Greentech Media receives a lot of press releases and promotional materials on products and services that stretch the meaning of green.  My recent favorites were the flood of bidet promotions – they cut down on toilet paper, you know, and green cigarettes.

Greenwash is growing. There is no standard or single organization to substantiate these claims and there are literally hundreds of "Green Labelling" organizations.

Anyway, on that topic (greenwashing, not bidets) Business for Social Responsibility, a sustainability consulting organization, just released a great report on "Understanding and Preventing Greenwash."

They provide a guide to spotting the “10 Signs of Greenwash”:

• Fluffy language: Words or terms with no clear meaning (e.g., “eco-friendly”). 
• Green product vs. dirty company: Such as efficient lightbulbs made in a factory that pollutes rivers. 
• Suggestive pictures: Green images that indicate a (unjustified) green impact (e.g., flowers blooming from exhaust pipes). 
• Irrelevant claims: Emphasizing one tiny green attribute when everything else is not green. 
• Best in class: Declaring you are slightly greener than the rest, even if the rest are pretty terrible. 
• Just not credible: “Eco friendly” cigarettes, anyone? “Greening” a dangerous product doesn’t make it safe.
• Jargon: Information that only a scientist could check or understand. 
• Imaginary friends: A “label” that looks like third-party endorsement — except that it’s made up. 
• No proof: It could be right, but where’s the evidence? 
• Outright lying: Totally fabricated claims or data.

You can download the full report at their website. 

It has become cliche to refer to energy storage as the holy grail of renewable energy.  Actually, it's not energy storage that we need.  We have that.  What we need is cheap energy storage. 

"Most storage technology is expensive so we spend a lot of time trying to figure out the value."

Those are the words of EPRI's Dan Rastler who spoke on Wednesday night at the monthly Silicon Valley Photovoltaic Society meeting at PARC.

EPRI

Mr. Rastler is the Program Manager for Energy Storage at EPRI.
  
Founded in 1973, EPRI is an "independent" non-profit center for public interest energy and environmental research center that receives about $350 million in funding each year.  "Independent" is an approximate term in this case as EPRI's substantial budget comes in the most part from America's utilities.  And utility agendas don't always map exactly with the public good.  That said, it was an informative talk and Mr. Rastler did not seem too evil.

Smart Grid Defined

Rastler's talk looked at electric energy storage's role in the smart grid, defining the smart grid as "overlaying information control technology over the electric grid for efficiency and reliability,"  adding, "The buzzword is interoperability – how do you make everything connect across the entire domain from bulk generation to the customer?"

He made the distinction between smart grid on the utility side – where utilities are putting sensors and cameras on utility assets, "to where it really gets interesting"– the customer side where the smart grid can influence customer behavior.

Another important point he made was the need for scale – because anything less than 100 megawatts is not really important to a utility.

Industry Pain Points and Market Drivers

• The biggest driver the electrical sector is facing is carbon.  "There is no single technology that is going to get us there."  It's going to take a portfolio of technologies – solar, de-carbonizing, EVs, wind, nuclear, etc.

• Managing increased wind penetration – Texas could have 18 gigawatts of wind by 2015, California could have up to 12 gigawatts of wind by 2012.  The intermittency of renewables like wind and solar need bulk storage to buffer that unpredictability.

• We are going to need $200 billion in transmission and $400 billion in distribution investment in T&D infrastructure over the next 15 years

• Peak is only 400 hours a year – storage and information control can help manage the peak

Advanced Energy Storage Technology

Rastler is a fan of advanced lead acid batteries.  He pointed out a firm called Xtreme Power and declared that, "lead acid is going to re-emerge."  Xtreme Power builds a solid dry cell rated as a 1-megawatt four-hour system for $2 million.

He noted a few other storage technologies nearing commercialization or ready for deployment at reasonable price points:

• A 400 megawatt-10hour CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) system
• A 1 megawatt–seven hour NaS system as substation grid support  that costs $3,000 to $3,500 per kilowatt hour
• A 500 kilowatt-four hour ZnBr flow battery system that is meant to be transportable to where the pain point is
• "Lithium ion is getting to megawatt scale," he said citing a 1 megawatt-15 minute Li-ion system.  He adds, "There are as many different Li-ion chemistries as there are California wines."  There are currently early field trials by Altair Nano and A123 using Li-ion at utility scale.
• Redox flow batteries with a number of different electrolyte species

Costs of Storage

According to Rastler, "We need to get below $300 per kilowatt hour installed all in."

CAES is below $100 per kilowatt hour (but does use a fuel source).

Cost of Li-ion ranges from $400 per kilowatt hour to $1,200 per kilowatt hour.

Final Words

Rastler finished in saying that we have to get the cost structure down significantly and we need a smart grid and storage-aware regulatory policy.

He concluded saying that storage is "really an advanced materials play."  The EPRI presentation can be downloaded here.

What Is BIPV?

The term BIPV (Building Integrated Photovoltaics) is a loaded term. What is it really?

Photovoltaic roofing tiles? OK, that makes sense. Although that's a tough product to sell. Just ask now bankrupt Open Energy. Or perennial fund raiser Redwood Renewables. Merging electronics with roof tiles, roofers with electricians, is a difficult mix. Sharp, SunPower, Suntech and others have made forays into this type of product.

How about flexible solar that sticks on roofs?  Like United Solar Ovonic (a-Si) or Ascent Solar (CIGS)? These are innovative, lightweight, flexible technologies – but what part of "Building Integrated" don't you understand? These are "Building Applied" and don't form a structural part of the building envelope.  No doubt there are applications for these products, especially when light weight is a crucial consideration. But they are not truly building integrated.

France has a generous BIPV tariff but BIPV is a pretty vague term in French as well. According to a colleague: "As you're driving through the French countryside you'll occasionally see its ambiguity put to good use on bare-boned lean-tos with 'integrated' PV panels. The BIPV provision basically says that for it to qualify for the €0.65/tariff the panels need to form an aesthetic part of the building architecture. Funny."

Real BIPV

The real revolution for BIPV is to bring PV into the built environment and transform PV from Greentech into Maintech – making solar power part of the building envelope. This is the type of BIPV designed and integrated by companies like altPower.

I spoke with Anthony Periera, the CEO of altPower, a solar installer and integrator who designs and deploys BIPV. Real BIPV.

His most recent BIPV project, the Visionaire in New York City, is pictured below.

altPower's BIPV is assembled with "cassette-built pre-glazed construction" also called "unitized curtain wall." That's essentially modular window units, pre-assembled off-site – as opposed to "stick construction" where the glass is infilled on-site.

altPower designs the unitized curtain wall, contracts its' construction to others, after which it is installed by ornamental iron workers (as opposed to glaziers or electricians).

"The BIPV market is pretty slow but will come back when construction comes back," said Periera. altPower mostly does rooftops and claims to have 10 megawatts to 20 megawatts in the pipeline. It has three BIPV projects totaling 150 kilowatts in the pipeline.

The PV curtain walls cost ~$180 per square foot installed of which the module is ~$120 per square foot. 

altPower is one of the early pioneers in the untapped and huge-potential BIPV market. Maintech, not Greentech.

VC investment tends to come in stages.

In the biofuels realm, 2006/2007 was the corn and food-based ethanol stage. That has not worked out too well for VC investors or corn-farmers who dabbled in ethanol factories.  It has been a boon for bankruptcy lawyers, though.

The years 2007/2008 were the cellulosic biofuels phase. That's somewhat in remission with occasional VC outbreaks.

And 2008/2009 has been the era of algae biofuels.

Venture Capital Investment in Algae Biofuels

Considering the immense technical risks and daunting capital costs of building an algae biofuels company, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable venture capital play. And most if not all of the VCs I’ve spoken with categorize these investments as the longer-term, long-shot bets in their portfolio. But given the size of the liquid fuels market, measured in trillions of dollars, not the customary billions of dollars, it makes some sense to take the low-percentage shot.

These startups run the gamut of algae technologies – open pond, closed pond, photobioreactors, aphotic, naturally occurring algae and genetically modified.

And these firms are going to continue to need capital.  According to Jennifer Fonstad of VC investor, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, “The current strategy of many of these companies has been to turn to the government stimulus plan – this is the risk capital we can rely on today.” Ms. Fonstad was an investor in the now defunct GreenFuel.

Michael Kanellos covers recent algae activity with LiveFuels here.  Jeff St. John gives an algae rundown here.  I covered Synthetic Genomics' funding here.  And GTM Research has a brief algae summary report here.

I'm not a phycologist, but after hundreds of conversations with experts and a few years of research – my take on vehicle-scale fuel from algae is that it can be done but it's going to take a lot more time, money, land, water and resources than currently anticipated.

“VCs cannot come in here and just harvest ripened fruit – this is not shovel ready technology,” according to Dr. John Benemann on Venture Capital in algae.

You don't become a solar installer/integrator to make millions of dollars or headlines, you do it because you're passionate about solar and want to change the world a little bit, one roof at a time.  Boulder, Colo.-based Astralux is an example of a this type of solar hero. 

"It's all about financials, solar is a commodity now," said Jesse Malcomb, VP of Biz Dev at Astralux. "Out-of-pocket costs are the real barrier and getting the that cost down is key." Interestingly, while California's SolarCity is working on leasing and imaginative financing for residential applications – PPAs are illegal in Colorado for installations smaller than 10 kilowatts.

Colorado doesn't have the world's greatest solar resources, but the state's utilities do offer some of the nation's highest solar rebates. Xcel Energy offers a $3.50 per watt rebate and Black Hills Energy offers the "nation's highest rebate" – $4.50 per watt, according to Malcomb. Colorado utility Xcel, despite its attractive rebate price, is not that friendly to solar – the firm recently tried to institute an interconnection fee for solar installations (see Ucilia Wang's article here). That effort was withdrawn due to public outcry, according to Malcomb.

While we're talking price per watt, the pre-rebate price to install solar has dropped significantly according to Malcomb – from about "$8/W in 2008 to $6.50/W this year." This makes life difficult for installers and panel manufacturers as the margins start getting tight – but it's good news for consumers.

Astralux actually has its' roots in the science of solar. Its CEO Dr. Randolph (Rande) Treece, has a background in PV materials, as well as sputtering and CVD systems for the deposition of thin-film PV. Despite these advanced materials roots, almost all of the panels the firm installs are crystalline silicon-based in order to maximize energy harvest from the available roof space.

It's always interesting to hear from installers about new products and Astralux' Malcolm had some positive things to say about microinverters.  "We've seen a huge increase in interest in microinverters," he said, adding, "Microinverters really help in installations with variable slopes, multiple orientations, and mixed string size."  He also noted that he has seen microinverter costs come down, and he raved about the monitoring capabilities and ease of set-up with microinverters. He specifically cited Enphase microinverters (see The Coming Disruption in the Inverter Market).

Greentech Media spends a lot of time covering the big guns in solar – Suntech, Sanyo, SunPower, etc. as well as the larger residential installers like Akeena Solar and Solar City – but it's the little guys like Astralux who are the foot soldiers of the solar revolution.

Astralux has installed a little over 1-megawatt of solar since 2008. This video shows off some of the company's fine workmanship.

I believe that EEStor is the only energy storage company with a tribute folk song.  I checked the Maxwell website and they are lacking an ultracapacitor jingle, having to settle for actually building and selling ultracaps.

James Schultz, Quaker songwriter, begins his song as an earnest paean to our favorite stealth energy firm.  The minstrel regales us with the tale of "DW," "CWN" and "IC" and the saga of permittivity and barium titanate purity.  Very few folk songs manage to fold in these terms save for the lost verse of Woody Guthrie's "This EESU is Your EESU."

Brother Jim's song continues with EEStor saving the planet with the miracle of energy storage.  Energy crisis averted.  Case closed.

But the song does have an alternate ending in which "DW" and "CWN" end up in a "penal colony" for evidently defrauding their investors.  The alternate ending is much more Guthrie-esque.

Meanwhile, in non-musical EEstor activity, we've had the "leaked" Dick Weir phone call courtesy of Paradigm Capital, the non-enthusiasm of non-investor Vinod Khosla, and the seeming non-enthusiasm of early EEStor investor Kleiner Perkins, allegedly not participating in a recent EEStor funding cycle.

Rock on, Brother Jim.

Inverters represent about 8 per cent of the total cost of a solar installation but result in a disproportionate instance of reliability issues.  And the traditional method of stringing photovoltaic panels in series has inherent inefficiencies that Greentech Media Research has explored in deep detail (see The Coming Disruption in the Inverter Market).

Entrepreneurs and VC investors have turned out in full force to confront these inverter reliability and performance issues with a number of different approaches.  In the microinverter camp are startups like Enphase and PetraSolar, pairing discrete, self-contained inverters with each solar panel.  In another take, companies like National Semiconductor, Tigo, and SolarEdge have designed distributed MPPT DC-DC solutions which locate some of the inverter electronics at the module.

In both of these cases – energy harvest is improved and certain design constraints like panel mismatch, varying roof pitch, and shading are minimized.

Entering this fray is another player, Sustainable Energy Technologies, S.E.T., and its "Paralex" inverter.  Designed with low high-voltage thin film modules in mind, the S.E.T. inverter is a parallel solution but without locating any electronics at the PV module itself.  Instead, a pre-assembled wiring harness connects the thin-film panel to a "Sunergy" (not be be confused with Sunrgi) inverter specifically designed to work with the low-voltages of thin film panels built from Cadmium Telluride, amorphous silicon, or CIGS.  Efficiencies are optimized for these low voltage panels.  In S.E.T.'s case "Module voltage equals system voltage equals inverter voltage."

Unlike most of the long list of players in the distributed inverter field, S.E.T. is publicly traded on the TSX Venture Exchange, a small cap bourse analogous to the London Stock Exchange's AIM listing.  For companies in Western Canada like S.E.T., the TSX Venture Exchange is a way of raising capital, absent a thriving VC community.  As testament to the value of their idea S.E.T. did raise $7.6 million from U.K. venture firm Doughty Hanson earlier this year.

S.E.T. is targeting Southern Europe and Greece and already has 6 megawatts of standard inverter product in the field.  Brent Harris, cofounder and Director of Technology at S.E.T. claims they are working with First Solar's distributors in Spain and are on First Solar's approved inverter list.  He also says that one of the advantages is cost – the S.E.T. parallel inverter topology is competitive with traditional central inverters.

According to the company, its Sunergy inverter "sells for $0.40/W at a healthy margin."  

S.E.T adds yet another inverter technology to the list. 

And here's the list:

Microinverters

• Accurate Solar
• Azuray
• Enecsys
• EnPhase Energy
• GreenRay Solar
• Larankelo
• Petra Solar
• SolarBridge

DC-DC Inverter Architectures

• Accurate Solar
• MPPC
• National Semiconductor
• Sympagis
• SolarEdge
• Tigo Energy

Other Inverter Startups

• 1-Solar
• Apollo Solar
• Act Solar (acquired)
• Array Converter
• EOS
• GenDrive
• Princeton Power
• Phobos
• Sustainable Energy Technologies
• TerraWatt Power

From the S.E.T. website: