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Archive for the ‘environment’ Category

SolarCity scores $100 million to finance solar arrays

Posted in alternative energy, climate change, enviro startups, environment, green financing, green startups, renewable energy, solar energy, SolarCity, tagged , , , , on September 29, 2009| Leave a Comment »

SolarCity_FirstSolarArray-_Coast

photo: SolarCity

When Wall Street collapsed last year so did  tax equity funds, the primary vehicle to finance renewable energy development.  But as I write in The New York Times today, investors are beginning to jump back into the game.

U.S. Bancorp has agreed to finance $100 million of solar installations in 2009 for California startup SolarCity. Investors are being lured in part by a federal stimulus package provision that lets them take a 30 percent investment tax credit for renewable energy projects as a cash grant:

The credit crunch has walloped the residential solar industry, making it hard for installers like SolarCity to tap investor funds to finance rooftop arrays for their customers.

But in a sign that the recessionary clouds are parting a bit, SolarCity on Tuesday said that U.S. Bancorp has agreed to finance $100 million worth of solar installations in 2009.

That’s double the money the bank committed to provide SolarCity in June when the original deal – but not the financial details – was announced.

SolarCity, based in the Silicon Valley suburb of Foster City, offers customers the option of leasing their rooftop panels and thus avoiding the five-figure cost of buying a solar system.

The company retains ownership of the solar array and thus qualifies for a 30 percent federal tax credit against its cost. Since most startups have no use for such tax credits, they give them to investors in exchange for financing installations.

Still, most such tax equity partnerships have collapsed along with the Wall Street banks that often funded them. In fact, U.S. Bancorp stepped in after Morgan Stanley pulled the plug on a financing arrangement with SolarCity earlier this year.

“For all of this year, tax equity has been the number one constraint in financing for the entire solar industry,” said Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s chief executive. “In the third quarter of last year there were about 20 active banks and insurance companies making tax equity investments. They all fell off a cliff and now there’s three or four.”

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Congestion pricing payoff: More alt fuel cars on road

Posted in climate change, electric cars, environment, global warming, green cars, green policy, tagged , , , , on September 29, 2009| Leave a Comment »

thnk-goes-amsterdam77
photo: Think

In The New York Times today, I write about how Stockholm’s congestion pricing system, which charges drivers to enter the city center, has helped triple the number of alternative fuel cars in the Swedish capital:

When Sweden began charging motorists to drive into downtown Stockholm during rush hour, the goal was to reduce traffic congestion, cut greenhouse gas emissions and boost ridership on public transportation.

That has happened, and now a new study has found another benefit from so-called congestion pricing: In the 24-square kilometer congestion zone in Sweden’s capital, the number of registered alternative fuel vehicles, which are exempt from congestion tolls, jumped from five percent of the total vehicle fleet in 2006 to 14 percent in 2008.

“The changes in the make-up of the vehicle fleet are not exclusively due to the congestion tax, but surveys show that exemption from the congestion tax is the single most significant incentive for those buying alternative fuel vehicles in Stockholm,” concluded the report, which was released this month by the Stockholm Traffic Administration.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Home market dead, desert developer goes solar

Posted in alternative energy, BrightSource Energy, climate change, enviro capitalism, enviro startups, environment, green startups, PG&E, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, tagged , , , , , on September 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

solarh

Photo: BrightSource Energy

In today’s New York Times, I write about how Harvey Whittemore — one of Nevada’s biggest power brokers and a confident of Senate majority leader Harry Reid — has responded to the housing crash by leasing desert land at his mega-home development to BrightSource Energy for a 960-megawatt solar farm complex.

What to do when building a 159,000-home city in the Nevada desert and the housing market collapses?

Go solar.

The Coyote Springs Land Company this week expanded a deal with BrightSource Energy, a solar power developer based in Oakland, Calif., to carve out 12 square miles of it its 43,000-acre mega-development for solar power plants that would generate up to 960 megawatts of electricity.

Harvey Whittemore, Coyote Springs’s chairman, said his plan always was to include some renewable energy in the massive golfing community under development 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. But, Mr. Whittemore said, he decided to go bigger as the housing market crashed and solar developers like BrightSource began to sign deals with utilities.

“We’ve always said we’ll adjust the land use plan to the market,” said Mr. Whittemore in an interview. “At the end of the day we have approvals for 159,000 units and we looked at what we could do to reduce the number of units while at same time coming up with a functional business plan that takes advantage of private land.”

Private land is in short supply in Nevada, where the federal government owns about 87 percent of the state. That has forced solar developers like BrightSource – which is under the gun to supply 2,610 megawatts to California utilities — to seek leases on desert property managed by the United States Bureau of Land Management, a years-long process involving extensive environmental review.

By dealing with Mr. Whittemore, BrightSource is sidestepping all of that and acquiring an ally who knows how to get things done in the Silver State.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Vinod Khosla: Green tech must pass “Chindia” test

Posted in alternative energy, biofuels, climate change, enviro capitalism, enviro startups, environment, green financing, green startups, renewable energy, tagged , , , , on September 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

ausra-kimberlina

photo: Ausra

In my new Green State column on Grist, I sit down with legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla to talk about his approach to green tech. Khosla — who raised a record $1.1 billion for green tech investing earlier this month — believes that unless a technology can scale and be adopted in markets like China and India, it will not have a meaningful impact on climate change.

Getting an audience with Silicon Valley’s guru of green investing isn’t always easy.

If Vinod Khosla is not speaking at one of the innumerable, and apparently recession-proof, green business conferences that seem to happen every other week, he’s giving lectures at Google headquarters, writing white papers, or, of course, inking checks to green tech startups with the potential to disrupt multi trillion-dollar global industries like energy, automobiles and building materials.

He’s something of a Valley legend:  Co-founder of Sun Microsystems, then a longtime tech investor with marquee venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and now head of Khosla Ventures, which he started in 2004 to invest in green tech startups.

Khosla and his partners had been investing their own money, but earlier this month the firm announced it had raised $1.1 billion for two funds—one of which is the largest first-time fund in a decade. It was a rather staggering amount, given that clean-tech investing has plummeted from $4 billion in 2008 to $513 million so far this year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, as the “Great Recession” continues to take its toll.  Putting money into the two Khosla funds was the nation’s largest pension fund, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.

It’s not the size of Khosla’s fund but what he intends to do with it that should command your attention. In short, he wants to take the green out of green investing and globalize the bottom line.

You can read the rest of the column here.

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Green tech changes venture capital game

Posted in alternative energy, BrightSource Energy, energy, energy efficiency, enviro capitalism, enviro startups, environment, global warming, green chemicals, green financing, green policy, Nanosolar, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Solyndra, Tesla Motors, the green economy, tagged , , , , , , , on September 21, 2009| Leave a Comment »

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photo: eSolar

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, I write about how the rise of green technology is changing the way Silicon Valley venture capitalists do business:

Silicon Valley venture capitalists have always been about inventing the future — taking a wild idea, nurturing it with cash and creativity and giving birth to new products, companies and industries we once couldn’t imagine and now can’t conceive of living without: the Web, Google, the iPhone, Twitter.

But as green technology becomes the latest tech wave to break from the nation’s entrepreneurial epicenter, it’s now all about companies reinventing the past. Solar power companies, electric car start-ups and algae biofuel ventures aim to remake century-old trillion-dollar industries on a global scale.

Venture capitalists poured $4 billion into green-tech start-ups in 2008 — nearly 40% of all tech investments in the U.S., according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Green-tech investment plunged in the first half of 2009 to $513 million as the recession dragged on, but there are signs of a rebound: Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures announced this month that it had raised $1.1 billion — the biggest first-time fund in a decade — that would be largely devoted to investing in green-tech start-ups, many in Southern California.

But green-tech companies face unique challenges, including global markets, tough technological hurdles and a future shaped by government incentives and regulatory policy. Those challenges are changing the game on Sand Hill Road.

“If you’re starting a Web 2.0 company, your basic needs are personnel and servers — there is no physical product, no manufacturing capacity, no inventory, no steel in the ground,” VantagePoint’s Salzman said, referring to software-based companies that provide services over the Internet.

Green-tech start-ups, he said, often need big money and investors steeped in big science and big government.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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The Tesla Roadster of electric motorcycles

Posted in electric cars, enviro startups, environment, green cars, tagged , , , on September 16, 2009| 2 Comments »

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photo: Mission Motors

Would you pay $68,995 for an electric motorcycle that goes 150 mph and 150 miles on a charge? Mission Motors, a San Francisco startup, is betting well-heeled techies and gearheads will pony up for the thrill of instantaneous acceleration offered by an electric superbike. The company’s prototype, the Mission One, earlier this month set a world speed record for electric motorcycles. As I write in The New York  Times today:

Mission Motors, an electric motorcycle startup based in San Francisco, said Tuesday that its prototype vehicle had set a world speed record for battery-powered bikes of 150.059 miles per hour at the Bonneville Speedway in Utah.

That was the average speed achieved during two, mile-long trials but the motorcycle, called the Mission One, hit 161 m.p.h. on the Bonneville Salt Flats during one run on Sept 1.

Speed matters for what amounts to the Tesla Roadster of electric motorcycles.

“Our focus is on the market that is most motivated by performance,” said Forrest North, the co-founder and chief executive of Mission Motors and a former battery engineer at the high-end electric car maker, Tesla. Mr. North is bringing a bit of that company’s strategy to Mission Motors: Build a stylish high-tech, high-priced electric vehicle for enthusiasts, and then move down the market with less expensive models.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Green tech investing is back — with a vengeance

Posted in alternative energy, biofuels, energy, energy efficiency, enviro capitalism, enviro startups, environment, green financing, green startups, green tech, tagged , , , , , , on September 1, 2009| 1 Comment »

ausra-kimberlina

photo: Ausra

In Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times, I write about green tech guru Vinod Khosla’s new $1.1 billion venture funds — the biggest first-time fund since the halcyon days of the dot-com era a decade ago and and a strong signal that investors see a bright future in clean and green technologies. CalPERS, the United States’ biggest pension fund, is the major backer of the new Khosla Ventures’ funds:

In a sign that green technology investing is bouncing back, Silicon Valley venture capital firm Khosla Ventures said Tuesday that it had raised $1.1 billion to spur development of renewable energy and other clean technologies.

It is the biggest first-time fund in a decade and comes as venture capital investment in green technology is just beginning to recover from a precipitous fall prompted by the global economic collapse last fall.

In the first half of the year, investments in green tech plunged to $513 million from $2 billion in the first six months of 2008, according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

But Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif., and a leading green tech guru, has managed to raise an $800-million fund to invest in early and mid-stage clean energy and information technology companies as well as a $275-million fund to finance what he called high-risk “science experiments” that may exist only in a university laboratory.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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California moves to auction off solar energy contracts

Posted in alternative energy, energy, environment, green policy, PG&E, Recurrent Energy, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, SunPower, tagged , , , , , , , on August 28, 2009| 3 Comments »

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photo: Southern California Edison

It hasn’t received much media attention, but the California Public Utilities Commission has just proposed instituting a first-of-its-kind reverse auction market to spur renewable energy development — mainly solar photovoltaic.  As I write today in The New York Times:

California regulators are taking an eBay approach to ramping-up renewable energy in the Golden State.

In what might be a world first, the California Public Utilities Commission on Thursday proposed letting developers bid on contracts to install green energy projects. A solar company that offers to sell electricity to one of California’s three big utilities at a rate lower than its competitors would win a particular power purchase agreement.

This “reverse auction market” feed-in tariff is designed to avoid the pitfalls the have plagued efforts in Europe to encourage development of renewable energy by paying artificially high rates for electricity produced by solar power plants or rooftop photovoltaic projects.

You can read the rest of the story here:

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Norway’s Think is back in business — in Finland

Posted in electric cars, environment, green cars, Think, Think Global, tagged , , , on August 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

think-city-8_imagelarge

photo: Think

Norwegian electric car maker Think has exited bankruptcy protection and brought on board new investors. As I write in the New York Times Green Inc. blog today:

Norwegian electric car maker Th!nk is back on the road.

The company on Thursday said it has exited bankruptcy protection and secured $47 million in new funding to restart production of the Think City, a highway-capable urban runabout with a range of about 112 miles.

Think had shut down its assembly line outside of Oslo late last year when the global financial crisis cut off access to new capital.

But is Think still a Norwegian automaker? The company did get some local street cred Thursday: Among its new shareholders is Investinor, an investment fund backed by the Norwegian government.

Still, in another sign of the globalization of the nascent electric car industry, the Think City will now be made in Finland at the plant of one of its new investors, Valmet Automotive. (Valmet assembles the Porsche Boxster and Cayman and will begin producing the Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid electric sports sedan.)

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Chevron’s solar-powered oil field

Posted in alternative energy, BrightSource Energy, energy, environment, renewable energy, solar energy, tagged , , , on August 26, 2009| Leave a Comment »

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photo: BrightSource Energy

Chevron and solar developer BrightSource Energy have revealed a deal for a solar steam plant that is being built in an oil field in California. As I wrote in The New York Times this week:

BrightSource Energy has broken ground on a 29-megawatt solar steam plant at a Chevron oil field in Coalinga, Calif.

The 100-acre project’s 7,000 mirrors will focus sunlight on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a 323-foot tower to produce hot, high-pressure steam.

In a conventional solar power plant, the steam drives a turbine to generate electricity. In this case, the steam will be injected into oil wells to enhance production by heating thick petroleum so it flows more freely. Oil companies typically rely on steam generated by natural gas or other fossil fuels to maximize oil recovery in places like the oil patch in California’s Fresno and Kern counties, where the petroleum is heavy and gooey.

You can read the rest of the story here:

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