$3.4B in Smart Grid Grants Coming Tomorrow?

The Department of Energy is set to announce winners of $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus grants on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

There are hundreds of applications in to DOE's $3.4 billion smart grid investment grant program, which makes up the lion's share of $3.9 billion the department has set aside for bringing two-way communications and information technology to the nation's electricity grids (see DOE Issues Rules for $3.9B in Smart Grid Stimulus Grants). DOE representatives had said winners wouldn't be announced until next week at the earliest, making this a bit of a surprise announcement (see Green Light post).

Add up all the requests to the program, and they come to several times more than the amount available, so there are sure to be some disappointed losers — as well as happy winners — among the smart grid set tomorrow. But with utilities generally picking lots of partners from a relatively small pool of smart grid companies, there may well be enough wealth to go around (see Green Light post).

The GridWise Alliance, a trade group of smart grid companies, is already praising the effect the stimulus will have on business. In fact, waiting for stimulus has kept many utilities from doing much smart grid business at all, according to the industry. That's created a lull that looks likely to break tomorrow.

One interesting question is how closely the DOE will stick to its promise to award about 40 percent of the $3.4 billion in individual grants of $20 million or less — a move to support smaller utilities in their bids for projects. On the other hand, many large utilities have made the maximum $200 million requests to the remaining 60 percent of the program's funding.

ARPA-E: 3 Home Runs Out of 37 At-Bats Wouldn’t Be Bad, Chu Says

Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks a three-for-37 home run average is just fine.

That is, out of the 37 "high-risk, high-reward" energy technology projects funded by the Department of Energy's ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) program on Monday, "If we can get three home runs, that's terrific," Chu said.

Chu was speaking at Google's campus in Mountain View, Calif. on Monday to mark DOE's first, $151-million round of grants from the ARPA-E project, meant to boost experimental energy technologies.

Among the 37 winners were several Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinouts – 1366 Technologies, SunCatalyx, FastCap Systems and FloDesign Wind Turbine – as well as winners ranging from General Motors to a host of university research projects (see MIT, Storage, 'Direct Solar' Among DOE Research Grant Winners).

All are aiming for "transformative" technologies that can change the energy industry in a way similar to the Internet's effect on information technology, Chu said – thus, the appearance at Google.

Which projects might be home runs? Chu didn't specify, but mentioned boosting renewable energy from wind and solar, replacing fossil fuels for transportation, and finding ways to capture and store carbon from coal-fired power plants as likely candidates.

ARPA-E was created in the 2007 energy bill but wasn't funded until the stimulus package directed about $400 million to it (see Green Light post). Chu declined to say when ARPA-E would next announce grants, beyond saying that announcements could come "very, very soon."

Among the billions of dollars in grants and loans DOE is putting toward renewable energy, smart grid, energy efficiency and carbon capture and storage projects, ARPA-E represent the most risky (see DOE Stimulus Spending: $17B So Far, $30B by Year's End).

But Chu said they're necessary to help the United States regain the initiative in what he called the "second industrial revolution, which the world needs to go through."

"If we look at China, they're now spending more than $100 billion a year in developing clean energy," he noted (see GridWeek: Chu Lays Out DOE's Smart Grid Vision, Standards to Come).

Chu also said that legal caps on emitting greenhouse gases would be critical for boosting a U.S. green technology revolution – something he said he plans to tell the U.S. Senate on Tuesday as it takes up a controversial energy and climate bill that includes a cap-and-trade provision to limit CO2 emissions from energy producers and other big emitters (see Green Light posts here and here).

In a talk with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Chu mentioned a few other focuses of the DOE, including finding ways to reuse more enriched uranium created in nuclear power plants to fuel new generations of reactors (see The U.S. Left Behind in Nuclear).

He also said he'd push for policies to incentivize new electricity transmission lines to carry renewable power, as well as find ways to make them big enough to be expanded over the decades (see Tres Amigas: Triple-Linking Transmission Grids and Green Light post).

Test Drive: The All-Electric Whip From Wheego

In our quest to drive every plug-in car we can get our hands on, here's a video of our drive with the Whip, the all-electric town car coming from Atlanta area Wheego. 

The two-seater, which resembles a Smart Car, kept up with the flow of traffic along the pancake-flat Embarcadero. When I needed to change lanes, it let me accelerate ahead of other cars. Going up Nob Hill, I managed to accelerate from a standing stop to between 20 to 25 miles an hour on some of the steepest sections and maintain speed. The car I drove is actually the low-speed version (price: around $19,000) that tops out at 25 anyway. The version with lithium-ion batteries comes later.

"Steve McQueen is probably rolling in his grave somewhere," joked CEO Mike McQuary, a former internet exec, after we realized we were driving on some of the same blocks where Bullitt was filmed.

Although those aren't Porsche speeds, I was able to keep an even gap with an Econoline van behind me on one block and catch up to an empty Toyota pickup on another one. I purposely hit a few potholes and only felt a moderate lurch.

Wheego is trying to fit into the budget end of the market, somewhat like Coda Automotive. It won't be easy. Nissan is going after the same market with the Leaf, which comes out next year. Ford also plans to launch an all-electric Focus in 2011. Who will the average consumer turn to: an established car company or one that just started a few years ago. Still, electrics are catching the imagination from consumers so there should be room for some startups.

GreenVolts Gets a New CEO

GreenVolts has hired David Gudmundson as CEO, the company said.

The company, which also has moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Fremont across the bay, had been helmed by chief financial officer Gary Beasley ever since founder Bob Cart left the post this past spring to become chairman. 

Back in spring, the company also said it would change its focus from project development to equipment engineering. GreenVolts' technology makes use of mirrors to concentrate the sunlight onto solar cells for electricity generation. The system is mounted on a dual-axis tracker called CarouSol.   

Beasley isn't staying at GreenVolts. He's leaving to "pursue a career in private equity," the company said in a press release.

So who is Gudmundson? He came from the networking equipment business. He joined JDS Uniphase (NSDQ: JDSU) in 2003 as vice president of business development. His role expanded to include corporate marketing before he became an executive vice president and the president of the optical communications product group, leading a 3,000-person team, GreenVolts said.

Gudmundson didn't stay in the role of president before he joined GreenVolts, however. In October 2008, JDS Uniphase announced Gudmundson would step aside from that role to become vice president and senior advisor for optical technologies.

The announcement came four days after JDS Uniphase's CEO Kevin Kennedy resigned; he was to continue to be a member of the board and its vice chairman.

Before JDS Uniphase, Gudmundson worked for Cisco Systems. He was a group vice president and general manager, and played a key role in the company's entry into the router, broadband and security server markets, GreenVolts said.

Before Cisco, he was an engineer at ArgoSystems, which is now a subsidiary of Boeing, as well as at ESL Inc., which is part of Northrop Grumman.

Founded in 2005, GreenVolts has raised nearly $45 million in equity.

GreenVolts won recognition for signing a deal to sell electricity to the Pacific Gas and Electric from a 2-megawatt project in northern California. The company has suffered setbacks in completing that project.

In an interview with Greentech Media in March this year, Cart said the company wanted to complete generation-two technology before finishing the project. The engineers were working on changing the designs of several parts, including the mirrors and the receiver, which is made up of a solar cell, a lens and a device to dissipate heat.  

Zenn and Them Old EEStor Blues

The EEStor music catalog continues to expand.

This summer's EEStor tribute folk song from James Schultz, Quaker songwriter, was a Guthrie-esque ode to EEStor's Dick Weir and Zenn's Ian Clifford and their saga of permittivity and barium titanate purity.  Schultz has released a bluesy new hit single entitled "The EEStor Blues" in which he sings (sort of sings) of being  "tired of the old NDA, no new net news blues," and laments the demise of the City Zenn. He once again manages to get barium titanate into the rhyme scheme, unique in the history of song.

In September, Zenn Motors Chief Executive Ian Clifford told Reuters that the company discontinued its plans to sell its own highway-speed EV. Instead, Zenn is betting on EEStor, the secretive startup claiming a radical advance in ultracapacitors, that will allow EVs to charge faster and go 250 miles on a single charge at low cost. Zenn abandoned its car manufacturing business to focus on the EEStor alchemy and a drivetrain built for other auto vendors. 

EV maven Darryl Siry and former blogger on these pages writes in Wired:

"This change in strategy represents a moment of clarity for Zenn – recognition that the entire value of the company lies with its speculative bet on EEStor’s game changing technology claims, and not with the expected value of its now abandoned car business.  Which means that if you attribute today’s $169 million market capitalization of Zenn Motor Cars entirely to its 10.7% stake in EEStor, the secretive and mercurial startup can announce another questionable milestone: an implied value of more than $1.5 billion."

In the words of EEStor skeptic, frequent commenter and fabled gadfly, Steve Pluvia, "EEStor is nothing more than a vehicle for a Canadian pump-n-dump, specifically Zenn Motors. Zenn has a powerful Canadian hype team supported by a crooked bucket shop (Paradigm Capital), paid promoters and degenerate gamblers. Experts in the field of EEStor’s technology do not believe the claims in their product... The trade here is to short Zenn on all pops from here forward."

Investor Vinod Khosla is also skeptical of the company and it appears as if early investor Kleiner Perkins chose not to re-up on their investment when Zenn raised their ownership stake.

In the truthy column, apparently UL has received a request to test the mythic EESU and a firm called Polarity has received a contract from EEStor to integrate Polarity’s high power HV to LV converter into EEStor's EESU.

If EEStor is real and its technology is a game changer that disrupts the world of automotive transportation – then Zenn, Weir, KP, Paradigm, Ed B. are brilliant technologists, investors and futurists.  If EEStor is a scam, we get an illustrative story of technical disingenuousness and a naive public and investor team.

And we get a few good songs. Thanks Brother Schultz.

New Studies to Show Coal States Can Benefit From Climate Legislation

A study conducted by the University of California, Yale and the University of Illinois to be released Monday argues that both Ohio and Pennsylvania will experience both economic growth and job creation if the U.S. passes climate legislation.

The study could bear reading. Ohio and Pennsylvania are both heavily dependent on coal for their electrical power – electric cars in those states at the moment probably result in as many greenhouse gases as regular cars because of power plant emissions. Coal also provides a number of jobs in the Rust Belt. On the other hand, unemployment remains a huge problem and politicians like Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell have argued for years that the region can be revitalized by retrofitting factories to make wind turbines or energy-efficient building materials. Serious Materials re-commissioned a closed factory in the state earlier this year.

Look what is happening in Michigan and Ontario, after all. If Ohio and Pennsylvania become supporters of climate legislation, the bipartisan dominoes begin to fall.

The study, though, is just that: a study, which invariably is subject to bias and criticism. Still, should be interesting.