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Wind, solar and tidal power, batteries and hybrid cars have all attracted entrepreneurs who become advocates for a core technology. But those entrepreneurs often watch what else is happening in cleantech as a whole. So we asked a star chamber of cleantech providers, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in which industry (not their own) would they invest their own hard-earned dollars — and which technologies would they steer clear from.
Steve Kaufman, CEO of Alteris Renewables Inc., summarized the criteria as “solutions that provide strong financial return, can be implemented quickly and provide real environmental benefits.
Cleantech draws comparison to the dot-com bubble, but clean technology simmers rather than boils. “Four guys in a garage can create a software startup, but (an energy startup) takes tens of millions of dollars in the world’s slowest-moving business: electricity,” said F. William Capp, president and CEO of flywheel energy-storage company Beacon Power Corp. in Tyngsboro. “If you want to create an idea and see it go viral, you don’t do that connected with the energy grid.”
Ultimately, the economics must make sense.
“Solar (is successful) in Germany because they have a feed-in tariff of 40 cents per kilowatt, which spawned the solar industry because people could sell power into the grid,” observes William “Wilbur” James, a managing general partner of Boston-based Rockport Capital Partners.
Similar economics favor wind in Scandinavia.
Subsidies, not tariffs, influence cleantech economics in the U.S., said CEO Walter Sass of wind measurement company Second Wind Inc. of Somerville. “I’m not critical of subsidies, but they favor some technologies that wouldn’t otherwise fly. You can assess breakthroughs (as investments) on the B-to-B level. What big players like GE and Siemens do is sophisticated and reasonable — they’re not buying some new rotor that supposedly cuts costs by 30 percent.”
“I’m leery of technologies that may one day be profitable,” said Don Young, president and CEO of Aspen Aerogels Inc. in Northborough. “Most targets you’re seeing are for 2020, 2025. What will catapult us to those goals in the next five years are existing technologies that can be latched onto existing platforms,” he said, citing the electric grid and liquid-fuel infrastructures, and “doing better with things that already exist; improving the energy efficiency around our built environment, our homes, federal buildings or industrial processes; or around tougher fuel standards.”
Tapping the wind and sun
Of the renewable energy sources, the solar providers are most enthusiastic about wind, and vice versa.
“Wind action has very good economics,” says CEO Thomas M. Zarrella of GT Solar Inc. in Merrimack, N.H. “It has challenges, in that it has to be sited where there’s wind. But it’s come a long way technology-wise.” The general take on wind is that it is more mature than solar, but more of a hit in Europe than here, noted Zarrella, whose company makes equipment used by solar power systems manufacturers.
Solar provides more than just electricity — it provides waste heat. “And we should be able to make better use of that,” said Justin Aborn, CTO and chief scientist of General Compression Inc. in Newton, which is developing storage systems for wind and other renewables. “There are solar-concentration technologies, which focus a lot of sun on a smaller spot, to produce steam and generate electricity.”
Both wind and solar technologies have the advantage of bypassing the grid and hedging against rate hikes. But once again — neither source can be stored at the moment. Unlike oil or gas, you cannot tank it or truck it. If he weren’t in the solar business, Zarella said he would be “quite interested” in battery technology: “Much of the time, wind generates electricity with nowhere to go because the grid system is not designed to move electricity around the country.”
Nor has storage realized its consumer-grade potential, he said: General Electric has yet to realize its ideal of a fuel-cell car and solar- or wind-powered house in an autonomous minigrid.
Conservation, smart grids, renewable power
Efficiency technology is not as “sexy” as renewable energy (three of our executives used that exact word), but all 12 regarded conservation technology as proven and immediately influential.
According to studies commissioned by Boston Mayor Thomas Menino’s Climate Change Advisory Council, 75 percent of emissions in Boston are associated with heating, cooling and lighting buildings. Lighting is an energy hog as well, and switching out lighting fixtures for higher-efficiency LED lights can reduce the energy load by 20 percent.
That success is scalable, observed Capp of Beacon Power, from the building to the distribution grid. The newly available Google Inc. PowerMeter monitors home consumption in real time, and “people find things like one six-pack in an inefficient fridge in a warm garage creates a phenomenally high expense. That’s a residential version of what you can do in distribution.”
Several executives observed that conservation technology must pass rigorous standards and offer measurable payback. Energy-efficient lighting, for example, must displace existing lighting with better technology, but at much the same cost.
Smart-grid technology improves communications, diverts power as needed, minimizes loss and better integrates renewable sources like wind. Still, it cannot store energy. “This is screaming for a solution,” says Scott Pearson, CEO of Protonex Technology Corp. of Southborough, which offers advanced fuel cell products. “The grid cannot sock away energy for use in peak times. You make it, you use it. The challenge is price point — existing technologies don’t go up to grid scale.”
On the road
What about alternative-fuel automobiles? Most executives were enthusiastic about hybrids, but cool on electric cars. For electrics to replace what is on the road, “we would need a couple of hundred miles on a charge, to charge it conveniently, and to run at 60 to 70 mph,” explained Robert LeFort, CEO of Ember Corp. in Boston, which provides wireless energy-efficiency products. “It will be a long, expensive process to make electric mainstream, where hybrids are an incremental business migration for big automakers.”
Two of the interviewed executives were enthusiastic about diesel hybrids coming out of Germany. “It’ll probably be my next car,” said Zarella, “It’s amazing some of the mileage they get — 70 or 80 miles per gallon.” And diesel works with the types of fuel easily available, which electric vehicles do not. Besides which, points out CEO William Frey of biofuel technology provider Qteros in Marlborough, “I don’t hear how the electricity is being generated, which is coal, natural gas, and oil — none of which are sustainable in the long term.”
A few executives were skeptical of coal gasification and clean coal, which GreatPoint Energy in Cambridge provides. “It’s inefficient to just take hydrogen from a fossil hydrocarbon fuel that took thousands of years to evolve, when it could be used for things with a high-value function like medical plastics,” says Foerd Ames, CEO of Ocean Wave Energy Co. in Bristol R.I.
But coal is so plentiful, Andrew Perlman, co-founder, president and CEO of GreatPoint Energy, defends. “In Illinois, there are more BTUs of coal than of oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. I tend to agree that there’s no clean way to burn coal,” but GreatPoint Energy relies upon catalysis: It does not burn coal — it chemically converts it to hydrogen or natural gas, he says.
In turn, does wave power make economic sense?
“It wouldn’t be our first thought,” says Charles McDermott, general partner at investor Rockport Capital. “You’ve got siting issues, in that you can’t interfere with recreation. And the harsh marine environment breaks down the equipment. Add the cost of getting the power onshore and factor in the useful lifetimes of equipment, and it becomes expensive power.”
Look again, said Ames of Ocean Wave Energy: “Look at the combined forces that move a wind turbine versus lifting a cubic foot of water. There’s a lot of energy there, and very concentrated. I’ve worked at it for 31 years, and I’m just waiting for more of a consensus.”
“There is no cleantech silver bullet. Instead, there is clean buckshot,” says William Kanzer, director of marketing for integrator Alteris Renewables. Clean technology as a whole answers energy/environmental challenges. But near-term, say both investors and providers, the proven solutions are the best investments.
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