Colorado Green Tech Meetup Blog

We’re growing again. Our June meeting hit another milestone with over 100 “yes” RSVP’s for our meeting. With the growing attendees, the meeting has been moved to an auditorium on the main floor in the Koelbel Building.

Pre-meeting Activities

There was lots of networking before the meeting started – great food, drinks and conversations. Lots of new faces as well. Kris was approached by the Boulder County Business Report who covered our meeting this month.We’re excited to have them aboard. Green technology is seeing more exposure in the press will hopefully draw the interest of new and current entrepreneurs to the meetup.

Introductions

Kris Wiesenfeld kicked off the meeting with the unveiling of a new logo, designed by Denise Cote. We’re grateful for such an innovate design and happy to promote Denise – she can be contacted via the members list. Also we’re happy to announce the addition of a new sponsor Infield Capital, thanks for the support for green tech meeting! Infield joins our current sponsors Sequel Ventures and Access Ventures.

Presenters

Professor John R. Dorgan, PolyNew Inc
Ecobionanocomposites, A New Class of Green Materials

Professor Dorgan is currently teaching at the Colorado School of Mines. John started his talk with some background on the current plastics market, an amazing 107 Billion dollars. But with plastics relying on petroleum as a major component, the feedstock cost and access is becoming an issue. Enter bio-plastics, now on its third generation(that employs genetically modified crops), that is competitive with its petroleum based counterpart.

Some of previous work in this area are

• Nature Works LLC – that produces green house gas neutral poylmers
• Brasken – Brazilian plastics company with green polyethylene products made from sugar cane
• Metabolix/Telles – using non-food feedstock for plastics, chemicals and energy, ADM licensing technology

One of foundation domains support bioplastics is Industrial Ecology(IE) and is defined as:

an interdisciplinary field that focuses on the sustainable combination of environment, economy and technology.

Within this field the sub-domains can be associated with “Red” is the research and processing of plants for the medical field. “Green” is associated with agriculture and “White” is associated with industrial biotechnology.

So now for a mouthful to describe the current field bio-plastics sits in the cross-roads of

“Ecobionanotechnology”

representing the convergence of Industrial Ecology, Biotechnology and Nanotechnology

So where is one of the great markets and demands for bioplastics?  The plastic cup, an industry that would address the need for a bio-friendly solution for plastics cups. The biobased beer cup is a significant market but even larger, coffee cups, cups and lids that could withstand “McDonalds coffee hot” temperatures.

In order to get solve this challenge, nanotechnology is employed, to provide clay like material heat distortion properties. Take a tip from our green chemistry book, we want to avoid materials that mined (acid mine drainage” is a well know mining issues). To achieve these properties, Dr Jordan has engineered a “Nanowisker” to embed in the plastic structure, similar to fiberglass

A natural target market is to company’s producing cups, MeadWestVaco being a prime example. Making  ecobionanocomposites cost-effective is key and with current oil prices this threshold has been reached.

PolyNew has secured an NSF Phase II funding and is seeking additional funds. With a potential market of 100 mill/annually PolyNew is well positioned. They are also exploring a number of feedstocks for their product, such as soy-beans and others and working to reducing costs of their product to 95cents/lb and lower.

Quale Hodek, Renewable Choice Energy
Renewable Energy and Carbon Offsets

Renewable Choice Energy, started in 2001,  is a Boulder based company that sells renewable energy and carbon offsets.  Company rep, Quale Hodek indicated a number of businesses and private individuals are taking advantage of the opportunity to grow renewable energy through credits and offsets. Their customer list is very extensive with company’s such as Whole foods Market, Vail Resorts, Steel Case, John Deere, HSBC, Washington Mutual, Microsoft.

Business services offered go beyond the sale of offsets & credits. They also provide renewable energy education and work with businesses to promote/market their own contributions to green energy. Company and individuals can contribute to many types of energy “purchases” or project developments such as geothermal, wind, pv, biomass and small scale hydro. Some businesses specify that wish to contribute to a specific project or help support a from-scratch project, such as a Wind Energy farm that Steel Case helped develop.

The market for selling credits and offsets is currently 31 million. Renewable energy choice is working hard to penetrate this market with a 27 person sales team. Growth in the renewable energy has seen a significant acceleration with credit/offset company’s facilitating contributions with Wind Energy growth alone growing 40% in 2007.

The carbon credit market is based on the Kyoto protocol and is globally recognized. Quale also emphasized that they “certify” the wholesalers of renewable energy, this is a value add to individual/business to validate their purchase since some field uncertain with some vendor claims. He also described that this support helps developers get their renewable projects online, a difficult task when the energy itself is sold to the end client at an extra premium(typically 2-5% more than fossil fuel based energy).

The typical client base is 90% corporate and 10% residential. Customers could go to Excel directly to specify a renewable energy source but corporate customers prefer access to “call centers” and marketing information provided to them.  Also Excel may only sell certain types of renewable energies such as a wind directly but Renewable Energy Choices sells credits for the complete domain of renewables.

With customers in all 50 states and clients like Vail Resorts (which made the 2nd largest purchase of Wind Energy credits – offsetting all their annual electricity use)  they see great potential. The opportunity is selling credits/offsets to help assist developing renewable infrastructure growth in 2008 for a 1 Bil. market.

Russell Thomas, Thomas engines
Variable compression engine technology

Russell Thomas has answered a question many have been asking lately, can’t we just get more fuel efficient vehicles with our current gasoline based systems with no power loss? The variable compress engine promises just that, no power loss, change in engine cost or driveability differences from today’s modern combustion engine.

Thomas engines has investment support from large international corporation such as SKF, AVL, Chevron Russia and interest from Sweden, Austria, China, Russia and the US.

You can think of variable compress engine as a comparable to diesel efficiencies without the drawbacks of a diesel. A high compression engine can provide better fuel economy 20-30% better but an engine need to switch between low and high compression to make the engine useful and this where variable compression engines come in. The only production vehicle variable compression engine to date is the Saab SVC.

Russell showed a great graphic of an engine configuration that is a little difficult to describe, but at high level it looked like undulating steel washers rotating around pistons – essentially a new take on the crankshaft to facilitate piston strokes. And with this novel design a lot of work and finite-element analysis has gone into the design to ensure mechanical endurance and minimal wear on the components. The engine is designed to last over 150K miles. Essentially with the design work the Thomas team has made, makes the engine extremely reliable, maintainable and smooth when compared to existing variable compression engines and even to existing gasoline engines.

The price of the engine is similar to normal gasoline engines, and less then half the price of a diesel engine. It is also competitive with existing hybrids since there is no extra battery cost. The engine design intellectual property is covered by extensive issued and pending patents owned by Thomas Engines and with a 60 Mil passenger car market it is well positioned to help mitigate of current global oil crisis.

More details about the engine, it is 2.06L engine with 240hp with “slightly less weight” for same power gasoline engine. Currently it is spark-ignited but will be non-spark ignited in the future. With some more years of development down the road this engine seems to be ahead of its variable compression competitors.

Sunil Cherien,  Spirae
Energy Management for Renewable and Distributed Energy

Sunil takes a through the future of energy management in his presentation. How do we management all the alternative energy sources on the grid with the inherently different characteristics? Both areas, demand management and supply management need to be tackled. Smart grids are the answer with an upgrade to our infrastructure that matured in the 1950’s and 60’s.

Sunil’s group is based in Ft. Collins and is part of a “Clean Energy Cluster” along with the Colorado State University supporting green technologies in Colorado. The city of Fort Collins, the city’s utility department, other state agency are helping in some form to Spirae and working to improve the grid to support alternatives.

The next generation involves both demand and supply management of energy resources

For demand management infrastructure there are smart grids, where the consumer is also part of the equation of “smart demand management”. The demand is managed or optimally utilized which helps consumers use power during “low usage” periods or during “peak generation” of alternatives such as higher wind generation. Consumers can make “discretionary usage” such as turning on a washer machines during the most optimal times.

Supply management is on the other side of the equation. The future of supply systems is both a hybrid collection of energy sources and systems to manage them. Outside of traditional energy supplieds (electric, nuclear, coal, etc.) there are new alternative supplies such as wind farms, solar concentrator power farms, PV grids. Additionally consumers can generate energy to the grid through small “dispersed systems” such as small PV systems on roof-tops.

How does a power system operator “balance” the system given the hybrid of alternative, dispersed and traditional generation plants?  The operator needs to keep supply power attributes within specification (120V/240V and 60hz).  Current system management is done with the SCADA system (You can ask our organizer Kris Wiesenfeld on this topic, I’ve also worked on power transformers as an electrical engineer).  We’ve also go issues with scaling systems (such as PV – which have fixed outputs). Also we now have to compensate for multi-directional systems – your house PV can feed into the grid with net metering or you can also draw power (on a rainy day). Remember the grid was designed for uni-directional supply of energy. Another issue with alternative supply management is that output can be variable, so that a wind farm can generate 450MW at is peak but drop significantly based on the wind conditions.

The road to integrate these challenges has been set, and Sunil and his  company are on that road.  At the governmental level there are standards such as Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) and states such as California are already adopting it. Sunil’s company is providing advisement and building infrastructure for the hardware side of this equation.  Euclidean systems with intelligent nodes that communicate to each other and work together.

Spirea is an R&D shop of 35 people working with strategic customer around the world.  Spirea’s control system help build managed substations that produce consistent electrical supply that can turn off or on or “island” the power station. They can bring on natural “gas beakers” to produce electricity when alternative sources are producing lower outputs and bring on consistent power to the grid. Also modeling and software are inportant part of the infrastructure solutions that have to work in real-time to react to changing conditions and “protect” the grid from large fluctuations.

Sunil had some great stories on work they have done in Denmark which receives 20-30% of their energy from renewable’s today but are planning to increase that to 60% in the next few years. If you’re interested there is a great presentation on Wind Energy done for the DaVinci institute where a NREL researcher explains how Denmark sells excess wind energy to Norway.  Also Ft. Collins is a leader in renewables. The city is a Zero Energy District (ZED) with both wind, PV and CFCP engines on the grid.  Sunil also mentioned in the area, the selling of power to neighboring geographical areas needs work in the regulatory field. In Europe again there is the potential to sell power from Denmark down to Italy, the regulation and systems need to be in place to do this. Also the cost for renewables usually draw a premium and customers and governments are working to educate on this new business model.

This was a great meeting with innovative topics, thanks to Kris and all our speakers!

Kevin Geminiuc