Copenhagen--Yes, you can make plastic forks out of it. Agroplast, a green chemistry start-up in Denmark, has figured out a way to produce plastics, fuel additives and other products from the urine of barnyard animals. The system automatically collects the urine, separates out the urea, and then prepares the urea for a useful life beyond the farm. Chemical manufacturers now use urea in a variety of products, but it is largely artificially produced by cracking natural gas, or methane. That top picture you're looking at is a solid plastic bottle made from urea from the farm-collected urea. That stuff in the white dish is what urea looks like when solidified. It sort of has a texture like Crisco, in case you were wondering. Getting urea straight from the farm has a number of benefits, says Chairman Jes Thomsen. For one thing, you're not digging up buried fossil fuels to make chemicals. The urea comes from a renewable process. Two, pig waste product is now a major problem for farmers. In the U.S., farmers have to pay collectors around $86 per pig per year (not counting subsidies) to dispose of the waste. Pigs produce a lot more waste than can be used as fertilizer. Third, there are a lot of pigs out there. the pigs in the U.S. produce enough urine to cover the urea needs of the states. The U.S. now imports 50 percent of its urea. The pig population in Canada, the U.S. and the six largest European countries comes to 200 million pigs. If you collected four percent of that urine, you're talking 2. 5 million tons a year. Fourth, it's cheaper. Thomsen estimates that the company's products could cost half to produce as those produced with natural gas, once Agroplast hits volume. Farmers in Europe also get credits for employing high tech solutions like this. Fifth, you could drastically cut down shipping costs and fuel consumption. Natural gas comes from the Middle East and Russia. "But s... is everywhere," said COO Bent Hundrup. Here is how it works. The company has a collection system that lets the waste from pigs fall through a grate. Once beneath the grate, the urine is rapidly separated from the manure. If the separation isn't accomplished quickly, the urine turns to ammonia, said Thomsen. Ammonia is actually the source of the terrible smells on farms (chalk up another benefit.). Agroplast then removes the yellow color, water and other materials. It's a tricky process. "Urea is a small molecule," Thomsen said. The company's first product, coming next year, is AgroBlue, which is sprayed into the tailpipe of diesel cars and trucks to eliminate NOx fumes. It is a mixture of urea and water. It is chemically identical to Adblue, a formula produced right now out of urea-produced methane. The EU mandates these sort of chemicals and the U.S. will have similar regulations soon. (That's Jes holding the bottle of AgroBlue, by the way.) Plastics will follow. The AgroBlue product was simply easier to produce, explained Hundrup. Bioplastics are clearly moving beyond corn. University of College Dublin is experimenting with a way to convert difficult-to-recycle plastic into a biodegradable form of plastic with the help of bacteria. The company does not sell the equipment. Instead, it installs a system on large farms (or near groups of smaller farms) and then charges farmers to eliminate their waste, albeit in an economically advantageous way to the farmer. In some cases, the company may even offer to take waste away for free as a way to build market share. Agroplast then processes the chemicals and sells them The company has proven the technology works in prototype plants in the U.S. and Europe and is currently seeking funding to build commercial-sized plants. A single module of their technology would serve 25,000 pigs and cost $2 million dollars. And once they do get into mass manufacturing, the plants will probably become one of the more popular and memorable third grade field trips around. There's another benefit.

Part One and Part Two of this CPV series covered high- and low-concentration PV systems, respectively. Part Three follows here and is devoted to firms developing and building the high-efficiency semiconductor cells that perform the actual solar power conversion. With a genesis in the space satellite industry, multi-junction compound semiconductor cells from the III-V groups are starting to see VC investment and offer a bit of a challenge to the existing Emcore-Spectrolab-Azur triple-junction oligopoly. Startups building triple-junction cells like Cyrium, Solar Junction and QuantaSol are a natural for venture capital investors, even those new to cleantech and solar. They are compound semiconductor plays, some are fabless, and VCs have domain experience in these sectors. We expect to see Spectrolab and Emcore challenged not only by these VC-funded startups but also by LED and laser companies with experience in MOVPE and these material sets. Here’s the list (which includes a Ge substrate manufacturer and a thin-film Ge company as well): Aonex: Aonex, owned by AmberWave, with technology from the Atwater group at Caltech, builds a triple junction cell with a silicon solar subcell. Here’s the patent. And here’s a paper on their GaInP/GaAs dual junction solar cells on Ge/Si epitaxial templates. Azur Space: German-based III-V and Si solar cell vendor with a long history of supplying space applications and, more recently, terrestrial CPV applications. Azur’s GaAs cells are manufactured by MOVPE on germanium substrates. Cesi Ricerca: Developing III-V solar cells for CPV. Cyrium: Quantum dot-based triple-junction solar cell startup with VC funding from the Quercus Trust, et al. Here’s a link to a relevant patent awarded to the company and its CTO, Simon Fafard. Emcore: Emcore is a publicly traded, vertically integrated supplier of III-V solar cells as well as CPV systems and is contemplating an IPO for its solar unit in 2009. (See Part One of this series for details on its systems.) Emcore's cells are said to sell for less than Spectrolab’s cells. It claims to be shipping more than $1 million in solar cells in the third quarter. IQE: AIM-listed firm providing wafer outsourcing including InGaAsP and InGaN epi wafers. Microlink Devices: Received $3.2 million from the DOE SAI PV Module Incubator program for multijunction solar cells. Microlink claim that its MOCVD technology and unique processing steps minimizes the amount of GaAs used in the solar cells. QuantaSol: “Strain-Balanced Quantum Well� triple-junction PV cells from this U.K.-based, VC-funded startup with technology developed at Imperial College London. QuantaSol claims that the spectral response of an SB-QWPV cell can be tuned to maximize conversion efficiency under a “wide range of radiation spectra by varying composition and thickness of the III-V semiconductor nano-layers in the active region of the solar cell.� Solapoint: High-efficiency GaAs solar cell wafer manufacturing foundry service. Solar Junction: III-V materials startup Solar Junction CEO Jim Weldon and VP Craig Stauffer confirmed that their funding was “north of $3 million,� the company’s goal is to create very high-efficiency, triple-junction cells for CPV systems, and that the “secret is in the EPI.� NEA is an investor. Spectrolab: Spectrolab has shipped about 4 MW of CPV cells to date and is moving from 100-mm to 150-mm substrates. Spectrolab has won one of the largest terrestrial III-V solar cell orders from Solar Systems with a claimed 350 MW purchase worth over $93 million. Spectrolab also signed a supply contract with OPEL for 10 MW of cells to be delivered in 2008. It is estimated that Spectrolab's cells currently cost its customers around $0.90 per watt of power generated. Spire: Spire has MOCVD capabilities to provide GaAs epi materials. Sylarus: Sylarus is a startup that claims to be a source for the Ge substrates used by Emcore and Spectrolab in its cells. The company is producing 6-inch germanium wafers. VPEC Asia: GaAs epi-wafers. Wakonda: “Virtual Single Crystal� high-efficiency, thin-film solar cells using III-V semiconductors on flexible metal foils. Wakonda claims to be able to produce a Ge film on a flexible metal substrate to replace expensive Ge crystal wafer substrate. The company raised a $9.5 million round A from ATV, General Catalyst, Polaris, Applied Ventures and MGEF. Here’s a link to one of Wakonda’s patents. Click here to continue to Part Four: Concentrated Photovoltaic Poetry Corner With Sunrgi.