While it’s not cold fusion, the latest claimed breakthrough from the laboratories of the nefariously named Blacklight Power does defy some laws of physics. The startup announced this week that they have created a 50,000-watt prototype of a new fuel source by lowering the energy level of a hydrogen atom to below its ground state.

Cranbury, N.J.-based Blacklight claims that they can push an electron closer to the nucleus by way of a catalytic reaction and that the result is a huge amount of clean energy. The company describes the reaction as “somewhere between a nuclear and a chemical reaction” but without any of the messy nuclear fallout. Sounds far-fetched, but they’ve clearly convinced at least some people, as Blacklight says they’ve raised $60 million from “hedge funds and wealthy families.”

The only problem is, as far as quantum physics is concerned, almost none of this is possible. Indeed, Blacklight’s founder and CEO, Randell Mills, is proposing that we do away with much of pesky quantum mechanics and stick to simple Newtonian physics. Mills has been creating controversy for years with this theory, which he describes matter-of-factly as a classical take on quantum problems. He claims to be able to mathematically pinpoint the energy state and location of an electron, Heisenberg be damned!

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Today, scientists working at the French equivalent of the Atomic Energy Commission said they have created a backup hydrogen fuel cell for powering cell phones. According to Agence France-Presse, the device is being developed by Bic, the French company more familiar as a maker of pens and lighters than mini fuel cells, and won’t appear until 2010. The article says the researchers have been working with European wireless chipmaker STMicroelectronics since 2005 on the project.

If the backup charger (to be used after the battery is drained) makes it to the market, it should have plenty of company. Samsung is developing a similar device for cell phones to hit the streets in 2010 as well. Motorola is working with a startup called Angstrom Power to develop a prototype hydrogen-powered phone. MTI Micro plans to start selling its products in 2009, including a backup power system and potentially a fuel cell embedded cell phone. And Medis Fuel Cells already makes disposable fuel-cell chargers for phones.

As consumers grow more and more mobile, these companies’ plans fit with the dream of having a power source that is truly free from the power cord. And as companies look to go greener, the goal is to develop a backup power source for consumer devices that can essentially run on water, and other non-toxic chemicals. Both were big topics this year at the Consumer Electronics Trade Show, but getting fuel cells to market will still need a lot of work. Still it’s good to know so many firms are trying.

Supercomputers have long been used to predict how climate change will affect the Earth, but they use a lot of energy and generate a lot of heat in the process. I suppose it seemed a bit hypocritical to the guys at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory when they realized that the type of in-depth climate change model they wanted to build would result in a supercomputer requiring 200 megawatts to operate — enough energy to power a city of 100,000 residents.

Yet, a computer to measure cloud formation at a 1-kilometer scale could generate real breakthroughs in climatological understanding, even if it would need to be 1,000 times more powerful than existing computers and would cost about $1 billion to build. So the Berkeley Lab guys took the current supercomputing architecture — which essentially places a lot of x86 processors in a box — and dumped it for specially designed embedded processors that could be connected to create a more power-efficient supercomputer.

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IBM Makes Concentrated Solar Breakthrough: Like a kid with a big magnifying glass, IBM has magnified the sun’s rays more than 2,000 times in a concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) system to produce 230 watts off a square centimeter PV chip. The trick is to keep the silicon chip from vaporizing under such intense heat. Big Blue has lots of experience cooling semiconductor chips. The computer giant used a very thin layer of a liquid metal made of a gallium and indium compound between the chip and the heat sink. The extremely thin layer of metal sucked heat off the chip, keeping it operating at 85 degrees Celsius when otherwise it would fry at temps upwards of 1,600 degrees. IBM says it has no intention of getting into the solar energy business but could license the technology to CPV firms, like SolFocus and Whitfield Solar.

Harvard Undergrads Win $200 For “Dirt-Powered” Fuel Cell: A team of Harvard students and alumni have developed a microbial fuel cell aimed at solving lighting challenges in Africa and won $200,000 in the World Bank’s Lighting Africa 2008 Development Marketplace competition. The fuel cell runs organic-rich materials such as soil, manure or food scraps. The team had help from microbiology professor Peter Girgius, who pioneered the technology and formed the startup Living Power Systems around the cells, which collect extra energy from microbial metabolism. The students have now formed their own social enterprise around the technology, Lebônê Solutions.

MIT Creates More Powerful Fuel Cell: Engineers at MIT have taken a granular approach to fuel cells and through a process called layer-by-layer assembly have boosted the power output of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) by 50 percent. The key is replacing the center membrane, currently made of Nafion, with a film that is less permeable to methanol. The scientists “were able to tune the structure of the film a few nanometers at a time,” and reduce internal leakage of fuel. Replacing Nafion is something researchers elsewhere are working on as well. Sharp recently claimed to have created the highest-power density DMFC ever.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has recruited a new entrepreneur-in-residence to work in its Department of Energy program, which aims to commercialize clean energy technologies coming out of national labs. Kleiner’s representative for the program will be Joel Serface, the current director of the Austin Clean Energy Incubator, we’ve learned.

A source close to the situation said that Serface plans to transition out of his role at the incubator over the next six weeks; Austin Clean Energy, meanwhile, plans to open up a nationwide search for Serface’s replacement. Prior to his job in Austin, Serface worked at several venture firms, including as a partner at Eastman Ventures, the venture arm of the Eastman Kodak company; as a director at Sierra Ventures; and as a principal at Alliant Partners.

In his new role as an EIR for Kleiner, Serface will work with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., to find technologies to commercialize. The other firm-lab partnerships are ARCH Venture Partners, which will team up with Sandia National Laboratory, and Foundation Capital, whose entrepreneur will work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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While many cleantech startups are working on making cleaner burning fuels for our cars, a biotech firm Down Under is engineering cleaner digesting grasses for our cows. Gramina, a joint venture between Australian Molecular Plant Breeding and Kiwi PGG Wrightson Genomics, is genetically engineering pasture grass to be more digestible so that cows grazing on it burp up less methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. (Hat tip Science Daily)

Cows produce methane as the microbes in their gut break down the cellulose of the grasses they eat. Just as lignin and cellulose are difficult for ethanol producers to breakdown, so too is it in the cow’s stomach. And actually researchers at Energy Biosciences Institute are looking to cow stomaches as a model for how to process plants into fuel.

Gramina is working on making grasses that maintain their structural integrity but have less lignin. The firm’s researchers hope that suppressing the expression of the enzyme ‘O-methyl transferase’ in the grass will make it easier to breakdown — and therefore produce less methane during digestion.

The joint venture won a Aus $1.8 million grant (or about $1.7 million USD) from Australia New Zealand Biotechnology Partnership Fund for their research in April. Gramina is also working on making grasses that grow better in warmer climes, in the expectation that climate change will be changing the temperature of grazing lands.

The Energy Biosciences Institute, a first-of-its-kind, half-a-billion-dollar partnership between energy giant BP and the labs of UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lawrence Berkeley National, has published its list of the first 49 projects it will fund to the tune of $20 million. Christopher Somerville, director of the institute, told us in an interview last November that they have been working on this list for months; it includes projects like researching the guts of termites to learn about breaking down cellulose, as well as those that review current biofuels laws and regulations.

Somervile had also expressed concern that the negative mainstream media discussion of corn ethanol could poison the whole concept of biofuels before researchers ever got a chance to develop more environmentally attractive practices. But at the institute, he said, they will actually be looking at biofuel options from dedicated energy crops that have a 10-fold-plus energy return and no run-off. These 49 projects will do much to provide education for the public and shape the future of the industry.

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Although plants and bacteria get most of the biofuel research dollars and media column inches, fungus, a kingdom of organisms that excels at breaking down fibrous cellulose, could provide some innovation for cheap and easy cellulosic biofuel production. Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute have sequenced the genetic code of Tricoderma reesei, a fungal strain that was discovered during World War II when it was found to be eating through the military canvas tents and fatigues.

“We were aware of T. reesei’s reputation as producer of massive quantities of degrading enzymes, however we were surprised by how few enzyme types it produces, which suggested to us that its protein secretion system is exceptionally efficient,” the study’s lead author, Diego Martinez, told Science Daily.

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Most solar companies use silicon to turn solar energy into electrical energy, but researchers at the University of Tel Aviv have recently moved to go green in more of a literal sense. Rather than silicon, they’re using bio-engineered plant proteins to build their PV base. This is very cool, and they aren’t the only ones.

Researchers at Cambridge University, MIT, Stanford and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory are also trying to bio-engineer photosynthetic chips to convert the sun’s rays to AC or DC power. A company called BioSolar is trying to use plant-parts to replace the petroleum-based plastics in solar systems.

The Israeli team claims that they can convert up to 25 percent of the sun’s energy to electricity compared with 14 percent for silicon-based PV cells. They also say they can do this for $1 per square meter, whereas the same amount of silicon substrate would cost $200.

If this research makes it out of the lab, the benefits would be significant. Silicon doesn’t face as much of a shortage anymore, but the cost advantages of a plant substrate would still be substantial. It’s possible that thin-film solar advances will render the silicon-based panels obsolete in a few years, but mass production has been an ever-moving target for the thin-film guys. For now we’re still playing with the sun and sand.

Ethanol Production Showing Efficiency Gains: Despite the biofuels backlash some positive trends are being recorded for the industry. Argonne National Laboratory has released a statistical comparison of data collected by the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) on ethanol production in 2006 and data collected by the USDA in 2001. Ethanol production in the U.S. increased by 276 percent, or to 4.9 billion gallons annually, in those five years and the report highlights some trends going on behind the biofuel boom:

• 21.8% decrease in total energy use (fossil and electricity)
• 23.5% of the ethanol production capacities capture and export CO2 as a co-product
• 26.6% decrease in water consumption

RFA President Bob Dinneen was certainly optimistic: “The future of this industry is bright and green.” While these energy gains are definitely good news, corn and soy processing will have to be supplanted by cellulosic and next generation biofuel production.

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