New Business Development Portal

The LED lighting revolution isn’t quite happening yet in the home, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t settling into certain commercial and industrial sectors.

For one company, Albeo Technologies, the focus on the industrial sector has reaped a 50-percent increase in revenue in 2010 and an increase in LED retrofits of 300 percent. In the LED space, Albeo is not alone. Redwood Systems, for example, saw year-over-year growth in sales of more than 300 percent, and Lighting Science Group produced 4.5 million LEDs in 2011, a 450-percent increase compared to 2010. 

Albeo and others only expect that trend to continue in 2012, as cold storage facilities, data centers and other large retail and industrial sectors embrace LEDs. Jeff Bisberg, CEO of Albeo, said that cold storage and data centers are seeing a 1.5- to 2-year payback for LED lights, which is making them extremely attractive compared to high-bay, high-intensity discharge lamps. The Boulder-based company has lights in more than 7 million square feet of space.

Besides its industrial focus, the Albeo team says the secret to the firm's current success is in the modular solution that can fit any building design. “Light fixtures are the last thing to go into the building,” said Bisberg. “It has to conform to whatever is happening below.”

To offer customers the flexibility they’re looking for, Albeo says its flexible system can fit whatever the needs of the space are.  And while Albeo offers controls as well, it is controls-agnostic, rather than focusing on the controls as the selling point. “The control technology is pretty mature,” argued Bisberg, “while the LED technology is still changing.”

In 2012, Albeo is “cautiously optimistic.” The success is expected to continue to come from retrofits, as well as the industrial sector, including food processing, large distribution warehouses and aircraft hangars. Once any sector starts to see about a 1.5-year payback, that’s when the mass adoption is happening, as it is with cold storage. A 2010 Enterprise LED Lighting report from Groom Energy and GTM Research also found that the market for LEDs in parking garages should start to mature going into 2012.

Outside of commercial and industrial applications, the interest is still nascent. There will be some groundwork laid in 2012, but GTM Research and Groom Energy see the period of 2013 to 2015 as the breakout years for those markets.

“The market is wide,” said Bisberg, “and there’s going to be a lot of winners. We’re pretty excited about the future.”

“For successful cleantech companies -- and there have been 23, if success is defined as having gone public on a major U.S. [stock] exchange  the average time to go public was nine years,” said Matt Trevithick of Venrock at a recent TiE (formerly The Indus Entrepreneurs) Energy event. “Entrepreneurs in cleantech have to have extraordinary patience. This is a 10-year journey just to get started.”
 
“Maybe the notion of four-year option packages is obsolete [for cleantech]. That is from the IT space,” continued Trevithick.
 
The TiE event brought together venture capitalists and entrepreneurs with roots in the Indus region (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal) for a frank discussion on opportunities -- and pitfalls -- in greentech.
 
“We are used to companies that are powered by Moore’s Law that sell into an entrepreneurial environment,” said Bob Walker of Sierra Ventures. “Intel, Google, Samsung, and LG [all] have an entrepreneurial core. They’ve got to come up with the next cell phone or display technology. These are industries where if you miss a product cycle or two, you are dead.”
 
“A lot of the industries that we consider cleantech don’t operate that way,” continued Walker. “No [employee] at a municipal water plant is going to lose their job because they didn’t buy the latest technology. These people have one goal in mind: to retire, get their pension, and not make a mistake that gets them fired. If there is a new technology, [they think] ‘Let somebody else buy it; we’ll wait five years and maybe we’ll buy it then.’”
 
To succeed, greentech startups -- and particularly energy efficiency companies -- must have business models that facilitate market adoption.
 
“I worked as a facilities engineer for a couple of years,” said Rachel Sheinbein of CMEA. “We would see a lot of things that would reduce water use or energy use. [But] it was very hard. There is a principal-agent [problem]. You need cap-ex spending to see op-ex savings and those are different budgets and different motivations. […] The business model becomes [even] more important if you are going after sustainability or efficiency.”
 
“Solar is an example of an industry that has innovated incredibly rapidly to figure how out to deploy, going from direct sales to leases and community solar,” said Nety Krishna of Redpoint Ventures.
 
In addition to financing innovation, participants suggested that greentech companies should consider developing aspirational products. For example, a Tesla Roadster or Model S electric car.
 
“Hybrid vehicles are a compromise and that may be dominated by Toyota and General Motors. But an all-electric vehicle is aspirational and is the basis of a disruptive business. That is Tesla,” said Trevithick. “Tesla received about the same size loan guarantee, as did Solyndra. Tesla is a three-billion-dollar company today. Tesla is a success story. Make aspirational products. That is how you make margins.”
 
The relative importance of margins, however, is a source of debate.
 
“Cleantech entrepreneurs have forgotten … that most of the money in venture capital has been made on products that have 50 percent to 70 percent margins,” said Trevithick. “The challenge in cleantech is that you are shipping hardware, an industrial category. How do you get beyond a 20 percent to 30 percent gross margin business [that] does not have very high multiples on sales or earnings?”
 
“I am not going to put the bar at 50 percent gross margins. That is high,” said Sheinbein. “If [cleantech] companies are going to exit through acquisition, they need to be accretive. They are more likely to be accretive through EBITDA. I am looking for [companies] being accretive, more than a certain percentage gross margin.”
 
Across the board, venture capitalists agreed about the paramount importance of a startup’s team.
 
“After seven and a half years as a venture investor and 10 years as an entrepreneur, I have come to a Zen-like appreciation of the importance of the team. It is really the CEO. Each cleantech success has had a gravity-bending CEO that could cause improbable things to happen and almost will them into existence,” said Trevithick.
 
“For most of the successful cleantech companies -- defined again by an IPO on a U.S. exchange -- the team that was present at the Series A played critical roles at the post-IPO company,” continued Trevithick. “In Venrock’s experience across all sectors ... in 70 percent to 80 percent of cases, the team that was present and gave the pitch when the first check was written was the team that rang the bell at NASDAQ.”
 
After building their team, founders should be very careful not to overcapitalize. Don’t take every dollar VCs offer, panel members cautioned.
 
“Companies that are capital-efficient, disciplined, and bootstrapped are going to be able to get favorable returns,” said John Robison, of NGEN Partners. “We have seen that from companies that were acquired three or four years ago in the smart building space, Gridlogix and Richards-Zeta, where the founders were very shrewd with when they chose to sell their business before they took on too much capital.”
 
“[In recent years,] there are companies in the data center space that have been very capital-efficient and have been able to virtually hold off on taking on additional VC money,” added Robison. “Some of their competitors perhaps -- only time will tell -- overcapitalized, [which] will make it harder for the investors and the founding team to realize their financial dreams.”
 
Similarly, participants indicated that venture capitalists should not monopolize even their most promising deals. Instead, they should share deals with colleagues at other firms.
 
“I would syndicate a lot more than I did [if I could redo the past few years]. VCs are motivated by two things: fear and greed. One of them is ascendant at any time. I think it is very important to balance,” said Krishna. “When you come across a company that you think is fantastic and you have a change to take a big share, you do, not thinking that down the road, it is better have more people at the table to manage risk.”
 
Increasingly, VCs are able to share risk with large corporations.
 
“We are seeing a lot of companies across very different sectors [become] interested in building relationships with venture firms and their portfolio companies,” said Sheinbein. Large companies “will continue to come in, everyone from General Mills to Delta Electronics to all the large chemical companies and consumer products companies. […] These companies have money on their balance sheet, are interested in getting into [the cleantech sector], and have very different timelines than the venture community.”
 
Indeed, when thinking about environmental innovation, it is important to consider not only venture-backed companies, but also corporate initiatives.
 
“Five years ago, very few companies were interested in biodegradable or bio-compostable goods,” said Krishna. “But look at what Coke and Pepsi are doing today. They have completely bought in to the concept, partly because it is green and partly because it is cheaper. Those things are happening, but they did not make a venture company a billion dollars, so you do not hear about them.”
 
But not every greentech opportunity will be attractive to either venture or corporate investors.
 
“We looked at residential energy efficiency plays. We hired a business school student to count them for us,” said Venrock’s Trevithick. “He got to 108 companies in residential energy management, which led me to believe that it is easy to start a company there, but most of those companies will not make any money. We didn’t make an investment because most of those businesses will not make any money.”
 
The profitable web startups you do hear about, the Facebooks of the world, are making raising capital for greentech startups more challenging.
 
“The Groupons, the Facebooks and the LinkedIns -- and all the stuff going on with cloud computing -- are incredibly capital-efficient companies. With a small amount of capital, [investors] get to see if the company is going to succeed. That is who your competitors are if you are [a cleantech entrepreneur] trying to raise money,” said Walker. “Even those of us who are pushing cleantech deals have to compete with our [venture capital] partners for resources in our funds.”
 
***
 
Yoni Cohen has worked for greentech venture capital firms in San Francisco and Israel and reported about environmental innovation for numerous publications. In May, he will graduate from Yale Law School. Follow Yoni on twitter @Cohen_Yoni.

Hydrovolts believes its technology can turn the increasingly precious water flowing in ever-larger volumes through wastewater treatment plants into electricity. Veolia Environmental Solutions, the biggest environmental solutions company in the world, and therefore one of the biggest wastewater processors in the world, will partner with Hydrovolts in the effort through its Innovation Accelerator program.

There are, according to Hydrovolts CEO Burt Hamner, over 26,000 municipal wastewater treatment plants in the United States and over 100,000 industrial treatment plants. The obvious opportunity raised a question for his emerging company.

The Hydrovolts team took a small turbine similar to those the company has used to capture energy flowing through irrigation canals to a wastewater treatment plant in Port Orchard, Washington. “We wanted to see how fast we could get it installed,” he said. They did it in a day. “And it worked. And then we said, ‘Wow, we could do this with a bigger machine.’ And then, all of a sudden, we discovered a lot more places to do this.”

Ready installation is the key, Hamner said. “Because it installs so quickly without needing site modifications,” he explained, “it is inexpensive. It doesn’t have to make lots of power to pay for itself. That’s the breakthrough.”

The turbine they installed in the wastewater stream only produces “around 350 watts.” The company had it running through the recent holidays “with a data transmitter and powering a Christmas tree. It’s the world’s first pee-powered Christmas tree.”

Hydrovolts has completed one round of financing and is about to complete a $5-million-plus second round, Hamner said. “We’ve sold three canal turbines and one waterfall turbine.”

Hydrovolts, he said, has built and tested three turbines of three different sizes. “The Portable turbine is expected to retail for under $2,000. The Canal turbine has two sizes, from 2 to 10 kilowatts output, depending on water speed, for approximately $20,000 and $40,000, [respectively]. The Waterfall turbine is in development and will likely have two sizes and a modular design. Price remains to be determined.”

Hamner has been working in tidal power since 2005 and with what he calls “micro-hydropower” since 2007, but it “has never been cost-effective if you have to pour concrete or do civil engineering. You just can’t make enough power to pay it off,” he explained. “But if you eliminate the need to modify a site, and you can do the installation in a day, and you have new technologies like grid-tied microinverters that didn’t exist 20 years ago, you can now do this -- and we are.”

Hydrovolts used the multiple-Oscar-winning Autodesk design software to develop a larger turbine for the Port Orchard site.

“We expect it will make 2 to 2.5 kilowatts of power. And this is a small water plant,” Hamner said. “The plant’s flow is only 1.5 million gallons a day from a population of around 10,000 people. That’s the smallest turbine we think it’s reasonable to make, because you have to make a certain amount of power for it to be economic.”

Wastewater treatment plants for large cities in the U.S. and around the world will require bigger turbines. “We are just starting to understand the possibilities, Hamner said. “We are quoting plants that have flows of 25 million to 40 million gallons a day. Bigger cities have bigger plants. A whole river runs through a bigger city’s plant.” Such plants, Hamner said, require “more and bigger turbines.”

There is a limit. “The maximum we think you can get with this technology from any one facility,” Hamner said, “is maybe 40 to 50 kilowatts with a number of modular machines.” But that is because of the way wastewater is presently managed, he added.

“We expect the world’s water engineering community is going to get very excited about this new paradigm in water engineering,” Hamner said. “Now you need to engineer the water flow to take advantage of it.” An example is overflows where the stream is wide and thin, he explained. “They could be made narrow so the water is more focused and the energy could then be captured better.”

The Autodesk design software, Hamner said, was essential to helping potential customers “instantly understand what this thing is going to look like and how it will fit into their system.” The Autodesk record keeping system has been “critical for intellectual property protection because it documents everything,” he added. And in Hydrovolts’ newest design, Hamner said, Autodesk’s materials software minimized “the environmental impacts of materials choices. That’s very important to us because we’re committed to sustainability, not just in the product we make but in the way we make the product.”

Having chosen Hydrovolts to be part of its Innovation Accelerator program, Hamner said, Veolia is “now starting to estimate how many turbines could be used throughout their global operations, which number in the thousands of facilities.”

In addition to the Veolia partnership, Hydrovolts has won multiple awards for greentech innovation from organizations like Launch and ImagineH2O and has, Hamner said, reached out to other partners.

“We’ve signed a letter of intent to do a turbine project with the Butte Irrigation District in California. We have become a member of the Fresno Water-Energy Technology Center. We are negotiating sales and demonstrations with two other water organizations in California. And we are in sales and technology partnerships with organizations in Massachusetts.”

Hamner said Hydrovolts’ newest breakthrough opens up “a new renewable energy sector” -- and he foresees “micro-hydropower bubbling up all over.”

Last month we published an article on the energy policies of Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, the clear front-runners in the GOP at that time. 

But the Republican presidential primary race remains fluid, and Rick Santorum had a strong night with a sweep of Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri.

Barring a brokered convention, one of these gentlemen will likely be the GOP candidate with a chance of becoming the next U.S. president.

What follows is a distillation of each candidate's most recent energy policy statement. 

Santorum's Energy Plan

According to Santorum's website, his energy policy is about "Unleashing America's Domestic Energy." Like most Americans, Santorum wants to limit dependence on foreign sources of oil. He wants to do that with domestic oil and gas drilling and more easily obtainable nuclear permits. Here are some of his bullet points:

In an interview with Rush Limbaugh from June of last year, Santorum said, "I believe the earth gets warmer, and I also believe the earth gets cooler, and I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man, through the production of CO2, which is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the manmade part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas, is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all of the other factors, El Nino, La Nina, sunspots, you know, moisture in the air. There's a variety of factors that contribute to the earth warming and cooling, and to me this is an opportunity for the left to create -- it's a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. It's been on a warming trend so they said, "Oh, let's take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it's getting warmer," just like they did in the '70s when it was getting cool, they needed the government to come in and regulate your life because it's getting cooler. It's just an excuse for more government control of your life, and I've never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative."

It's important to underscore that the "junk science" he refers to here is the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change. Santorum also embraces common threads of the global warming conspiracy theory, believing that global warming is a "beautifully concocted scheme" by the political left and "an excuse for more government control of your life."
 

Romney's Energy Plan

The Romney platform is called "Believe in America: Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth"; it also contains the candidate's energy policy.

But before Romney details his plan, he takes some swipes at the Obama administration's energy plan:

As the Obama administration wages war against oil and coal, it has been spending billions of dollars on alternative energy forms and touting its creation of “green” jobs. But it seems to be operating more on faith than on fact-based economic calculation. To begin with, wind and solar power, two of the most ballyhooed forms of alternative fuel, remain sharply uncompetitive on their own with conventional resources such as oil and natural gas in most applications. Indeed, at current prices, these technologies make little sense for the consuming public but great sense only for the companies reaping profits from taxpayer subsidies.

Romney's document accuses the Obama administration of having an "unhealthy obsession with green jobs" and cites studies which show that green jobs might actually hurt employment rather than help it. Obama's delay of the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline is also labeled a job killer; the document cites an arguable figure of 100,000 jobs lost in not constructing the pipeline that would originate at the Alberta Tar Sands.

Here is Romney's energy outline.

Regulatory reform.

• Streamline permitting
• Overhaul the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other environmental laws.
• Reform nuclear regulation: As president, Mitt Romney will seek to streamline NRC procedures so that licensing decisions for any reactors to be built with an approved design on or adjacent to an existing site are completed within two years. And he will expand NRC capabilities so that the agency is able to review and approve several types of certified reactor designs in a way that ensures safety and reliability.

Explore and develop domestic oil reserves. This includes the Gulf of Mexico, both the Atlantic and Pacific Outer Continental Shelves, Western lands, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and off the Alaska coast; it includes not only conventional reserves, but more recently discovered shale oil deposits as well.

Partner with Canada and Mexico.

Extract shale gas and "prevent overregulation of shale gas development and extraction."

Research and development. Redirect clean energy spending towards basic research instead of loan guarantees, cash grants, and tax incentives. The federal government should move funding "through programs such as ARPA-E that seek to replicate DARPA's success in energy-related fields." 

Romney does not support cap-and-trade or the Kyoto Treaty. Romney's viewpoint on global warming, according to a spokesperson: "He believes it’s occurring, and that human activity contributes to it, but he doesn’t know to what extent."

Newt Gingrich's American Energy Plan

Gingrich's energy plan also focuses on domestic supplies of oil and gas as well as shale oil, with the added element of replacing the EPA with "an Environmental Solutions Agency."

• Remove bureaucratic and legal obstacles to responsible oil and natural gas development in the United States, offshore and on-land.
• End the ban on oil shale development in the American West, where we have three times the amount of oil as Saudi Arabia.
• Give coastal states federal royalty revenue sharing to give them an incentive to allow offshore development.
• Reduce frivolous lawsuits that hold up energy production by enacting loser pays laws to force the losers in an environmental lawsuit to pay all legal costs for the other side.
• Finance cleaner energy research and projects with new oil and gas royalties.
• Replace the Environmental Protection Agency, which has become a job-killing regulatory engine of higher energy prices, with an Environmental Solutions Agency that would use incentives and work cooperatively with local government and industry to achieve better environmental outcomes while considering the impact of federal environmental policies on job creation and the cost of energy.

Gingrich's current take on global warming is that it is uncertain if anthropogenic global warming is real. He told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an interview last month, "I believe we don't know."

If there is a change in the Republican rankings in the weeks ahead, we'll get you the Ron Paul and Sarah Palin energy plans.

LEDs replacing conventional light bulbs for general illumination purposes seems a matter of when, not if.

As well as a matter of who.

Will it be a startup like Switch Lighting or Lemnis, a bigger firm like Lighting Science, or an incumbent like Philips or GE?

Or will it be a firm like the just-unstealthed Soraa? (Their website just came online.)

Soraa of Fremont, California closed an $88.6 million funding round from Khosla Ventures, NEA, and NGEN late last year for its light-emitting diode (LED) and blue laser technology. Dr. Shuji Nakamura, the inventor of the indium-gallium-nitride (InGaN) blue LED is a Soraa founder. Nakamura accomplished something in the early '90s that many considered impossible at the time: a white-light LED. The invention transformed Nichia from a small Japanese manufacturer to a global industrialist. Nakamura also later became a folk hero among salarymen in Japan after suing Nichia for a fair share of the financial rewards.

The Soraa management team is led by Eric Kim, a former Intel and Samsung executive, along with Nakamura, Steven DenBaars, a co-founder of the first company to develop gallium nitride LEDs, Nitres (acquired by Cree); and James Speck.

In 2008, the UCSB professors founded Soraa with the belief that if they could crack the gallium nitride code, they could produce LEDs with market-leading performance. And now the firm is commercializing lamps using gallium nitride as their substrate (rather than the sapphire used in conventional LEDs).

“Soraa has developed the world's highest-performance LED lighting product, which is 80 percent more energy efficient versus incandescents,” said Andrew Chung of Khosla Ventures. “[Soraa’s LED] has a payback of less than a year -- and the potential to shake up the lighting market in 2012 and beyond, as recently reported by GTM's Yoni Cohen.

Soraa is actually two companies in one. Originally, Soraa focused on lasers, while Kaai, another company, focused on lights. The two recently merged. The combined company will produce green lasers for projectors and LED light bulbs that use 75 percent less energy than conventional bulbs.

Lindsay Riddell was able to gather some information about Fremont-based Soraa from investor Vinod Khosla last week as reported in the San Francisco Business Journal. Khosla said that Soraa's standard MR16 light can plug into any outlet and be more than 80 percent more efficient with a payback period of “a few months” (if the bulb is used 15 hours a day, as in a typical commercial application). Khosla said the company revamped the production process for semiconductor chips that produce light. "We decided to redo the ... production process to produce 10 times more of the amount of light per square millimeter than any other substrate," he said.

Note that Soraa is going after the traditional halogen MR16 lamps commonly used in commercial and home applications. According to the press release, the Soraa LED MR16 lamp is priced to achieve less than one-year payback and is meant to replace the 50-watt halogen bulb.  

While some firms go after the incandescent with LEDs, others like Luxim are going after high-intensity discharge lamps.

Add halogen to the list of incumbent lighting technologies that will soon be yielding to more efficient technology.

While the recent solar market has its dark side (bankruptcies, layoffs, slim profits, and consolidation), the industry continues to innovate and drive device performance ever upward.

That means that when the solar sector makes it through these lean times, it will possess increasingly higher efficiencies and even lower price-per-watt metrics than today's already surprisingly low numbers.

These performance records are occurring across the board in every photovoltaic materials system, from CdTe (Abound) to CIGS (MiaSolé) to GaAs (Alta Devices) to triple-junction CPV cells (Solar Junction and Semprius) to crystalline silicon (SunPower).

Here are some recent announcements of record-setting results:


Alta Devices' most recent gallium arsenide (GaAs)-based solar panel boasts a 23.5-percent efficiency, as verified by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The firm claims that "This is the highest solar panel efficiency yet achieved." The press release did not discuss the size of the panel and the company has not yet responded to our inquiry.

Alta Devices has won more than $120 million in venture funding from August Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Crosslink Capital, DAG Ventures, NEA, Presidio Ventures, Technology Partners, Dow Chemical, AIMCo, Good Energies, Energy Technology Ventures, and Constellation Energy. The firm is still in the pilot manufacturing phase. Chris Norris, the CEO of Alta, has said that the company's goal is to "compete with fossil fuels without government subsidies" and get to a levelized cost of energy of $0.06 to $0.07 per kilowatt-hour. The epitaxial lift-off technique pioneered by Alta founder Eli Yablonovitch allows the firm to produce layers of GaAs that are flexible and measure only one micron in thickness.
 

SunPower has been the heavyweight champion of the world when it comes to commercialized cell and module efficiencies for the last half-decade -- and by a significant measure. The company's back-contact crystalline silicon cell design, in commercial production since 2005, moves the metal contacts to the back of the wafer, maximizes the working cell area, and eliminates redundant wires. SunPower has been able to achieve consistent improvements in efficiency with each successive generation of commercialized cells, and this has translated to gains in the module arena, as well. The firm's Gen 3 cells have efficiencies in excess of 23 percent.

MiaSolé, a CIGS thin film PV manufacturing startup, placed third in CIGS panel production in 2011 behind Solar Frontier (at 577 megawatts) and Solibro (at 95 megawatts), according to GTM Research. The firm just announced a 17.3-percent-efficient champion device, while the "manufacturing process for 14 percent efficiency is now in production," according to the firm. The firm is making a rare presentation on Wednesday night in Palo Alto, California to the Silicon Valley IEEE PV Chapter.

Solar Junction, a developer of multi-junction cells for high-concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) applications, is working with Semprius and has inked an agreement to deliver multi-megawatts of cells epitaxial wafers. Semprius claims to have set the world-record CPV solar module efficiency using Solar Junction's III-V multi-junction solar cells based on lattice-matched dilute nitrides. The firm recorded a module efficiency of 33.9 percent.

Abound Solar, a manufacturer of cadmium telluride PV modules, announced the production of 82.8-watt modules at its Longmont, Colorado factory, representing a 12.2 percent aperture efficiency that is now being verified by NREL. The units were produced on "existing production equipment," according to the firm's press release. The startup looks to begin mass production of 82-watt modules in the second half of 2012. Abound claims to have produced its one-millionth module in December 2011.

High-end hybrid carmaker Fisker Automotive has stopped work at its Delaware Project Nina plant and laid off 66 workers, and is renegotiating its $529 million Department of Energy loan amidst news that it has been blocked from accessing the money since May.

It’s bad news for Fisker on top of bad news that’s been filtering out for months. The Anaheim, Calif.-based startup has continually delayed the sale of its Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid sports car. That’s hurt lithium-ion battery maker and partner A123 Systems, which laid off about 125 employees in November and lowered its annual revenue forecast, a move blamed largely on Fisker’s delays.

At the same time, Fisker has been renovating an old General Motors plant to build its next-generation “Project Nina” lower-cost plug-in hybrid sedans. That’s the reason it won a $529 million AVTM loan in 2010, and the project it has now halted as it seeks to renegotiate its loan. 

So far, Fisker has drawn on about $193 million of that loan, which leaves $336 million yet to tap. The loan actually laid out that Fisker could spend about $169 million on Karma engineering and $359 million on its Project Nina plans.

Fisker spokesman Roger Ormisher told reporters that access to the loan has been blocked since May. Neither party would talk about the renegotiation underway. But DOE spokesman Damien LaVera told Bloomberg that the agency has “strict conditions in place to protect taxpayers. The department only allows the loan to be disbursed as the company meets certain milestones and demonstrates results.”

The DOE’s greentech loan program has come under intense scrutiny since Solyndra declared bankruptcy in October. The thin-film solar module startup landed a $535 million DOE loan in 2009, but looks to be unlikely to be able to pay much of it back. Closer to the automotive industry, lithium-ion battery maker Ener1 filed for bankruptcy protection last month, after receiving a $198 million DOE grant.

Fisker has raised about $850 million in private capital from investors including Kleiner Perkins and A123. That includes $260 million in 2011, most recently with a $150 million round launched in November.

But it’s also struggled to deliver on its $102,000 luxury plug-in Karma, with only 225 vehicles sent to dealers and another 1,200 in the pipeline, CEO Henrik Fisker said in December. At the same time, its DOE loan was made conditional on the company delivering a cheaper mass-market model built in the United States, not by Finnish contract manufacturer Valmet, as today’s Karma models are.

Fisker’s Project Nina plant is also backed by $21 million in Delaware state loans. Fisker bought the site in late 2009, started hiring workers in July and had hired about 100 people as of late 2011. Monday’s layoffs included about 26 Delaware employees and about 40 at its headquarters.

Making cars is expensive, and Fisker must prove it can control those costs as it moves from contract manufacturing collectors' items to building mass-market cars on its own. In that sense, its rival is Tesla Motors and that company's Model S sedan -- but it’s also fighting against auto giants like Nissan, GM and all the rest. Having its first U.S. factory put on hold can’t be reassuring to would-be investors in its hoped-for IPO.

Jonathan Pickering, President of JA Solar Americas, talks about solar trade and a 6-gigawatt U.S. solar market.

Bankrupt flywheel company Beacon Power has found a buyer for its technology and its 20-megawatt energy storage plant in New York -- and that’s going to allow it to pay back at least some of the money it owes the Department of Energy.

Private equity firm Rockland Capital will buy Beacon’s assets for $30.5 million in cash and a promissory note, along with “additional guarantees and funding obligations to DOE of $6.6 million,” according to a Monday press release (PDF).

The sale must still be approved by the bankruptcy court and by federal regulators. But under the deal, the Department of Energy stands to recover 70 percent of the $43 million it loaned to Beacon, a DOE spokesman told reporters on Monday.

That’s a better result than the DOE is expecting from its other big, bankrupt loan recipient, Solyndra. The thin-film solar module maker landed the department’s first clean energy loan guarantee for $535 million in 2009, only to declare bankruptcy last year. Despite attempts to find buyers for its technology and equipment, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said it’s unlikely the government will recover much of its loan.

Beacon’s situation also differs from Solyndra’s in that its buyer intends to keep its business running -- at least that part of the business that’s already been built. Under Monday’s agreement, Rockland will form a new private company called Beacon Power LLC that will maintain ongoing operations of Beacon’s 20-megawatt grid frequency regulation facility in Stephentown, N.Y., which has been delivering frequency regulation services since early 2011.

Rockland also said it intends to develop a second 20-megawatt flywheel regulation plant in Pennsylvania. Beacon had a $5 million state grant to back the project. The agreement also gives it ownership of Beacon’s Tyngsboro, Mass. headquarters, as well as “many of the contracts associated with operations of the business,” though the companies didn’t specify which contracts were included.

All in all, it sounds as if the Houston-based firm is banking on a recent ruling from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to substantially increase the value that Beacon’s flywheel plants can earn for their services. That ruling calls for the country’s interstate grid operators to institute market systems that pay more for “fast” responding sources like flywheels and batteries than for slow, fossil-fueled power.

Beacon CEO Bill Capp said last year that the new FERC rule could double the revenues per megawatt-hour that Beacon earned on its services. We’ve seen other startups tackle the market in anticipation of those greater rewards, as well: in November, startups Viridity Energy and Enbala launched smaller-scale projects aimed at responding in seconds to play into frequency regulation markets for Mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM.

It does appear that Rockland has secured a pretty good price for Beacon’s assets. The company’s Stephentown plant cost about $69 million to build but had seen its book value fall from $41.9 million to about $12.6 million in the month before Beacon’s October bankruptcy filing.

Can solar play nicely with coal and natural gas?

Tucson Electric Power (TEP) is working with Areva Solar on a concentrated solar power (CSP) "booster" to the 156-megawatt Unit 4 at TEP’s H. Wilson Sundt Generating Station in Tucson. The Sundt plant is a dual-fueled unit capable of using coal or natural gas.

The Solar Boost Project will use Areva Solar’s Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) solar steam generators to produce up to 5 megawatts of power during peak power demand. Areva acquired the CLFR technology from KPCB-funded Ausra back in February 2010.

If and when fossil fuel prices rise or emission allowances are mandated, solar-augmented steam cycles might be a pragmatic option for energy companies.

A typical system would use steam generated by a solar field coupled to a conventional coal or natural gas-powered steam cycle, offsetting some of the fossil fuel required to generate power. Many energy companies are interested in adding solar power to their generating mix, but most solar technologies are not yet cost-competitive with fossil-fuel power generation.  

Why build a hybrid plant instead of a fossil-fueled plant or a stand alone PV or solar thermal plant?

• It reduces the amount of fossil fuel being burned
• A hybrid produces less emissions
• It potentially "greens" existing assets
• Hybrids can address regulatory pressures and potentially help meet Renewable Portfolio Standards   
• The transmission and Balance of Plant (like the power block) are already in place, as well as existing plant staff, along with permits and a water supply

Hybrid solar thermal is gaining popularity. There are more than a dozen projects in development with a total solar component of about 450 megawatts. The largest is the FPL project with 75 megawatts of solar in Florida.

The Sundt Solar Boost Project is part of TEP’s plan to expand its solar generating capacity to more than 200 megawatts by the end of 2014 in an effort to meet the Arizona RPS 15 percent by 2025.

Construction of the Sundt Solar Boost is due to begin in the spring of 2012, and it is expected to be operational by early 2013. 

Areva just broke ground on a 44-megawatt solar booster project for an Australian coal-fired power plant and currently has more than 540 megawatts of CSP projects in operation, under construction, or in development.

Other hybrid CSP-fossil fuel projects expected to start up in 2014 include:

• NV Energy at the Chuck Lenzie Station in Nevada, an 1100-megawatt natural gas plant with 95 megawatts of proposed solar
• Tri State G&T in Escalante, New Mexico, a 245-megawatt coal plant with 36 megawatts of proposed solar

Areva's Compact Linear Fresnel Reflector (CLFR) solar steam generators

Correction: This article originally mentioned the Cameo coal-steam hybrid plant in Colorado which has since been retired. Here is a link to a performance report on that project. The report concluded that "[o]verall the performance related to coal and emissions savings were not as good as Abengoa predicted or what Public Service expected."