A lot of cell phones end up in the toilet, but not on purpose. While precise numbers are tough to come by, it happens enough so that if you waterproofed cell phones, you could extend the average life of many of them by a year, according to Captain John Konrad, who runs the gCaptain blog and is one of the people helping to promote Golden Shellback, a waterproof coating for electronics devised by the Northeast Martime Institute. Apply the coating to a cell phone or a notebook and you can submerge them without harm. The NMI is now trying to commercialize the coating. It actually evolved from a splash proof coating for a man overboard system. It's somewhat expensive now, but could come down with volume production. NMI has been in contact with several large vendors. Konrad also noted that the coating is environmentally safe. To demonstrate it, Sid Martin, the director of technology at NMI, coated a sugar cube and ate it. Konrad, by the way, is a licensed ship captain who follows nautical technology through his blog. Earlier this year, I spoke to him about green ship designs.

The new home of Other World Computing, a large computer dealer in Woodstock Illinois, is about as green as you can get. The building, which will ultimately aim for LEED platinum certification, sports a geothermal heating and cooling system, a reflective roof and a system from Sunlight Direct that pumps sunlight from a reflector dish into the building with fiber optic tubes. The sunlight system, which becomes operational by October, will provide about 1/3 of the light for the outfit, with about 2/3s coming from high-end florescent bulbs, said CEO Lawrence O'Connor. "In the warehouse, reuse of materials occurs where practical," he wrote in an email after we spoke. "We invested in a commercial bailer which compacts recyclables into pallet sized bails that we are then able to actually get some resale value from. We started this kind of thing at a lower level in our old facility, but are working to pursue a zero waste status as we get worked into our new home." There are other nuances too. The ducting system, for conveying hot or cold air, was designed with precision to minimize the number of turns and kinks. The fewer turns, the less heat loss, he explains. The downside? Building the new facility to platinum standards boosted the construction price by 35 percent. Some building owners have curbed the costs increases by going for lower levels of certification. Still, building green costs more. Overall, it should take about 15 to 17 years to achieve a return on investment when you look at the additional costs in terms of today's energy prices. Any regrets? No, says O'Connor, who is a firm believer in conserving resources. Besides, energy prices will likely climb in the next two decades which will shorten the time required for return on investment. There are indirect benefits too. "I’d have expected a reasonable productivity gain even in a conventional building given the crowded in location we moved from – but there is definitely a clear indication that the natural light and extra environmental details we’ve provided to benefit our team is producing additional benefit back," he said. I can back him up on the productivity gains. The quality of light from sunlight systems are distinctly better than the light you get from florescent bulbs. Maybe Apple, with its somewhat dismal record for sustainability, can learn a thing or two here.

Following up on my previous post, here are a few more things from the California Clean Tech Open presented at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Here’s a list of the 44 finalists vying for the “$100,000 Startup in a Box" prize package. It’s worth taking a scan of these firms to get a flavor of the range of clean-tech technology and entrepreneurs – everything from desalination to diapers, from solar concentrators to plug-in hybrid chargers. Some quotes from the hallways:

• Power Assure’s Donnie Foster said that his firm’s pending software “can cut Data Center electricity bills by 50 per cent. According to Gartner, Data Centers need to go from “always-on to always-available.â€? Power Assure’s uses load shifting and load shedding to correlate IT load with energy consumption.

• Green Plug’s VP of Business Development, Seth Socolow said that his company’s “goal is to rid the world of external power supplies. The model of every device coming with a dedicated power is a broken model.â€? He went on to claim that 3.2 billion external power supplies will be manufactured and shipped in 2008 and 2 billion will go into landfills.

• Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, is a developer of eco-friendly building materials. The startup recently acquired Alpen Windows, an energy-conscious window manufacturer. Mr. Surace enthusiastically rattled off some statistics:
  • 9 percent of global energy goes to passenger cars, but 52 percent is tied to buildings, and 12 percent of global energy usage goes to inefficient building materials.
  • “After you’ve taken care of walls, insulation and ducts – you’re left with windows, which is why we acquired Alpen Windows,â€? said Surface. “The R value of most windows is terrible, the best is R3. The DOE has been trying to raise the R value of windows for years but the only people who talk about R value is us and Alpen Windows.That’s why we bought them.â€?

• Gigagreen plans on building a dirigible that extracts energy from the jet stream and transmits it wirelessly to earth. The company’s “high altitude wind energyâ€? platform “beams powerâ€? to earth – using what? Alex Flemming, the founder, would not reveal the precise method. He denied it was microwaves, which I think leaves a long extension cord or lasers or magic as the only other technology alternatives. The company is looking for funding.

Ausra has a proprietary Thermal Energy Storage method and the company is not talking about it. However, insiders tell me that storage material is being mined and shipped for Ausra on a huge scale. Thermal Energy Storage (TES) can allow parabolic trough power plants to store solar thermal energy at peak solar hours and to dispatch the power when it's needed. According to NREL, TES can allow parabolic trough power plants to reach annual capacity factors of up to 70 percent (versus 25 percent without thermal storage.) Josef Eichhammer of Solar Millenium spoke about molten salt thermal storage at a panel I moderated at Intersolar and I blogged about it here. The company is building molten salt storage on a massive scale. It is a proven, reliable, non-toxic material and construction is underway at a number of molten-salt TES systems around the world, notably the Andasol facility in Granada, Spain. Also at Intersolar in San Francisco, Ausra’s Chief Development Officer Robert Morgan mentioned that Ausra was working on a thermal storage technology that was not molten salt-based. He would not be specific about the storage medium. I asked Glen Davis, Ausra’s EVP, to comment and he was non-communicative on the subject as well. (Although, he was plenty communicative about financing solar thermal projects though.) Anyway that leaves me to guess what the company anticipates using to store thermal energy in their trough-based solar thermal system. One can store the energy directly in the steam or oil collector medium but that’s not too efficient.  NREL talks about the use of molten salt, cement or concrete, a thermocline, or PCM (Phase Change Material). Here are some comparisons of these technologies. And a brief presentation on concrete storage can be found here.