20 million prize for innovation in marine power. The First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, will make the announcement in a speech on renewable energy at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. this morning.

The Scottish government claims the Saltire Prize will be the “world’s largest single prize for marine power technology;” to qualify, researchers must prove the commercial viability of the technology in Scotland waters. And according to the BBC, Salmond will use the prize and the speech to also urge U.S. marine power firms to come to Scotland.

Update: The government’s PR team just sent us over a text of Salmond’s speech. He says one sea area, “Pentland Firth,” could generate as much as 40GW of renewable power, and points out Scotland’s goal to meet at least 31 percent of electricity demand from renewables by 2011, and 50 percent by 2020. And Salmond calls the Saltire prize “a call to action.”

Continue reading this story

Carbon Sponge Box: Researchers at Tucson, Arizona’s Global Research Technologies have built a refrigerator-sized device that acts like a sponge for carbon emissions. Called the Atmospheric Carbon Capture Systems (ACCESS) Air-Capture System, the secretive material used captures carbon from the air (currently at a rate of less than 100 kilograms per day) and is meant to be clustered around places where carbon can be stored permanently. The sticking point is, “Because it uses electricity from the grid to separate gas from the solution, the prototype barely breaks even in CO2 savings.” — Popular Science.

Nanotubes to Fuel Cell: Lighten Up: Because fuel cells are rather complex, there always seems to be another little innovation discovered that can help out the tech. Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and the University of Darmstadt are working on using carbon nanotubes to make fuel cells lighter. As Jadoo knows, lighter can deliver some interesting applications — Physorg.com.

Global Warming Sucks, and I Don’t Care: Knowledge can empower, but when it comes to global warming actually lead to apathy, says two Texas A&M University political scientists. The researchers only used a telephone survey of roughly 1,000 Americans, but still . . . . maybe our new carbon policy should include therapy sessions — EurekaAlert.org.

While fuel cells are just starting to power industrial operations and some homes, scientists are working on fuel-cell tech that can work under hotter, dryer conditions. Researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering have made a new ceramic membrane out of iron nanoparticles that could allow the newly designed fuel cell to operate at higher temperatures and lower humidity than traditional fuel cells while pushing down production costs and boosting efficiency.

Fuel cells have a central membrane that separates the hydrogen fuel (or other fuel source) from the reactive agent. The membrane is key to facilitating the reaction, and therefore generating electricity, and improvements in membrane performance can greatly increase fuel-cell efficiency. Currently, many fuel cells use a membrane technology from the 1960s called Nafion that requires high humidity and tops out in efficiency at 190 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mark Wiesner, lead author of the paper, claims that the new membrane doesn’t need to be cool or moist, and also estimates that the new ceramic membrane could cost less to manufacture than the Nafion membrane. This is a big deal: The membrane alone accounts for some 40 percent of fuel cell costs, Wiesner estimates.

The new nanoparticle membrane is still undergoing experimentation, but Wiesner seems quite confident that his work is attractive to funders. “If the next series of tests proves that fuel cells with these new membranes perform well at high temperatures, we believe it might attract the type of investment needed to bring this technology to the market.”

Image courtesy of Jadoo.

The Department of Energy and venture capital firms have something in common — they’re both looking for entrepreneurs to help commercialize early stage clean technology. And last month Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner named three venture capital firms that were selected to participate in a new Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program in association with the Department of Energy.

We got a chance to chat with one of those firms’ new EIRs: Foundation Capital’s Michael Bauer, who will soon be headed off to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennesee, where he will try to help move clean technologies out of the lab and onto the market. He’s looking forward to it and thinks, “Being in all these labs will be like being a kid in a candy store.”

Continue reading this story

At the start of the 20th century, two German scientists revolutionized agriculture by making nitrogen cheaply available in fertilizers. Now two American companies are trying to make crops that don’t need as much nitrogen. Chemical giant DuPont and agricultural biotech company Arcadia Biosciences announced a partnership on Wednesday aimed at improving the nitrogen efficiency of corn. Under terms of the agreement, DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred unit will have exclusive rights to the technology developed by Davis, Calif.-based Arcadia but further details were not disclosed.

Nitrogen is crucial for plant growth and farmers supplement the limited available nitrogen in soil with lots of fertilizers. But as oil prices climb so do the prices of petrochemical fertilizers; developing corn that needs less nitrogen could help push down farmers’ costs. It could also reduce the carbon footprint of growing corn.

Continue reading this story

Researchers at Swansea University are developing solar cells that can be painted right onto your roof, Science Daily reports. The photovoltaic paint is being designed to coat the steel exterior cladding, making bulky panels unnecessary. Dave Worsley, of the Materials Research Centre at the University’s School of Engineering, said the work his team has been doing for years, that of studying the effects of sunlight on exterior paint, was what ultimately led them to examine how paint might capture and store solar energy.

Worsely, working with building material manufacturer Corus Colours, has high hopes for the power-generating capabilities of the painted steel:

“Corus Colours produces around 100 million square metres of steel building cladding a year. If this was treated with the photovoltaic material, and assuming a conservative 5 percent energy conversion rate, then we could be looking at generating 4,500 gigawatts of electricity through the solar cells annually. That’s the equivalent output of roughly 50 wind farms.”

While the research is still in the early stages, the success of a preliminary study has won the project £1.5 million ($3 million) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Continue reading this story

Have biofuels been around long enough for there to be four generations of them? Those in the biofuel industry think so. Scientists at the University of Essex have discovered a new mechanism that regulates the process of carbon fixation in plants. The research, to be published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to improvements in so-called “fourth-generation” biofuels by letting scientists design feedstocks that capture more carbon (hat tip to Biopact).

This follows Craig Venter’s statement last week that his company, Synthetic Genomics, will produce fourth-generation biofuels in as little as 18 months.

There’s been a great deal of debate recently over first-generation, or food-based, biofuels. Meanwhile, a breakthrough to commercialize second-generation, or lignocellulosic, biofuels has yet to materialize. So how are we already jumping to the fourth generation? We’ve broken down their evolution below, including making note of any related startups.

Continue reading this story

J. Craig Venter may be known for splicing genes, but he’s not one to mince words. Speaking in San Francisco last night as part of the Long Now Foundation’s lecture series, Venter implored members of the audience to not let the failures of first-generation biofuels shake their faith in biofuels as a whole. “Corn-to-ethanol just is not going to get us there. It’s a negative carbon balance and has been heavily subsidized by all of us,” he said. “This is just the wrong experiment taking us very much in the wrong direction.”

Venter is trying to tackle the problem from another angle, using “biofuels by design.” He says his own startup, Synthetic Genomics, could deliver in as little as 18 months a biofuel that turns carbon dioxide into octane.

Continue reading this story