THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for May, 2011

Will the popular incubator program for young web and mobile start-ups, Y Combinator, work for cleantech? That’s what a group of entrepreneurial investors including Mitch Lowe, Dave Graham, and Dillon McDonald, are looking to find out. On Tuesday morning, the team is launching Greenstart, an incubator and investment project that is looking to give seed funding and mentorship to the most promising young cleantech startups as they try to perfect their business plans and gain customers.

Lowe explained to me in an interview last week that Greenstart is looking to do four things for the young teams it selects to join its group:

1. Provide $25,000 in seed funding to innovative early stage cleantech teams for a small stake (3-10 percent) in their companies.
2. Offer mentorship and guidance around their business models, and help them figure out their target customers, products, and pricing. While the investors themselves don’t have an extensive cleantech background, they plan to bring in a group of advisors (they say they have 20 or so already signed up) that have had success in cleantech (investors, founders, entrepreneurs).
3. Help the teams raise the next round of Series A financing, and help them cultivate their financing pitch.
4. Provide networking, through their own Rolodex and mentor program.

Greenstart plans to operate out of a 7,000-square-foot office space in San Francisco,which can offer an open and collaborative experience, and is available to their teams for about three months. Greenstart is calling for all budding entrepreneurs to pitch them for the upcoming program, which will start Sept. 12, 2011.

On the surface, I like the idea. As Lowe put it to me: “We are cognizant of how difficult it is to start a greentech company … We just really want to help entrepreneurs who are starting cleantech companies be more successful.” It has become particularly hard to be an early stage cleantech startup in recent months as venture capitalists seem to be shifting towards later-stage and follow-on investments. Lowe says this new incubator model could help fill that gap.

However, there are a couple of hurdles I see for the program. I just don’t know if the incubator web model fits into the cleantech model. Unless the projects are only going to produce cleantech lite or cleanweb products (basically software and web-based cleantech projects), $25,000 won’t go far for a more science or materials based project (biofuels, clean power, etc). The Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program commits about the smallest grants I think are possible for chemicals, materials and biology innovations, at around a couple million dollars each.

The investing team doesn’t have that much cleantech experience, which they say will be made up by the mentor group. But if a group is bringing you mentors, why not just skip the middle man and go straight to the mentors? Also, if the Y Combinator model would work for cleantech, why wouldn’t Paul Graham (Mr. Y Combinator) just bring in more cleantech companies, or launch his own cleantech version? Food for thought?

Image courtesy of Al Albut.

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Japan is expected to announce a requirement to have all new buildings include solar panels by 2030 at an upcoming G8 meeting in France on Thursday.

For awhile, people wondered how Japan would react to the Fukushima nuclear disaster (in the long term). Would it cut its plans to build 14 new nuclear reactors and have 50% of its energy supply coming from nuclear by 2050, or would it stay on that route once the steam from this disaster died down?

Well, in the past month or so, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan has made the answer pretty clear. It is cutting its nuclear expansion plans completely (though, will continue start operation of its existing plants again soon following “confirmations” of safety — an announcement on this is also expected this Thursday). And rather than fill the gap with fossil fuels, it intends to keep on with its carbon-cutting policies by focusing on renewable energy and energy conservation instead.

And it seems, as a recent TIME piece stated, its leadership realizes that solar energy is one of its most promising assets. ”Geothermal, wind, biomass and small-scale hydropower projects all have potential in Japan, but for now, solar looks like the fastest way to add more power to the national grid,” TIME‘s Lucy Birmingham wrote.

At the 2-day G8 Summit in Deauville, France at the end of this week, Prime Minister Naoto Kan is expected to unveil a renewable energy and energy conservation plan that is said to include an unprecedented requirement to have all new buildings come with solar panels by 2030. Stunning. And, of course, well-liked by me, greens, and other clean energy enthusiasts around the world.

I can imagine the U.S. “don’t step on my freedom” people now. But guess what, we have countless safety requirements for new buildings all around the country and if you look at this with a little bit of perspective, that’s what such a requirement is.

From global warming to energy independence and security, we need clean, renewable energy installed fast and we need leading policies like this to make it happen. Of course, I can’t imagine the U.S. ever passing such a policy, but it’s nice to see that another leading democracy is looking to do so.

Kan said a couple weeks ago that Japan needed to “start from scratch” and create an entirely new energy policy. Approximately one month ago, he said that taking the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a lesson, the country would “lead the world in clean energy such as solar and biomass, as we take a step toward resurrection.” This bold new plan to put solar panels on every new building is a good step in that direction.

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Photo via CoCreatr

Deploying information technology — from software to wireless networks to computing — is supposed to be able to reduce 15 percent of global carbon emissions by 2020, according to the Climate Group, through things like creating smarter grids, buildings and transportation. But some countries’ governments are doing better than others at supporting the use of information technology to build low-carbon infrastructure, according to a report from the trade group the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) on Monday.

GeSI reports on the top 10 countries relying on IT to reduce carbon emissions, and there are few surprises on the list. Japan, Germany and Denmark lead the list (not so surprising), while Romania and India made the bottom ninth and 10th slots (nice work), and the U.S. didn’t make the list at all (boo). Despite the U.S. leading the way in IT production and creation, the U.S. government isn’t being a leader when it comes to using it for reducing carbon emissions, says GeSI.

The GeSI put together the list in the run up to COP 17 (the United Nations annual conference on climate change), which will take place in Durban, South Africa late this year. The GeSI says the criteria for choosing the list is based on a variety of factors, including integrating these IT technologies with low-carbon applications, and also using IT to meet the UN carbon reduction goals (probably why the U.S. is lacking on that one). Here are the top 10:

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