A resolution to separate the chairman and CEO positions at ExxonMobil failed to receive a simple majority today at the energy company's annual shareholder meeting in Dallas. The resolution was one of four promulgated by descendants of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller aimed at getting ExxonMobil to focus on energy portfolio diversification and environmental conservation. Needless to say, all four resolutions were voted down at the meeting. The Rockefeller descendants collectively own only 0.006 percent of the company's 5.4 billion shares - this relatively small shareholding was likely part of the reason behind the resolution's failure. The resolution was aimed at diminishing the power of chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson who has been loathe to move the energy giant from its base in fossil fuel exploration, development and production. At last year's shareholder meeting, Tillerson famously told the assembly if they were interested in renewable energy, they should move their cash over to Shell. Only 39.5 of the proxy voters voted in favor of the resolution, down slightly from 40 percent on a similar resolution last year. The question remains, however, if separating the two positions would have resulted in a strengthened focus on portfolio diversification. While Shell and BP have separate spots, neither Chevron nor ConocoPhillips have made that step. The former two companies have made more substantial gains in renewable energy investment and development, while the latter two have largely stayed in the background developing biodiesel joint ventures or investing in pure-play ocean power companies, for example. Still, their contribution has been much more noticeable than ExxonMobil's. Florida Power & Light is another company with a unified chairman/CEO position. Lewis Hay III, who occupies those positions at FP&L, announced yesterday the company would invest between $16 billion and $20 billion over the next five years in developing renewable capacity. FP&L has the second largest installed renewable capacity under management in the world, trailing leader Iberdrola by about GW, though it has roughly 22 GW in its development pipeline, mostly in wind power. This brings us to a larger point - whether internal, internecine board warfare is really the necessary component for portfolio diversification. It's possible that the scale of ExxonMobil's market share is really what's preventing it from getting involved in renewables. It's king of the hill status among non-state oil companies will allow it weather the peak oil and declining margin storm more ably than some of its smaller competitors. So, really, what's the point? A similar effect was highlighted this morning with Indonesia's announcement that it will drop out of OPEC. The cartel's only Asian member and only member who's also a net importer of oil, dropped out to protest the cartel's refusal to rise production in a bid to drop prices. Similarly, as the margin squeeze in the oil industry continues to affect company stock performance, it's possible we can expect more than a few of the smaller oil companies to become more aggressive in their pursuit of renewable capacity. If we take the assumption that boards of directors are ultimately responsible to their shareholders - the SEC certainly does - then we must also assume one of the only things that will get boards to respond to demands for increased diversification is poor performance. This was demonstrated recently with BP's announcement to shed its investment in renewables because of declining company profits. Soon, this effect will start moving oil companies - including ExxonMobil - in the other direction.

Phil Giudice, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources, spoke today at Greentech Media's PV Annual 2008 on the Commonwealth's plan to hit grid parity with PV in the near future. The Commish took an interesting tack, though. Instead of waiting for module and installed costs to come down, he's going to wait for retail electricity prices to go up. Massachusetts has one of the highest retail electricity rates in the country - about $0.15/kWh, putting it up there with Hawaii, New York and California. According to Giudice, rising natural gas prices will push this price up to (and past) $0.20/kWh. Wholesale natural gas prices have risen close to 40 percent in the last few years, which has had a drastic effect on the cost of electricity generation in the Commonwealth. But how will this affect PV prices? Most analysts have pointed to $4.00 per watt as the tipping for explosive demand growth in the PV market. However, given the still unpredictable polysilicon supply market, the inability of a-Si and CIGS manufacturers to ramp up volume production to meet demand, and the likely failure of production tax credits in the U.S., it is unlikely the installed system cost will drop to this level until 2012 at the earliest. Giudice thinks this is relatively unimportant. Backed by the right policy-based incentives, like Massachusetts's Commonwealth Solar Initiative - a $68 million plan to increase PV capacity in the state to 250 MW by 2017, pushing PV on the market at prices above $4.00 per watt will work as long as the natural gas-based retail electricity rates continue growing at their precipitous rate. Hearing this argument, Prometheus Institute President Travis Bradford put his head in his hands and exclaimed, "That's good. I was right. That was lucky." Travis has long predicted possible tipping points occurring before the $4.00 per watt price mark. The Commonwealth Solar Initiative, combined with Massachusetts's participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, as well as Giudice's work promoting the expansion of net metering and RPS caps, means the PV market in Massachusetts has the potential to exhibit a 40 percent cumulative annual growth rate. Based on this, Giudice thinks it may be possible to generate between 20 percent and 40 percent of the state's electricity from PV if retail electricity rates remain at the $0.20/kWh level - or maybe more if they go higher. This is equivalent to 2.5 GW to 5 GW of installed PV capacity. With global installed levels hovering around 7 GW, and with projections for 10 GW to 12 GW by 2011, Giudice's goal is nothing but ambitious. However, countered against rising electricity prices, Giudice argues PV is the most "effective hedge against a rising fossil fueled future." Proposals to resurrect the state's whale oil industry failed to gain the necessary votes in the State House. Something about the smell.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant and arbiter of all things cool, will be sponsoring a conference in Washington D.C. on June 11 and 12 on plug-in hybrids with the Brookings Institute. The company is asking viewers to submit videos on why they’d like to own a plug-in hybrid. Post the video by June 4 on YouTube. The company will also likely discuss the data it has been gathering on its own use of plug-in hybrids as corporate fleet cars. It should be an interesting event. But keep this in mind: although plug-ins cut fuel consumption, the cost/performance benefits over plain vanilla Prius hybrids remains a work in progress. Here’s some data from Google’s own site. The plug-ins it owns get an average of 66.2 miles per gallon, a figure that factors in the power these cars obtain from electricity fed in from wall sockets. Regular Priuses get 44.6 miles per gallon. That’s nearly a 50 percent increase in fuel economy. Go team plug-in! The plug-ins also get more than triple the 19.8 miles per gallon figure for the U.S. car fleet as a whole. But when you translate the mileage into dollars, the comparisons to normal Priuses are less exciting. The plug-ins owned by Google use 425 fewer gallons of gas per year than a regular car. A normal Prius uses 337 fewer gallons. Thus, a plug-in only uses 88 fewer gallons a year (assuming you drive 12,000 miles a year) than a regular Prius. If gas costs $4 a gallon, that means the plug-in only saves $352 a year. If gas costs $5, you save $440. (Google will also likely provide updates on this data.) Unfortunately, converting a regular Prius into a plug-in costs anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 now. Paying off the cost of the retrofit with gas savings at the moment, therefore, takes decades of driving. But many consumers right now are willing to pay that. And when manufacturers such as GM begin to build plug-ins at the factory in the next few years, the price premium will drop substantially. Mileage for plug-ins will also be higher in most instances. Google uses its cars for short hops around town, which cuts mileage. If you drive the cars on the freeway more, or take them for longer jaunts, plug-in mileage can get into the 80 mile per gallon plus range, Alec Proudfoot, an engineering product manager at Google working on RechargeIT (the name of the plug-in effort), told me earlier this year. And in the interests of disclosure, I’ll insert my own opinion. Plug-ins and clean diesels represent the best opportunities to reduce gas consumption, but plug-ins face a challenge when it comes to battery prices. If manufacturers can get the plug-in premium (over a regular hybrid) to $5,000 plug-ins will fly off the showroom floor.

Verenium, the cellulosic ethanol company that faced close to $440 million in deficits only two months ago, announced this morning it has entered the commissioning phase of its new 1.4 million gallon 'commercial' scale ethanol refinery in Louisiana. This is the first and largest completed cellulosic ethanol plant in the U.S., beating out Coskata's 40,000 gallon refinery and Range Fuels's 10 million gallon vaporware plant. Verenium's plant, which will test out a couple different variations of the company's technology, will convert agricultural waste from sugarcane production at a price close to $2 per gallon. Differently from the small pilot facilities built so far, Verenium's plant is designed to run continuously as a commercial production facility. The plant will use a few different enzymatic combinations to break down bagasse from so-called 'energy cane', a variety with a high fiber and low sugar content that allows the plant to grow taller, increasing yield per plot. Verenium's goal is to perfect its enzymatic combinations with an eye towards selecting one for a series of 20 million to 30 million gallon commercial refineries it plans to begin construction on within the year. To get around some of the feedstock availability problems that have plagued other ethanol producers, Verenium has begun working with farmers in Louisiana to produce energy cane on a commercial scale. The company will take advantage of the production incentives included in the recent Farm Bill to assist farmers in switching over from food crops. Energy cane is a perennial plant, which won't reach commercial production levels until two or three years from now - if planting begins tomorrow. This, combined with the fact that most commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants won't come online for at least the next three years, means the production incentives are essential for convincing farmers to grow crops to sell into a market that doesn't yet exist. The problems Verenium reported in their March 10-K may evaporate as a result of their successful plant launch. The company was having issues attracting follow-on investment and project finance, while sinking most of its funding into the Jennings refinery. It appears they have managed to work through some of the costly technological problems at the plant, though they'll definitely need a considerable level of financing to bring their series of planned commercial plants online in the next few years. The Department of Energy will likely help defray some of this cost, as will incentives derived from the Renewable Fuels Standard. However, without private project financing, growth prospects will be significantly limited.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) will unveil sweeping climate change legislation in the House of Representatives today. The legislation aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent between 2012 and 2050, led principally by an aggressive cap-and-trade scheme. Under Markey's plan business would be eligible to buy emissions permits up their alloted level through a government auction. This differs from early European schemes, other cap-and-trade legislation wending its way through Congress, and the proposal offered by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, all of which are based on free distribution of emissions credits. The credit auctions, according to Markey's estimates, would raise nearly $8 trillion over the program's lifetime, to be used principally for funding rebates and tax credits for green technology, helping defray rising energy costs for middle- and low-income home owners, and as an assistance platform for helping developing countries reduce their emissions. Power company Duke Energy has launched a bid to install 800,000 smart meters in Indiana. The statewide program will be the country's largest smart grid deployment, if it receives regulatory approval from the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, and is part of the company's plan to expand smart grid services throughout its five state service area in the Carolinas, Ohio, and Kentucky. It is likely the smart grid deployment will involve several different companies providing networking services, device installation, and IP protocol links - enough to make you nostalgiac for 1996, huh? - to make the proposed Indiana smart grid capable of providing real time data flow and energy management tools on both the demand and supply side. Duke, which is member of the smart grid trade group GridWise Alliance, has worked with GridPoint and Echelon in the past for smaller prototype deployments. The Indiana plans follow on the heels of an announcement by Oncor, a Texas utility, to spend $690 million deploying three million smart meters across its service area in North Texas. A legislative battle is taking shape in Brussels, as European Members of Parliament have recently rejected watered down proposals to regulate emissions from the EU's rapidly expanding aviation sector. The MEPs have demanded airlines cut emissions 10 percent by 2011, a number set to a 20 percent reduction on 1990 levels by 2020. National government representatives have offered a less ambitious plan allowing airlines to remain at their 2004-2006 levels through 2012. It's funny, right, because I thought babassu nuts were carbon neutral. A short programming note - I, along with the rest of the GTM team will be at our PV Annual 2008 today (it's not too late to sign up), so you expect constantly updated info on the state of the global solar industry. And funny photos of Travis Bradford.

Back in 2006, semiconductor equipment giant Applied Materials unfurled a strategy that the company said would reduce the time and cost of putting up solar panel factories.

The world is now seeing the results of that. Signet Solar announced last week that it erected a thin film solar facility in Dresden, Germany: it took about ten months to complete. Construction of the 200,000 square foot production facility took about seven months and the installation of equipment took less than three months. The factory is based around an integrated manufacturing process from Applied. In a sense, it's like buying a solar factory in a box. 

The plant is a generation 8.5 plant, meaning that it produces cells on sheets of glass measuring 5.7 square meters, or 2.2 meters by 2.6 meters. It’s the world’s first Gen 8.5 solar plant.  In fact, most LCD TV makers haven’t even graduated to Gen 8.5 plants yet.

Signet will release prototypes in early June and full production will begin in the third quarter. The company hopes to expand production at the Dresden site to 100 megawatts in 2009. (Signet will discuss its Gen 8.5 plant at Intersolar, the solar hoedown taking place in June in Munich.)

And who is Signet Solar? It’s not an old-line solar company. It was formed in 2006 and is largely staffed by  execs from the chip industry. Chairman and founder Prabhu Goel was a longtime exec at IBM and Cadence Design Systems, which makes software for designing chips. CEO Rajeeva Lahri came from Intersil. Vice president of business development Keshav Prasad comes from Applied Materials. (Side note: First Solar and DayStar Technologies have also recently hired Applied Materials/Solyndra alums.)

Signet will also open factories in India. Applied is also building turnkey factories for others.

One can argue that this is all smoke and mirrors. The chip industry is different than the solar industry and that there is no reason to think that newcomers can displace those with decades of experience. On the other hand, I am familiar with the chip industry. It is a competitive, unforgiving place. The industry thrives on cutting costs, grinding out technological advances at regular pace, ramping up production facilities rapidly and starting price wars. Applied helped a number of Taiwanese companies get into the semiconductor business in the 80s and now Taiwan is one of the top centers for chip innovation. Take it from me: the chip guys will change the solar industry. 

Signet’s silicon thin film panels aren’t as efficient at generating power from the sun as crystalline solar panels. Signet says it will get about an eight to ten percent efficiency with its panels, close to half the efficiency of good crystalline panels. But the company says it uses much less raw materials and thus they cost less.

Everyone seems to be looking at ways to exploit stranded methane these days. Pacific Gas & Electic and Microgy are in separate experiments extracting methane, or natural gas, from cow manure in large-scale digesters. Large waste companies are capturing the gas generated by rotting garbage at the dump and transporting it. And now the Pacific Northwest National Labs has completed the first part of a project that could allow refiners to capture methane that gets expelled in oil fields. Right now, the methane that bubbles up from underground oil wells gets flared off. It looks cool in pictures: nothing gives that end-of-the-world ambience like a smoky oil flare. But burning methane adds greenhouse gases into the air. Besides, with methane prices climbing, that’s just money up in smoke. Researchers at the lab have identified the structure of a catalyst that can convert methane into an easier-to-transport liquid. The catalyst--molybdenum oxide sitting on a zeolite mineral—has been known since the 1930s, but the exact structure and mechanics of the reaction were not. The recent breakthrough in understanding the reaction opens the possibility of coming up with a cheap, commercially viable way of converting methane. In some ways, the effort is similar to the gas-to-liquid plant operated by Shell in Qatar. There, Shell has taken a stranded methane field, i.e. one that’s not connected to a pipeline, and created a plant that can convert it to a car fuel. The fuel is expensive, but it burns fairly clean.