THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for May, 2011

Recently-public biofuel and chemical maker Gevo is holding the official ground breaking ceremony for its first commercial-scale project, a retrofit of an old ethanol plant in Luverne, Minn. on Tuesday. Gevo’s business model is based on converting corn ethanol plants to enable them to turn cellulosic feedstocks like agriculture waste into a bio-based isobutanol, a fuel additive and a precursor to manufacturing plastics and other products.

Gevo’s Luverne retrofit project will be able to produce about 18 million gallons of isobutanol per year, is expected to start operating in the summer of 2012, and according to Gevo, will be the world’s first commercial-scale biobased isobutanol plant. Gevo also says with another $24 million in investment, the retrofit project could scale up to 50 million gallons per year, and for another $40 million to $45 million, the project could scale to 100 million gallons per year.

Gevo’s core intellectual property is what it calls its “Gevo Integrated Fermentation Technology, or GIFT,” which is tech to produce and separate isobutanol. GIFT contains biocatalysts that convert sugars from a feedstock (plant waste, energy crops etc) into isobutanol through fermentation, and a separation unit that separates isobutanol from water during the fermentation process.

The Luverne project is Gevo’s first commercial-scale plant, and until the plant starts producing bio isobutanol, the bulk of Gevo’s revenues will continue to come from selling ethanol (after its acquisition of Agri-Energy). For the quarter ended March 31, 2011, Gevo generated revenues of $15.28 million, and lost $9.28 million. Gevo’s stock fell almost 3 percent to $19.15 in morning trading.

It will be a long 12 months of investment and construction before Gevo can start booking those new revenues. According to Gevo’s latest quarterly financials:

The Company’s condensed consolidated financial statements have been prepared on a going concern basis, which contemplates the realization of assets and the satisfaction of liabilities in the normal course of business. For the three months ended March 31, 2011, the Company incurred a consolidated net loss of $9,283,000 and had an accumulated deficit of $95,704,000. The Company expects to incur future net losses as it continues to fund the development and commercialization of its product candidates.

But Gevo says it has letters of intent for its bio isobutanol product from customers including chemical company Lanxess, French oil giant Total’s subsidiary Total Petrochemicals USA, plastic maker Toray Industries, airline company United Air Lines and oil industry technology developer CDtech. Gevo also says it has been working with Cargill to develop a future-generation yeast biocatalyst specifically designed to produce isobutanol from cellulosic feedstocks. Gevo CEO Patrick Gruber told Reuters  he expects Gevo to be profitable by 2014.

Gevo went public in February of this year, on a per-share price of $15 — priced at the high end of its range — and raised $95.7 million after offering expenses. Khosla Ventures and Virgin Green Fund backed Gevo early on and did pretty well in the IPO. Gevo plans to use the IPO proceeds to acquire access to ethanol plants through acquisitions and joint ventures, and retrofit those facilities to produce isobutanol.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• Green IT Overview, Q2 2010
• The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks

Large tanks filled with fluids could be the next low-cost way to provide energy storage for the power grid. A quiet company called Primus Power is developing so-called flow batteries, and on Tuesday morning, announced it has raised a round of $11 million from a group of venture capitalists including DBL Investors, I2BF Global Ventures, Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Primus Power has been building a flow battery farm that when completed offer between 25 MW to 75 MW on energy storage capacity for the Modesto Irrigation District. The battery farm will be Primus Power’s demonstration facility and will provide storage technology to make up for the variable nature of wind power in the area. The company said these new funds will go towards completing that facility and for wider scale commercialization.

While I don’t know all the intricacies of Primus Power’s technology, flow batteries, in general, use large storage tanks full of electrolytes and pumps that circulate the solution throughout the system (see image of Sumitomo’s tech). Flow batteries can be safer and more reliable (compared to lithium-ion batteries), can be lower cost than other forms of energy storage, and can be deployed relatively quickly. Some flow battery technology can run around $100 per kWh, compared to some batteries which can range in cost between $200 per kWh to $500 per kWh and up to $1,000 per kWh for more advanced batteries.

According to a Department of Energy website, Primus Power is working on an inexpensive metal electrode for a flow battery, and is also employing manufacturing processes common in high volume metal production to develop the electrode. Primus Power was awarded two grants from the Department of Energy for the innovation. Greentech Media reported earlier this month that the technology is based on a zinc bromine system.

Other startup flow battery makers include EnerVault and Deeya Energy. Deeya Energy is a 6-year-old company that has raised $53 million from Technology Partners, BlueRun Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and New Enterprise Associates and has redox flow battery inventor Lawrence Thaller as a technical adviser. EnerVault has raised $3.5 million in venture funding, from Oceanshore Ventures and U.S. Invest.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times
• Report: Cleantech’s Third-Quarter Growing Pains

"Electron shell diagram for Hydrogen, the 1st element in the periodic table of elements."

There is now more good news out on producing hydrogen, the clean-burning fuel that leaves behind water as an emission.

An international scientific team has announced that it can create hydrogen using ambient temperatures and pressure through a combination of sunlight and ethanol. This news has been reported in Nature Chemistry.

The research team hails from Spain’s Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Scotland’s University of Aberdeen, and New Zealand’s University of Auckland. The team’s research concludes that this method for producing hydrogen is potentially cheaper and can produce a higher yield.

The news is important because standard hydrogen production today requires high temperatures and pressure, thus demanding a considerable amount of energy, which is generally obtained from fossil fuels. The net result: while hydrogen is very appealing because it is a clean fuel, producing it has traditionally been too costly to have appeal in the marketplace and actually relies on dirty energy.

Jordi Llorca, director of the Institute of Energy Technology and researcher at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya’s Nanoengineering Research Centre, is one of the authors of the study, which represents a major step towards using hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels. In the framework of the research, a fully scalable powder photocatalyst was created that makes the hydrogen production process simpler and cheaper as it takes place at ambient temperature and pressure.

As reported by Science News, the process that was reported uses a powdered photo catalyst and ethanol in a container. The mixture is agitated and exposed to ultraviolet light from the sun. A titanium dioxide semiconductor within the container generates electrons when exposed to the light, and those electrons are captured by metallic gold nanoparticles in the catalyst. Those captured electrons proceed to react with the ethanol’s alcohol molecules and produce hydrogen.

The researchers say they have been able to produce up to five liters of hydrogen per kilogram of catalyst (1.32 U.S. gallons per 2.2 pounds) within in one minute. Because no high temperatures or pressures are required, the system uses less energy than conventional methods.

This is not the first time that sunlight has been used to generate hydrogen, writes gizmag, which reported in February on another discovery at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

The team reports it is now looking at designing reactors that can generate hydrogen to produce electricity for homes.

Image & Caption Credit: Wikimedia user Pumbaa (original work by Greg Robson)

Transportation is a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, automobiles and planes and our dependency on them are large reasons for that, especially here in the U.S. where transportation accounts for an even larger piece of our emissions pie compared to other countries. Learn more about the energy use or energy efficiency of various modes of transport in the info graphic and article below, republished from our sister site, Planetsave.