Michael Kanellos: December 11, 2008, 12:58 PM

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Quercus Puts Money Into Lightwave: That’s 37 Companies and Counting

Lightwave Power—which wants to make a film that can be added to solar cells to boost efficiency and/or cut manufacturing costs—closed a first round of funding from the secretive Quercus Trust and 21Ventures.

Founded in January of this year, Lightwave is actually part of a new wave of companies that are getting into solar without necessarily making solar cells. Instead, they are concentrating on films or other additives that will improve the performance of cells. Some of these companies might make solar cells too, but licensing seems destined to play a part in the business plan. 1366 Technologies, for instance, will make solar cells but it will also license the technology for texturing silicon inside cells to capture light. Sionyx has something similar. NetCrystal, meanwhile, stretches silicon so the material will be better exposed to light.

Licensing has its advantages. Companies don’t have to build their own mass manufacturing plant. Then again, getting a large manufacturer to adopt a startup’s technology and then pay for it is often an uphill challenge. In semiconductors, you usually have to sue someone in court and win before they pry the wallet open.

The Lightwave investment marks the 37th confirmed investment I’ve counted for Quercus, the green VC fund founded by multimillionaire math whiz David Gelbaum. Gelbaum made a fortune devising algorithms for hedge funds. Now, he spends his time giving to charitable causes and funding companies. Some are already active in the market (GridPoint) while others are probably still a few years off (Hydro Green Energy.)

We put a list together in early November with 34 confirmed investments. Since then, we and readers have turned up investments in Evolution Robotics and Cool Earth Solar. The firm may also have investments in Valcent Products (biofuels) and Composite Tech.

Jeff St. John: December 11, 2008, 11:26 AM

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DOE Calls CHP a Big Fat Target for Energy Savings

Forget solar panels on every rooftop. How about a combined heat-and-power system in one out of every five factories instead?

When it comes to low-hanging energy efficiency fruit, capturing the heat wasted by the industrial sector and turning it into electricity is a huge apple ripe for the plucking.

At least that’s what a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy says. The roughly 9 percent of U.S. factories that now use these so-called combined heat and power, or CHP systems (also known as cogeneration systems) produced about 506 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2006 — about 12 percent of the power consumed that year, the report says.

That was enough to save the country 1.9 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) of fuel used to make electricity — about 2 percent of the nation’s total appetite. One BTU equals the energy of one burning match — multiply it by a quadrillion, and you’ve got about the same amount of energy that is contained in 8 billion gallons of gasoline.

But if 20 percent of U.S. industrial facilities were to install CHP systems by 2030, that energy savings would grow to 5.3 billion BTUs, about half the power U.S. households now consume, according to DOE’s report.

That would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 850 million tons a year, or the equivalent of taking 154 million cars off the road, Doug Kaempf, program manager for DOE’s Industrial Technologies Program, said Thursday in a presentation for the Virtual Energy Forum.

“If you’re talking one technology that could do this, this is amazing,� Kaempf said during the online event featuring live video discussions of green technology business and research leaders.

There’s plenty of waste heat to go around. Arun Majumdar, the Almy and Agnes Maynard professor of mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley, estimates that up to 60 percent of the 100 quads of energy the U.S. consumer per year is wasted as heat (see Tapping America's Secret Power Source).

Cogeneration systems aren’t necessarily that complex, Kaempf added. Retrofitting an existing plant is “very easy.�

Still, a buildout of the scope DOE contemplates could generate $234 billion in new investments and create nearly 1 million new jobs, he said.

Because cogeneration systems generate electricity where it’s consumed, they’re also more efficient than shipping electricity from power plants to customers, he said.

Making electricity where it’s used “very well could help grid congestion — and it helps energy security,� he added. After all, it’s harder for would-be saboteurs to blow up a hundred factory turbines than one big power plant.

Michael Kanellos: December 11, 2008, 8:30 AM

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Old Coffee Grounds a New Source of Auto Fuel?

Researchers at the University of Nevada-Reno say that old coffee grounds could potentially be transformed into 340 million gallons of biodiesel a year, according to a report in the ACS Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (and summarized here by Green Car Congress.)

Oil accounts for around 11 percent to 20 percent of the content of spent coffee grounds. When dried and mixed with solvents, the researchers found they could extract most of the oil. It’s a high quality oil too that’s somewhat stable. That’s important in biodiesel. Some biodiesels, like those derived from animal fats, sometimes have low smoke points.

The world consumes 16.34 billion tons of coffee a year.

Although bigger than most fish tanks, 340 million gallons a year is a small amount of oil. The world consumes around 85 million barrels of oil a day right now and there are 42 gallons of crude oil in a barrel (which means 3570 gallons a day) Thus, if you started on January 1 and tried to run the world of coffee biodiesel, we’d run out while most New Year’s Eve parties are still going. But still conservation helps and every little bit count.

And for local production, it could be great. Lots of coffee gets gulped in Reno. (I think there was a coffee machine in my fourth grade classroom.) The researchers did not harvest their grounds from the Lucky Forest Snack Bar at Fitzgerald’s or some other classic Reno locale. They went to Starbuck’s.

Eric Wesoff: December 11, 2008, 6:56 AM

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Can a Startup Save the US Auto Industry?

In the wake of the epic fail that is the U.S. automotive industry, Mike Rocke, Vice President of Business Development at Transonic Combustion suggests that their fuel injection technology, “is a way of putting the American car business back on its feet.�

While U.S. auto execs try to make up for flying private jets to beg for money and for the last 30 years of Ford Mustang design and for the Hummer and, I’ll just stop there, Transonic Combustion is working on a piece of “bolt-on� equipment that can double gas mileage for high-compression engines.

Transonic is VC-funded by Venrock, Rustic Canyon Ventures, and Khosla Ventures and has a lot going on:

• It has a new CEO -- Brian Ahlborn has joined the company as its new president and CEO. He was most recently the president of McLaren Performance Technologies and has lots of automotive industry experience. He replaces Mike Cheiky, who brought the company out of the lab in 2006 and will remain on the board. Cheiky is working on his next startup, CleanPlanetBioFuels, which is developing “negative carbon fuels.â€?
• The company is “getting ready to open up a C Round of funding,â€? said Rocke.
• It has NDAs with, “three of the top six car manufacturers, one in Asia, one in Europe, and one in the U.S.â€? Rocke adds that the U.S. firm had to be “dragged kicking and screaming to the table.â€?
• Transonic has a demo unit installed in a drivable car.

Transonic Combustion talks about enabling “100 mpg cars� via their lean combustion process and gasoline fuel injection system. They can operate conventional reciprocating piston gasoline engines at super-high compression ratios with precise ignition timing and carefully minimized waste heat generation. Their secret sauce is a new type of fuel injector. Here’s a schematic:

Rocke says these developments will allow the “U.S. to start exporting automotive technology and equipment to the world, instead of the other way around.� Rocke also said the company is looking for DOE money.

I suggest they fly to the DOE meeting on commercial aircraft.