Twenty. That's the number of major utilities that are experimenting with the TREE (Tendril Residential Energy Ecosystem) from smart metering start-up Tendril. Fifteen of the utilities are engaged in lab tests with the Boulder-based company, four are preparing field pilots and another will kick off a commercial rollout to consumers in the next few weeks. Collectively, these these utilities serve 56 million customers, according to CEO Adrian Tuck. It's a notable achievement and, in the increasingly crowded field of smart metering and automated energy management, it is the sort of metric that will underscore who is winning and who is falling behind. Why? Utilities will be the key players in this field for the next several years. In automated energy management, homes are outfitted with intelligent thermostats, power supplies, light switches and other pieces of electrical equipment that connect to each other and ultimately their power-supplying utilities via a series of wireless and wired networks. The electrical appliances in a home can then be throttled back to conserve power. Depending on the contract and relationship between the utility and the customer, the utility can control the system, or the customer can set up his or her own rules. The utility is the lynchpin because, in most cases, the utility will pay the bill and install the equipment. Most people can barely program their digital thermostats and they aren't going to rush out to Home Depot to replace them with new equipment. Thus, you need utilities to thrive. Comverge and EnerNoc, the early leaders in the field, did so through relationships with utilities. Tendril seems to be growing largely by being cooperative. The company's equipment is tuned to work with the most popular standard protocols, such as Zigbee. (Tuck actually worked on the low-power wireless standard.). The company also allow customers to set their own rules regarding energy consumption or leave that job to the utility. Tendril's Insight, a home control and information panel, provides homeowners with a constant, visual tally of how much electricity they are paying at any given moment. When the rate goes higher, the thermostat flashes red. The Insight also provides data on how much power you are consuming compared to similarly situated neighbors. Thermostat and power consumption settings can all be set from a PC. Granted, many other companies such as Threshold and Agilewaves tout similar features, but Tendril has put it together in a fairly smooth fashion. Almost every appliance in the house can thrive on less electricity, said Tuck. Garage freezers, for instance, can be put on a five minute on/five minute off rotation without risking a bout of botulism or freezer burn. The company charges around $1 per month per consumer to the utility. The actual hardware costs an additional fee, but you can plug in non-Tendril hardware into the system.). Consumers save around $100 a year threw lower energy consumption, said Tuck. Utilities can potentially save more; if enough customers sign up, it obviates the need to fire up peak capacity plants. The company, which started the year with 17 employees, will probably pass 100 in the near future, said Tuck.

Intel makes its third solar investment in the last month. Intel Capital continued its surge in the solar market with this morning’s announcement of a $12.5 million investment in precursor chemical company, Voltaix.  Founded in 1986, Voltaix makes electronic chemicals and gases used in semiconductor manufacturing and CVD precursors such as germane, used in the production of advanced PV cells. Voltaix’ materials are intended for in thin film PV cells using amorphous silicon, CdTe and CIGS (as opposed to wafered silicon).  The market share for thin film solar is only about 10% today but that share is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.   XsunX is one of Voltaix’ customers. Intel just spun out SpectraWatt with a $50 million investment, joined by Cogentrix Energy, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund, and Solon AG.  SpectraWatt manufacturers and supplies PV cells to solar module manufacturers. Intel’s third recent solar play was a $38 million investment in German company Sulfurcell as part of an enormous $134 million infusion to build a plant to make solar cells using thin film CIS or CIGS. Other investors included Climate Change Capital Private Equity, AIG, Demeter Partners, Zouk Ventures and BankInvest. On one hand, it’s nice to see a major global player like Intel jump into the solar fray.  On the other hand, they’re more than a bit late in their sudden discovery of the $20B photovoltaic market. Intel once made a similar discovery of an overheating optical networking market in the late 90s.  They made some big acquisitions and many VC investments but few if any of those bets paid off and they ended up closing, selling, or abandoning those units.  Let’s hope that this is not a repeat of that late entry.

British Energy, the UK's nuclear power monopoly, will likely be sold to Electricité de France this week in a deal valuing the company at close to $25 billion. Though negotiations are ongoing and the parties are still apart on the precise value per share of British Energy (EdF thinks the 750p per share valuation a bit too rich), both sides are expecting to end the week with the largest transfer of wealth from Britain to France since Jane Birkin married Serge Gainsbourg. For some, the sale has aroused feelings of economic nationalism. Unlike in the U.S., where we prefer to keep our state-owned enterprises at least nominally private, the Europeans have no problem taking an active position in their largest companies. The British government owns 35 percent of British Energy, while the French governments owns close to 85 percent of EdF. Dieter Helm, an Oxford professor and energy expert, said the sale means "essentially handing the British nuclear industry to the French government." For a country looking to jumpstart their nuclear power industry, I don't think you could do any better than handing it over to the French. They've got nuclear in spades. Britain's decision to move ahead with its nuclear modernization plan, which involves building 10 subsidy-free reactors in the next 25 years at a cost of $140 billion, is flawed for two reasons. Well, three, if you count handing it over to the French. I don't. First, the plan will lead to a reorganization of the British electricity supply industry, effectively killing the only good thing Maggie Thatcher accomplished in her time as PM. The British electricity supply industry was restructured in the early 1990s, a move that paved the way for electricity trading on wholesale power markets and presaged our own move toward deregulation. Restructuring broke up the traditional vertically integrated monopolies, which controlled generation, transmission and distribution, and retail service, and required that generation companies sell their power in bulk through a combination of spot trading and forward agreements to utilities over independently owned wires. This was done to spur competition, to reduce the overhang of depreciating capital stock, and to make generation more efficient. British Energy, incidentally, is one of the largest participants in the wholesale markets - though their presence as an independent power producer is due largely to series of regulations and subsidies that look more like life support than red tape. That the bid-in price of nuclear energy runs close to £0.00/kWh no doubt makes for some serious liquidity problems in the wholesale markets. EdF, which already has a significant presence in Britain, would control about 20 percent of the country's installed capacity after the sale goes through. The only way to sustain generation capacity of this size without subsidies is to re-integrate the company and rely on some form of rate-of-return regulation to push costs to the consumer base. In other words, an indirect subsidy paid for by the British people. Removing such a substantial amount of capacity from the British wholesale market will do more than ruin what little liquidity that currently exists. It will also raise entry barriers for independent power producers, and slough of investment in new capacity. With all this nuclear capacity about to come online, maybe the UK doesn't need another CCGT plant. But it does need to build a lot more offshore wind - about 33 GW worth - to fulfill its EU obligations. Market failure on the supply side will make this a lot tougher. Second, and perhaps less talked about, are the significant water requirements of nuclear energy. Power stations generally account for about one third of all water consumed in Europe, though nuclear power stations have water requirements as much as 83 percent greater than those of other types of generators. In the Summer of 2006, much of Europe's nuclear capacity had to be taken offline because the heat wave roiling the Continent created drought-like conditions that made generating nuclear power extremely difficult. EdF, which generates more than 75 percent of France's electricity from its nuclear power stations, was forced to buy electricity on the spot markets to meet demand. Incidentally, after the British Energy sale goes through, there may not be a spot market big enough to pick up excess load in case this happens again. Water scarcity is not the only problem. Nuclear plants are also tied to severe water pollution and irradiation as well as ecosystem disruption as fish and plant life are exposed to water inflow pipes and heated outflow. It's possible that if the deal moves forward this week, British and EU regulators may force some kind of competitive output arrangement. This would throw a bone to the independent power producers, but probably not the fish.

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.