Cash for Caulkers: The President Is Mulling Home Energy Efficiency

Cash For Caulkers, now officially called Homestar, is in front of the president, according to the The New York Times.

“It’s one of the top things he’s looking at," said Rahm Emanuel, the President's chief of staff told the paper.

The $23 billion dollar program would essentially provide incentives to homeowners to weatherize and energy retrofit their homes. John Doerr has become the public face for the program, but it emerged from Steve Cowell and Matt Golden, the founder of Recurve (formerly Sustainable Spaces). Matt told us about his work a few weeks ago and the clever caulkers name, but forgot to get around to it. Sorry about that.

"We looked at the state of the construction industry (scary, 17%+ unemployment) and the opportunity for job creation and for hitting our climate goals in retrofitting," Golden wrote us earlier this month. 

Housing is a top priority in the White House. Joe Biden has already launched the Recovery through Retrofit program to make home retrofits easier to finance. It's also no coincidence that Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, formerly run by Department of Energy Secretary Steve Chu, is the nation's premier building energy efficiency research center.

With carbon cap and trade looking like a next year issue, don't be surprised to see energy efficiency bills carved out of the main legislation and passed on their own. This is one of the few green issues that enjoys bipartisan support. It saves energy and creates jobs that are difficult to outsource to China. Someone has to go into the attic. If both programs pass, there could be a stampede to Lowe's.

Just by coincidence, Golden has been writing a series of articles on weatherization and energy efficiency on our website. Here are his two most recent posts.

EcoFactor, Building Energy Efficiency, Win at Cleantech Open

SAN FRANCISCO -- Functional trumped futuristic at the Cleantech Open this year.

EcoFactor, which has produced an energy management system for homes that doesn't need a smart meter, won the national grand prize. Other finalists included modular solar maker Armageddon Energy (see award-winning video here) and companies that promise to turn sewage and carbon dioxide into plastic and other materials. Waste heat specialist Alphabet Energy was also a finalist.

The alumni award went to Adura Technologies, which specializes in managing lights (and in the future energy) in commercial buildings. The sustainability went to HydroVolts, which has created a tidal turbine that extracts power from irrigation ditches. I kid you not. It's great stuff. Read more here. Adura is already in the market and EcoFactor will be soon.

In EcoFactor's system, a wireless thermostat sends data to a home DSL or cable box. A continual exchange of data between the home gateway and EcoFactor's servers then allows EcoFactor's servers to modulate the temperature up or down according to parameters set by the consumer and data gathered about a consumer's usage and behavior.

The centralized servers also analyze local weather patterns in order to forecast or devise a cooling/heating strategy for the next 24 hours. The weather data, along with the historical data about your home, effectively forms a thermal profile of your home that allows the company to fine-tune power consumption and reduction.

"It's like cruise control for the air conditioner," CEO John Steinberg told us earlier this month. "We are not taking away any form of control. We are doing what you would do if you were paying attention."

Oncor, the Texas utility, has tested the system in a limited number of homes and contracted with EcoFactor to install the system into close to 2,000 homes. That will give Oncor approximately 3 megawatts worth of demand response capacity it can turn to on emergency days.

Overall, the system can cut heating and air conditioning power by 20 percent to 30 percent, Steinberg claims.

The Cleantech Open seeks out promising startups throughout the western U.S. and then gives them publicity and prizes. It's a great start for anyone.

Renewable Energy for $1 a Watt? Yes, Says Alphabet Energy

SAN FRANCISCO -- Alphabet Energy, a Lawrence Berkeley National Labs spin-out with a semiconductor that converts heat directly into power, says it can make devices that will produce power at close to $1 a watt.

Traditional waste heat converters cost around $20 a watt and are made out of bismuth telluride. Alphabet won't say what it's semiconductor is made from, but sources say it is silicon nanowires.

The company, one of the finalists for the Cleantech Open, hopes to get a prototype plant running in about 18 months. Potentially, it could move into mass manufacturing 18 months to two years after that. The chips will be bought mostly by industrial manufacturers first, where the material could be wrapped around hot steam pipes. Later, it could move into the auto industry, but the amount of heat and often lower temperatures could make that a challenge.

The U.S. consumes around 100 quads (100 quadrillion BTUs) of energy a year and 55 to 60 quads get dissipated as waste heat, according to Arun Majumdar, the UC Berkeley professor who came up with a lot of the technology behind Alphabet. He now runs ARPA-E, the advanced projects group inside the Department of Energy.

GMZ Energy, Promethean Power and Cypress Semiconductor are all also experimenting with thermoelectric devices and various semi materials like gallium. GMZ and Cypress want to turn heat into power while Promethean converts electricity from PV panels directly into heat.

MC10 and Photonic Devices recently received grants from ARPA-E to develop, respectively, waste heat semiconductors from silicon nanotubes and what silicon nanowires.

Companies such as Recycled Energy Development (RED) and Ormat have successfully retrofitted factories to capture waste heat, but they largely rely on mechanical engineering. Heat is captured and then channeled into productive uses. One of RED's showcase projects coming next year is a system at West Virginia Alloys, a silicon manufacturer, that will generate 45 megawatts of electrical power from the waste heat generated by factory operations. The company uses 120 megawatts right now: The waste heat system will effectively allow Alloys to recover about one-third of the power it now buys but wastes.

Replacing mechanical systems with semiconductors, potentially, will be the next wave for the industry.

Waste heat – we love it around here.

Chinese Wind Power Maker to Set Up Factory in U.S.

A-Power Wind Generation Systems and the U.S. Renewable Energy Group have said that they will build a wind turbine factory in the U.S. that will produce 1,100 megawatts worth of wind turbines a year and employ approximately 1,000 American workers.

One-thousand jobs is great, but the real interesting part is who the companies are. China's A-Power and U.S. Renewable are part of a joint venture that wants to build a 600-megawatt wind farm in Texas that is something of a Chinese creation. Shenyang Power Group, the U.S. Renewable Energy Group and Cielo Wind Power. Shenyang will own 49 percent of the project. It will employ turbines from A-Power Generation. Jinxiang Lu is CEO of both SPG and A-Power. Commercial banks in China will provide financing.

When it was first announced, the joint venture said that the Texas wind farm would create about 2,800 jobs, but only about 240 in the U.S. U.S. politicians began to thunder. Hence the change.

"A-Power sees great opportunities in renewable energy in America and this state-of-the-art facility will be our first major step towards bringing clean, renewable energy to the world's largest wind power country," said John Lin, A-Power's Director and COO in a prepared statement. 

And the key takeaway for you job seekers is this: Brush up on your knowledge of international relations. Just as Japanese manufacturers became large employers in the '80s in the U.S. Chinese manufacturers seem posed to do the same in the next decade. Suntech Power Holdings plans to open a module assembly facility in Arizona. Duke Energy Services has linked up with China's ENN, which makes thin-film solar panels and develops solar farms, to bid on contracts for utility-scale solar farms and large commercial solar projects in the U.S. Duke will bring its expertise in navigating through public hearings and the legal hurdles of getting large-scale projects off the ground along with technology for building them to the 50/50 partnership, while ENN will provide expertise for building solar farms and possibly solar panels.

And let's not forget Coda Automotive, which wants to bring an electric car effectively designed and built in China to the U.S. Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is an investor.

Itron Enlists Sequentric as Newest Partner

Itron has picked a new partner to link its older, one-way communicating electricity meters to utilities – North Carolina-based home energy networking startup Sequentric Energy Systems.

The idea is to capture data that's sent out by those "drive-by" meters – so called because their encoder receiver transmitter (ERT) radios send out signals meant to be captured by utility workers driving by with digital readers – and carry it back to the utility via another communications channel.

At the same time, Sequentric will display the energy usage information, which comes about once every 15 seconds or so, to the homeowner via an interface, which could be a stand-alone panel or a Web or mobile device display, CEO Daniel Flohr said.

There are about 67 million Itron ERT meters in the field today, making them an attractive target for utilities that can't justify replacing them, but still want to make them more capable of two-way communication.

Sequentric joins a long list of partners involved with Itron on that effort, including Tendril Networks, OpenPeak, EnergyHub and Ambient (see Green Light post).

But Flohr thinks that his company's starting price of $59 for a home energy management hub that links to Itron's ERT meters might well beat the prices from the competition. Adding a smart thermostat and a few other sensors attached to appliances or home circuits could be done for less than $150, he said.

Keeping prices low will likely be critical to capturing the home energy management market. Studies indicate that most homeowners don't want to spend much more than $50 to $100 on such a system, and utilities will be pressed to justify to regulators the costs of delivering systems across their entire service territories (see Utilities Mull Price Points, Policies for Home Energy Management).

At the same time, Google and Microsoft have come out with home energy platforms that are free for consumers to use, although they would need smart meters or in-home energy measuring devices to get more detailed real-time energy usage information (see Green light posts here and here).

Unlike some companies making home energy management systems, Sequentric doesn't see itself selling directly to customers, Flohr said.

"We're not suggesting this is something the homeowner goes out and buys," he said. "Our customer is, and likely always will be, the utility company. That's to us how the smart grid gets deployed."

That is, he sees these gateways as a way for utilities to control demand response – turning down air conditioners, clothes dryers, pool pumps and other power-hungry appliances.

To link its devices and gateway, Sequentric uses a proprietary wireless network in the 433-megahertz spectrum. That could make it a hard sell to utilities that are expected to deploy smart grid systems that use standards now being developed by the federal government (see Smart Grid Standards Roadmap Unveiled).

But Flohr said that Sequentric's gateway could come with a bridge device to allow it to communicate via ZigBee, the protocol that's emerging as a leader in North American smart meter deployments, or other standards-based wireless technologies such as WiFi (see RF Mesh, ZigBee Top North American Utilities' Smart Meter Wish Lists).

Sequentric is piloting its system with a number of utilities, Flohr said. Sources have told Greentech Media that one of those partners is Duke Energy, though neither Duke nor Flohr have confirmed that fact (see Sequentric Working on Duke Pilot Project).

Greentech Ponzi Scheme

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two companies and their executives for running a $30 million ponzi scheme to defraud mostly elderly investors, who thought they were putting money into eco-friendly projects.

The SEC filed the complaint against Wayde and Donna McKelvy of Denver-based Speed the Wealth and Troy Wragg and Amanda Knorr of Mantria Corp. in Pennsylvania.

The four defendants reportedly used seminars and webinars to convince more than 300 investors, particularly those who have retired or are near retirement, to buy bogus shares of Mantra. The investors were led to believe that their money went to projects such as a "carbon negative" residential community in Tennessee and the development of a charcoal substitute from organic waste (biochar), the SEC said.

Mantria had claimed to be a major global producer of biochar with many factories. But the company never sold any biochar and had one facility testing biochar for eventual commercial sales, the SEC said. And there was no plan to build an eco-friendly community in Tennessee – Mantria did re-sell vacant lots that were supposed to be used for such a project.

Some of these investors took money out of their retirement plans or home equity to invest with Mantria. The four defendants allegedly told investors that they could enjoy 17 percent to "hundreds of percent" of returns on their investments annually.

The two companies used the money from the investors to pay other investors for their returns. The McKelvys also reportedly received a 12.5 percent commission for their work, the SEC said.