Trivia Time: How Many Dust Mites You Are Sleeping With?

There's a question you probably didn't want to get today.

The answer: Probably quite a few. Diana Dobin of Valley Forge Fabrics sent us a note today with test results comparing regular cotton sheets and sheets woven from a fabric designed by Austria's Lenzing and Valley Forge made from eucalyptus fibers. Eucalyptus is a renewable material and it has microbial properties that can serve to kill microbes. (The sheets also feel plush and not like wood, she tells us – more about Valley Forge in this insightful article.)

The test, conducted by the Microbiology laboratory-Institute Francais du Textile at de l'Habillement, involved putting 300 dust mites on separate 100 percent cotton sheets and 300 percent on a sheet made from Tencel fabric, the fabric made with eucalyptus. There were three separate tests for each kind of sheet.

Then they let them breed.

After 42 days, the Tencel sheets had an average of 184 dust mites.

The regular sheets had an average of 5,880 dust mites. Those are the ones you probably own.

Can I get a big ewwww from the audience. Imagine 5,880 plus of those little guys in the picture crawling around at night. And you can probably raise the figure if you have shoulder hair.

In the U.S., the American Society for Testing and Materials performs safety and health tests.

Sweet dreams.

Brammo Cuts Electric Scooter Price, Just in Time for Holidays

Here's something that will spin your dreidel this holiday season.

Brammo, the electric scooter company that's still in business, has cut the price of its Enertia scooter to $7,995, or about 33 percent from the current price. After a federal tax credit, the price drops to $7,195. Consumers can also buy them on down payment at Best Buy. You put down $2,000 and pay $249 a month. Brammo inadvertently announced the Best Buy retailing deal in February, months before the "official" massaged announcement.

The Enertia has a top speed of 60 miles per hour and can go 42 miles on a charge. It came to market later than the electric scooter from Vectrix, but Vectrix has since gone to scooter heaven. Electric motorcycle makers Zero Motorcycles and Mission Motors continue to sell all-electric motorcycles.

The company attributes the cost reduction to engineering changes and advances. But also note that the thing sold for $12,000 earlier this year. It would take an awful lot of engineering changes to cut the price that much in less than a year.

Marketshare for Thin Films to Reach 31% in 2013

Solar panels that use little or no silicon are likely to more than double their global market share to reach 31 percent in 2013 from 14 percent in 2008, according to market research firm iSuppli Tuesday.

The rise of First Solar has helped to establish the foothold of solar thin films in the market, which is still dominated by solar panels made with crystalline silicon cells.

While crystalline silicon cells are made with wafers that are 180 to 230 microns in thickness, a thin-film solar cell is made up of a much thinner layer of semiconductor (a few microns) on a backing that can be a thin sheet of metal or plastic.

Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar (NSDQ: FSLR) makes glass panels with cadmium-telluride cells. It's poised to become the largest solar panel maker in the world this year, iSuppli said. 

First Solar, with just over 1 gigawatt of manufacturing capacity, is able to beat its crystalline silicon technology competitors thanks to its manufacturing costs, which have fallen to less than 90 cents per watt. The company is able to drive the cost down partly by expanding its factories quickly and, of course, finding customers who want its products.

Developers of other types of thin films, such as those using copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) or amorphous silicon, also are aiming to achieve similar production costs.

Thin films tend to have lower efficiencies – the rate at which the semiconductors convert sunlight to electricity – than silicon cells. Keeping manufacturing costs low, then, makes thin films attractive to customers.

Many of these companies are startups that have yet to achieve any large-scale manufacturing. Some of these technologies are too new to have proven their reliability, and that makes it difficult to sell them to customers who expect the equipment to perform well for at least 20 years.

Some thin-film startups have amassed enough capital and customers to expand their production. Earlier this year, Solyndra, a CIGS solar panel developer in Fremont, Calif., began building a factory that would eventually be able to produce 500 megawatts of solar panels per year. 

iSuppli expects the average selling price of thin-film panels to fall to $1.40 per watt in 2010 from $1.70 per watt in 2009. The price for crystalline silicon panels would drop to $2 per watt in 2010 from $2.50 per watt in 2009. 

Source: iSuppli

Rumor: Secretive Tri Alpha Energy to Show Off Fusion Technology Next Year

Tri Alpha Energy, the fusion power company that dare not speak its name, may finally showcase, or at least describe, its technology next year, according to sources.

That's all we know now.

But that's not bad. Tri Alpha is one of the most secretive greentech companies out there. Back in 2007, I wrote about how the University of California Irvine spin-off raised $40 million from Venrock and others and Venrock still doesn't list it as a portfolio company. The company is based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., but it doesn't answer the phone.

But here are some things I've picked up:

• The basic technology comes from Hendrik Monkhorst of the University of Florida (see CV on link) and Norman Rostoker, the 84-year old professor that oversees fusion research at UCI. Other technical employees include Eusebio Garate and Artan Qerushi from UCI. Some of Qerushi's patents can be seen here. Sean Dettrick and Vitaly Bystritskii have been associated with the company. 

• George Sealy is the CEO.

• The technology sounds similar to some degree to the fusion and hybrid fusion research taking place at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Tri Alpha wants to mix hydrogen and boron in a high temperature plasma to make helium. That reaction will release energy. Additionally, the fusion reaction can be wrapped in blankets of uranium, thorium, plutonium and your garden variety nuclear waste. Neutrons from the fusion process can create fission reactions within the nuclear blankets and generate even more power. The fusion-fission nature of the proces is what makes it a hybrid.

Lawrence Livermore, however, has 192 high-powered lasers to drive its fusion reaction. We're not completely sure what Tri Alpha has. Lawrence hopes to demonstrate its lasers in 2010 or 2011.

How Much Do Lithium-Ion Batteries Cost to Make?

Battery cost – that single factor will likely determine when and how fast cars move from gasoline to electricity. Driving range and charging infrastructure are two problems that will likely take care of themselves: Consumers will lose range anxiety when they realize they have another car that they can take to Disneyland and lose interest in public charging stations when they realize they don't need many of them.

But battery costs directly impact car costs and hence the attractiveness of electric vehicles to consumers.

The short answer? It costs about $250 a kilowatt hour to produce ordinary lithium-ion cells for laptops, said Mark Duvall, an analyst at EPRI at a greentech breakfast sponsored by the SD Forum this morning. Making lithium-ion packs for cars cost more: Automakers have strict safety and performance standards. The general consensus is that lithium-ion packs for cars cost around $900 per kilowatt hour. General Motors, though, has strongly hinted that it is closer to $500 a kilowatt hour than the $1,000 mark, Duvall said. The Volt has a 16 kilowatt hour battery, so the battery costs about $8,000. The Volt battery, he added, also is overbuilt: It is bigger than GM needs for the car to do 40 miles on a charge. A supersized battery, however, gives the battery more charge cycles.

Ultimately, the price of batteries will approach the cost of manufacturing, he said, and many expect manufacturing prices for batteries to decline as volumes pick up. Ergo, batteries could get somewhat cheap in the next few years, if Duvall is right. Then again, improving battery technology has historically been tricky. There is no Moore's Law for batteries that allows performance to double every two years. It takes about ten years for performance to double.

Other notes at the event:

• Both Duvall and Marianne Wu of Mohr Davidow Ventures said that power prices will inevitably rise due to scarcity of resources, the influx of renewables and other technical and macroeconomic issues.

• "Consumers don't understand that the cost of energy is just going up," Wu said, adding that consumer expectations are "out of whack" with current trends.

• Creating green jobs also may not be easy. Solar installation jobs will be based in the U.S. but it's an open question how to bring solar manufacturing to come to the U.S.

ActaCell Gets $1M From Texas

ActaCell has received a promise of $1 million from the state of Texas to boost its development of longer-life lithium-ion batteries.

To be specific, the Austin, Texas-based startup said Tuesday that it had secured $250,000 in pre-seed funding from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

The remaining $750,000 awaits further proof that the company's technology, licensed from the University of Texas at Austin, is ready to be scaled up into commercial production, CEO Bill Ott said Tuesday. The company expects to deliver that by mid-year, he said.

ActaCell, founded in 2007, already raised $5.8 million last summer from investors Google.org, DFJ Mercury, Applied Ventures and Good Energies (see Funding Roundup: VCs Bet on Electric Rides).

Its goal is to deliver a longer-lasting lithium-manganese battery – the chemistry favored by such automakers as Nissan and General Motors for their plug-in hybrid and electric vehicle applications because of its ability to withstand higher operating temperatures (see In Batteries, Will Tesla Stand Alone With Cobalt?)

Without getting too specific, Ott said that ActaCell was "working to harden the material in the cell" so that it could be discharged and recharged more often, increasing what's known as its cycle life – a key consideration for batteries that are supposed to last for years.

The new round of funding will help the company hire new managerial and technical staff, with a goal of bringing full-time employees from five today to about 12 by mid-2010, Ott said. At the same time, the company would continue to make demonstration battery packs using its chemistry with an eye toward proving their commercial promise, he said.

Just when ActaCell might start mass-producing, Ott couldn't say. The company had been a partner in the so-called National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Batteries, which did not receive the up to $1 billion in stimulus funding it had sought from the Department of Energy to build a U.S. battery plant (see Green Light post).

Absent that funding, "We clearly need a manufacturing partner," he said, though he didn't name any such potential partners.