Brother, Can You Spare a Stimulus Dime? Washington Innovation Summit Notebook

Luke Timmerman4/10/09Comments (2)Follow @ldtimmerman

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from Mike Schwenk, the director of technology deployment and outreach for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA. It has already been reported that the Department of Energy wants to seriously amp up the Hanford nuclear waste cleanup, to the tune of $2 billion of stimulus money over the next three years. The goal will be to shrink the active cleanup site from 586 square miles to 75 square miles or less by 2015.

The intriguing part is what will happen with all that extra federal land, Schwenk says. It could be a prime staging ground for entrepreneurs to try out all sorts of alternative energy projects, from wind to solar to anything else, presumably without much trouble with permits or any NIMBYs to get in the way.

—Some big news is coming soon from Bend, OR-based InEnTec, according to a presentation from CEO Jeff Surma. InEnTec, a developer of “gasification” technology that turns municipal garbage into renewable fuels, has struck a partnership with the largest hauler of trash in the United States—Waste Management.

Surma didn’t disclose any terms of this deal, but he noted that Waste Management has 300 landfills in the U.S., which are prime sources of raw materials for InEnTec. This Bloomberg story from yesterday notes that Waste Management is making a serious global push to build a waste-to-energy site in China as part of a plan to double its revenues from power generation.

—The summit was a bit of a coming-out party for Rogers Weed, the former Microsoft executive who became the new Secretary of the Department of Community, Trade, and Economic Development (CTED) last month.

Weed, who was once the publisher of the online magazine Slate, explained how he defines innovation, which has become such a buzzword that it is losing some of its specific meaning. Weed used phrases like “the secret sauce that creates value,” or “the relentless pursuit of improvement.” Unlike former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who wrote a book called “Only the Paranoid Survive,” Weed said he prefers to think the best way to spur innovation is to “embrace opportunity, not fear its consequences.”

These are clearly not the sorts of thoughts on innovation I’ve heard from past directors of CTED. I got to hear much more of what Weed had to say in an exclusive interview at the conference, which we’ll share in this space next week.

—Seattle’s Blue Marble Energy is closing a round of funding for its technology that turns nuisance algae into energy such as natural gas, according to this story from the Seattle P-I’s Andrea James. Blue Marble founder and CEO Kelly Ogilvie didn’t say how much money he’s getting, or when the deal will be done.

Luke Timmerman is the National Biotech Editor of Xconomy, and the Editor of Xconomy Seattle. E-mail him at ltimmerman@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ldtimmerman.