Lenovo is the greenest consumer electronics giant while Apple (AAPL) turned brown in Greenpeace’s latest ranking of companies according to their e-waste recycling policies and their use of toxic materials in their computers, mobile phones and other gadgets. The Chinese computer maker, which now own IBM’s (IBM) personal computer division, won kudos from the environmental group for taking back old computers for recycling and for reporting the volume of waste it recycles as a percentage of its sales. “Given the growing mountains of e-waste in China – both imported and domestically generated – it is heartening to see a Chinese company taking the lead, and assuming responsibility at least for its own branded waste,” said Greenpeace official Iza Kruszewska in a statement. “The challenge for the industry now is to see who will actually place greener products on the market.” Greenpeace ranked Apple last for what it calls its "failure to take a green initiative." The enviro group has campaigned against Apple (see ad above) in recent years but the company has denied the group’s charges that it is among the least environmentally friendly of the major consumer electronics giants. But unlike Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Apple has not gone out of its way to portray itself as clean and green. Nokia (NOK) took the No. 2 spot on the Greenpeace list while Sony Ericsson (SNE) came in third, Dell fourth and Samsung fifth. Greenpeace highlighted Sony’s efforts to remove toxic materials like phthalates and beryllium from its products.
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Everything’s bigger in Texas, they say, and so Australian solar energy company EnviroMission today said it is proposing to build a 200- megawatt solar tower outside El Paso that could be as tall as 3,000 feet. The company announced it has submitted a bid to El Paso Electric (EE) in response to the utility’s request for proposals to supply 300 megawatts of electricity. EnviroMission didn’t specifiy the size of the tower but a 200 megawatt plant it earlier proposed building in the Australian Outback would have reached 3,000 feet (1,000 meters). The company subsequently scaled down the tower in an unsuccessful bid to get Australian government funding for the project last year. Since then the company has turned its attention to the United States, studying potential sites in the Southwest. Green Wombat chronicled the company’s six-year quest to build the solar tower in "Tower of Power," which appeared in the August 2006 issue of Business 2.0 magazine. Here’s how the technology is supposed to work: A glass canopy – a mile or two wide – heats the air underneath. Hot air rises and the tower operates as a vacuum. As the air is sucked into the tower, it will produce wind to power an array of turbine generators clustered around the structure. The turbines in turn generate electricity.
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photo: green wombat
Less than a week after PowerLight (SPWR) opened an 11-megawatt solar power plant in Portugal, the Berkeley, California-based company said today it will build a third photovoltaic solar power station in Spain. The newest project is a 4.8-megawatt plant to be constructed north of Seville and about 105 miles east of the Serpa, Portugal, facility that opened last Wednesday. As with the Serpa plant, which was financed by GE Energy Financial Services (GE), PowerLight will design and build the plant, which will cover about 50 acres with thousands of solar panels that track the sun. The project will be developed, owned and operated by two Spanish companies, Agrupacion Solar Llerena-Badajoz 1 and Solarpack Corporacion Tecnologica. PowerLight, a subsidiary of solar panel maker SunPower, is already building two other Spanish PV solar plants in the 20-megawatt range. Like Portugal, Spain promotes renewable energy with a feed-in tariff that guarantees solar power plant developers a premium rate for the electricity they produce over a long-term contract.
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photos: green wombat
Amid undulating hills dotted with olive groves and grazing sheep, the world’s most powerful photovoltaic solar energy station officially went online Wednesday outside Serpa, a village of white-washed, orange-tiled homes about 125 miles southeast of Lisbon, Portugal. Green Wombat was there for the dedication ceremony for the 11-megawatt power station – built by Berkeley, California-based PowerLight (SPWR) and financed and owned by GE Energy Financial Services (GE) – that is now powering 8,000 homes. PowerLight is known for its
commercial and residential rooftop solar arrays but has found a niche building utility-scale PV power stations in Europe. The reception given PowerLight and GE shows why countries like
Portgual, Spain and Germany have become attractive markets for solar power plants.
Unlike the United States’ complex and undependable system of state and federal tax
credits for solar power, Portugal supports renewable energy with a simple "feed-in tariff" that will
pay GE a premium rate for 15 years for the electricity produced by the $75 million Serpa power plant. Portugal modeled its policy on Spain’s, were PowerLight is building two 20-megawatt range power stations. [Update: Powerlight has announced it will build a third PV solar power plant in Spain.]
Government support for renewable energy was on display at the opening ceremony for the plant – 52,000 solar panels that track the sun. As waiters served port and wine outside a tent set up for the dedication luncheon, Portugal’s minister for the economy and other government dignataries arrived to join PowerLight CEO Tom Dinwoodie, GE Energy Financial 
Services managing director Kevin Walsh and executives from Catavento, the Portuguese renewable energy company that will manage the plant. Inside the tent, the officials made speeches against a backdrop of 150 acres of solar panels glistening in the sun. "We commend you for your leadership and
vision of clean energy and encourage you to continue to adopt policies and economic incentives that stimulate renewable energy production," Walsh said in his remarks, referring to Portugal’s left-leaning government as economics minister Manuel Pinho
languidly smoked a cigarette
at a nearby table. Portugal’s government has pledged to invest nearly $11 billion in renewable energy to reach its exceedingly ambitious target of getting 45 percent of its 
energy from renewable sources like wind, waves and sun. (The day before the Serpa plant dedication Portuguese utility EDP announced it would acquire the U.S.’s biggest wind energy company, Horizon, for $2 billion from Goldman Sachs (GS) )
It’s hard, of course, to imagine anyone holding a four-course luncheon complete with fine Portuguese wines to celebrate the opening of, say, a new coal or gas-fired power plant. But the solar power plant’s appeal – for the government, the developers and the towns of the Alentejo region – are clear: Despite the substantial power it produces, the Serpa station is all but invisible. The panels take up considerable acreage but are only chest-high and make nary a sound. In fact, the plant looks more like a modern art installation than an industrial facility, blending in with the agricultural landscape of this grape and olive-growing region. Imagine dozens of such PV solar power stations spread across rural Europe – the EU this month ordered greenhouse gas emissions be reduced 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 – and you can why the future looks bright to PowerLight and GE Energy Financial Services.
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Green Wombat is in Portugal today, where one of the biggest green tech deals of the year has just gone down: the $2 billion takeover of U.S. wind farm giant Horizon Wind Energy by Portuguese utility EDP. One potential beneficiary of the deal is GE Energy Financial Services (GE), the renewable energy dealmaking arm of General Electric. EDP’s acquisition of Horizon from Goldman Sachs (GS) was all the buzz at the opening today of an 11-megawatt photovoltaic power plant – one of the world’s largest – in Serpa, Portugal. PowerLight (SPWR) built the plant, which was financed and is now owned by GE Energy Financial Services. More on the Serpa solar power station in a later post. Among those present at the Serpa event was GE Energy Financial Services managing director Kevin Walsh. "I see a substantial financing opportunity," Walsh told Green Wombat, referring to EDP-Horizon deal, as he looked out at the Serpa power station’s 52,000 solar panels arrayed among groves of olive trees. The word today was that EDP will need to finance as much as $600 million of the acquisition, and after the solar power plant dedication Walsh headed to Madrid for a meeting with EDP execs.
If the deal goes through, it will make the Portuguese utility one of the largest renewable energy companies in the United States – as well the world – and the acquisition is another sign that European companies are increasingly looking at the U.S. as rich market for green tech. Horizon operates wind farms in 15 states that generate more than 1,500 megawatts, and the Houston-based company has another 9,000 megawatts in the pipeline, according to EDP. Walsh said GE Energy Financial Services could also help EDP navigate the U.S.’s byzantine system of state and federal tax credits for wind power. "I’m happy to congratulate you on the impending invasion of Portguese business into America," joked the U.S. ambassador to the Portugal, Alfred Hoffman, at the solar power plant dedication.
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What do Silicon Valley’s leading business organization, the Rainforest Action Network and California’s largest utility have in common? They’re teaming up to pressure automakers to produce plug-in hybrid vehicles as a way to fight global warming and reduce U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil. The Silicon Valley Leadership Group and its new allies in Plug-In Bay Area got together yesterday in Palo Alto to launch a campaign to get companies to place "soft orders" for plug-in hybrids, or PHEVs, to show Toyota (TM), Honda (HMC) General Motors, (GM), Ford (F) and other auto manufacturers that demand exists for cars that can get 100 miles to the gallon by using a rechargeable battery that extends the vehicle’s ability to run on electricity. SVLG’s membership roster includes tech powerhouses and green-leaning companies like Google (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Yahoo (YHOO). "The specific action we are taking is to promote PHEVs among our 210 member companies, urging them to support these efforts to accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids through ‘soft’ fleet orders, employee incentives, education, demonstration projects, and support of favorable legislation," SVLG spokesman Duffy Jennings told Green Wombat. So far, the Bay Area cities of Berkeley and Alameda as well as Marin County have placed soft orders – commitments to buy – for 160 fleet PHEVs, according to Plug-In Bay Area. (Yes, I know, that’s a shocker.) That might not get Detroit’s attention but it may be harder to look the other way if thousands of soft orders starting coming in from Silicon Valley. Plug-In Bay Area is part of the national Plug-In Partners campaign.
Green Wombat happened to watch Who Killed the Electric Car? last night and was struck by just how much things have changed since GM sent the last all-electric EV1 to the junkyard 
in 2005. The EV1 owed its birth in the 1990s to a California regulatory agency – the
California Air Resources Board – which mandated that 10 percent of cars sold in the Golden State be zero-emission vehicles by 2003. General Motors offered the EV1 for lease in California while it and other automakers fought to scrap the zero-emission rule. They succeeded and GM then refused to renew the EV1 leases, claiming there was no consumer demand for electric cars despite the EV1’s vociferous fans. The movie’s conclusion: the auto industry, Big Oil, the government and indifferent consumers were guilty of killing the electric car.
Flash forward to today. Environmentalists, tech companies and electric utilities like PG&E
(PCG) – a member of Plug-In Bay Area – are banding together to create the market for plug-in hybrids first, pre-empting the inevitable arguments from reluctant automakers that there’s no demand for such vehicles. After all, it’s much easier to argue against Big Government and "unfair regulation" than it is to to fight your own potential customers and the free market.
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While Congress debates establishing a national carbon trading market to combat global warming, New Orleans-based utility Entergy (ETR) today said it had purchased emissions credits from Nike (NKE) to offset 100,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases from its operations. The transaction was conducted through the Greenhouse Gas Registry program run by the Environmental Resources Trust,
a non-profit offshoot of green group Environmental Defense. Here’s how it works: Corporations register their greenhouse gas emissions with the Trust, which verifies the numbers and sets an emissions target. Outside auditors verify any qualified reductions in metric tons of emissions, which then can be sold as credits. For instance, the registry shows that since 2000, Entergy has purchased emissions credits from DuPont (DD), Shell (RDS-B) and other companies. In 2005, Entergy’s baseline emissions were 60 million metric tons but its actual emissions that year were about 45 million tons. In 2006, the utility reduced its spew to 38.9 million metric tons, Entergy spokesman Chris Winters told Green Wombat. Counting the most recent purchase, Entergy has bought credits worth a total of 740,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions and has been reducing its emissions steadily in recent years. "Environmental Defense and Entergy have partnered … to stabilize Entergy’s emissions at 20 percent below 2000 levels through 2010," Winters said. The company relies on natural-gas and nuclear plants to generate electricity and has joined utilities PG&E (PCG) and Duke (DUK) in calling for the imposition of a cap on greenhouse gas emissions. "The key to shifting markets and the economy to a more carbon-neutral position includes a robust carbon offset market," said Entergy executive Brent Dorsey in a statement.
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Investors controlling some $4 trillion in assets and their corporate
allies this week launched a campaign to get the U.S. Congress to pass
global warming legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions
60 to 90 percent by 2050. Led by Ceres,
a Boston-based alliance of investors and environmentalists, the group
also called for the Securities and Exchange Commission to require
public companies to disclose climate change risks in their financial
reports. So-called green reporting has long been backed by
environmentalists but now mainstream corporations like aluminum maker
Alcoa (AA), oil giant BP (BP), Merrill Lynch (MER), utility PG&E
(PCG) and Sun Microsystem (SUNW) are backing such efforts along with
CalPERS, the world’s largest pension fund. "We are hopeful that growing
mainstream investor and corporate demand for SEC action will have an
impact," Chris Fox, Ceres’s director of investor programs, told Green
Wombat. "This is not just socially responsible investors asking for
this but mainstream fiduciaries asking for guidance."
The investors and companies backing the coalition’s Climate Call to Action
want the SEC to clarify just what public companies must disclose about
the risks and opportunities presented by global warming. Ceres is
pushing for the SEC to modify reporting regulations to require
corporations to disclose in their annual reports their current and
historical greenhouse gas emissions; the physical risk climate change
poses to their operations; the regulatory risk if greenhouse gas limits
are imposed; and their strategy for managing climate change risks. (A
growing list of companies have adopted "sustainability reporting" in
recent years, including Bank of America (BAC), General Motors (GM) and
Green Wombat’s employer, Time Warner (TWX).) Fox says Ceres is
continuing to meet with SEC officials about climate change disclosure
but the agency has remained non-committal. "We think protecting
American’s property and investments from climate risk is a winning
issue," he says.
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photo illustration: PG&E
Even Major League Baseball is going green. Sort of. In a made-for-TV-news media event, executives from the San Francisco Giants and PG&E (PCG) will join SF Mayor Gavin Newsom today to announce that the utility will install a 120-kilowatt solar panel system at AT&T (T) Park. The catch: the 590 Sharp solar panels won’t power the park itself but will feed into San Francisco’s grid. Still, the solar panels that will serve as awnings (photo illustration above) might raise the eco-consciousness of the ticket holders that drive to the bayside park in their Suburbans and Tahoes. Beyond the PR value of portraying San Francisco’s team as the jolly green Giants, there’s a more interesting dynamic at work here: the growing value of commercial rooftops – or awnings in this case – as prime real estate for solar energy companies. In the April issue of Business 2.0 now hitting the streets, Green Wombat edited a story by senior writers Paul Kaihla and Michael Copeland on the land rush to lock up solar and wind sites and the opportunities to 
become a renewable energy broker, selling the rights to locales for wind farms and solar arrays. Typically, solar energy companies like PowerLight (SPWR) and financiers like MMA Renewable Ventures (MMA) install and/or own and operate the solar array and sell the
electricity it produces at a discount to the building owner. Just take a look around at amount of rooftop square footage at the local Costco or regional shopping mall and you’ll get the idea of the opportunity. The Giants-PG&E deal is structured differently but the idea is the same: the utility installs the solar system – PG&E hasn’t disclosed the cost but given similar sized arrays it’ll probably be around $1.2 million – and reaps the benefits of an additional clean, green source of electricity.
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photo originally uploaded by misterken
Call it industrial recycling. PowerLight, the solar panel subsidiary of SunPower (SPWR), is moving its headquarters from Berkeley, California, to a historic Ford (F) manufacturing plant in the East Bay city of Richmond. An icon of early 20th century industrial design, the bayfront Ford factory once was the largest manufacturing facility on the West Coast, according to the federal government. The reason for leaving eco-conscious Berkeley? Space – business is booming and PowerLight is bursting out of its current HQ, a company spokeswoman told Green Wombat. PowerLight will occupy about 175,000 square feet of the Ford plant’s 520,000 square feet of space. The facility produced jeeps and other military vehicles during World War II and was considered a key cog in the war effort. And where once greenhouse-gas spewing cars rolled off the assembly line, the factory will now be enlisted in the fight against global warming, producing solar panels for homes and businesses.
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