The National Park Service is worried that a slew of proposed large-scale solar energy projects on public land could harm wildlife, cause severe water shortage and pollute the air.

Jon Jarvis, director of the park service’s pacific region sent a memo dated February 9 to the federal Bureau of Land Management that spelled out his concerns, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) this week. Jarvis’ memo said the 63 utility-scale solar projects that have been proposed for development on BLM land in Nevada could pose serious threats to the habitat of the Lake Mead National Recreational Area, Mojave National Preserve and the Devils Hole section of the Death Valley National Park.

Water is a precious resource in the Nevada desert, and the proposed solar power farms would require a large amount of ground water for cooling and cleaning, the memo said.

PEER posted this excerpt from the memo:

“The NPS asserts that it is not in the public interest for BLM to approve plans of development for water-cooled solar energy projects in the arid basins of southern Nevada, some of which are already over-appropriated, where there may be no reasonable expectation of acquiring new water rights in some basins, and where transference of existing points of diversion may be heavily constrained for some basins.”

The BLM has been inundated with applications to develop solar, wind and geothermal projects on land it oversees, mostly in western United States. Solar companies have pegged California, Arizona and Nevada as idea locations for developing large-scale solar power plants that would cover hundreds of acres each (see The Rush to Gigawatts in the Desert Explodes).

The BLM is still developing a comprehensive plan for assessing the environmental impact of these proposed projects. PEER said BLM should only allow renewable energy projects on land that already has been scarred by human activities, such as an abandoned mine or a toxic waste site.

Environmental groups are gearing up for big fights over these projects, while the federal government must tread carefully as it carries out mandates from Congress and President Obama to support renewable energy generation (see story from Greenwire).

There's a part of me that feels bad when I am skeptical about a potentially great thing. It's so easy to be a skeptic, and whenever an entrepreneur or innovator proposes a new, potentially game changing thing, legions of lazy skeptics come out of the woodwork denouncing it as hype. Many of these skeptics seem motivated by nothing other than a bitter envy of someone actually working hard to change things, when usually the skeptic has not even tried to change anything, much less succeeded.

But there are times when skepticism is warranted, and EEStor is one of those examples. For years, the company has made extraordinary claims about its new ultracapacitor, with very little in the ways of evidence. It has even lured Kleiner Perkins, a top-tier VC, to invest, as well as Zenn, a Canadian manufacturer of Neighborhood Electric Vehicles with aspirations to much more. But in all these years it has demonstrated no physical prototype to anyone's knowledge. In fact, a colleague of mine visited the company's offices in Cedar Park, Texas years ago and his request to see anything physical was angrily rebuffed.

All this is preamble to the opportunity I had on Tuesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference to directly question Ian Clifford, CEO of Zenn about EEStor. I took great care to pose the questions as fairly but directly as possible. While I didn't record it, the paraphrasing below is from my notes and very close to verbatim.
______________________________

Me: "The specs you just described for EEStor -- $250/kWh, 300 lbs. for 50 kWh, are so good that they fall in the category of 'too good to be true.' In fact, if they are true, they will obsolete all other battery technology in the world today. You say you have done due diligence, and that you have invested. How confident are you that EEStor will deliver a product to the specification promised to you later this year?"

Mr. Clifford: "Our confidence is shown in our actions -- we've invested, we've since followed up our investment -- and the actions of others, like Lockheed Martin."

Me: "Have you ever seen a working prototype of an EESU from EEStor?"

Mr. Clifford: "We don't comment publicly on that."
______________________________

The answer to the first question is a non-answer, but one that is understandable considering the circumstances. Mr. Clifford needs to have plausible deniability and sufficient distance so that he is not fully tarnished by EEStors continued failure to deliver.

The second answer, however, is just bizarre and not credible in the least. As an investor in the company that claims to have done due diligence, the common expectation would be that he or someone in his company has at least seen a prototype on the bench. I know of no circumstance, regulation or reason why he would feel that he could not disclose such a simple confirmation publicly. In the absence of such a confirmation, I have to conclude that there is no such prototype. This, unfortunately, is not surprising.

A fresh new bizarrely opaque announcement from EEStor today, trumpeted by Zenn on its website as "EEStor announces permittivity!" gives some insight as to what is going on here.

The announcement is that EEStor claims that the material it is producing has been found to have a very high level of "permittivity", which is one of several things that need to fall into place in a theoretical capacitor that meets the energy storage claims the company has been boasting. The announcement says nothing about demonstrating any energy storage nor does it make mention of any prototype energy storage unit. Permittivity, in and of itself, does not suffice to achieve its goals.

But this accomplishment, and the hope that it represents to speculative investors everywhere, is enough to achieve Zenn's goals -- its stock is up 45 percent today.

Darryl Siry is the Senior Analyst for Cleantech at Peppercom Strategic Communications. He is also the former chief marketing officer for Tesla Motors. You can read more at his blog at http://www.darrylsiry.com or email him at djsiry@gmail.com.

Oerlikon Solar saw its first-quarter sales decline by 32 percent from a year ago to reach 51 million Swiss francs ($44.24 million), the company said Thursday.

The company said it’s laying off 60 people, and another 200 of its remaining employees are working shorter hours to save costs. Oerlikon Solar had about 850 employees by the end of 2008. The company produces factory equipment for making thin-film solar panels.

The company, part of the Oerlikon Group, said it also didn’t win “any significant new orders” during the first quarter and has seen customers delaying orders and expansion plans because of the economic downturn. It stressed that it isn’t cutting spending on research and development.

During the first quarter, Oerlion Solar received new orders totaling 11 million Swiss francs ($9.54 million), down 40 percent from a year ago. The amount of total orders reached 390 million Swiss francs ($338.27 million), down 3 percent.

Oerlikon Solar expects business to improve by the second half of 2009. Negotiations taking place now could lead to at least one large equipment order by then, said Uwe Krüger, CEO of Oerlikon Group.

The downbeat news isn’t surprising. Many solar companies in different market segments, from silicon suppliers to panel makers, have had to layoff staff and scale back factory plans. Some could go out of business soon (see Silicon Producer SilPro Teeters On Bankruptcy).

Oerlikon Solar’s chief competitor, Applied Materials, said two months ago that it didn’t expect to see new orders for a few quarters. Earlier this month, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said one of its customers had slashed its contract from $1.9 billion to $250 million.

Here are a few interesting tidbits and links from the last few days.

gCaptain.com provides a list of top ten most interesting wind turbine designs.  And also a list of the top ten green ship designs with some great photos and illustrations.

gCaptain is not exactly a green products guide -- but if you have an interest in things nautical, this is a great site.

Biofuels Digest has compiled a list of their top 50 bioenergy companies -- an interesting mix of VC funded firms like Sapphire and Coskata and massive public corn ethanol firms like Poet.  Here are their top five:

1. Coskata
2. Sapphire Energy
3. Virent Energy Systems
4. Poet
5. Range Fuels

Billion Dollar Dreams

There's a shard of an article in CPV Today in which SolFocus’ CEO Mark Crowley is quoted as saying his firm will be a $1 billion business by 2011.  Does he mean $1 billion in revenue?  That would be what? 50 to 100X revenue growth in two years? That borders on fantasy, I think.  Does he mean $1 billion in market cap as a public company?

Is this really the growth expectations that SolFocus has?  I’m tracking this down and trying to get a clarification from the company.

Gridpocalypse Now

“Smart Grid” vies for leading buzzword of the year along with “bailout,” “stimulus” and “teabagging.”  Hundreds of millions in the form of spending and tax cuts are being directed towards smart buildings, demand response and transmission network upgrades.

Unfortunately, the great solar space storm of 2012 is going to render all of that hardware into slag metal and vault us back to the fifties.  The 1450s.

In a report report funded by NASA and issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January this year, there are scenarios that show millions of Americans dead, water shortages, food shortages, cats marrying dogs, and a general collapse of government and society.  Read about that cheery report right here.  And have a good day.

The debate over cleaner transportation fuels will kick up a notch today when the California Air Resources Board issues its regulations for cutting greenhouse gases.

Eleven other states are waiting in the wings to adopt similar legislation and there is support in Washington.

The new rules would require refineries and other people in the fuel supply chain to reduce the carbon intensity of their products by 10 percent by 2020 with more cuts after that, according to Reuters.

The rules would lead to 20 percent of the state's fuel being replaced by things like batteries, hydrogen or biofuels. Even natural gas and propane would qualify.

One sticking point right now is corn ethanol. Ethanol producers are worried that the way California includes land-clearing activities in its carbon calculation could impact them. Negotiations are taking place behind closed doors, according to Reuters.

California late last year imposed new rules on diesel trucks that will require truck fleets to put filters on the one million big rigs that travel through the state. A bevy of startups have formed to take advantage of both the new regulations and the desire of truck fleets to conserve fuel.

The state has also passed regulations to require manufacturers to put green ratings on cars.

Algae cultivation for biofuel applications is full of promise and hype.  Until one of the many companies working on the puzzle solves the cost issue -- algal biofuels remain a well-funded science project.  But now, OriginOil might have solved a few pieces of the cost puzzle with new lighting and new extraction technologies.

Harvesting oil from algae is an expensive and difficult challenge.  Algae must be separated from its growth medium -- water -- and the lipids in each algae cell must be extracted.  Companies are researching a variety of ways to filter the algae from water and to liberate the lipids from the algae -- ranging from chemical catalysts to bioconversion.

OriginOil (OTCBB:OOIL) is a small cap early-stage algae farmer looking to use their Helix BioReactor to evenly illuminate algae and create large amounts of biomass.  They recently signed a CRADA with the DOE's Idaho National Laboratory and hope to use ultrasonics and microwaves to crack algal cell membranes.

The firm's process combines electromagnetism and pH modification (using CO2)  to break down cell walls, and release the oil within the cells. Algae oil rises to the top for skimming and refining, while the remaining biomass settles to the bottom for processing as fuel and other co-products.

According to the company, in less than an hour, the oil, water and biomass separate by gravity alone and unlike conventional systems, no chemicals or heavy equipment are used in the one-step process.  No initial dewatering is required.

If OriginOil’s claims are true -- it might be on its way to bringing algae fuel pricing to “pump parity,” the only metric that really matters in bringing this technology to commercial reality.

The April issue of the Greentech Innovations Report dives deep into the algae pond.  You can subscribe to it here.