Energy Notes and Scoops From Silicon Valley

I was shopping in Whole Foods, Palo Alto the other day (Don’t get the wrong idea – I do not drive a Prius like our CEO, I drive a 1971 Datsun 240Z) and while buying cheese (Jarslberg, not Brie), I ran into a notable VC with an investment in an algae development company. This investor, who asked to remain nameless, lamented the difficulty of even finding the right species of algae, let alone scaling up to the volumes required.

Then, buying chocolate, I ran into the CEO of another algae firm, also requesting anonymity (seems like a trend). He said that achieving real volume in algae to biodiesel production is four to seven years away. Which seems realistic but also seems to fall outside the time horizon of most VC fund expectations. Which seems problematic for impatient VC investors and their LPs.

According to Ken Epstein at NewCap Partners, an investment banker with some knowledge in this field, algae would be better used in aviation fuel applications, where the volumes are less and the prices are better.

I then slowly backed out of the store in order to avoid any more algae entrepreneurs. For some reason I bought this beverage.

In other energy news, Steve Eglash, CEO of Cyrium, a fabless developer of advanced 3/5 PV solar cells, let me know that they will soon announce their $15M round B. Cyrium uses quantum dots to improve the efficiency of solar cells for use in concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) systems, currently a zero billion dollar market.  Potential end-customers are system vendors like Solfocus and Greenvolts. Competitors include incumbents Emcore and Spectrolab and other startups like Solar Junction and Quantasol.

CPV system start-up Solfocus is also closing in on a (large) funding round, which we’ve blogged about previously.

Cyrium has their sights set on achieving efficiencies of 40 percent to 45 percent, a figure that will has the potential to alter the economics of CPV.