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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 finally had a few minuted to breath and think today and what a timely arrival was the latest email from TEDTalks in my inbox. I have heard a great number of mentions on “cradle to cradle” design over the past couple of years. Most of this in a negative or absurd light as what some people consider a knee jerk reaction and unrealistic for a real manufacturing society. As I am almost never dissapointed by TED, I listened to the embedded talk below. (Click Here if your corporation blocks embedded video)

For those of you that may not be familiar with William McDonough here is an introduction from the TEDTalk site that might give you a little insight.

“Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “All children, all species, for all time.” A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world’s largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he’s designing in China.”

Here is a link to the website for his book “Cradle to Cradle“.

For those of you interested in design, lifecycle, and how to couple the two, you are in luck. Check out the TEDTalk topic of “Design Like You Give a Damn“.