Nuclear CEO Asks Senate to Put Nukes in Renewable Standards

A very interesting tidbit in the WSJ's Environmental Capital blog today:

John Rowe, CEO nuclear power plant operator Exelon, suggested in a hearing in the U.S. Senate that nuclear be included in renewable portfolio standards.

That's one way to hit the 20 percent by 2020 mark in the typical RPS standard. Nuclear already accounts for 9 percent of the total energy consumed in America, including petroleum, and 20.6 of the electricity generated. That 20.6 percent, by the way, comes from 104 plants. Done.

He also wants $50 billion in loan guarantees.

If anything, the hearings and debates over the energy bill may prod the long awaited showdown on nuclear to occur.

Nuclear proponents and opponents have jousted over several topics in the past few years and several companies have begun to suggest new technologies – such as modular nuclear plants – to reduce some of the planning and financial risks associated with nuclear. Unfortunately, it will also be a debate where the known unknows far outweigh the facts.

A nuclear plant hasn't been built in the U.S. in years and since then the safety, proliferation and expense issues have become more complex. And the solar and wind companies have this going for them: They will be able to put massive amounts of capacity continue to put capacity in the ground before the first permits to build a new nuclear plant are even granted.

DOE Dishes Out $338M for Geothermal: The Winners Are…

Is everybody but me getting money?

The Department of Energy once again opened the money bag. This time, it awarded $338 million for 123 projects. The funds will be matched by $353 million in private funds.

The DOE divided the awards into six categories. The three categories to get the most money were innovations in exploration and drilling ($98.1 million), ground source heat pumps ($61.9 million) and enhanced geothermal systems demonstration ($51.4 million).

Among individual companies, AltaRock Energy will build a demonstration of its enhanced geothermal recovery technology in Oregon. In September, the company, which has received money from Google and Kleiner, Perkins, stopped drilling at its California site. AltaRock injects water into the ground, heats it up and then exploits the steam to crank a turbine. Some fear that the technique can induce earthquakes.

Meanwhile Magma received $10 million in two grants, including one to study how to use oil and gas equipment more effectively in geothermal. Naknek Electric got $12.4 million to build geothermal systems to power three communities in Alaska. A number of companies received grants to find geothermal wells in Montana, Hawaii, California, Oregon and Nevada. You can see the whole list here.

Geothermal constitutes only 5 percent of the renewable energy consumed in the U.S., and renewables only constitute 7 percent of the total energy diet, meaning that geothermal makes up only 0.35 of a percent of the total energy budget. Most of the potential exists in the western U.S. But look at the bright side. Geothermal is baseline power, which means the amount of power produced does not vary with the weather. The amount generated right now is five times the amount generated by solar.

The U.S. consumes about 100 quads of energy a year.

SPI Blog, Part 3: eIQ and the Distributed PV Electronics Field

eIQ is one of many startups that have emerged in the last few years with an eye toward innovation in the photovoltaic inverter / balance of system market. The global inverter market is sizable and estimated at $2.4 billion in 2009.

The central inverter incumbents include SMA, SatCon, Fronius, Xantrex, PV Powered, and many more.

Here is a list of most of the startups chasing this market:

Rather than build the next central inverter, most of these firms are trying to distribute the electronics in the solar installation and they all have their own little twist on how they are performing that trick.

eIQ uses a DC-to-DC boost architecture that relies on parallel interconnection, ostensibly simplifying the design and reducing the amount of wire, combiner boxes and labor required to install a system. Like almost all of the firms on the list above – eIQ distributes the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) function and corrects for panel mismatch caused by shading, soling or degradation. This can yield significant more energy energy harvest, from 5 percent to 30 percent, depending on the enthusiasm of the marketing person pontificating.

I spoke with Michael Lamb, VP of Business Development and Gene Krzywinski the CTO of the firm.

The early stage startup, funded with $10 million from NGEN and Robert Bosch Venture Capital, already has some market traction – evidenced by its work with Signet Solar, an amorphous silicon panel vendor. "Signet is making a choice to bundle their products with ours because of the systems issues we address," said Krzywinski. 

The CTO continued: "We allow more Signet panels to be connected per bus – 75 Signet panels per DC bus (9 to 10 kilowatts per string) versus 4 to 5 kilowatts with other architectures," adding, "The others in the market control the current and eIQ works more in the voltage domain."

Pricing at small quantities is 40 cents per watt for the company's system alone. The customer does have to include a central inverter but the company claims that the savings that eIQ provides are in the Balance of System budget which includes wiring, combiner boxes, junction boxes, conduit and labor saying "That budget is bigger than the inverter budget – up to $1 per watt," said Krzywinski.

In addition to working with Signet, the firm has partnered with PV Powered.  There were First Solar panels in the demo room as well.

The bottom line according to Signet is that "eIQ helps the partner inverter become more efficient."

Silver Spring, Greenbox Go Back to Oklahoma

Oklahoma Gas & Electric on Tuesday named Silver Spring Networks and Greenbox Technology as partners on its smart grid plans – yet again.

Only this time, the utility plans to use the two for a full-scale deployment rather than a pilot project, as it did last year (see Smart Grid: Test Customers Give Thumbs Up).

And, of course, Silver Spring bought Greenbox last month, so the two will be working even more closely together, so to speak (see Silver Spring Swallows Greenbox).

The OG&E project announced Thursday calls for 42,000 smart meters from General Electric to be installed in Norman, Okla. Redwood City, Calif.-based Silver Spring will network the meters.

The project will also seek to recruit 2,000 to 3,000 customers to get "almost real time" information about their in-home energy use and electricity pricing.

That's similar to the pilot project Silver Spring and Greenbox did last year in Oklahoma City, and OG&E plans to use both technologies in their new project, Eric Dresselhuys, Silver Spring's vice president of markets, said Thursday.

The 42,000-meter deployment is part of a 771,000-smart meter rollout that OG&E just got $130 million in Department of Energy grant funding for on Tuesday (see DOE's $3.4B Smart Grid Grant Program: The Winners).

Details of that broader deployment were awaiting state regulator approval of the utility's request to raise customer rates to recover the remaining costs of the project, which is expected to total about $300 million, the utility said Thursday.

With $3.4 billion in DOE grants announced Tuesday - enough to deploy 1.8 million smart meters, one million in-home energy displays, 175,000 load management devices, 170,000 smart thermostats, 200,000 advanced transformers and 700 automated substation systems over the course of the next three years or so – expect more of these announcements in the coming days.

Wilson, Sonsini Launches Guide to Stimulus Funding

Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati has launched a web portal primarily for investors and startups that tracks grants, loan guarantees and other financing mechanisms available at the state and local level.

As an added bonus, it also includes all of the grant awards. Thus, VCs and others can track who is applying for what and what sort of ideas they are proposing. The Small Business Innovation Research Program, for instance, has a $36 million fund for Phase I grants that top out at around $100,000. Phase II and II grants will follow. Applications are due by Nov. 20. Foro Energy, meanwhile, just got a $9.1 million grant to study geothermal drilling in ultra hard rock formations.

Is the information available elsewhere? Sure, but this cuts down search times. Did you want to apply for California state grants for natural gas innovations? Too late: It closed Oct. 27.

The site, which is based on Wilson's research and was set up with help from the Cleantech Group, breaks up the proposals into categories: green building, geothermal, etc. Check it out at Wilson's website.

The Next Wave of Smart Grid Funding?

Smart grid has been the buzzword on utility, entrepreneur and investor's lips in 2009. 

Funding the smart grid has certainly been on the Obama administration's agenda – as evidenced by the billions being funneled into this sector (see Jeff St. John's pieces about the winners and losers in this contest).

Venture Capital investors have been talking about smart grid investments for a while now. Foundation Capital's Steve Vassallo even authored a "Smart Grid Manifesto" to "help drive a single point of view across our four Smart Grid portfolio companies." Vassallo writes, "Smart Grid and smart pricing together answer the riddle of how you get market forces to make a difference in a monopoly environment." 

Foundation's smart grid investments include EnerNoc, Silver Spring Networks, eMeter and Control4.

Another theme amongst VC investors in 2009 has been the capital efficiency of smart grid plays. In other words: Don't expect too many Solyndra or Nanosolar-magnitude deals from the VC community in 2009 or 2010. 

That said, in looking at the numbers, although funding in smart grid is recovering:



It's a bit surprising to see the small proportion of smart grid deals relative to VC in greentech as a whole:



So are VCs talking and not diving in?  Are they looking to see the outcome of Silver Spring Networks' utility roll-out? Are we only in early days? 

Or will these initial forays into Advanced Meter Infrastructure and Home Energy Networks give way to a bigger and steadier wave of other smart grid technologies like Vehicle to Grid, EV charging stations, data management and analytics, network optimization tools, and independent energy storage operators?

The next few quarters will tell. Smart people in Greentech Media's smart grid practice see a new smart grid innovation and investment wave about to break.