San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is in talks with electric vehicle startup Project Better Place about building the infrastructure for a fleet of plug-in cars in the city, including parking meter charging stations and battery replacement stations.

Newsom traveled to Israel last week to meet with representatives of the company. The mayor’s office tells us that during a luncheon with Moshe Kaplinsky, CEO of Project Better Place Israel (pictured after the jump with the mayor), and Aliza Peleg, a rep from the startup’s U.S. offices, Newsom offered to work with Project Better Place if it would consider doing a test project in San Francisco. Newsom also met with the company’s chairman, Idan Offer, at a reception earlier.

The city is already in early talks with private companies that could potentially work with Project Better Place to build an electric vehicle infrastructure, according to the mayor’s office. Newsom was also said to be “very impressed” with the Project Better Place’s team in Israel.

If San Francisco does do a deal with Project Better Place, it would be the first city in the U.S. to get on board with Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle infrastructure plan (with three cars, San Francisco currently has one of the largest plug-in hybrid fleets in the country). This is the first we’ve heard of Project Better Place being in serious discussions stateside; we’ve tried to contact them for comment and when we hear back, will update the post.

Continue reading this story

We often cover semiconductors that require less energy, but we rarely talk to the companies behind those chips to find out what else they might be doing to reduce their power consumption. However, Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer for Qualcomm, recently shared a few tidbits about what the cell phone chip maker is doing to keep corporate consumption down — and it all starts with information technology (not everyone is jumping ship to build “cleantech” firms).

While it was some 20 years that the Qualcomm IT department instigated a recycling effort that’s still in effect on the Qualcomm campus today, it is within the last five years that Qualcomm has made its biggest strides. In 2004 it began construction on a new corporate building and attached a data center to the corporate offices.

The building contains a cogeneration plant that takes the waste heat delivered by the all the servers in the data center and uses it to partially power the office building. That idea won Qualcomm a $600,000 award from the state of California, and has returned the cost of construction in the form of power savings in just four years. Qualcomm didn’t disclose the price tag for the construction, but said the cogeneration plant reduced the energy costs of the building by 39 percent and saved the chip maker $2.9 million last year.

Continue reading this story

While the voluntary carbon trading economy is booming (it tripled in 2007 to $331 million) the power of free-market economics has yet to directly connect our own personal actions with carbon emissions. This week, the UK nixed plans to get people to reduce their emissions via an exchange of personal emissions permits. Citing issues of practicality, the ministry said implementing the system would be excessively expensive and that the idea is “ahead of its time.”

The idea was based on the system used in the EU’s emissions trading scheme whereby industrial emitters can buy permits for the right to pollute and players who reduce their emissions can sell excess permits on the open market. The system has proven itself effective in combating sulfur dioxide emissions in the United States and is growing in popularity as a way to regulate carbon emissions from industrial players around the world.

However, making the jump to a personal exchange is quite ambitious. The biggest barrier is simply measuring one’s personal emissions. This would include home energy costs, travel, food and other goods purchased. British supermarket giant Tesco had plans to list the carbon footprint of the good it sells but has discovered how hard it is to calculate the carbon cost of individual grocery items.

Continue reading this story

We talk a lot about new energy opportunities and technology breakthroughs here on Earth2Tech, and less about the high risks involved in developing new cleantech markets and commercializing unproven technologies. But at the Berkeley-Stanford CleanTech Conference this week, there was a lot of discussion over the tensions between venture capitalists backing new technologies and the utilities, regulatory and industry groups in charge of bringing the clean power to the people.

Sue Kateley, executive director of the solar industry group California Solar Energy Industries Association, said she was concerned about venture capitalists flushing money into companies that promise to offer and install solar for free (no up-front costs) to consumers. “The free reckless solar thing can kill the industry,” Kately said, explaining that she saw similar business models that went under in the energy boom decades ago.

Utilities’ motivations can come into conflict with those of venture capitalists when it comes to the price of contracts for utility-scale renewable deals like solar thermal power plants. Roy Kuga, VP in the energy supply division of California utility PG&E, said that while the company would like to deliver the most competitive price for customers, venture-backed startups are looking for higher-priced contracts in order to deliver the kind of financial returns that venture firms want (startups Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar and Infinia are all venture-backed).

Continue reading this story

While U.S. ethanol producers are like teenagers in the global biofuels market, Brazil is like a mature adult, approaching middle age. The Brazilian government began investing heavily in ethanol infrastructure and R&D more than 30 years ago. Now the country, which produces 45 percent of its own transportation fuel “on only 1 percent of its arable land,” is aggressively looking beyond both first-generation biofuels and its domestic market.

Brazil currently produces 4.7 billion gallons of ethanol every year; the Brazilian government estimates that number will double by 2015. And they are increasingly looking at the U.S. as potential buyers. Although President Bush did sign an ethanol technology-sharing agreement with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a 54 cent-a-gallon tariff prevents cheap Brazilian ethanol from competing with homegrown U.S. corn ethanol.

But the readily fermentable sugars found in sugarcane make it a far better ethanol feedstock than grain. Brazilian sugar ethanol gives an eightfold return on the fossil energy used to make it; American corn, on the other hand, only yields 1.3 times the fossil energy used. Brazil is now the No. 2 producer of ethanol, dethroned by the U.S. in 2005, but still leads in ethanol exports, sending some 900 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year, according to Reuters.

Brazil’s ethanol success and failures can teach the rest of the world a lot about biofuels. So who are the big Brazilian ethanol players? Who’s investing in the sector? And which biofuel startups are making Brazilian deals? Below, a primer:

Continue reading this story

On the heels of the news of its partnership with auto giant General Motors, cellulosic-biofuel startup Mascoma has added Big Oil to its growing list of investors. The Boston-headquartered company says this week that it has raised $61 million in a third round of financing that included $10 million from Houston-based Marathon Oil. GM participated (as we reported last week) in this round, as did previous investors Khosla Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Atlas Venture, General Catalyst Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Vantage Point Venture Partners, as well as Pinnacle Ventures, which provided an additional $20 million in venture debt.

This pushes Mascoma’s venture funding over $100 million; that’s in addition to over $100 million in federal and state grants, making Mascoma one of the most well-funded biofuel startups.

Marathon’s participation is not unprecedented; the company has equity in Midwestern ethanol plants and plans to be able to blend E-10 throughout its entire distribution system later this year.

Now Mascoma’s got deals with Big Oil and Detroit, two huge industries that see biofuels as a significant part of the future. The companies’ bets on Mascoma are a vote of confidence for the industry.

Going forward, Mascoma needs to use these funds to deliver that one-stop “consolidated bioprocessing” microbe and get its plant up and running ASAP. While there will likely be plenty of space in this industry for multiple players, being the first to market with a viable cellulosic ethanol process will grab a huge amount of public attention and probably even more funding.

Demand management firm EnerNOC, following its successful IPO last year, has been buying up firms to help its growth. The Boston-headquartered company said Monday that it has acquired Baltimore-based energy procurement services provider South River Consulting, which serves as a clearinghouse for the increasingly complex and competitive deregulated energy supply market.

EnerNOC spent roughly $4.75 million on the deal — $3 million in cash and 120,000 shares of its common stock valued at $1.75 million. This is the second energy procurement acquisition EnerNOC has made in the last six months; back in September the firm bought MDEnergy for $7.9 million. Energy procurement firms allow their customer bases to shop for energy on the deregulated market; their services include offers from a variety of competing energy providers.

We chatted with EnerNOC’s CEO and founder Tim Healy about why the company is snapping up energy procurement services — and what its plans are for more growth:

E2T: How is this acquisition of South River similar to your acquisition of MDEnergy?

Tim Healy: Very similar, in fact. The success of the MDEnergy acquisition gave us the confidence to do this again. We did it again because MDEnergy specializes in the Northeast market and South River specializes in the Mid-Atlantic. These are small, strategic acquisitions. In both cases we acquired a small bit of technology as well. In this, case South River brings us some of the unsexy back office technology you really need to scale.

Continue reading this story

DIY Solar Electric Car: Between the financial strain of high gas prices and seven children it’s no wonder Brent Hatch decided to build a solar-pedal powered hybrid to schlep to and from the middle school - CBS News via Autoblog Green.

LDK CEO Founds New Thin-Film Startup: Named Best Solar, the startup founded by LDK CEO Xiaofeng Peng is the mystery buyer of $1.9 billion worth of Applied Materials solar manufacturing equipment, enough to make 1 gigawatt of thin-film panels - Greentech Media.

“An Open Letter to Our Next President about Energy Policy”: Step 1: Get elected. Step 2: Read this letter. Step 3: Make a comprehensive energy plan - The Oil Drum.

Carbon Footprint Fatalism: For those of you have switched to the hybrid, the CFLs, the vegan diet and sworn off air travel MIT has some bad news - it doesn’t matter. If you live in the developed world the infrastructure you depend on will send your footprint sky high - New Scientist.

Boone Pickens Clearing Way for Wind Transmission: Our favorite Texan oil-baron-turned-wind-power-wildcatter is getting ready to build a giant water and electricity transmission line in the Texas panhandle to accommodate the 2,700 wind turbines he plans to build there - Times Record News.

Today’s data centers consume 0.5 percent of the world’s energy but are about as energy efficient as a poorly maintained Hummer is fuel efficient. But getting data centers to run more like a Prius is going to take a lot of work in areas that range from equipment design to the physical layout of the data center. IT shops need to get smarter about managing their equipment to fully utilize servers and storage assets as well.

A recent survey performed by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. for the Uptime Institute lays out a clear picture of what IT managers and CIOs can do to make computing less of a drain on the resources of both companies and the Earth. The survey concludes that the cost of managing a data center is rising to the point where it’s affecting the operations of companies’ core businesses.

The report dismisses the idea that new technology and equipment are needed, saying instead that conservation could be used to double energy efficiency in the next four years and halt the growth of greenhouse gases caused by data centers. It also suggests a few key things to bring costs and energy usage into line. Suggestions include making sure data centers increase the utilization of their servers from an average of 6 percent through the use of virtualization. Improving efficiency by decommissioning older servers is also recommended.

Another way to conserve costs and energy is to assign responsibility for conservation to the CIO and to get executives involved in making decisions about data centers and IT. Finally, the report calls for an industry-wide efficiency metric for data centers, although as we’ve previously argued, getting such a metric in place will be a challenge. Doing these things should both decrease energy use but also increase the bottom line, which makes conservation a green solution indeed.

The U.S. economy may be sputtering, but there was some good news coming out of the cleantech world this morning. First Solar, the poster child of cleantech IPOs and the so-called “Google of solar,” reported a sharp rise in its profit and revenue for the latest quarter. The company also said it now expects that its revenue could top $1 billion for the full-year period.

First Solar reported net earnings of $46.6 million, or 57 cents a share, for the three-month period ended March 29, a more than nine-fold increase from its profit of $5.03 million, or 7 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier. Revenue jumped to $196.9 million from $66.9 million in the first quarter of 2007. On a conference call this morning, First Solar CFO Jens Meyerhoff said the company now expects full-year revenue to come in between $975 million and $1.05 billion, up from a prior forecast of between $900 million and $950 million.

Shares of First Solar surged as much as 8 percent to change hands for $307.80, just shy of its 52-week high. This is the same First Solar that we thought might be “crashing back to earth” at the start of the year and was chosen by Jim Gillies on Motley Fool as the “Worst Stock for 2008.” So what’s the deal? Is the solar industry really worth this much or is this a boom-bust cycle, as our own Stacey Higginbotham has posited? Or are First Solar’s financials a testament to a slowly maturing industry that is still growing according to Moore’s Law?

Continue reading this story