150 Solar Startups: The Sequel

Back in January of this year we published a long list of VC funded and early-stage solar firms. We called it “150 Solar Startups” because the total number of firms was in that ballpark and it had a bit of a ring to it.

But as we kept looking and as our readers continued to bring more firms to our attention the numbers climbed – first past 200 and settling in at a grand total of 219.  Subtracting newly departed SV Solar and Optisolar leaves us with 217 solar firms hatched in the last few years.

This article updates that list and shows the additions to the master list.

Note that the list is for privately held firms with a focus of VC-funded or pre-VC startups. No public firms or OTCBB firms.

We’re getting to the stage in the solar gold rush that the number is starting to drop as we lose firms and the attrition on the down-side of the bubble kicks in.  Removed from the list are OptiSolar (see Inside Optisolar’s Grand Ambitions) and SV Solar (see SV Solar RIP).

This is a long and extensive list – but our readers will surely let us know if we’ve missed any.  And the list conveys a number of points, some positive, some negative.

It serves as a testament to the innovative spirit in Silicon Valley, in the U.S. and around the world. There are so many new ideas and new approaches – it is a true illustration of the entrepreneurial mind at work.

It also serves as a testament to the irrational exuberance that a strong market encourages in VC investors as science projects and powerpoint-based bubble firms get liberated from the lab a bit too early.

On with the list!

These are the recent additons and the links below will take you to the sublists Parts 1 through 6.

• Part 1: Wafered Silicon, Installers, Financiers, Balance of Systems, System Monitoring

Balance of System Startups

Azuray: Microinverter startup received $8 million from NEA in May 2008. Rohini Chakravarty of NEA is on the company’s board. Terri Fiez, a former Oregon State University professor, is the CEO.

MPPC Technology: For distributed MPP and inverter architectures, Maximum Power Point Control (MPPC) is the exact calculation of the Maximum Power Point (MPP) coordinates (voltage and current and therefore power). MPPC Technology is conducting on and off-grid tests in Europe and India.  Pre-VC.

Silicon-based Solar

Twin Creeks Technologies: Twin Creeks Technologies is an early stage, VC-funded solar start-up founded in January 2008. Using silicon fabrication processes.  Received $13.1 million Round A from Crosslink Capital and Benchmark in Q1 2008. $52 million Round B led by Artis Capital and DAG Ventures at 7X series A price in Q3 2008.  Attempting to make Si cheaper than CIGS or CdTe.  CEO is Siva Sivaram.

Solar Monitoring Firms

Deck Monitoring: Monitoring commercial solar systems with a rich web-enabled interface.

Locus Energy: Low-cost, revenue-grade, web-based performance monitoring for solar systems and distributed generation.

Solar Integrators

Armageddon Energy: Armageddon’s hexagonal module is easier to handle and better accommodates the contours of a rooftop and includes an integrated microinverter.  Armageddon claims that its’ affordable systems enable mainstream consumers to buy into solar with much lower installation time and cost.  Currently seeking VC funding.

Eshone Energy: Founded in 1995, Eshone is a solar power integrator providing turnkey, grid-connected systems for public and commercial sectors.

Financiers and Project Managers

Axio Power: Axio Power develops, finances and constructs large-scale solar projects.  Taking on private equity funding in 2009.

Renewable Funding: Renewable Funding develops and delivers solutions for renewable energy and energy efficiency financing. Cities raise funds through bonds, and the consumer pays it back through property taxes. The company provides on-line application processing coupled with a financial package that provides reasonable interest rates and low risk.

• Part 2: CPV

MegaWattSolar: With investment from Scatec and iEnergies, MegaWattSolar builds dual axis CPV “solar trees” using silicon modules and 10 to 50X concentration.

Everphoton: Taiwan-based HCPV with TJ cells.

• Part 3: Next-Gen PV

NanoMas Technologies: NanoMas builds highly conductive metallic nanoparticles for use in printed electronics, conductive pastes, solar cells and IC chip packaging. They closed a $3.2 million Round A in Q4 2008 with funding from BASF Venture Capital, Earthrise Capital Fund, and NanoMaterials Investors.

• Part 4: Thin Film

SkyPoint Solar: A thin-film solar panel manufacturing firm, launched with seed capital from its founding management team, including John Tuttle, the former CEO of troubled CIGS solar manufacturer DayStar.  Their technology is based on amorphous / microcrystalline silicon materials and they look to deploy their product in Skypoint-owned and operated solar power parks, both domestically and internationally. InfusionCapital is involved in their financing.

• Part 5: Solar AC and CHP

• Part 6: CSP

RawSolar: The company's flagship product is a tracking mirrored parabolic dish that captures sunlight to produce steam or hot water.

Miscellaneous

Kotak (India): With $8 million in financing from KPCB, Sherpalo Ventures, and Applied Materials, Kotak deploys solar power installations, and builds and distributes solar appliances such as solar water heaters, water pasteurizers and solar drying systems.

Snow Peak Energy: Solar parking structures

Veranda Solar: Low-power output, consumer-oriented on-grid solar modules.  With integrated inverter.  They’ve received seed funding in business plan competitions and are seeking VC funding.

BIPV

Modular Solar Roofing: Polymer roofing tile containing an integral PV module which is mounted using a track system, similar in concept to track lighting.  Pre-VC funding from British Columbia’s Innovative Clean Energy fund.

Rainbow Solar: Rainbow claims to build a 60-cell, standard-size, mono-crystalline photovoltaic-module with a 350W output rating for solar farm and BIPV applications. They also claim to build BIPV glass.

If we've missed any – let us know.

SolarBridge and PV Micro-Inverter Reliability

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BOM...

Silicon-based solar panels have warranties of 20 to 25 years, while vendors of the DC-AC inverters that make PV panels useful have struggled to offer warranties of five years.

Obviously if you have to replace your inverter two or three times over the lifetime of a PV installation – the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) is going to go way up, and it will tilt a competitively-priced solar installation away from the promise of grid-parity.

In the words of a colleague and respected solar designer, “The early inverters were crap.”  But that’s changing and inverter firms like SMA are now offering 10-year warranties.

There’s a new inverter game in town, however, and if the industry can develop some confidence in these new distributed inverter architectures – there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the once-stagnant inverter space (see Disruption in the PV Inverter Market).

First mover advantage belongs to Petaluma, Calif.-based Enphase and its miciroinverter.  The company has already shipped tens of thousands of units for hundreds of PV installations. You can look at every PV installation in California under the California Solar Initiative here. It’s not the most elegant spreadsheet but the data is there and you can sort by inverter vendor.  It looks like Enphase has about 400 PV installations in California using their microinverter.

But SolarBridge, (formerly known as SmartSpark) is also going after the microinverter market and has a slightly different take on the distributed inverter endgame (see SolarBridge Seeks up to $15M).

Whereas Enphase’s current inverter design mounts on the panel racking equipment, SolarBridge envisions a fully integrated AC PV panel where the inverter is incorporated into the panel itself.  SolarBridge sees this as a superior solution and is partnering with module manufacturers to develop AC module solutions.

Solar Bridge’s VP of Marketing, Joseph Scarci, believes that the integrated AC solution, “Will help accelerate the Do-it-Yourself market,” and he listed the benefits:

• No exposed DC wiring
• 208VAC or 240AC comes right out of the panel
• There are no DC disconnects

In a recent conference call with the SolarBridge braintrust, Paul Parker, their Director of Reliability, contrasted the reliability of the SolarBridge microinverter with the Enphase microinverter. “When Enphase brags about MTBF you have to be careful, Enphase uses Telcordia [as their reference], while SolarBridge uses Mil Standard 883,” he said, adding that, “Enphase … used Telcordia and in solar we don’t have the luxury of a controlled environment – there are nasty chemicals in the air, salt near the beach, sulfur near plants, and the models have not been calculated for combined environments.”

Parker continued, “One of the first things I learned in my interview was that the product needs to last 25 years with an annual failure rate of less than .2 percent per year over the lifetime of the product. If you use optoisolators, fans, or electrolytic capacitors the probability of lasting a long time is low.”

And so, gauntlet in the microinverter reliability smackdown has been dropped.  Enphase uses electrolytic capacitors while SolarBridge uses film capacitors.

Parker issued the challenge: “When we have a competitor who claims long lifetime with electrolytic caps, we have to address the electrolytic caps.”

SolarBridge uses a design that uses a thousand-fold reduction in capacitance and thus can use film caps. “Very rarely have I heard a peep about film caps,” said Parker.  He contrasts that with electrolytic caps: “It is just not a 25 year lifetime product. ... E-Caps have a nasty history, it’s not theory it’s a fact.”

More on electrolytic capacitors from Parker:

• “It is a big leap of faith to think that these e-caps can last this long.”

• “If they don’t account for every variable – they’re dead.”

• “The world’s worst recall to date involved electrolytic caps.”

• “Film caps under the same environment have a 10 to 1 lifetime advantage.”

This went on for several hours.  I went to the kitchen, made myself a nice lunch and returned in time to hear Parker continue:

• “To make the value proposition and the LCOE work you have to have a lifetime that matches the 20 year lifetime of the module itself”

• “We believe we have a fundamental advantage in performance.”

You can learn more about electrolytic capacitors, inverter relaibility and impending doom at the SolarBridge website or by searching online.

Enphase copes with the electrolytic capacitor problem via a design that minimizing their weaknesses and discusses that here in a whitepaper.  As reported by Ucilia Wang: When asked about SolarBridge's claims, Enphase's co-founder and vice president of marketing, Raghu Belur, said "It is very difficult to comment on a product that is not yet available."

SolarBridge is sampling now, looking to raise additional funding and anticipating going to market at the end of this year.

Lots more details on this disruptive new technology and this new market are in the latest issue of the Greentech Innovations Report.

Let’s Talk About CIGS (And New CIGS Player AQT)

In 2008, copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS)-based materials accounted for less than 3 percent of global photovoltaic module production. 

Yet, the potential high efficiency and the potential low cost of the CIGS material system has spurred enormous capital investment in companies, both private and public, to develop large-scale CIGS solar manufacturing.  Here's a list of the top five recipients of venture capital amongst CIGS players.

Firm             VC Received        Investors
Solyndra         $600M+            CMEA, Redpoint, Argonaut, Virgin, Rockport, USVP, et al.
Nanosolar       $500M              MDV, Riverstone, Grazia Equity, Lone Pine, Skoll, et al.
MiaSolé          $300M              KPCB, Vantage Point, Firelake, Garage Technology, et al.
SoloPower      $235M+            Convexa Capital, Crosslink Capital, Firsthand, et al.
SulfurCell       $165M+             Masdar, Intel, Climate Change Capital, et al.

That’s $1.8 billion dollars right there and the figure easily exceeds $2.3 billion when one counts the remaining CIGS players.  More than 35 firms around the globe are working on CIGS or CIGS variants.

But CIGS has proven to be an extremely difficult materials system – its manufacture and behavior has not yet been mastered as evidenced by the very few CIGS firms in true commercial production.  Almost every CIGS firm has experienced schedule delays, personnel shake-ups, or massive re-working of processes and technological approaches.

A few firms such as Wuerth Solar and Global Solar are actually shipping commercial CIGS product. Others such as Solyndra and Nanosolar boast of winning large purchase orders but true large-scale production at promised costs and efficiencies is not yet proven.  And the remaining CIGS aspirants like Miaolé and Heliovolt have gone quiet after their own personnel, financial, and technical spasms.

One of the gaping structural gaps in a CIGS builder's business plan is the lack of standard manufacturing tools - Applied Materials does not have a turn-key CIGS factory.  This means that every CIGS player has to be an equipment builder as well as a PV module and panel vendor.  That's technically risky and a highly inefficient use of VC investor capital.

Into this new VC climate of capital efficiency, a quiet CIGS innovator, Applied Quantum Technology (AQT) has raised $4.75 million from undisclosed sources and in less than a year, produced CIGS materials at an NREL-validated efficiency of greater than 10 percent.  It has taken most of the other players several years to reach that efficiency milestone. 

So what is the eight-person AQT doing that the other the other generously-funded and highly-hyped players have missed?

• They are focusing on building solar cells, not manufacturing equipment
• They are using pre-existing high-volume manufacturing equipment
• They are starting with CIS2 (Copper Indium Sulfide), a relatively less complex materials system before they tackle CIGS
• They look to ramp up in 15-megawatt to 20-megawatt modular increments, not biting off 50MW-100MW chunks like other CIGS players

AQT uses a dry reactive sputtering process and is targeting a $.65 per watt capital cost and $1.06 per watt cell cost.

Among the firm's management are the brothers Bartholomeusz, Brian and Michael, who seem to get along pretty well for brothers – more Orville and Wilbur than Groucho and Chico.  It has manufacturing and materials experience from their days at Moser Baer and Heraeus and are looking to close a $20 million Round B to advance their firm to pilot production. 

Can this David challenge the numerous Goliaths in the world of CIGS?

2009 and 2010 will be the year that most of these CIGS firms reveal their capabilities and weaknesses as we start to see their technologies or as their money runs out.  It should be an interesting time for the CIGS market and for AQT.

Top 12 Greenest Cities in the U.S.

All politics are local. So is the progress in greentech.

Federal and state Renewable Portfolio Standards, federal loans and stimulus packages are vitally important programs.

But progress in greening our cities is going to come from local efforts as much as from on high. We take a quick look at some city-based green initiatives.

San Jose, Calif. considers itself the capital of Silicon Valley, and wants to be the global center of greentech innovation. The city and its Mayor, Chuck Reed, have initiated one of the nation's most aggressive green initiatives – the Green Vision program with a 15-year goal that includes:

1. Creating 25,000 cleantech jobs

2. Reducing per capita energy use by 50 percent

3. Receiving 100 percent of its electrical power from clean renewable sources

4. Building or retrofitting 50 million square feet of green buildings

5. Diverting 100 percent of waste from landfills

6. Recycling or reusing 100 percent of its wastewater (100 million gallons per day)

7. Ensuring that 100 percent of its public fleet vehicles run on alternative fuels

8. Planting 100,000 new trees

9. Replacing 100 percent of its streetlights with smart, zero emission lighting

San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley but Palo Alto, Calif. could arguably assume the mantle of its' heart (against the protestations of Mountain View and Menlo Park). Palo Alto is the home of Stanford University, Packard's garage (of Hewlett Packard fame), Facebook, and a lot of Venture Capital firms. Steve Jobs of Apple and Sergey Brin of Google call it home.

Palo Alto can also lay claim to be one of the nation's greenest cities.

In June 2008, Palo Alto adopted mandatory green-building requirements for residential and commercial development -- one of the most stringent green building ordinances in the nation.

New buildings and remodels in Palo Alto must meet standards developed by the U.S. Green Building Council or the Build It Green organization. Expect some public pushback since the green requirements can add from $2,000 to $10,000 to the cost of a home and 2 percent to 5 percent to the cost of a commercial project, according to a city report.

Palo Alto also has

• A climate protection plan addressing CO2 emissions and water
• A program for less-toxic pest control
• Proposed stringent ordinances on construction and demolition debris, a major source of landfill material, waste, and toxics.
• The "greenest" congressional office. Anna Eshoo, a high-powered Congressperson, recently unveiled the very first congressional office in the nation to go maximum green. Eshoo's office has installed a 1.6 kilowatts photovoltaic system and 100 percent of the electricity used by the office is obtained from renewable sources. The office has made profound green modifications to its' lighting, water, heating, cooling, materials, waste stream and the transit habits of its' employees.

Palo Alto has some competition from its neighbor/rival across the Bay – the Republic of Berkeley, Calif. 

Late last year, Berkeley's city council approved a program to provide city-backed loans to property owners who install photovoltaic systems. The loans, which could total up to $20,000 each, would be paid off over 20 years as part of the owners' property-tax bills. This type of program goes a long way to remove the biggest obstacle to solar installations – the large upfront cost.

If this program succeeds, it could be expanded to finance other energy-efficiency efforts such as installing double-glazed windows or thermal insulation.

How about tiny Greensburg, Kan.? After being decimated by an F-5 tornado that leveled the city and left few homes standing, the survivors launched a plan to resurrect their town as the greenest city in America. All public buildings are to conform to LEED platinum standards.

Now, two years after the disaster, Greensburg's new homes are almost 50 percent more energy-efficient due to energy-saving windows, improved insulation, efficient heating, etc.

The people of Greensburg are pioneering the greening of a municipality, in one of the reddest states, no less.

Gainesville, Fla. is the first U.S. city with Feed-in-Tariffs.

In the first such program in the country, The Gainesville City Commission has approved a solar feed-in tariff for residential and business customers served by the Gainesville Regional Utilities in Florida. Wrote Ucilia Wang:

"Under the program, owners of solar energy systems would sell the electricity to the utilities at $0.32 per kilowatt-hour under a 20-year contract. The rate, which is higher than the price for conventional power, will remain for the first two years of the program. ... The program is modeled after the successful one in Germany, which has become the largest solar market in the world."

Other cities with claims on "the greenest" include:

Austin, Texas: Austin Energy, the city's municipally owned utility, plans to grow the renewables' portion of Austin's energy portfolio to 30 percent by 2020 and to build solar power's share to 100MW by 2020.

Boulder, Colo.: The city has resolved to become a zero-waste community.

Burlington, Vt.: More than one-third of energy used in the city comes from renewable resources, an impressive figure for the frosty Northeast.

Madison, Wis.: A bike-friendly city with an extensive recycling program that claims more than 90 percent participation.

New York City: High-density populations like NYC use fewer resources per capita. New Yorkers use of public transport dwarfs that of any other city.

Portland, Ore.: Portland is bike friendly, has set an urban growth limit to protect 25 million acres of open space, and recycles more than half of the city's trash.

San Francisco: More than half the city's residents use public or alternative transportation to get to work.

Please forgive the slightly California-centric selection in this list. Feel free to comment and let us know your choice for greenest city.

Barbarians at the Gate

Depending on whom you ask, Bechtel, Chevron and Lockheed Martin are either three of the most respected or most reviled companies in Corporate America. They employ thousands of people; provide technology and resources essential for America's continued ability to assert itself on the world stage; and play a key role in shaping federal policy and regulations on energy, the environment, national security and defense, and the economy. The constant demand for large infrastructure, oil and advanced weapons systems doesn't hurt either – especially considering how the U.S. Government usually needs some advanced weapons to defend the large infrastructure used to extract oil.

But peel back the onion a little more and you will find Bechtel, Chevron and Lockheed Martin have something else in common: They are all important players in the U.S. solar industry and, taken together, represent a trend whose strength is positively correlated with the deepness of the recession. Chevron Energy Solutions is one of the California Solar Initiative's most active installers, with 87 large-scale PV projects at some stage in the program. Bechtel is not so secretly working with a well-known Chinese solar company on its U.S. projects. Lockheed Martin has taken its expertise designing PV arrays for space applications to the utility-scale market, partnering with Starwood Energy to offer packaged engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) and structured financing deals.

What each of these companies possesses, and what makes them a threat to pure-play PV project developers, installers and EPC contractors, are enormous balance sheets and considerable expertise designing, building and managing complex projects. Why are these qualities important? First, consider the development of the U.S. PV market. Solar installations in the U.S. are trending larger over time. In 2007, nearly 35 percent of U.S. PV projects were between 1 kilowatt and 20 kilowatts, 60 percent were between 20 kilowatts and 2 megawatts, and 5 percent were larger than 2 megawatts. By 2012, GTM Research and the Prometheus Institute estimate 30 percent of cumulative projects in the U.S. will be ground-mount systems, while residential systems will comprise close to 20 percent of the market and large rooftop projects will make up around 50 percent of total installations. Large ground-mount and rooftop systems are the fastest growing segments of the U.S. market, and will represent the highest percentage of installations of the 5.4 gigawatts of cumulative capacity we estimate will be added by 2012. When the shovel hits the dirt on most of these projects, it is more likely the hard hats will bear the Bechtel logo than that of Namaste Solar.

The experience of another large-scale market bears this out. Spain's pre-September 2009 feed-in tariff incentivized big projects – most systems installed in Spain during the PV gold rush were between 5 megawatts and 10 megawatts. And while a number of pure-play developers, including Fotowatio, Renovalia, Conergy and Phoenix Solar stamped their names on some of that market's biggest projects, the impact of energy and industrial conglomerates did not go unnoticed. Consider that Acciona, Iberdrola, Abengoa and Elecnor were established infrastructure firms building transmission lines, dams, highways, bridges and fossil fuel power stations long before they became big players in the downstream PV market. In other words, experience counts.

The second reason is directly related to the current state of the credit markets. Asset financing has contracted significantly from its peak in early 2008 and tax equity has virtually disappeared from the market. Scarce capital and tight credit are forcing bank credit committees to pass on projects they would have approved only 12 months ago. The few projects receiving second looks now are airtight, addressing each project risk aspect. Important among these is EPC and supplier risk: Can the engineer credibly guarantee system performance? Will the O&M contractor be solvent in two years, five years or 20 years from now to service the project? How able is the EPC firm to guarantee construction deadlines and system costs? An industrial contractor like H&M Company or Mortenson Construction might be able to check all these boxes and back it up with construction financing where a smaller PV integrator might not.

This is not to say that today's installers and integrators are on the losing side of a difficult battle. It's quite the opposite, actually. In addition to continuing their domination of the rooftop market, pure-play PV project companies have a number of competitive advantages over their newer, larger rivals – experience navigating a byzantine array of state solar policies, PV-specific system engineering expertise, creative and innovative business models for getting projects done with scarce capital, and track records working with a global module and component supply industry – just to name a few. Additionally, some the of the heavy hitters with deep pockets, like SunEdison or a+f GmbH, will compete aggressively and well against these new entrants.

The entrance of companies like Bechtel and Lockheed Martin to the solar industry is a net positive for the industry. A recent survey report from the Solar Electric Power Association found, among other things, that "utilities do not have as much faith in the abilities of solar developers and EPC contractors as they do in the abilities of similar entities in the coal and combustion turbine industries." In planning the build out of large-scale PV, which we believe will occur in the U.S. within the next four years, utilities and independent power producers, at least initially, will turn to companies they have turned to for decades to build their power stations. Over the long term this competitive situation may play out differently, but for now the barbarians have breached the walls and their presence is not as bad as one might expect.

Growing Algae: Open Pond vs. Closed Bioreactors

NREL’s Aquatic Species Program concluded that open ponds are the optimal economic design and used open ponds for its experiments and economic models.

Algae can be grown in natural or man-made ponds. The advantage is cost: open pond growth requires less capital equipment than other techniques. The disadvantage comes in quality control. Raceway ponds, shaped like horse tracks, for growing algae for human consumption are not yet economical for fuel production (while nutraceutical algae can sell for several thousand dollars a ton).

Raceway ponds, usually lined with plastic or cement, are about 20 to 35 cm deep to ensure adequate exposure to sunlight. Paddlewheels provide motive force and keep the algae suspended in the water. The ponds are supplied with water and nutrients, and mature algae are continuously removed at one end.

NREL’s Aquatic Species Program concluded that open ponds are the optimal economic design and used open ponds for its experiments and economic models. The productivity of raceways is much higher than unmixed algae ponds.

Here is a list of open pond algae players:

Aquatic Energy looks to develop, construct and operate open pond algae farms in the Louisiana Gulf area, converting algal oils into biofuel.

Aquaflow Bionomics looks to produce biofuel from wild algae harvested from open-air environments. The firm harvests algae from the settling ponds of effluent management systems and other nutrient-rich water, typical of industries that produce a waste stream including the dairy, meat and paper industries. Aquaflow has a relationship with Boeing, targets jet-fuel production, and are trying to raise capital.

Aurora Biofuels is VC funded with more than $23 million from Oak Investment Partners, Noventi Ventures, and Gabriel Venture Partners. They are using open ponds and selected strains of algae in a pilot project in Florida.

Aurora is looking to use wastewater treatment models and is experimenting with drying algae with a “wet extraction” method. Wet extraction has the potential to eliminate or reduce the costly and energy-consuming de-watering step.

Aurora Biofuels isolates naturally-occurring algae strains with strong fuel-producing properties, ostensibly producing biodiesel with greater yields and lower costs than existing production methods.

According to Matt Caspari, Aurora’s VP of Business Development, the biggest challenges are in selecting the feedstock and sites. The company has patents pending on algae growth, harvesting, oil extraction and conversion to biodiesel.

Aurora expects to have commercial-scale facilities in 2012.

Carbon Capture Corp. operates open algae ponds with a total capacity of 8 million gallons located on a 40-acre Algae Research Center, part of a 326-acre R&D facility in Imperial Valley, California.

Cellana, a JV created by algae-to-biofuel startup HR Biopetroleum and Shell Oil, is building an open-pond demo facility in Hawaii. Cellena is developing a process for extracting algae oil without using chemicals, drying or an oil press.

General Atomics developing improved processes for growing and extracting oil from algae in open ponds.

Infinifuel Biodiesel is developing algae ponds in Nevada.

Ingrepo plans to build open pond algae production facilities in Malaysia.

Kai BioEnergy has a continuous, open system that produces bio crude oil from microalgae. The technology overcomes the risk of algae contamination in open systems and allows for high yield growth of a dominant species.

Kent BioEnergy develops open ponds algae farms with extensive experience in aquaculture and licenses from Clemson University. The company has operations in southern California, including a 160-acre process development/production facility south of Palm Springs.

LiveFuels of San Carlos, Calif. received $10 million in funding from The Quercus Trust in 2007 and looks to continue the Aquatic Species Program’s research in using open-pond algae systems to develop biofuel. The firm is trying to develop green crude to be integrated into the nation’s existing refinery infrastructure. The firm initially planned to grow algae in ponds at the Salton Sea, an inland saline lake in Southern California, but has shifted to Texas.

David Jones, LiveFuel’s COO spoke at a recent algae summit and revisited common themes in stating, “The biggest challenge is scale and scope.” And “figuring out how to manage the water and recycling wastewater.

LiveFuels is focused on wild type algae, not GMO algae although they have “come 180 degrees on that.

PetroAlgae of Melbourne, Fla. has 110 employees and plans to complete a 20-acre demonstration algae farm by the end of the year according to Fred Tennant, the firm’s VP of business development. They have patented natural strains and according to Tennant, “are making tremendous strides towards a commercially viable solution.

The company’s business model is to develop turnkey algae farms that they will license to investors with a stress on scalability and cost.

PetroSun (PINKSHEETS: PSUD) of Scottsdale, Ariz. is looking to develop an algae farm network of 1,100 acres of saltwater ponds. They claim the ponds will produce 4.4 million gallons of algal oil and 110 million pounds of biomass per year. PetroSun has a partnership with Science Applications International on algae-to-jet fuel and has been working to convert catfish ponds to algae ponds in the Southeastern U.S. They have numerous DOE grant applications in process.

Tom Konrad of Alt Energy Stocks writes: “Even if Petrosun does execute on its algae farms, will there be any first mover advantage? It seems unlikely to me; growing algae in open saltwater ponds will depend on access to suitable land near coastlines... later entrants who can acquire suitable land should be able to produce algae just as efficiently as Petrosun, since they do not seem to have any special technology or expertise. After all, the company is simply an unsuccessful oil exploration company with an algae farm division.”

Seambiotic, an Israeli firm, uses raceway/paddle-wheel open-pond algae cultivation growth fed by C02 flue-gas from a nearby IEC power plant. The company uses genetic optimization and has teamed up with Inventure Chemical to turn the algae into fuel.

XL Renewables, formerly XL Dairy Group, of Phoenix, Arizona, is developing an algal production system using dairy waste streams and attempting to integrate and co-locate dairy production, algal production, and biorefineries producing ethanol and biodiesel.

XL is focused on biomass production more than biofuels – using a semi-closed system based on a farming model and a farming mentality – making use of agricultural and irrigation components. Their trough system uses a greenhouse-type process to cultivate algae in 18-inch deep, 1,250-foot long plastic-lined troughs with aeration and lighting integrated along the six-foot wide troughs.

A plastic cover (also called plastic mulch) can extend their season from six months to 240 days. They apply and retrieve the solar cover with low-hp tractors resulting in a low labor cost – one man and one implement can service 160 acres at a claimed capital cost of $35K/acre.

Oil extraction is not necessary in XL’s case as it wants to produce high omega-oil content algae biomass for animal feeds. Ben Cloud, XL’s COO, believes that we are starting to see protein shortages and that the consumption of soybeans and corn has created an imbalance in our diet which algae omegas can mitigate.

Harvesting is accomplished via a simple flocculation system in a weir tank. The design is expected to provide an annual algae yield of 300 dry tons per acre

XL Renewables is developing a 400-acre integrated biorefinery in Westen Arizona that combines a dairy operation with a biofuels plant to produce ethanol, biodiesel, milk, animal feed and compost fertilizer. The biorefinery would use the dairy manure and other waste streams to provide all of the power, heat and steam requirements of the project.

Diversified Energy Corp. has licensed this technology from XL Renewables under the name Simgae for simple algae.

This is a small excerpt from the April issue of the Greentech Innovations Report, which dives deep into the algae pond. You can subscribe to it here.