Introduction to Green Tech/ Clean Tech

Clean Energy Roadmap Workshop in Austin 18-19 November

CHP Industry and Interested Stakeholders:

At the upcoming Clean Energy Roadmap Workshop, the GC RAC seeks input from the CHP, waste heat recovery, and district energy industries and key stakeholders regarding market development strategies and RAC service offerings in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. A vital part of the workshop preparation is a survey of the CHP industry and interested stakeholders. Your input is needed now to help develop a successful workshop.

Whether or not you plan to attend, please TAKE THE CHP SURVEY NOW

Please forward the survey link to anyone you know that might have an interest in taking part.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=P59WnTuFDAM1jHWu3JZn1A_3d_3d

If you are interested in attending the Workshop, come prepared to roll up your sleeves and share your ideas to help grow the CHP market in the Gulf Coast region. This event will be a major opportunity for interested stakeholders to provide strategic input to the GC RAC regarding its education and outreach offerings, project support services, and policy development initiatives.

• The outcome of this two-day workshop will be an Action Plan promoting market development for combined heat and power (CHP), district energy, and waste heat recovery industries.
•  Your input is needed to chart the roadmap toward wider adoption of CHP and to help develop a strategic plan guiding the GC RAC’s education and outreach offerings, project support services, and policy development initiatives.
• Come brainstorm with regional clean energy industry representatives, energy policy experts, and key regional and national stakeholders and share your ideas for growing the clean energy in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma.
• The Action Plan developed at this event will support your business development objectives.

To REGISTER, please go the registration page at the link below.
Date: November 18-19, 2009

Location: Hilton Hotel at Bergstrom Airport in Austin, Texas
Registration Cost: $100 per person on or before November 6th; $150 afterward
Registration Site: https://www.regonline.com/gcrac_workshop

Seats: Seating is limited to 60 people.

Hadoop as the Opensource Data management backbone For the Smartgrid

Can an open source data management system do for the smart grid what Google’s open mobile operating system Android is doing for cell phones — spawn innovation and low cost development? Execs at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the largest public power provider in the U.S., seem to think so.


TVA analyst Josh Patterson says Google’s Android is a good analogy for openPDC, an open source version of a platform that aggregates and processes data about the health of the power grid, and which TVA has helped create.

Like Android has done for the mobile industry, openPDC will enable utilities and the power industry to develop their own versions of data management services with more flexibility and at a lower cost than proprietary systems, Patterson points out.

The comparison might be a tad abstract, but I think it holds water.

• OpenPDC could be as key to the deployment of the smart grid as Android has been for the recent sea-change in the mobile industry (see GigaOM Pro’s report on Google’s Mobile Strategy).
• As the $3.4 billion in stimulus funds are allocated to the winning utilities, the power industry will be rapidly turning to a variety of methods for collecting, storing and processing the petabytes of data that will be unleashed.
• While many utilities will want to stick with proprietary systems and already established data management players, early-adopter utilities (particularly outside the U.S.) are starting to look at openPDC for a more economical and flexible approach.

So how exactly does it work? TVA’s openPDC specifically looks at information collected by devices called phasor measurement units (PMUs), which gather information like voltage, current, frequency (and the accompanying location) several thousand times a second.

The regulatory agency the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) designated the TVA’s PMU collection system as the national repository of such electrical data and TVA now aggregates info from more than 100 PMU devices.

• The phasor data collection system is known as the Super Phasor Data Concentrator (SuperPDC) and last month TVA announced that it had made that system open source, based on Hadoop, an open-source software framework.

Originally developed to analyze large data sets generated by web sites, Hadoop is a low-cost and open way to manage this massive amount of data so that it can be accessed and processed by utilities when they need it. Hadoop has been designed to run on a lot of cheap commodity computers and uses distributed features that make the system more reliable and easier to use than competing proprietary systems for running processes on large sets of data.

Computing and web companies like IBM, Amazon, Yahoo and Google are turning to Hadoop for the open source underlying for some of their new commercial products.

Not coincidentally two of the distributed features of Hadoop — its Distributed File System and its Distributed Processing Framework — take a cue from Google: Google’s File System, which distributes file system data across multiple servers and maintains multiple copies of all of it, and an algorithm popularized by Google called “MapReduce” that partitions compute jobs out to hundreds or thousands of nodes.

In other words, Open PDC and Hadoop have roots in the same ideology that created Google’s open source Android platform.

That ideology calls for creating a platform that is open to any developer, easy to access and innovate around, and low cost. As analyst Phil Hendrix pointed out in this GigaOM Pro report, Android, Google’s open operating system for mobile, has removed licensing fees that developers normally have to pay and created a platform with significant programming efficiencies. As a result, Android had a slow start, but earlier this year HTC, the world’s fifth largest cell phone maker said that more than half of its devices will be built around Android. Motorola announced its first Android phone at our Mobilize conference earlier this year.

TVA’s Ritchie Carroll, who started working on openPDC project back in 2004 and had a long history in the IT world before he joined the power industry, tells us that openPDC has garnered a lot of interest from utilities particularly in Brazil, China, South Korea and Russia.

In the U.S., TVA plans to build out nine nodes across the nation that will be able to collect PMU data and monitor the health of the entire grid.
All that data will be processed and stored by openPDC. “NERC found it very important to that common nomenclature and common metadata was created about this data,” says Carroll

• Patterson and Carroll say they see utilities turning to Hadoop and open source data processing for other forms of smart grid data, like information from smart meters.
• Patterson doesn’t see utilities turning to traditional data storage and processing options used in the web world, because he says utilities have different needs. Instead, he envisions utilities building Hadoop clusters, like Google does, to store and process the information.

While I agree with Patterson that this would be the best way, the big stumbling block that I see is the utility learning curve.

• These are cutting-edge systems in the web and mobile industries, so developers at a utility will have to be particularly savvy to set up their own Hadoop clusters. Perhaps this will have to wait for the next generation of utility IT leaders? Carroll and Patterson agree, but think the future is coming soon: “the IT education for the power grid is already under way.”

The Rest @ Earth2Tech

Green Marketing Has Consumers Confused

Companies marketing green products and, in particular, promoting their green energy initiatives are using words like “energy conservation” and “green energy,” but what effect has this had on consumers? Do they care? Do they even understand what these terms mean?

EcoAlign, a strategic marketing agency focused on energy and the environment, decided to find out. In September, it conducted 1,000 interviews, comparing against a similar survey conducted in September 2007. The sample was balanced to match the U.S. population by age, gender, region and ethnicity.

The results? Green Align found that consumers generally have positive associations with the terms “energy efficiency,” “energy conservation” and “clean energy,” but their understanding of what these terms mean has remained the same or decreased since 2007.

They also have low or negative understanding about technical terms such as “demand response” (resulting in the recommendation that such terminology not be used in external marketing communications) and showed a lot of confusion about green pricing terminology such as “peak pricing,” “green pricing,” and “fuel supply pricing.”

Moreover, consumers remain confused about the definitions of basic terms. They cannot articulate the difference between energy conservation, energy efficiency and smart energy. Less than one third chose the correct definition for those terms from among a selection of definitions (multiple choices).


The Rest @ The Inspired Economist

Loans to Small Bunsinesses Opening Up

In mid-October, President Obama moved to raise the amount of credit extended to small businesses. If Congress approves his plan, the measures would enable community banks to borrow at low rates from the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). It would also raise loan caps on some Small Business Administration (SBA) programs. To qualify, the banks would have to show how they would increase lending to small enterprises.

The relief could not come a moment too soon. The job-creation engine known as small business has been slammed, not only because of falling demand but also because the normal flow of financing has slowed to a trickle.

• Small enterprises have created two-thirds of all new jobs since 1994 and they employ more than half of all private-sector employees. (The SBA's definition of a small enterprise is "an independent business having fewer than 500 employees.")
• In September, for the second straight month, they laid off more workers than mid-sized or large employers.
• Prior to August, small businesses had never been the biggest source of layoffs, according to employee payment and data firm ADP, which began tracking the figures in 2001.
• Meanwhile, the U.S. unemployment rate hit 9.8% in September, and many analysts expect unemployment to hit 10% or more before topping out.

Last month, a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) found that expansion plans for small enterprises were at a 35-year low.

• That's no surprise, given that their usual sources of borrowing -- banks, government-secured financing, venture capitalists and credit cards -- are far more limited than a couple of years ago.

The good news is that some tentative signs of improvement are turning up. Interviews with Wharton experts, banking officials and spokespeople from small business development organizations suggest that this patchwork of finance sources, all battered by the current financial crisis, is inching back towards pre-recession lending levels.

Wharton lecturer and small business expert Robert Chalfin, for example, notes that "community banks are still lending. They have been active. They're in business to support their communities." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the American Bankers Association, community bank loans to small businesses are only down slightly in 2009 to about $680 billion outstanding, from about $700 billion in 2007.

Now, Chalfin says, even larger banks are becoming more active, if only marginally. "I'm getting many calls from the large national banks, saying, 'If you've got clients, we would like to talk with them about lending them money' -- but they are not as quick to say 'yes.'"

• According to the SBA, volume for its loans is 60% or more above the exceptionally low levels reached during the January-February period this year, in part a result of easier SBA loan terms.
• Earlier this year, the SBA had come under fire for its low loan volume at a time when small businesses were facing enormous financial pressure, and some critics say that loans still tend to be available only for the most stable small businesses.

But now, the Obama administration's proposal could open the tap to 70,000 additional SBA loans over the next year. The fragile economic recovery, meanwhile, is helping banks to improve their balance sheets and open their purse strings a bit more.

Among other positive signals: ,An October survey by the NFIB found the lending environment had improved slightly since May, and a Greenwich Associates survey found that earlier in the year, eight of the top 10 U.S. banks were more willing to lend in the second quarter of 2009 than in the first.

Struggling, but Viable

One company's experience shows how a small business escaped the threat of insolvency with a timely liquidity injection. Ashland, Va.-based Daystar Desserts nearly went under because it could not get a loan. Toward the end of 2008, the company was obligated to buy a building it had been renting for five years from a company it acquired in 2003, according to CEO John Fernandez.

The building was valued at $2.4 million. Says Fernandez: "We had a good scenario. We'd been paying rent. We could show we had the ability to pay." However, the real estate market was plummeting and banks weren't lending -- not even to fundamentally healthy companies such as Fernandez's. With 54 employees and about $15 million in annual revenues, Daystar was growing. And while its "financials weren't perfect, they were in good shape," Fernandez says. Still, three banks turned the company down. That transformed a seemingly viable situation into a life-or-death struggle for the business. The problem, he says, was the banks and the real estate market, not the company's balance sheet.

Help came in the form of an SBA 504 loan under America's Recovery Capital (ARC), the SBA's new program for small companies that was already in place before President Obama's announcement.

According to Jonathan Swain, the SBA's assistant administrator for communications, "ARC is one small program, strictly for debt repayment, not for working capital -- a one-time temporary program that Congress asked the SBA to create under the Recovery Act."

Businesses can apply for these loans to pay off debt or to reorganize. "It's really a bridge loan," says Swain. "This is a unique program targeted to a specific kind of business owner --struggling, but viable."

• Daystar Desserts secured its SBA-backed loan with 6% interest, saving an estimated $150,000 compared with what commercial banks would have charged.
• Additionally, Fernandez says, "We saved $9,000 in upfront fees."

SBA 504 and 7(a) small business loans have been around for years (504 for commercial real estate and equipment; 7(a) for general purposes). But this year, under ARC, Congress asked the SBA to change the requirements by eliminating the upfront fee altogether and increasing the amount of the loan guaranteed from an average of 75% to around 90%. "Lifting the fee makes it easier for banks to lend," says Hayley Matz, an SBA spokesperson.

Under the program, the average 504 loan is around $200,000. Now, President Obama wants to expand the 7(a) loan pool by tapping TARP money.

Swain says that ARC loans represent about a quarter of all SBA programs. There have been 2,700 loans so far under ARC, with plans for 10,000 loans altogether after a ramp-up period. SBA-backed loans are made available through banks. As of September, the total volume of 504 and 7(a) loans approved was $1.92 billion, up from $1.09 billion in April. Pre-ARC, in August 2007, both loan groups totaled $1.94 billion -- close to where it is today.

According to Therese Flaherty, director of the Wharton Small Business Development Center, banks won't generally give a company an SBA loan if they are comfortable doing it from their own funds. "SBA loans mean more paperwork for the banks." The SBA comes in, she says, "when a bank isn't quite ready to do the loan."

For Daystar Desserts, the process was "paperwork intensive," recalls Fernandez. "But a 504 loan is administered through development companies that partner with the SBA.... The process was not simple. But by all means it was doable."

Alternate Financing Sources

What are some other sources of financing for small businesses that might not qualify for an ARC loan through the SBA? According to Wharton's Flaherty, "One of the obvious opportunities is to look at micro-loan funds that typically lend up to $30,000. Micro-loan groups look beyond your personal credit, with more depth into your business." And many offer technical assistance to business owners to help them manage their debt and pay off their loans.

The SBA launched a microloan program in 1991 to provide loans of up to $35,000 to small businesses. The SBA makes funds available to nonprofit community-based lenders such as community development financial institutions, which make loans to local eligible borrowers with a term of no more than six years. Additionally, a handful of regional microloan programs exist across the U.S. For example, beer maker Samuel Adams recently partnered with micro-lender ACCÍON USA to help food, beverage and hospitality entrepreneurs in New England with loans ranging from $500 to $25,000 to expand or start a business, purchase inventory or equipment, or pay licensing fees.

Another source available to some businesses: angel investors. "Angels work with small startups with a great potential to return the angel's investment," Flaherty notes. "An angel often takes equity. It's very private. You have to think about whom you are taking on as a business partner. At times, you can find a private investor who really cares about your business."

Though not easy to come by, angels might be a better source today than venture capital, where activity is down significantly, according to VentureSource, the Dow Jones database that tracks venture-backed companies in every industry. Offering some proof that recovery is tentative, an October 17 VentureSource report said that, following an uptick in the second quarter, investments in U.S. venture-backed companies stalled in Q3, "putting 2009 on track to be the worst investment year since 2003." Venture capitalists invested $5.1 billion in 616 deals in the third quarter of 2009, down 6% from the $5.4 billion placed into 595 deals during the second quarter and down 38% from the $8.2 billion invested in 663 deals during the third quarter of 2008.

Chalfin says there are other viable sources for small business financing, including credit cards, one of the largest lenders to small business. "The disadvantage is that the interest rates are very high. But the advantage is you can borrow. I've had people who needed to finance their business, generally for a short period, and via credit cards they obtained liquidity for 30, 60 or 90 days." Yet in recent months credit card companies have been lowering credit limits and increasing interest rates. According to the Pew Safe Credit Cards Project, the median lowest advertised credit card rate rose to 11.99% in July from 9.99% in December.

Community banks provided more than half of all loans to small business this year, and presumably they will be more active if the President's latest proposal involving low-interest TARP funds gets approved. (For that program, "community banks" are defined as having less than $1 billion in assets). Community banks usually require a personal guarantee and ongoing monitoring, Chalfin notes. "They'll insist on looking at metrics of your fiscal soundness. They may have pre-payment penalties or charge points up front. They will usually insist on receiving copies of your financial statement and tax returns every year. And they'll want collateral." On the other hand, there are some clear advantages to working with community lenders. "They can provide more than money," Chalfin adds. "They can provide contacts. They can introduce you to people who may have industry expertise."

In general, he says, lenders are much more conservative and more cautious. "They want the business owners to contribute equity into the deal. They're doing more reference checking, asking for more collateral, such as mortgages."

Certain sectors may have an easier time securing loans, too. According to Wharton management professor Raffi Amit, online businesses featuring social networking and other Web 2.0 platforms are likely to be able to raise money faster and on better terms than other sectors. Online organizations will have an easier time "because in principle, they require much less cash so you will be cash flow neutral or positive after investing less capital," says Amit. "Just $200,000 or so can get you cash positive." Another sector with a better track record for securing loans is clean energy, primarily because the government is making it attractive by providing incentives in order to reduce emissions and energy dependency on other countries. "That's a priority for this administration and investors will understand that."

VentureSource data underscores Amit's assessment: "For the first time, Web 2.0 investments surpassed the software sector," the company said in a recent statement. "Although the IT recovery has been sluggish, this quarter's investments in the web-heavy information services sector are nearly double the investments made in the first quarter of this year."

As always, however, "The best source of money is not to need it," says Flaherty. She knows of companies that are looking at their business and finding ways to avoid having to take out loans. "It's a good time to review a business's marketing and advertising costs," she says. "Are they advertising in English in places where no one speaks English? Have they adjusted for Internet and print ads and PR? We see people doing this who weren't doing this before." And a good number of them, she adds, are rethinking whether or not they even need a loan right now.

Flaherty's thinking is confirmed by the American Express survey of small business owners. In August, 71% of respondents claimed that over the next six months, they would manage their businesses by cutting expenses -- up from 30% in March 2003 and 48% September of 2007.

"I'm optimistic," says Flaherty. "I'm seeing a great many small businesses that are doing well, that adjusted months ago and are starting to see real increases in sales and a recovery that's making a difference to them."

The Rest @ Wharton Business School

German Lichtblick has a DSitributed Energy Plan

Green-energy provider Lichtblick and German automaker Volkswagen are joining forces and promising to stir up the energy market with an unusual plan. Instead of relying on massive energy facilities, the average consumer may soon have a miniature power station in their basement.

Chief executives of Germany's major energy suppliers usually don't have much time for their junior counterpart, Lichtblick. The Hamburg-based green-electricity provider's half a million customers may be "impressive," they say, but Lichtblick works in a niche market and is no competition for the larger companies in the industry.


But things may be about to change. In the next couple of days, the relatively small company is due to reveal a new business model that could shake up the energy market quite a bit -- and not only in Germany. So, despite the fact that they currently have large power plants and considerable power over the market, things may soon turn a little less comfortable for energy giants like E.on and RWE.

Lichtblick -- the name translates as "glimmer of hope" -- is no longer content with distributing eco-friendly gas and electricity. Ten years after entering the market, the group wants to take a shot at the electricity-generation business as well -- and to do so while collaborating with a unusual partner on a completely new idea.

Unlike Germany's well-established energy giants, the Hamburg-based company isn't planning to build a few colossal wind farms or solar-panel systems. Instead, it wants hundreds of thousands of buildings and private households to get their own highly efficient mini "home power stations."

Mini Power Stations

The ambitious new project could be worth billions of euros and generate enough electricity to replace up to two nuclear power stations or even coal-fired power plants in the near future. The technology required to put this plan into practice is highly complex, but -- depending on demand and the market situation -- the new setup could network 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 small natural-gas-powered thermal power stations and, in effect, instantly create a virtual large one.

A giant quantity of electricity could be generated by such a system. Channelled straight from the basements of individual houses, where Lichtblick plans on installing the mini power stations, it could then be fed into the public powergrid. Likewise, the mini stations could also provide a source of cheap thermal energy and warm water for each household.

It may all still sound like a fairy tale, but developers at Lichtblick have actually been testing the system as part of a field trial in Hamburg. What's more, now one renowned company has shown an interest in becoming a partner in this pilot project: the Wolfsburg-based motor- and auto-manufacturing giant, Volkswagen.

For many years, Volkswagen engineers based in the central German town of Salzgitter have been tinkering with different ways to build a highly efficient thermal power plant. And there are good reasons why VW is looking into the field. "Much of what you need to manufacture a mini powerplant" is already found in ultra-modern automobiles, says Rudolf Krebs, a director of Volkswagen's powertrain-development division


The centerpiece of the new mini powerplant system is a natural-gas-powered engine used in some Volkswagen Golf models. Thanks to the engine's highly intelligent design -- and the fact that the heat it produces can be directly used to heat the house -- the efficiency factor of the Volkswagen mini thermal powerplant lies at around 94 percent.

To understand how that is an improvement over the current situation, you first have to know that the efficiency factor of your average nuclear power plant is only between 30 percent and 40 percent and that even modern coal- and gas-fired powerplants only reach an efficiency factor of between 40 percent and 60 percent.

Volkswagen engineers have long suspected that the mini thermal stations could prove incredibly promising. Until now, though, they just haven't had the technical know-how and familiarity with the electricity industry they needed. Nor did they have a concrete idea of how the relatively expensive (€20,000 or $29,000) mini thermal plants would be able to survive in a competitive energy market.

But now these problems are being solved by Lichtblick. As Werner Neubauer, a member of VW's executive board, told SPIEGEL, the company's proposal was so convincing that its managerial board agreed to collaborate with Lichtblick on the project almost immediately.

This week, Volkswagen and Lichtblick plan to sign a contract giving the auto manufacturer exclusive global rights to produce the mini thermal plants. If all goes according to plan, Volkswagen's auto-production facilities in Salzgitter will be able to churn out 10,000 mini powerplants every year.

"This will be a real revolution for the electricity market," says Lichtblick CEO Christian Friege. But there is still one question that remains unanswered: Will there be enough customers willing to give up space in their basement and foot the bill for their very own "home power station?"

A Breakthrough for Eco-Friendly Energy

The new concept may prove particularly appealing to homebuilder associations and homeowners who may already have toyed with the idea of replacing their aging central-heating systems. For an all-inclusive fee of around €5,000, Lichtblick technicians promise to tear out and dispose of any old system and replace it with a new Volkswagen mini thermal powerhouse. Repair and maintenance costs from then on are covered by the company, and the customer only has to pay for the energy actually used -- a sum significantly lower (or so Lichtblick claims) than the cost of heating with gas.

Under this arrangement, Lichtblick is effectively paying the homeowner rent for being able to use their basement, while homeowners benefit from getting cheap thermal energy. As an added incentive, homeowners will also receive a bonus at the end of the year based on the revenue the system generates for the companies. After all, the system will not only generate thermal power, but also electricity, which it can sell for a tidy profit.

Thanks to a carefully devised monitoring system centrally linking the system via the Internet, the network will be set up to optimize its functioning. According to this system, water will be heated up more often in the homeowners' basements when there is more demand for electricity on the energy market. This would happen, for example, when there's a change in the weather and thousands of windmills can simply not provide enough energy to meet a sudden surge in demand. In such cases, as Lichtblick executive Gero Lücking explains, Lichtblick will be able to react very quickly and channel the missing amount of energy into the national powergrid.

Such an arrangement would be a breakthrough for eco-friendly energy as well. Owing to the fast reaction rate of the system of small powerplants, a lot more sustainable energy could be used than has been the case until now.

More-established energy suppliers, on the other hand, will not benefit from the new arrangement and might soon feel its sting. Their multi-billion-euro back-up power plants, which the energy companies currently use to compensate for fluctuations in the electricity supply, making a nice profit in the process, may soon be displaced by the cheaper and more flexible VW power stations.

And then it might just be time for the chief executives of Germany's major energy suppliers to give their little Hamburg-based competitor a bit more respect, instead of the occasional condescending glance.


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The Rest @ Der Speigle (English)

Interest Rtes for new 20 year SBA 504 Loans Hit a New Record Low

20-year fixed interest rate on SBA 504 loan projects has hit a new record low, and this is the fourth time it's happened in the last six months. I feel a bit like a broken record. Every time I turn around I'm blogging about this, emailing someone about it, or talking to another financial news outlet about it .

This really is a HUGE deal.

This is the first time the 20-year fixed interest rate on SBA 504 loans has dropped below 5.00% to 4.86%.

The Rest @ Blue MauMau

These loans can be used for comercial property purchases, including energy efficiency refinanaces.

-Editor