C-Lock Technology Inc., says it’s got a better breed of software to measure, analyze and report greenhouse gas emissions, and they’ve gone to Poland to prove it.

C-Lock announced Thursday that it has a $12.5 million deal to deploy its GreenCert software in a pilot project at 14 coal-fired power plants in Poland. The deal is with Crowley-Shindler Management LLC, a unit of The Crowley Group, which develops Internet networks and transportation infrastructure in Eastern Europe.

Jim Bitonti, president of C-Lock, a subsidiary of “cleaner coal� refining company Evergreen Energy Inc., bills its GreenCert software as “a real-time, information management capability that can go from a component level drill-down, all the way through up to the enterprise.�

In other words, he said, it can take data from smokestack monitoring equipment and similar sources, analyze it and store it for presentation to regulators like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or auditors for the European Union Emission Trading System, the world’s largest carbon-trading platform.

GreenCert, which is built on infrastructure software from IBM, is already being tested at agricultural and coal-fired power plants in the United States and Canada, though Bitonti wouldn’t give more information about those projects.

C-Lock isn’t the only company looking to make money on what’s expected to become a huge business of helping companies track and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

In November, Sterling, Va.-based Clear Standards, which has developed software to help businesses calculate their carbon footprint throughout their operations and find energy-efficiency projects to deploy to cut emissions, raised $4 million for a Series A funding (see Clear Standards Bags $4M for Carbon Management).

Earlier that month, San Francisco-based Planet Metrics said it had raised $2.3 million in Series A for its carbon management and visualization software (see Planet Metrics Launches Carbon Modeling, Raises $2.3M). Canada-based Carbonetworks also raised its Series A earlier this year, snagging $5 million.

Given the potential market for helping companies reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, such bets could be well-placed.

New Carbon Finance, a subsidiary of research firm New Energy Finance, projected in February that the world’s carbon-trading markets — led by the European Union’s carbon cap-and-trade program in place since 2005 — would top $100 billion by the end of 2008.

In North America, regional cap-and-trade efforts now underway include The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which is made up of 10 northeastern states; the Western Climate Initiative under development by seven western states and four Canadian provinces; and private, voluntary programs such as the Chicago Climate Exchange and American Carbon Registry (see RGGI Generates $38.58M in Carbon Permit Sale, U.S. Congress Reconsiders Credits While Carbon Auctions Launches and American Carbon Wants Your Business).

If the U.S. does put a cap-and-trade program in place, as President-elect Barack Obama has said he wants to do, it could boost the world’s carbon markets to $3 trillion by 2020, New Carbon Finance reported.

But Bitonti said those markets won’t be able to work without accurate and reliable data on greenhouse gas emissions to back them up. That problem has arisen in the European Union, where one of the largest auditors for its carbon-trading program was recently suspended by the United Nations for alleged irregularities.

And the scope of the information management challenge is daunting, he said. Scientists with the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado said in April that a monitoring system to ensure regions are meeting their greenhouse gas emission reduction goals would have to be 10 times the size of monitoring in place today.

The grid can accommodate a lot more solar and wind power than many experts believe, according to a new study. If it's correct, it could cut the cost of trying to deploy renewable power. Stanford doctoral student Elaine Hart has been running simulations which try to maximize the amount of solar and wind power going over the electrical grid in California in roughly its current state, according to a report on Wired.com. At least 70 percent of the power in California on a hot, summer day being generated by solar and wind in 2016, according to one result from the simulator. it's a simulation of course and the simulations only try to mimic what the grid might experience in hour-long slices over a single day. If the resources had been in place, renewables could have provided 50 percent of the power California needed on a winter day in 2007. (More on the study here.) Her ultimate conclusion is that the figure the governor has set for utilities -- get 33 percent of your power from renewable energy -- can go higher as far as the infrastructure is concerned. The study came out at the American Geophysical Union, which has been a source of a number of stories this week. Here's some of our coverage. The grid potentially could slow the development of wind and solar power on a large scale, according to some. In short, the volume of wind power or power from solar panels can't be predicted with much accuracy far in advance (unlike wave or tidal power, or even solar thermal) and wind and PV farms are often located far from urban centers that need power. (Think of it like organic food delivery boxes. You wouldn't like it if they showed up with 18 pounds of grapes one day and then disappeared for a month.). Accommodating that variability will take some storage and transmission technologies. Hart's study provides some indication that it may not be as hard as people thought. Future simulations will also look at the impact that large-scale energy storage, solar thermal plants, improvements in conventional power plants and electrification of cars will have. Hart's study indicates that hopes exist that this aspect  may not be as tough as it seems.

Fourteen U.S. chemical and electrical companies have banded together to seek $1 billion in federal aid to jumpstart an effort to make advanced batteries for cars, according to, among others The Wall Street Journal. While some of the money will undoubtedly go to research, much of it will be dedicated to building supply chains, prototype factories and job training. Right now, most of the battery industry is in Asia. In the past few years, a number of venture-backed startups -- Boston Power, International Battery, Valence Technology, Altair Nano, A123 Systems, PowerGenix, ZPower -- have sprung up in the U.S. with products and plans to improve batteries and bring batteries to the car market. Some of these companies focus on new types of battery chemistries and some focus on improving the overall performance while tinkering with the electronics to improve efficiency. Some such as PowerGenix have started selinig products. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove is also prompting the company to get into the market for car batteries. This may work, but it also has a lot going against it. Here are some of the reasons: 1. There is no Moore's Law for batteries, people. Get used to it. Semiconductors can double in performance every two years because engineers have found ways to steadily decrease the size of transistors. It's a lucky combination of hard work and physics. Battery chemistry doesn't work that way. Batteries improve about 6 percent every year -- thus they double in performance every 10 years. At least this is what people like Elon Musk (CEO, Tesla Motors) and Christina Lampe-Onnerud (CEO, Boston Power) have told me. Hence, tossing money at the problem won't necessarily solve it. 2. Federal funding is great for research, but often misfires when used to build a market or factories.  Back in the '80s, 14 chip companies got together to form Sematech, which was supposed to make the chip and chip equipment industries competitive again. The U.S. did regain the edge over Japan in chips, but it wasn't because of Sematech. Sematech opened up dialog between competitors, but other factors changed the market. It's tough to find people to sing its praises these days. "They've got a very short string to show on results," said Robert Graham, the chief executive of Novellus Systems said back in 1991. If this money were given directly to national labs and universities to train people in energy storage, it'd be great. It would be the proverbial New Deal on energy we keep talking about. But it will slip through the fingers as a biz dev project. 3. Electric cars are going to take a long time regardless of what the U.S. does. It's hard to see that this will accelerate it much. 4. Silicon valley guys and startups hate the government and always complain about government. So let's listen to them for once. Sorry to be a pain, but battery chemistry just won't be solved with flag waving.

Using Solar to Heat, Cool, and Power the Home.

A relatively overlooked and underinvested solar sector, solar AC and solar combined heat and power have received small amounts of VC investment of late, primarily in Israel.

Although solar HVAC is a promising technology with a potential real impact on energy usage, it doesn’t lend itself to the type of scalable innovation that VCs demand in an investment opportunity.

The following firms are the innovative startups in this small field.

BrightPhase Energy:  Privately held firm combines skylights, CPV and, thermal solar planning to offer the product via a PPA model.  According to their website – they are seeking $6M in funding.

Cool Energy: Angel, NSF and state government-funded manufacturer of solar residential combined-heat-and-power systems based on Stirling engine technology.  “Taking advantage of non-metallic materials throughout the engine to optimize performance for 100-300°C temperature differences. They are seeking an equity investment of $5M. 

Distributed Solar Power: Israel-based firm developing a CHP system that produces electricity and heat using sun-tracking miniature PV concentrators. The system has a claimed ~75 percent efficiency and is intended for on-grid customers. It can produce high quality heat for steam generation, cooling and AC (using absorption cooling), space and water heating, and process heat. The firm is working with Italy’s Shap and has raised $1.2 million from Israel’s Aurum Ventures et al.

ESE: Project developer doing something they call CHCP -- Combined Heat Cooling Power.  (see comment below)

EWA Technologies Group: Israel-based firm developing a solar powered AC system that collects and stores solar energy, and transforms the accumulated energy into effective cooling. A granular material within the solar collector, reacts with a liquid cooling fluid that send cool air into a room or office in a process similar to an inter cooling radiator system in an automobile.

Global Sun Engineering: Based in Sweden, GSE is in beta testing a CHP unit that produces ~700W electricity and 4200W of heat. It is seeking U.S. and European venture funding.

Millennium Electric: The company's Multi Solar Systems generate electricity and produce hot water.

Promethean Power Systems: With round A funding from the Quercus Trust, Prometheus is developing a solar-powered refrigeration system for commercial cold-storage applications in off-grid and partially electrified areas of developing countries.

PVT Solar: One of the Khosla Ventures’ stealthy, early-stage portfolio firms, PVT seems to be attempting to harvest the waste heat lost on solar-paneled roofs for use in water and home heating.

ThermaSun: Self-funded start-up now seeking outside funding builds solar thermal systems that supply hot water and heating for commercial, corporate and residential applications.  Their target market is green home architects and builders.

And don’t forget to check the other parts of this series:

• Part 1: Wafered Silicon, Installers, Financiers, Balance of Systems
• Part 2: CPV
• Part 3: Next-Gen PV
• Part 4: Thin Film

(This started out as 150 Solar Startups although the actual number is looking like 175.)

As always, we welcome your feedback. Let us know if we’ve missed any.

The next post on Concentrated Solar Thermal startups finishes off this list.

I have been noodling on some of the issues I first raised in a blog post last week regarding how government funds could be used to help support innovation in the EV or alt-fuel space. The fundamental problem I raised was that the types of terms and conditions that will be placed on government loan guarantees might not work for startups. In particular, the government oversight and administrative burden that is being talked about for companies who take loans from the government might be incompatible with how VC-backed startups operate. Another problem is the massive dilution that startup investors (and employees) may face if the government requires 20 percent of the loan value to be matched in equity. The overall picture of how this plays out has many considerations, but I think there is one area where the government can provide support that would be politically acceptable and level the playing field between innovative startups struggling to bring their products to market and big companies. In the business of manufacturing cars, a massive amount of capital is tied up in inventory purchases prior to building the product. For a startup, your suppliers demand aggressive terms so your cash outlay for the parts and other associated costs to put together a vehicle occur many months before you actually deliver that vehicle to your customer and collect the revenue. A simple way of demonstrating this would be to imagine that you have a great car that many customers want to purchase for $30,000, but it costs you $20,000 per car to purchase the inventory for each car and you don't get paid by the customer until you deliver that car many months later. If you are trying to sell a large number of these cars, the working capital you require to support this is very large. Most established businesses with similar issues can access a revolving line of credit for working capital needs. Startups have a hard time doing this because they may not have established credit or sufficient assets to provide as collateral. If they are able to get financing, the terms are likely to be onerous. If they cannot get financing for this working capital, they must fund it with equity, which is expensive and increasingly difficult to raise. I don't have direct information on this, but I am confident this is one of the challenges that confronted Think, which recently declared that it may close its doors without financial support from the Norwegian government. The Big Three get around this issue because they have tremendous leverage with their suppliers. They do not pay their suppliers for the inventory they use until some time after that part is assembled into the vehicle. These types of terms would be impossible to negotiate as a startup. This is where the government could play a very valuable role. By providing low or no interest working capital loans which could be used only for funding inventory purchases and other similar up-front product costs (such as shipping and logistics), the government can level the playing field for startups and allow them to scale production rapidly to put products in the hands of their customers. To prevent abuse of the program and overproduction of vehicles, the government could require that these startups demonstrate a credible order book that proves (to the extent possible) that the products being built will indeed be sold to customers. A strong order book has not been a major challenge for the new crop of EV startups. Financing the working capital required to deliver products to these waiting customers is a bigger challenge, and focused government support for this will not be as controversial or problematic as direct injection of government funds into VC-backed startups. Such a program also avoids the problems, perceived or real, of having the government pick the winners among the crop of EV startups vying for government support. The program could be made available to any advanced technology vehicle startup that is able to demonstrate a viable product and a credible order book. Daryl Siry is the former chief marketing officer for Tesla Motors. He now consults on marketing and the automotive industry. You can read more here: http://darrylsiry.blogspot.com.