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Clean Edge has finished their Report Entitled “Clean Energy Trends 2008″. You can get your pdf copy here.

An excerpt:

Further proof of clean tech’s move from marginalized to mainstream is abundant. A growing number of governments announced plans to generate electricity from renewables. Corporations continued to jump on, if not lead, the race to transition to a cleaner, greener economy. Venture capitalists in the U.S. invested $2.7 billion in the clean-energy sector, representing more than 9 percent of total VC activity. Cleanenergy indices outpaced the broader markets in 2007. For example, the NASDAQ® Clean Edge® U.S. Liquid Series index (co-developed by Clean Edge and NASDAQ) was up 66.67 percent last year, compared with 3.53 percent for the S&P 500 index and 9.81 percent for the NASDAQ Composite index.

According to Clean Edge research:

• Biofuels (global production and wholesale pricing of ethanol and biodiesel) reached $25.4 billion in 2007 and are projected to grow to $81.1 billion by 2017. In 2007 the global biofuels market consisted of more than 13 billion gallons of ethanol and 2 billion gallons of biodiesel production worldwide.
• Wind power (new installation capital costs) is projected to expand from $30.1 billion in 2007 to $83.4 billion in 2017. Last year’s global wind power installations reached a record 20,000 MW, equivalent to 20 large-size 1 GW conventional power plants.
• Solar photovoltaics (including modules, system components, and installation) will grow from a $20.3 billion industry in 2007 to $74 billion by 2017. Annual installations were just shy of 3 GW worldwide, up nearly 500 percent from just four years earlier.
• The fuel cell and distributed hydrogen market will grow from a $1.5 billion industry (primarily for research contracts and demonstration and test units) to $16 billion over the next decade.

Together, we project these four benchmark technologies, which equaled $55.4 billion in 2006 and expanded 40 percent to $77.3 billion in 2007, to grow to $254.5 billion within a decade.

For those of you that might be interested in the wind sector in particular or clean energy in generatl, the latest issue of Renewable Energy World has a couple of great articles worth the read:

• Britannia to rule the waves?: Ambitious for Offshore
• 40,000MW by 2020: Building Offshore Wind in Europe
• Powering China’s Developmen: The Role of Renewable Energy
• A Roundup of News from around the world

Enjoy.

Original article is here over at Roland Piquepaille’s “Emerging Technology Trends”. I think this is a fairly significant line of work. Directly harnessing electricity generated at the microbe level stands to be a while new class of energy harvesting.

It will take years before bacteria can generate enough energy to generate electricity for transportation, homes or businesses, but researchers at the University of Minnesota studying bacteria have found a way to convert waste into electricity. They’ve discovered that riboflavin (also known as vitamin B-2) is responsible for much of the energy produced by a bacteria named Shewanella, which is commonly found throughout aquatic environments from the Arctic to the Antarctic. As said one of the researchers, ‘This is very exciting because it solves a fundamental biological puzzle. Scientists have known for years that Shewanella produce electricity. Now we know how they do it.’ But read more…

The Shewanella oneidensis is well known. You can see above an “AFM topograph of the metal reducing bacterium Shewanella oneidensis strain MR-1 cultivated under electron acceptor limitation to induce the production of electrically conductive appendages known as bacterial nanowires” (Credit: M. El-Naggar, USC and Y. Gorby, J. Craig Venter Institute, via this page on Asylum Research website, a company developing atomic force microscopes).

It’s the third time that this Shewanella oneidensis appears on my blog. Here are the links to two previous posts, “Bacteria can build nanowires” (July 11, 2006) and “Cleaning uranium waste with bacteria” (August 12, 2006).

Now, let’s go back to the researchers involved in this project. They include assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology, Daniel Bond and the members of his lab, and Jeffrey Gralnick and the members of assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology
his lab.

But how these bacteria produce electricity? “In nature, bacteria such as Shewanella need to access and dissolve metals such as iron. Having the ability to direct electrons to metals allows them to change their chemistry and availability. ‘Bacteria have been changing the chemistry of the environment for billions of years,’ said Gralnick. ‘Their ability to make iron soluble is key to metal cycling in the environment and essential to most life on earth.’”

This research work has been published as an open access article in the March 3 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under the name “Shewanella secretes flavins that mediate extracellular electron transfer.” Here is the beginning of the abstract. “Bacteria able to transfer electrons to metals are key agents in biogeochemical metal cycling, subsurface bioremediation, and corrosion processes. More recently, these bacteria have gained attention as the transfer of electrons from the cell surface to conductive materials can be used in multiple applications. In this work, we adapted electrochemical techniques to probe intact biofilms of Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 and Shewanella sp. MR-4 grown by using a poised electrode as an electron acceptor. This approach detected redox-active molecules within biofilms, which were involved in electron transfer to the electrode.”

For more information, here is a link to the full article (PDF format, 6 pages, 915 KB).

Sources: University of Minnesota news release, March 3, 2008; and various websites

It you work in a materials business like I do you probably have noted the emergence of eco-friendly or green products pushed in the marketplace. Working in a company that has had a eco-slant for quite some time now it is interesting to see the up-tick in awareness in green/eco. I am still a little cautious of green for green’s sake, but have had an awakening per se recently after listening the Ted Talk below. The talk in question was by John Doerr entitled “Seeking Salvation and profit in greentech”.

John Doerr is quite a legend in the VC community and has helped to fund many startups that are now in the common venacular (Amazon, Netscape, Google, and Compaq for instance) as a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. His Bio is is here is you are interested in learning more. He goes so far as to say that “going green may be the “biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.” His theme of the talk centers around the situation that our actions have put us in and that he absolutely thinks that we must correct the problems we have created in the past century with mismanagement of our environment. What is really refreshing in his talk is that he does not think that legislation alone will bring the change needed. He urges that the real solution to our plight is the combination of greentech and business acumen. Greentech that also saves money is the key to widespread adoption. He cites a few early examples of this. Listen to the talk and see what you think. Then analyze in what areas of your business can you create and sell solutions that not only make sense from a financial point of view but also from an environmental point of view?

I was reading over at endless innovation this post which points to a presentation by Amy Smith at TED.

I found the presentation to be quite refreshing and eye-opening. She specializes in designing solutions for the other 90% of the world. Engineering solutions to common, but life-threatening problems in developing countries. Highlighted in the talk are designs for cleaner burning cooking fuels made from local resources that achieve equivalent performance to wood based charcoal.

For those of us that develop products or design something for a living, it was a kick in the teeth. Many of us work very hard to solve difficult problems (sometimes very niche I must admit) with some of the very latest technology at our disposal. This is a reminder of:

#1 Try to solve those problems that are important.

#2 Get your head up out of “the way” things are done and look at what works.

#3 Look at how to match your resources, methods, and economics with the environment and situation at hand.

TEDTalk - Ideas worth spreading.

For those of you that are working in nanotech or are interested in how nano will effect your lives should take some time and visit The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies Site. This site and the information there is a collaboration between the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The Pew Charitable Trusts. Their Mission Statement is interesting in their goals. They also have some great content on there:

1. Frontpage with Nano News
2. Green Nano discussion series
3. Inventories of nano products in (Medicine, Agriculture/Food, & Consumer)
4. A list of government sponsors research on EH&S of Nano.
5. Some of the research projects they are sponsoring.
6. Some Publications they have been involved in.

One interesting item on the site I didn’t list above is the Nano Google Maps Mashup. One static image is shown below that shows the relative activity in Nano across the United States. At the link you can zoom in on your area and see the companies locally are working in Nano. Looking at my area, I know the data collection is not complete, but the concepts is a nice way to visualize the geographical relationships to data.

So is your company on the map? If it is you should at least check out the rest of the data at the site.

I have a couple of interesting links that people may be interested in.

• My friend forwarded this transcript of a pre-commencement lecture given by Narayana Murthy (chief mentor and chairman of the board, Infosys Technologies) at the New York University (Stern School of Business) on May 9. The theme of the lecture was the great impact that chance events played in shaping his life. Quite a good lecture. It really got me thinking as to the random events that lead to long friendships, family, professional success, and perception altering moments.

• I got a note in my email today with links to 3 new TED Talks.
  • John Doerr: Seeking salvation and profit in greentech
  • Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo on SeaDragon and PhotoSynth (AMAZING)
  • Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala: How to help Africa? Do business there

• Also some interesting articles in SmallTimes this month. NanoDynamics is planning an IPO.

• The rankings for the top Schools with Nano programs according to SmallTimes is out. ( or the quick view for the impatient).
• The SmallTimes mergers and acquisitions summary this month seem to have quite a few interesting tid-bits.

  • Xradia with it’s minaturized microscope offerings with some new funding.
    
  • NaturalNano Funding deal is in there (Notice the much improved website with their new money).
  • SolarDiesel with a huge buyout deal on the plans to builds the worlds largest biodiesel plant.
  • Arrowhead Research Corporation continues its end-run to gobble up all the SWNT patents it can find with the purchase of C Sixty Inc. and CNI

• This story from Seth Godin about alignment is concise and to the point.

“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed.”

I was actually watching an episode of “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe” where he was working with someone making biodiesel from waste cooking oil. I was surprised at the relative straight-forward nature of the process. This started me thinking about the growth in awareness of biofuel.

For a while now I have been somewhat following the interest in bio-sourced plastics, biofuels, and carbon footprint as a factor in purchasing decisions and marketing. With Walmart including sustainability (carbon footprint and biodegradability) as factors in its Packaging Scorecard for vendors and the rise of interest in bio-sourced fuels and chemical feedstocks it is a good idea to keep an eye on this trend.  For example, in my inbox last week I noticed again that 10 of the top25 articles in Chemical Engineering on ScienceDirect are articles on biodiesel or biofuel processing.

So I decided to go to Google Trends and see what the search rates look like for some relavent terms: biodiesel, biofuel, carbon footprint, PLA.

For biodiesel I was wondering how much of thisinterest  is really linked to crude oil prices versus the publics commitment to eco concerns? So I compared biodiesel, Crude Oil, and “carbon footprint” in the same graph. (separate terms by commas to compare, neat feature). This is the comparison that came up:

(Blue=biodiesel ; Red=Crude Oil ; Yellow= carbon footprint)

I was shocked to see how tightly biodiesel and crude oil searches were linked. The cause:effect relationship is not clear however. Are people searching for biodiesel because of high crude oil prices or are they looking up crude oil prices to see how much they are saving by using the biodiesel that have already decided to use for environmental reasons? Either way the two terms are linked tightly. The other interesting thing to note is that carbon footprint is a farily new term emerging in late 2005, with press coverage picking up in late 2006. (bottom lines are news reference volumes.)

Some questions:

• Is biodiesel a hype tech  or the future?
• Do you pay more for eco-friendly products?
• Do you choose an “eco” labeled product over another product that you view have similar performance?
• Does bottom-line overrule “eco” every time?

I’d appreciate your opinions on the subject, drop me a comment or an email.