A team of U.S. and Israeli geologists will publish a paper asserting that climate change could have contributed to the downfall of both halves of the Roman Empire. Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, they pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. The results found increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. It was particularly dry from 100 A.D. to 400 A.D. The Roman Republic transformed into the Empire around 44 B.C. (see Caesar, Julius) and expanded across Europe, Africa and the Middle East until exhausting itself centuries later. "Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines or not isn't known, but it is an interesting correlation," said University of Wisconsin Professor John W. Valley. "These things were certainly going on at the time that those historic changes occurred." Personally, I don't buy this one. There were a lot of causes: ineptitude, untenable expansion, greed, failed cultural assimilation, and people like Alaric, King of the Visigoths (not to be confused with Bob of the Ostrogoths), who came through and sacked the city in 410 A.D. Romans weren't starving. They were overpowered by circumstances. As Edward Gibbon, author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," wrote: "The seven first centuries were filled with a rapid succession of triumphs; but it was reserved for Augustus to relinquish the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth, and to introduce a spirit of moderation into the public councils. Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious, and less beneficial." But an interesting study nonetheless.

Ultracapacitors have been a star attraction in scientific research for years, but the component might be best suited for a supporting role in the commercial world, says Alex Shnaydruk at APowerCap Technologies.

APowerCap Technologies is trying to bring a novel breed of ultracapacitors — which are essentially holding tanks for electrons — to the automotive and electronics market in a way that better fits economic reality. APowerCap won’t sell ultracapacitors to power electric cars. Instead, it is prepping a line of ultracapacitors to charge the batteries in electric cars, which will in turn run the car. That’s similar to the way General Motors will use a gas generator to charge the batteries on the Chevy Volt, but without the gas.

In a nutshell, the problem with ultracapacitors is cost, he said during a presentation and meeting at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place in beautiful Redwood City, Calif. this week. Employing ultracapacitors to power a car would break the component budget. Other than that massive problem, ultracaps are great. They can be charged in a few seconds and can discharge rapidly as well.

The first project out of the company is KERS, which stands for Kinetic Energy Recuperation System. It is an “energy recuperation� system commissioned by a company that supplies components to Formula 1 cars. The KERS charger will consist of 200 of APowerCap’s cells. That is a single cell in the picture. The company showed off a 14-cell prototype at a meeting.

APowerCap will subsequently move onto producing ultracapacitors for electronic bikes, a growing market in Asia and even Europe, as well as power storage devices for notebooks and other electronic devices. Using an ultracapacitor can take some of the bulk out of a phone or other product, he said.

The company is also working with a lead acid battery maker to supplement more traditional batteries. In tests, APowerCap was able to show that a lead acid battery supplemented by its ultracapacitors required only one third of the lead of traditional lead acid batteries, lasted 2.5 times as long, and worked well in cold weather. The overall volume of the battery was also 60 percent smaller. (Lead acid, by the way, isn’t dead. Axion Power International is also building carbon cathodes for lead acid batteries while Firefly Energy is making a membrane for lead acid batteries. Both of these companies have received investment funds from the Quercus Trust.)

“Most of our intellectual property is in the electrode,� he said. The electrode is made of carbon sheets measuring only a few hundred nanometers thick or less. Current is collected by aluminum strips. Thus, two key components of the battery are made from two of the more common elements on Earth.

“We use just regular carbon,� he said. How the carbon molecules arrange themselves in the sheets, however, determine its properties.

If the company can move from the science experiment stage to mass manufacturing, it could find a receptive audience. The lengthy charging times of batteries and the limited range remain two of the big stumbling blocks to the greater acceptance of electric cars. (Think of it: Will consumers really want to swap car batteries, like Project Better Place has proposed for getting around the charge time issue.) Ultracapacitors can put a dent in that, although cost would still be a big question.

APowerCap, by the way, comes out of the Ukraine. It has received some funding from local VCs and is now seeking $10 million. It has delivered samples to potential customers, he said. Ukraine isn’t a hotbed of startup activity, but all the countries east of the Vistula are certainly well regarded for their science.

Some large automakers are already thinking in the same direction as APowerCap too. Two weeks ago, I interviewed Minoru Shinohara, senior vice president of the technology development department at Nissan. He said that the company was trying to figure out a way to make an electric car that could charge itself while driving. Nissan’s goal, however, would be to recharge the battery electrically, not with a gas generator. An ultracap might work better than a fuel cell for that task.

Lyngby, Denmark--As long as rivers flow into the sea, we potentially can get cheap power with almost no effort. That's the view from Scandinavia, where some scientists and start-ups are turning their attention to generating power from osmotic pressure. It works as follows. Fresh water from streams and rivers comes tumbling toward a tank of sea water filled by the ocean. Before it falls into the sea, though, it must pass through a membrane. The membrane eliminates any impurities and lets only the tiny water molecules get through. When fresh water enters the tank filled with sea water, it decreases the salt concentration in the seawater and increases the overall pressure. (You can get a more full description from Rolf Aaberg from Norway's Statkraft Energi here.). The pressure can then be harnessed to run a turbine. "You have the potential of approximately 2,000 terawatt hours a year globally. Any place you have a stream going into the sea you have potential energy," says Peter Holme Jensen, a microbiologist turned CEO of a water purification company in Lyngby called Aquaporin. Aquaporin is looking at this market, but Jensen said it is in the very experimental stage. The sun, meanwhile, keeps the whole process going by evaporating seawater, which later turns to rain to fill streams. Like coal and wind, osmotic power is indirect solar energy. It is one of those zany ideas--like nuclear fusion, piezoelectrics and self-powered hydrogen plants--that is on the fringe now but could pay off massive dividends in the future. A longshot, yes, but who knows. If someone in 1944 told you that a bunch of Europeans were in the New Mexico desert building a bomb that could flatten a city, you probably would have scoffed. Others are working on different passive ocean power concepts.  John Craven in Hawaii wants to exploit sea-based heat exchangers to generate air conditioning. The heat exchanger, a tube, would fill with frigid water thousands of feet below the surface. When that cold water gets toward the surface, it radiates cool. But if osmotic power sounds easy, how come we aren't doing it now? Getting adequate pressures is difficult. It has also been tough finding a durable membrane that won't foul. That is where Aquaporin says it can play a part. The company, along with Novozymes, is devising a water purification membrane based around a protein called an aquaporin. Aquaporins sit in channels in living cells: they eject impurities but let water pass. (Read more here.). Novozymes is working on developing a synthetic aquaporin while Aquaporin the company is working on arrays and membranes. (That's an artists' rendering of an aquaporin, by the way.) The companies will first sell membranes to the semiconductor industry, which buy membranes to turn very clean water into almost absolutely pure water. Later, it will move into the mass water market and in the meantime continue to work on the energy concept. "We could have energy as long as the sun shines," Jensen said. The Scandinavian countries, by the way, are pushing cleantech hard. Denmark, Sweden and Finland are trying to commercialize their university research more and large local established companies like Danfoss and Dong Energy are concocting spin-outs. Will all of these things make it? No, but it shows that, in greentech, you are going to continue to see a lot of activity overseas. It probably won't be like the IT revolution where most of the important companies came from the U.S. or the east coast of Asia. Other interesting Danish start-ups: fabric that can replace steel from PolyPower and an LED growing system.

Here's to not taking time off. Back in the summer of 1958, Jack Kilby, a new employee at Texas Instruments, hadn't accrued enough vacation time to take off the days at the end of August when TI shut down. Instead, he stayed at the job and sketched out an idea he had been contemplating. It was the integrated circuit. After the vacation, Kilby's boss reviewed the sketches told him to go ahead. On September 12, 1958, he tested a prototype for company executives (see picture below.). It worked. Although Kilby's prototype did not become the essential building block for the chip industry (the integrated circuit Intel co-founder Robert Noyce showed off a short time later turned out to be design everyone adopted), Kilby was first. And in 2000, he got a Nobel Prize for it. (Noyce would have probably shared the award but he had died years earlier.) And what does it have to do with clean energy? Semiconductors and software are the essential building blocks for the energy efficiency business. The cleanest kilowatt is the one that doesn't get used. Utility CEOs like PG&E's Pete Darbee say that efficiency is a higher priority than solar. Trilliant, Gainspan, Tendril, SynapSense and a whole host of companies are exploiting WiFi, ZigBee and other PC-centric technologies for data centers and smart meters. VCs in recent quarters have begun to wake up to energy efficiency and put more money into these companies. Devising chips and software to save energy is also in some ways easier than trying to build solar or geothermal plants. The technology challenges are somewhat understood and many of the companies that will make products for this market already have factories. Thus, there's no massive capital outlay required. TI, in fact, unfurled a new line of microcontrollers this week (see second picture) called Piccolo, which can control the power consumed by air conditioners and other devices. Freescale has also been active in lately in this market, helping a company devise a system for increasing gas mileage on scooters.

Copenhagen--Yes, you can make plastic forks out of it. Agroplast, a green chemistry start-up in Denmark, has figured out a way to produce plastics, fuel additives and other products from the urine of barnyard animals. The system automatically collects the urine, separates out the urea, and then prepares the urea for a useful life beyond the farm. Chemical manufacturers now use urea in a variety of products, but it is largely artificially produced by cracking natural gas, or methane. That top picture you're looking at is a solid plastic bottle made from urea from the farm-collected urea. That stuff in the white dish is what urea looks like when solidified. It sort of has a texture like Crisco, in case you were wondering. Getting urea straight from the farm has a number of benefits, says Chairman Jes Thomsen. For one thing, you're not digging up buried fossil fuels to make chemicals. The urea comes from a renewable process. Two, pig waste product is now a major problem for farmers. In the U.S., farmers have to pay collectors around $86 per pig per year (not counting subsidies) to dispose of the waste. Pigs produce a lot more waste than can be used as fertilizer. Third, there are a lot of pigs out there. the pigs in the U.S. produce enough urine to cover the urea needs of the states. The U.S. now imports 50 percent of its urea. The pig population in Canada, the U.S. and the six largest European countries comes to 200 million pigs. If you collected four percent of that urine, you're talking 2. 5 million tons a year. Fourth, it's cheaper. Thomsen estimates that the company's products could cost half to produce as those produced with natural gas, once Agroplast hits volume. Farmers in Europe also get credits for employing high tech solutions like this. Fifth, you could drastically cut down shipping costs and fuel consumption. Natural gas comes from the Middle East and Russia. "But s... is everywhere," said COO Bent Hundrup. Here is how it works. The company has a collection system that lets the waste from pigs fall through a grate. Once beneath the grate, the urine is rapidly separated from the manure. If the separation isn't accomplished quickly, the urine turns to ammonia, said Thomsen. Ammonia is actually the source of the terrible smells on farms (chalk up another benefit.). Agroplast then removes the yellow color, water and other materials. It's a tricky process. "Urea is a small molecule," Thomsen said. The company's first product, coming next year, is AgroBlue, which is sprayed into the tailpipe of diesel cars and trucks to eliminate NOx fumes. It is a mixture of urea and water. It is chemically identical to Adblue, a formula produced right now out of urea-produced methane. The EU mandates these sort of chemicals and the U.S. will have similar regulations soon. (That's Jes holding the bottle of AgroBlue, by the way.) Plastics will follow. The AgroBlue product was simply easier to produce, explained Hundrup. Bioplastics are clearly moving beyond corn. University of College Dublin is experimenting with a way to convert difficult-to-recycle plastic into a biodegradable form of plastic with the help of bacteria. The company does not sell the equipment. Instead, it installs a system on large farms (or near groups of smaller farms) and then charges farmers to eliminate their waste, albeit in an economically advantageous way to the farmer. In some cases, the company may even offer to take waste away for free as a way to build market share. Agroplast then processes the chemicals and sells them The company has proven the technology works in prototype plants in the U.S. and Europe and is currently seeking funding to build commercial-sized plants. A single module of their technology would serve 25,000 pigs and cost $2 million dollars. And once they do get into mass manufacturing, the plants will probably become one of the more popular and memorable third grade field trips around. There's another benefit.

Sydney, AUS – It’s the last day of a round-the-world solar trip that’s taken me through Spain and Australia with pit stops in the UK and Hong Kong. I’ve met a lot of really interesting people – a Belgian PV engineer, a suicidal Valencian cab driver, an overly talkative Aussie faith healer, and kangaroos. That’s right. Kangaroos. I haven’t added up the numbers yet, but it’s possible I’ve spent more time on airplanes in the past week than on the ground. Most of my photos from this trip are from inside airports. Ooh! There’s Kowloon Bay! Right there – behind Terminal A. In between bits of hallucinatory airplane sleep I’ve had a lot of time to think about greentech and the renewable energy industry. Over the course of this week I’ve met analysts, technology suppliers, investors and project developers. Only one, Travis Bradford, was American. And Travis, who was on a Euro-dash of his own, is more global citizen than your average putz from Padukah. Granted, I wasn’t in the U.S. But from all the talk there about leading the greentech industry through innovation and investment, the absence of America from the conversation was striking and perhaps a bit revelatory. The other day Rob Day wrote an interesting piece on energy independence, arguing the concept of energy independence deserves a demand-side focus. Sure, when we’re thinking about fossil fuel, “The single most ‘Energy Independent’ barrel of oil is the one not consumed.� But underlying the notion of energy independence as an end-use issue is a more complex problem regarding the technology driving consumption Energy independence in terms of renewables is both a demand and a supply issue. In theory, deploying renewables at scale would allow us to maintain our consumption levels while reducing our demand for fossil fuels. The supply of fuel is free – sun, wind, tides, ground heat, etc. – though the supply of technology used to convert that free fuel into energy isn’t. If you can imagine a future powered by renewables, then you should also be able to imagine a future where a new kind of energy independence issue rears its ugly head. While it’s not linked to fears of Middle Eastern or Venezuelan oil, it’s one we’re equally familiar with, one that’s equally xenophobic, and one that’s equally idiotic. The issue of globalization and international is inextricably linked to the development of green technology and the growth of the renewables industry. Whether it’s Brazilian thermochemical lignin convertors, Chinese solar cells, or German turbine nacelles, the technologies driving the growing penetration of renewable energy are, by and large, not coming from the U.S. The solar industry, because of its relative maturity, is a good example of this. The commoditization of input materials and secondary goods – polysilicon, cells, wafers, modules – has driven the emergence of a global supply chain. While some of the ideas driving this supply chain may start in the U.S., when the vapor depositor hits the epotaxial layer, it’s increasingly not going to happen in this country. Take SunPower, one of the U.S.’s leading solar companies. It started out as a concentrating PV company, moved into optics and optoelectronics (I found out this week SunPower occupied a pretty large piece of the IrDa market), and then finally into flat plate PV. It’s highly efficient panels, derived from the company’s work in CPV years ago, have high average selling prices but fetch fairly small margins. If markets in the U.S. and Spain fail to meet demand projections next year and prices fall, a situation that’s looking more and more likely, SunPower’s margins will get even smaller. Good thing most of its manufacturing capacity is located in Malaysia. Without that, it probably wouldn’t have any margins at all. I’m waiting for the day that some politician rails against Chinese PV because the factory workers in Shenzhen Took Our Jobs. The problem is that those weren’t really our jobs anyway. Even less so because that same politician probably also voted against extending the investment tax credit or a national RPS, while voting in favor of expanding offshore drilling. Energy independence is a joke and a myth – and that’s a good thing. No one talks about computer or t-shirt independence, yet neither computers nor t-shirts are made in the U.S. Even if the federal government took the step of actually supporting a renewables industry in the U.S., it wouldn’t be long before most domestic greentech companies move their operations somewhere else. Companies like A123 and First Solar have already figured that out – the rest will soon follow. We'll need to accept a global supply chain in renewables in the same way that we need to accept one for other industries. The difference between renewables and other industries, however, is that not doing so will cost us a lot more than just some jobs. When utilities and power retailers talk about security of supply, they’re not talking about natural gas reserves or coal contracts. They’re talking about power over-the-lines in whatever 10-minute increment they happen to be in at the moment. Regardless of how efficiently we use fossil fuels, they suffer from volatile prices, uncertain supply, and perpetually increasing demand – all bad conditions from the utility’s perspective. If, instead of gas turbines or coal steam boilers, power producers used renewables, the price and security of their supply would be much more stable. Getting to that point requires a steady stream of cheap renewable technology – something available only if we accept the idea that true energy independence is both undesirable and impossible to achieve.

Copenhagen—Biomass is the original source of energy for humanity (It’s lasted far longer than bear skins, the original insulation) and still one of the most pervasive. But can it continue to scale? Yes, says Claus Felby of the University of Copenhagen, but we’ve got to figure out better ways to harvest it. Globally, the amount of energy contained in the biomass produced by plants annually is five times larger than our current energy consumption, he said in a lecture at Copenmind, a technology transfer conference that took place this week. Put another way, that's 5X our energy consumption in indirect solar power. Right now, though, the world only gets 10 percent of its energy from biomass. 'We need to increase it by a factor of three to four," he said. "If we cannot supply enough sustainable biomass, we cannot develop a sustainable economy. Economic growth will depend on ecological growth." Two-thirds of it could be used for heating and the other 1/3 could go to transportation. Does the land exist to expand like that with existing crops and current technologies? No. He did an examination of Denmark's own land capacity. If you wanted to run 10 percent of Denmark's vehicles on biofuels, you would need 1.5 million hectares. Denmark only has 2.5 million hectares under cultivation. So what can we do? 1. Cross-breed new types of plants. 75 percent of a plant's mass is sugar. We need to develop plants that will yield the types of sugars that are more easily extracted and converted to fuel. 2. Stop eating so much, particularly meat. This could have the biggest dent. Right now, only 1 percent of cropland globally is dedicated to biofuels. Close to 70 percent are used to grow feed for animals. 3. New types of power plants. In 2009, Europe's first combined biomass/biofuel power plant will start producing. This plant, located in Denmark, produces ethanol and power, and the waste heat is captured to help run the plant. It's been in development for seven years. 4. Better farming techniques. Felby created an economic model to determine how much could be saved (in fertilizer, carbon credits etc,) if farmers optimized production with multicrop growing and other techniques designed to reduce energy consumption. He concluded that efficiency techniques could save 1359 Euros per hectare per year.