Fuel cells. Bring up those two words in polite conversation at a greentech conference and close to half of the people in listening range will say, "You've got to be kidding."

Sanjiv Malhotra, CEO of methanol fuel cell maker Oorja Protonics, would care to differ. His company, which he will showcase at the Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity Conference on November 17, makes large-scale fuel cells for forklifts and cellular towers. In specific applications, fuel cells do a far better job than batteries or diesel generators, he says.

First, look at fork lifts. A lead-acid battery pack can only power a fork lift for four hours before depleting. An expensive lithium-ion battery can go eight hours. The fuel cell will keep the fork lift cranking for 12 hours, or more than one shift.

Charge time is also far lower. It takes eight to 15 hours to charge a lead acid battery pack, two to four hours to charge a lithium-ion pack, but only three minutes to fill up a methanol tank. Because batteries take so long to charge, fork lift drivers don't wait around for their batteries to rejuvenate. Instead, they drive their rigs to a battery changing bay where a technician swaps out the old battery for a new one.

But that adds cost. Think of it, Malhotra says. You need at least two battery packs for each forklift and a lot of chargers, one for ever two batteries at a minimum. The infrastructure for a lead acid battery fork lift operation can run $500,000, which is roughly the same price as one for lithium ion battery forklifts. Oorja's methanol refueling station: $25,000. (Here's a video of an Oorja-powered fork lift in action.)

Toyota, Nissan and Ace Hardware already have fork lifts powered by Oorja fuel cells and are testing them. The company has made 150 units to date and is engaged in ten field trials. It takes four hours to build one of the fuel cells from scratch.

Is it tough to get methanol? No. One of the company's customers, a large meat processor, says its easy. "After I tell you this you will probably want to become a vegetarian. They (meat processors) feed methanol to the chickens," he said. It gets mixed into the feed. It costs a few dollars a gallon.

As an added bonus, there's a 66 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, assuming that those batteries are being charged up from coal-fired power plants. Thus, in real life, you have to knock that figure down a bit, but a sizable delta will still persist.

Now onto cellular towers. After Hurricane Katrina, the FCC has been busy passing new regulations regarding backup time for cell towers. Cell carriers will likely have to prove they can provide eight hours of backup time. Methanol fuel cells are simply easier to operate and can be cheaper. Oorja in fact will soon kick off a trial with an overseas carrier. (Malhotra won't divulge the name for wide publication yet, but expect to see it soon.)

Venus. The goddess of love. And wastewater treatment. Biokube, a Danish company, is going to bring the BioKube Venus to California. The Venus is an efficient septic system that cleans your household wastewater and sewage to such a degree that the water -- after treatment -- can be used on the lawn. Denmark is a center for water technologies. "The average American home sprays around 15,000 gallons of water a year on their lawns," said Patrick O'Regan, head of the U.S. Business Development Center for BioKube. "This will more than take care of that." The Venus effectively works by cleaning the water to a much higher degree than ordinary septic systems. In ordinary systems, solids are settled out via gravity. The remaining water then enters a tank with bacteria to clean it. After that, it gets released into a leaching field, where bacteria in the soil cleans it further. In the Venus, the water passes through several bioblocks, or membranes housing bacteria. Further purification in soil isn't needed at that point, he said. The Venus can handle around 7.5 liters every 15 minutes, he said. The tank stands around six feet tall and is around four feet in diameter. Why California? The state has and will continue to tighten up its regulations on these things. Approximately 1.2 million septic systems in the state will need to be unplugged and/or renovated to comply with modern regulations. The state is also facing more challenges with water supply and water consumption. The average American home, by the way, uses 400 gallons a day.

Bug eat bug. That’s the business model of Blue Marble Energy.

The Seattle-based company has come up with a system for generating algal blooms in wastewater facilities and then feeding the algae to other microbes. These other microorganisms in turn metabolically convert the algae into high-value industrial chemicals like propyl butyrate, said CEO Kelly Ogilvie, speaking at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif.

Why? That chemical sells for $801 a gallon, a heck of a lot more than $4 a gallon algae-based biodiesel, he noted. An algae biofuel company might get $500 worth of oils out of directly harvesting and processing algae. The indirect method proposed by Blue Marble can yield $4,000 worth of chemicals from a ton of algae. Harvesting a ton of the green goo costs about $190, he said.

And there are environmental benefits as well. Wastewater treatment isn’t cheap or easy. Municipalities spend huge amounts of money dumping chlorine into wastewater to clean it out. Wild algae can take out nitrogen and other compounds from the water as well as the chemical-based processes without the environmental degradation and fossil fuel consumption involved in producing and spreading industrial chemicals in the first place. Plus, unlike chemically treated wastewater, the process yields a feedstock (algae) that can be converted into a valuable product. Other plant matter can be fed into it.

“Algae is the preferred feedstock, but we are really a biomass play,� he said.

Optimism aside, there's a lot more to making money off algae that mixing up some sewage and letting nature take its course. There are over 50 algae companies, but only a few (GreenFuel Technologies, Solazyme, Sapphire, LiveFuels) have cracked many of the elements required to turn slime into something valuable.

Ogilvie admitted in fact that the ultimate output of chemicals from its process can vary, depending on the algae that was used. Variability can be the kiss of death in the chemistry industry.

The heart of the operation is a system called AGATE, or acid, gas and ammonia targeted extraction. It is a combination digester and fermenter. Digesters are used by other companies to decompose manure and turn it into methane. The fermenter is the part that converts the algae into an enhanced chemical byproduct.

The company has a modest prototype that can process 1/10^th of a ton of biomass. Blue Marble is currently putting together a larger prototype in Brittany, France. It is now raising money for a 5,000 ton commercial-scale system.

Blue Marble has patents on much of its intellectual property, but this is also the sort of system that could be produced by large manufacturers like Siemens.

Microorganisms are going to be named the greentech employees of the century, mark my words. They can work in filth, don’t take breaks and you can squeeze out their entrails without risking a lawsuit. You can’t even do that with temps anymore. Sure, we might all contract a futuristic, incurable case of dysentery from a microbe experiment gone awry, but think of the cost savings.

Another company mining microbes for industrial chemicals is Genomatica, funded by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

The Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference is taking place this week and, if you can't make it, here are a few highlights. Telio Solar more fully unveiled its strategy at the event. (The company has mostly been in stealth mode, but here's an early story.) The company, the latest entrant into the CIGS market, has licensed a CIGS cell from the Institute of Energy Conversion at the University of Delaware and has devised a manufacturing process to go around it. Telio's process, which revolves around chemical deposition and evaporation, takes 17 steps in all, CEO Gapseong Noh told me in an interview. But the best part is that it heavily leverages the machinery and processes from the LCD world: 60 percent of the steps -- including many of the cleaning, chemical sputtering and laser scribing stages -- come straight out of the semiconductor world. (Noh and other execs come from Samsung, the LCD king.) By leveraging LCD manufacturing know-how and the cell design, Telio says it has been able to drastically cut costs. It built a pilot line for under $4 million in about six months. You probably can't even get another CIGS CEO to raise his hands above his head and spin around three times for under $18 million. Before the end of the year, Telio wants to produce a 300mm x 300mm prototype with around a 10 percent efficiency. By the beginning of 2010, it wants to be in mass production with a 30-MW facility and to be on par in terms of cost with First Solar. Although it leverages existing standards, Telio has concocted some proprietary process stages. A chemical bath for depositing some of the ingredients is one of Telio's major achievements, he said. Planar Energy Devices, meanwhile, talked up a solid state lithium battery that is produced via printing. The company has licensed technology for solid state, large format batteries from Oak Ridge National Labs and printing technology from Bell Labs. The end result, in theory, is a way to make any surface a battery by applying layers of anodes, electrolytes and cathodes to it. The company will aim its thin-film batteries at the RFID and security card market first, and later cell phones and cars. If successful, this will take much of the bulk out of notebooks and phones because a separate battery wouldn't be needed: Planar's battery material could be sprayed onto interior surfaces in a phone. NREL has an equity interest in the company, CEO Scott Faris pointed out. The company is hand-building prototypes now and hopes to be in full production by 2010. Cool Energy touted a Stirling engine/solar thermal system for home that could provide hot water, heat and electricity. In all, the system could provide 75 percent of a family's baseload power, 95 percent of its hot water and 60 percent of its electricity, all for an $8,000 piece of equipment, says CEO Sam Weaver. Some I spoke to were skeptical. The Stirling engines also accomplishes all of this at medium temperatures. Usually, solar thermal systems require high temperatures. Thus, wait and see on this one. Smart Grid is also a hot topic. Powerit Solutions, which provides demand response systems for large commercial real estate developers and industrial sites, will unfurl a newly revamped suite of services on January 1. The company, a Swedish-U.S. affair, says it can release peak power by 10 percent to 40 percent. The trick is that the company analyzes a customers power usage and then tried to anticipate peak power needs so it can scale up or down in advance. The service costs around $80.000 but customers see a payback in about two to 18 months, says Claes Olsson, CEO. Hyperion Power Generation, which has created a small nuclear devices for power generation, also seemed to get high marks from the audience. (Disclosure: Hyperion will also appear at our own Greentech Innovations End to End Electricity conference on November 18.) Ultracapacitor maker APowerCap also seemed somewhat popular while Jon Bonnano talked up the slack-moored offshore wind turbines of Principle Power.

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.

If you aren't the Saudi Arabia of something, you're just not cutting it. Here's a list of some of the claims for Saudi Arabia-hood from the alternative energy world. The Saudi Arabia of Tidal Power: The Pentland Firth, separating Scotland from the Orkney Islands. It could provide up to 25 percent of Europe's tidal power. But don't include wave power in that. Both Scotland and Ireland claim to be the Saudi Arabia of wave. The Saudi Arabia of Wind: The Great Plains states. Three of them -- North Dakota, Kansas and Texas -- could provide the bulk of the electrical needs of the U.S., claim advocates. North Dakota also holds claim to being the Saudi Arabia of compressed air storage. The Saudi Arabia of Uranium: A tie! it's either Western Australia or Cameco, a corporation with uranium holdings in Canada. The Saudi Arabia of Algae: Western Australia again. you wouldn't think there would be a huge contest on this, but an entrepreneur recently tried to convince me that the salty water, open desert and plentiful sun will make the lands beyond Perth the Saudi of scum. The Saudi Arabia of Coal: The U.S. of course, followed by the other big land mass countries. The U.S. has the most, with 268 billion tons, followed by Russia (173 billion tons), China (126 billion tons) and India (102 billion tons). The four collectively hold 67 percent of the recoverable reserves. The Saudi Arabia of Geothermal: Nevada. In turn, this make Reno the biggest little Riyadh in the world. The Saudi Arabia of Solar Thermal: Australia for a third time. You can already hear presidential candidates denying that they've ever been to an Outback Steak House. The Saudi Arabia of Hydrogen: The Columbia River in Oregon. And if you are in the mood, you can visit the state institution where they filmed "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest." The Saudi Arabia of Biomass: Georgia. "That's right. Home not only to peanuts, corn, pecans and cotton, but also pine trees and poultry farms," say advocates.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it makes it a lot easier to look back at older predictions and scoff. This past May, for instance, oil analysts from major investment banks squared off on the future of oil prices. Arjun Murti of Goldman Sachs released a report then, according to the Telegraph, saying that demand from China and lackluster growth in supply will push oil near the $200 mark over the coming months. “We believe the current energy crisis may be coming to a head. A super-spike end game may be in the early stages of playing out,� Murti wrote, according to the paper. During the same week Lehman Brothers' Edward Morse speculated in a report that Saudi Arabia may boost output by 1.3 million barrels a day next year, more than the growth in demand. This could push prices toward $90 a barrel. The Saudis recently said that three new fields have entered production, he noted at the time. And the country has used oil for diplomatic overtures before. A weakened correlation between the dollar and oil prices may also help push prices down. And what happened? Oil prices are around $81 a barrel today, but not because of the factors Lehman's Morse outlined. Sinking demand and the worldwide credit shock caused oil prices to plummet. Ironically, Lehman has been one of the biggest victims of the crash. So that's what you get for being right for the wrong reasons. Side note: In May, I also had my cat, Fraulein Katze, walk across my keyboard to come up with a prediction. She came up with $132 a barrel. She's got to start thinking more outside of the cat box. (Disclosure: Frost and Sullivan sometimes employ her as a consultant.). In many ways, the whole episode points out one of the underlying, scary facts about the oil business: It is wildly unpredictable. I recall once attending an oil technology conference in Qatar in 2005. Oil had just come down from $70 a barrel to the mid-50s range. Despite the drop, companies were enjoying a surge in profits. So you’d expect everyone to be excited.

Not so. Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, second deputy prime minister and minister of energy and industry for Qatar, went out of his way to remind the audience that boom times only last for brief periods.