Hercules Technology Growth Capital, (NASDAQ: HTGC), the Palo Alto, CA-based provider of venture debt and equity financing to technology, cleantech, and life sciences companies, says it closed on $52 million in new loan commitments in July—including $17 million for San Diego-based Althea Technologies. In a statement today, Hercules says it provided $15 million in financing to Calera, a Los Gatos, CA-based cleantech developing technologies to capture carbon dioxide. Althea, a contract research organization, (CRO) provides services for plasmids, protein biologics and sterile products. Hercules did not identify the PV solar technology company that received $20 million.

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It’s another win for the Bay Area’s formidable social networking cluster. Brighter Planet, a provider of online and offline products that aim to help people and businesses reduce their carbon footprints, is downsizing its Vermont offices and expanding in San Francisco, company CEO Pattie Prairie says.

The startup, which was formed by students and a faculty member at Vermont’s prestigious Middlebury College in 2006, is moving out of its headquarters in Middlebury, VT, at the expiration of its office lease this month, Prairie says. The CEO and the company controller plan to stay in the Green Mountain state in a smaller office just south of Burlington, but more and more employees, many of whom are Middlebury College alumni, are moving to the firm’s San Francisco office. News about the firm’s move to San Francisco first appeared late last month in Middlebury’s Addison County Independent newspaper.

Brighter Planet has found that California has a more fertile business landscape than Vermont’s rolling green hills. The firm, which launched a social Web app for the environmentally conscious set last year, is following in the footsteps of other social Web firms—most notably Facebook and Twitter—that are based in the Golden State. California is also one of the most progressive states in taking measures to combat climate change, enacting some of the strictest rules in the U.S. on minimum gas mileage for automobiles and carbon dioxide emissions.

While living “green” in Vermont is more the norm than a lifestyle choice, it almost goes without saying that the small state cannot compete with the scale of sustainability-oriented business activity in California. For Brighter Planet, having a base of operations in San Francisco also brings it closer to a large number of potential customers. according to Prairie. The company started out by supporting Brighter Planet-branded Bank of America … Next Page »

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The Copenhagen climate conference is in full swing, and if you wonder why it matters, we’ve got evidence of a changing world to share with you. On the following pages is a series of arresting photographs and captions contributed by Alun Anderson, an Xconomy board member and former editor-in-chief and publishing director at New Scientist. Anderson is the author of After the Ice: Life, Death and Politics in the New Arctic, which is being published this month by HarperCollins-Smithsonian in North America and Virgin Books in the United Kingdom.

CLICK HERE FOR SLIDE SHOW (13 images)

Anderson made several trips to the Arctic while researching the book. His photographs and personal stories provide a stark demonstration that greenhouse warming is changing the planet’s climate—and altering both human and animal communities—at a rate few could have imagined just a few years ago.

Whatever your opinion about the “Climategate” controversy sweeping the media this week, a trip to the Arctic in summer is all it would take to convince you of the urgent need for measures to control greenhouse gas emissions. “That is where Xconomy and its readers have their connection to the Arctic,” Anderson comments. “You are the people who can help develop the technology that will slash greenhouse gas emissions cost effectively.”

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Quite a few clean energy companies around Boston have a stake in the outcome of the international climate change talks that start this week in Copenhagen, Denmark. If nations set more aggressive goals for greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, after all, they’ll have a greater need for technologies to reduce their carbon emissions.

But only one local cleantech executive, as far as Xconomy can determine, is actually going to Scandinavia to participate in the discussions. It’s Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Boston-Power, which makes green, longer-lasting batteries for HP laptops and other devices.

As a member of a non-governmental initiative called The Road to Copenhagen, Lampe-Onnerud attended climate change discussions in Brussels, Belgium in two years ago and Oslo, Norway, last year. She’s now heading to her native Sweden to take part in the group’s final conference in Malmö, just across the Oresund Strait from Copenhagen, on December 8 and 9.

Boston-Power is one of 13 corporate sponsors of the Road to Copenhagen meeting, alongside much larger companies such as Cargill, Procter & Gamble, and Whirlpool. Lampe-Onnerud, who trained as a chemist, says her most important job at the Malmö meeting will be to “bring some honesty to the scientific debate” around different options for dealing with climate change. “I have made it one of my personal and professional commitments to be a citizen of the Earth, and this is something I know something about, so I think I should volunteer some time,” she says.

The Road to Copenhagen group—an initiative of the Club de Madrid, a group of former presidents and prime ministers—consists largely of politicians, business leaders, and scientists who are not part of the formal negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. (That meeting starts today in Copenhagen and continues through December 18.) The group plans to develop a communiqué that will be delivered to representatives at the UN meeting. Its last communiqué, issued just before the 2008 UN climate change meeting in Poznań, Poland, called for a halt to further increases in greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2020 and a 50 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2050—goals that are far more ambitious than the emissions caps set out by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Developing a more aggressive, legally binding treaty to take the place of the Kyoto accord—which expires in 2012—was the original goal for the Copenhagen conference. But the U.S. Congress’s failure to pass energy legislation this fall committing the United States to emissions reductions means that President Obama is going to Copenhagen largely empty-handed. Many other nations have also been dragging their feet on climate legislation. In recent days, both the U.S. and China, the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases, have set informal reductions targets, but it’s too late for Copenhagen: UN negotiators have already scaled back their goals for the meeting to achieving an interim pact, with more negotiations over a binding agreement to follow in 2010.

Still, Lampe-Onnerud is upbeat (as always—she is perhaps Boston’s most cheerful technology CEO). “I know that there is disappointment in the setup [for Copenhagen], but I am going because I still think the time is now,” she says. “We have to take action, because the climate change threat is more severe than many want to depict. I will go in with a sense of urgency, and with the discipline of a measurable, milestone-driven agenda.”

One item on Lampe-Onnerud’s agenda will be to try to quash schemes for large-scale climate modification to dampen or … Next Page »

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Sapphire Energy has tried to maintain a relatively low profile since it established its headquarters in San Diego—especially since last fall when the media seized on reports that Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment had joined a $100 million secondary round of venture funding for the algae biofuels startup.

So when Sapphire opened its San Diego headquarters for a public tour during the Algae Biomass Summit that was held here earlier this month, I jumped at the opportunity. The venture-backed company maintains a 70,000-square-foot facility on La Jolla’s Torrey Pines Mesa, and now has about 120 employees. The company’s labs look like a lot of other biotech labs in San Diego, aside from all the gyrating machines with flasks full of gently swirling emerald-green fluid. But there were two particularly interesting factoids about Sapphire that I learned during the tour.

The first was ironic: Sapphire officials explained that algae consumes 13 to 14 kilograms of carbon dioxide to produce a gallon of green crude oil, which is roughly equivalent to conventional petroleum-based crude—and just as suitable for making gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. This is a good thing, as the fast-growing algae helps reduce atmospheric CO2.

So what’s ironic? Sapphire and other algae biofuel companies have to pump carbon dioxide into the algae they grow in their laboratories. Moreover, Sapphire spokesman Tim Zenk says one of the big problems that Sapphire is facing these days is getting enough CO2—at an affordable price—to support the company’s algae biofuels research and development efforts. The greenhouse gas is so crucial that Zenk says it limits the growth of algae if it’s in short supply.

Once algae-based crude is refined into a fuel like gasoline, though, it produces CO2 as a byproduct of combustion—just as any engine that burns gasoline, diesel, or aviation fuel produces greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, the argument is that algae biofuels are better for the environment because algae absorbs so much CO2 while it is growing, Sapphire officials estimate that algae-based fuels represent a 70 percent reduction in CO2 gases on a life-cycle basis compared to gasoline, diesel, or aviation fuel made from petroleum-based crude oil.

In the laboratory environment, however, CO2 gas is a valuable commodity. “You can buy carbon dioxide on the market,” Zenk says. “It’s heavily refined and used mostly by the food and beverage industry.” (The beverage industry uses dissolved CO2 to put the bubbly fizz into carbonated sodas.) But algae doesn’t need purified CO2. In fact, Zenk says the gas that goes up the smokestack at most utility power plants is 10 to 15 percent CO2—which is ideal for algal growth. As a result, some startups developing algae-based biofuels intend to … Next Page »

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If you worry about contributing to global warming–and who doesn’t?—there’s more than one way to go green. You can take actions to reduce your carbon footprint,which, for a big company, might mean doing things like building a LEED-certified office building or buying hybrid vehicles for your corporate fleet. Or you can buy carbon offsets, also known as carbon credits, which allow you to cancel out your own emissions by paying someone to take action that reduces or avoids carbon dioxide emissions somewhere else. Many utilities and other companies are legally required to purchase such offsets to meet “renewable portfolio” standards, and thousands more organizations and individuals do so voluntarily.

For cleantech entrepreneurs around the world, selling carbon offsets has become one of the major ways to finance green-energy projects. But there’s a problem: it’s not always easy to know whether a given offset is real—that is, whether it truly brings about new reductions in carbon emissions, or whether it subsidizes carbon-saving activities that were already underway. The national media have had a field day exposing examples of so-called “rip-offsets,” carbon offsets that turn out to have no “additionality,” to use the green energy jargon. The Washington Post, for example, ran an expose in 2008 charging that some of the $89,000 spent that year by the U.S. House of Representatives on carbon offsets for House office buildings went for no-till farming projects in North Dakota (the practice leaves more carbon trapped in soil than regular plowing) that farmers would have pursued anyway because they save fuel and increase crop yields.

Carbon credits would be one of the major commodities traded under any national cap-and-trade system for tackling greenhouse gas emissions, so there’s some urgency to figuring out how to assure buyers of offsets that they’re getting what they paid for. Several independent organizations offer carbon offset verification services, but for buyers, it’s still hard to assemble all the information needed to make an informed decision. Or at least, it was until Worcester, MA-based World Energy (NASDAQ: XWES) launched the World Green Exchange.

Unveiled in February 2008 and significantly upgraded in April of this year, the World Green Exchange is a free online marketplace where carbon-offset customers can not only price the various options, but peruse all the documents establishing their green bona fides, starting with additionality. World Energy says it set up the exchange as a more transparent alternative to the larger and more established Chicago Climate Exchange, the marketplace where many of the carbon credits criticized as rip-offsets originated.

My first story about World Energy, back in May 2008, focused on the company’s work to execute the first-ever online auction for greenhouse gas emissions allowances. Massachusetts and nine other Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, collectively known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), had hired World Energy to help conduct the auction, which was widely viewed as a dress rehearsal for the rollout of a national carbon cap-and-trade system. But RGGI auctions are restricted to power plant owners, and World Energy has also been busy developing the World Green Exchange, which is open to anyone selling or buying carbon credits. Last month, I had an in-depth interview about the exchange with one of its architects, Kenneth Ivanic, the vice president of environmental markets at World Energy. A partial transcript follows.

Xconomy: What were your main design goals for the World Green Exchange?

Kenneth Ivanic: One of the things we excel at is bringing liquidity and transparency to a closed, opaque market. When we looked at the green markets, we saw a real need to counter the “rip-offsets,” but also to help bring people together. To do that, we looked at the key variables that people need [before buying carbon credits]. The first thing, obviously, is transparency—they have to know who is behind the projects. If they know each other ahead of time, they can go over things like credit risk before they spend a year trying to make a deal. The next thing was … Next Page »

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Boston-based EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC), which manages demand-response programs to moderate electrical demand for large utilities, said today that it has acquired privately held energy management software company eQuilibrium Solutions. The Boston firm’s software helps businesses monitor and minimize their carbon footprints, and will be incorporated into EnerNOC’s PowerTrak software platform, helping clients meeting existing and possible future greenhouse gas emissions reporting requirements. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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Who’s Who in San Diego cleantech innovation?

At Xconomy San Diego, we wanted to answer that question as completely as possible, so we put together an accounting of all the local companies that are creating new ways to make biofuels, clean the environment, and improve the energy efficiency of our vehicles, homes, and businesses. In preparing our list, we owe a debt of gratitude to the nonprofit industry group Cleantech San Diego, which has compiled on its website a comprehensive inventory of every company under the sun with ties to the cleantech and renewable energy industries. We winnowed that list down to just the companies that are focused squarely on technological innovation (as opposed to other players in the cleantech arena, such as solar panel installers and engineering consultants).

Of course, our list likely isn’t comprehensive, and like so many good things, it will be outdated soon. If you know any companies we missed, please send us an e-mail addressed to “editors at xconomy.com”  (And if your interests lie further north, Xconomy Seattle recently published its guide to the cleantech clusters of the Pacific Northwest, breaking out separate lists for Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia.)

Achates Power (San Diego, CA)
This venture-backed startup is developing a fuel-efficient, cleaner-burning diesel engine, based on a two-cycle, opposed-piston internal combustion design.

AdaptiveARC (San Diego, CA)
This waste-to-clean-energy startup is developing an arc-plasma reactor and related technologies and services that offer an alternative to landfills.

Allylix (San Diego, CA)
Allylix has developed technology to synthesize terpenes, a class of hydrocarbons naturally produced by conifers and other plants. The company has licensed its technology to an unnamed cleantech company to develop and commercialize terpene fuels and fuel additives.

Ambient Control Systems (El Cajon, CA)
Ambient has developed a customized solar energy device with a computerized energy management and control system to power and operate remote sensor and surveillance networks.

American Biodiesel and Community Fuels (Encinitas, CA)
This company conducts biofuels research and development, using animal fats, vegetable oils, waste oils, and other … Next Page »

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This year marks a turning point in the debate on global climate change. The focus of the discussion is rapidly moving from a scientific analysis of how human activity effects climate change to a political process on how best to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. California is leading this shift with its 2006 Assembly Bill 32 (AB32) calling for the state’s GHG emissions by 2020 to be no more than 1990′s, roughly 15 percent lower than 2008′s.

The Climate Group’s Smart 2020 study reveals that the global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry produces greenhouse gases equivalent to that produced by the aviation industry (~2-3  percent). Furthermore, the ICT sector’s emissions will nearly triple, in a business-as-usual scenario, from 2002 to 2020. On the other hand, the Climate Group estimates that transformative applications of ICT to electricity grids, logistic chains, intelligent transportation and building infrastructure, and other social systems can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by about 15 percent— five times ICT’s own footprint!

This opportunity led the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) to co-host with the California Public Utilities Commission a workshop on greening the Internet economy. The two-day event, held at UC San Diego a week ago, brought together 200 leaders from industry, academia, and the public sector to discuss how to reduce ICT’s carbon footprint, while using ICT innovations to build out the smart grids, buildings, and transportation systems necessary to achieve the goals set by AB32. Webcasts of all the talks are available here.

The quality of the workshop discussions, starting with the keynote from Bill Wiehl, Google’s Green Energy Czar, was exceptional. IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, SilverSprings Network, CISCO, GM, and others from the private sector provided a great deal of insight into the “real world” challenges of applying ICT innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What was most interesting to me was the near universal recognition that we need to re-invent into a digital architecture our telecommunications, transportation, building, energy, and entertainment systems if we are going to meet targets like AB32. That is, we must integrate the Internet with each of these pre-existing societal-scale systems, so that myriad connected sensors and actuators throughout the systems enable them to become self-regulating so that they use much less energy. Lights and thermostats will adjust if no humans are sensed in rooms of buildings, cars will spend less time in congestions (burning fuel but going nowhere), and consumers will adjust their use of electricity in response to real time knowledge of pricing.  

A recurring theme from the workshop is that we need more public/private “AB32 testbeds” that enable scientists to experiment with the complex tradeoffs required. The first testbed category is for determining methods for lowering the carbon intensity of ICT itself—as was discussed in the workshop’s “Greening the Power Hungry Data Center” panel. An  example is the GreenLight Project, recently funded by the National Science Foundation that provides an instrumented data center on the UCSD campus that allows for detailed, real-time data measurements of the critical subcomponents. The resulting data is then made available publically on the web, guiding users who want to lower their energy cost of computation and data storage.

The second category of testbed is for studying the application of ICT to reduce the carbon footprint of our society’s infrastructure systems. The last panel on “Academic ICT and Green Cyberinfrastructure” explored the use of university campuses as rapid prototyping “Living Laboratories for the Green Future.” Campuses are functionally small towns with their own power grids, commuter transportation systems, hospitals, and populations in the tens of thousands. They can function as at-scale testbeds. Calit2′s two campuses, UCSD and UC Irvine, are ideal for such work as they are among the most aggressive campuses in the country on becoming ”carbon neutral” – deploying green energy sources (solar, fuel cells, etc.), while also reducing their own carbon footprint through efficiency programs.

Perhaps infused with the enthusiasm from the inauguration earlier in the week there was truly a “Yes We Can” attitude among the workshop attendees. Now is the time for us to roll up our sleeves, reach out to the best and brightest, and as is the American way, innovate our way to a better and greener tomorrow.

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For most of the “clean energy” startups Xconomy covers, the big question is whether the company’s prototype—be it a wind turbine, a wood-chips-to-ethanol reactor, or an anaerobic cow-manure digester—will still work efficiently when scaled up to industrial proportions. But for IST Energy in Waltham, MA, the question was how to scale down a waste gasification plant until it fit inside a standard cargo container, a space roughly 30 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet.

That’s exactly what the startup, a new subsidiary of engineering and defense contractor InfoSciTex, has now accomplished. Tomorrow the company is expected to launch its “Green Energy Machine” or GEM waste-to-energy conversion system, a unit that fits on the back of a truck and can shred three tons of trash per day—including paper, plastic, wood, food, and agricultural waste—and turn it into a synthetic gas mixture which can then be used to fuel electric generators or building heating systems.

In essence, it’s a mobile version of the factory-sized gasification pilot plant that Boston cleantech startup Ze-gen has built in New Bedford, MA (see my August 2007 story)—except that IST Energy uses a different kind of vessel to gasify waste, a “stratified downdraft gasifier,” in place of Ze-gen’s giant vat of molten iron. The unit takes up as much space as about three cars, and can be backed up to a building’s loading dock, or wherever its dumpsters are stowed.

The company built the Green Energy Machine in response to a request from the U.S. Army, which wants to cut down on the volume of trash, mostly from field kitchens, that it has to convoy across Iraq and Afghanistan. And IST Energy CEO and president Stu Haber says he expects the military to become one the prime customers for the machines, which will be ready for delivery this summer. But he says the GEM is also ideal for commercial and municipal facilities such as industrial plants, hospitals, universities, prisons, sports stadiums, and city waste transfer stations—”really, anybody who generates at least two tons of waste a day, which covers a huge market.” (For comparison, the town of Lincoln, MA, generates 6 tons of solid waste per day, and the Prudential Center development in downtown Boston generates 11 tons, according to Haber.)

While the machine isn’t cheap—IST will charge $850,000 per unit—its major selling point is that it can greatly reduce customers’ waste disposal and energy costs. About 95 percent of the material fed into the GEM is converted into gas, leaving an ash residue that is much cheaper to transport and takes up much less landfill space. (It also won’t emit methane and other greenhouse gases, as most landfilled materials do.) And not only does the machine power itself, but the extra gas produced can run a 120-kilowatt electrical generator or a 240-kilowatt-equivalent gas furnace. (For comparison, a typical standby home generator produces 12 kilowatts, while commercial emergency generators have outputs of 20 to 150 kilowatts.)

InfoSciTex didn’t start out in the clean energy or waste-disposal business. The company is working on an eclectic range of engineering and R&D projects in health, aerospace, software, energy, and defense, including an advanced insect repellent, a feeding bottle for pre-term infants, and an air-activated blanket for hypothermia victims. Many of its projects are a legacy of its 2005 acquisition of engineering staff and federally funded Small Business Innovation Research programs from Waltham’s Foster-Miller (which retained its robotics, advanced materials, and some other divisions and became a subsidiary of defense contractor QinetiQ).

Foster-Miller had been working on a small-scale gasification scheme, and in early 2005 it responded to an Army request for proposals for waste-management solutions for its overseas operations. “We not only outlined a solution but told them we could also provide electricity and gas heat,” says Haber. The Army accepted that proposal and several others, and the project—which became the core of IST Energy—won DoD funding to the tune of $2.5 million.

The company used the money to develop a lab prototype, then raised another $2 million in angel funding to build the first production unit, which is now parked outside the InfoSciTex building on Waltham’s Bear Hill Road (see photo).

I got a look at the unit last week. From watching a technician wriggle around the equipment inside the container, it seemed clear that one the biggest challenges for the company was … Next Page »

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DOE Plan Would Cut Emissions from Buildings

The U.S. Department of Energy says that, with proper building techniques and renewable energy installations, a majority of commercial buildings could reach zero emissions of greenhouse gases within 20 years. Now the DOE is kicking in $15 million to give companies access to its scientists and engineers to help achieve that goal, Ars Technica reports. The plans apply both to new buildings and to the retrofitting of existing structures.

Software Tracks Stolen Laptop but Hides Owner

Security experts are always concerned about the theft of laptop computers, which have led to both national security breaches and the theft of private financial information. There’s software available to keep track of where a laptop is, but privacy advocates worry that it can also be used to spy on the laptop’s owner. Now, Technology Review tells us, encryption specialist Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington has developed software that tracks a laptop only after it’s been stolen, thanks to the use of an encryption key that only the rightful owner can unlock.

Click It Before You Tick It

Better buckle up on Election Day. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association says traffic deaths tend to go up on Election Day, with an average of 24 more fatalities than on other Tuesdays in October and November. According to the Associated Press, the researchers cited, as possible reasons, people rushing to get to polls before and after work, driving on unfamiliar roads, and being distracted by thoughts of the choice they had to make. (The study did not examine whether despair at the prospect of the wrong guy winning played a role.)

Wind Turbines Not Bad for Birds, Study Finds

Wind turbines do not drive away birds from an area, according to a study by Newcastle University in England. The researchers measured the population density of 23 bird species at different distances from the turbines and found that the machines made no difference, Reuters reports. The one bird that is apparently affected, however, is the pheasant.

U.S. Lags in Broadband Growth

The U.S. has the largest raw number of subscribers to broadband Internet connections, but China will soon surpass it, and Europe has faster growth, according to an analysis by the research firm Point Topic. GigaOm reports that Germany and the United Kingdom have the fastest subscription growth, and about 26 percent of Belgium’s citizen have broadband connections. China, by contrast, hasn’t yet hit 6 percent of its 1.32 billion population.

Google Tells You Where to Vote

Google, which seems to have a hand in everything these days, is hoping to help get out the vote in the presidential election. As the company says on its public policy blog, its U.S. Voter Info Guide is already up and running in Ohio, which has started early voting, allowing people to type in their home address and find out where to register and where to vote. Google hopes to have the information available for all 50 states by the middle of this month.

New Flu Test Speeds Results

If a deadly new strain of flu emerges, public health officials can be right on top of it, now that a faster genetic test for flu strains has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The Los Angeles Times reports that the test can identify a strain of the flu within four hours, instead of the four days required by older tests. Between 20 and 30 state laboratories should be ready to perform the test by the end of the year.

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No Honor Among Internet Thieves

Even phishers—people who fake legitimate-seeming sites to trick people out of their financial information—are subject to phishing attacks, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apparently more seasoned scam artists are targeting newbie hackers and stealing the same credit card numbers they steal. For instance, they’ll sell would-be criminals software to set up a fake bank website, and then get their own copy of all the information the website collects.

Homeland Security Chief Talks of Cyber Threats

Fearing online attacks that could compromise intelligence information or shut down utilities, the government is taking an increased interest in cybersecurity, head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff says. Wired has a long and varied interview with Chertoff that also touches on the issue, currently percolating in the blogosphere, of border guards seizing laptops from travelers.

Group Promotes Cybersecurity for Next President

A private organization is looking for ways the government can make cyberspace more secure. The Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, a group organized by a Washington think tank, is working on recommendations it can make to the next president. CNET News reports that four members of the commission discussed some of their work at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week.

Ethanol Demand May Pose Health Risk

In a somewhat round-about way, the increasing demand for ethanol from corn may be leading to an increased risk of lead poisoning in children, some researchers warn. An article in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science and Technology points out that ethanol demand, as well as increasing demands for food from emerging economies, are driving the demand for phosphates used in fertilizers. Those same phosphates are added to water supplies to prevent lead pipes from corroding, and a shortage could mean more of the metal in drinking water, where it can harm children’s cognitive development.

California Company Captures Carbon for Concrete

A California company, Calera, has developed a process in which it captures the carbon dioxide emitted by a natural-gas-burning power plant, pumps it through seawater, and produces the materials needed to make cement. Normally the process of making cement releases at least a ton of carbon dioxide for every ton of cement, but the company says it captures half a ton of C02 for each ton of cement it makes, according to Scientific American. Since cement and its sister material, concrete, are widely used in buildings all over the world, such a change could have a significant impact on global warming.

UN Wants to Tighten Carbon Offset Rules

The United Nations wants to make sure its system of trading carbon credits actually results in a reduction of the greenhouse gas. Under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism, companies can buy the right to emit more carbon into the atmosphere by purchasing carbon offsets, which fund projects that reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. The International Herald Tribune reports that the UN wants to make sure any reductions are a direct result of the purchasing system, and aren’t just from projects that would have gone ahead without the incentive.

Computer Giants Have Their Heads in the Cloud

The current high-tech flavor of the month is cloud computing, in which applications and computing power run on remote machines that don’t necessarily belong to the user, saving time and expense. Technology Review tells us that Intel, Yahoo, and HP, along with research groups in Illinois, Germany, and Singapore, have formed a cloud computing initiative. The aim is to develop an Internet-based infrastructure that is stable enough to host companies’ more critical data processing tasks.

IKEA to Offer Cleantech Products

It’s not just bookcases and build-it-yourself credenzas for Swedish furniture store IKEA anymore. As the Cleantech Group reports, IKEA plans to invest in clean energy startups over the next five years to the tune of 50 million euros (about $77 million). Its goal is to eventually start selling cleantech technology, including smart meters and solar panels, in its stores. No word on whether solar panel installation requires more than that little wrench thingie.

Daily TIPs (technology, innovation, policy) is produced in collaboration with

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In case anyone didn’t get the memo, energy prices are going up.

This trend will most likely continue for two very simple reasons: Worldwide energy demand is rising, and global fossil fuel supplies are tightening.

Add to this the need for critical action on the part of all nations to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in response to what is now a preponderance of evidence that continued reliance on fossil fuels will result in catastrophic changes to our climate and eco-systems.

It has been prophesied by some that taking state-level legislative action on climate change by capping allowable GHG emissions would place a tremendous burden on our local economy—especially at a time when the economic outlook is not all that rosy to begin with. The thesis is that, by forcing our businesses to pursue energy-saving measures, and adding more expensive renewable energy into the supply stream, we will greatly add to their expense burden, thus reducing their competitiveness.

Don’t believe it. And here’s why:

Let us, for a moment, take a cap on GHGs off the table, and look at the long term. Assuming a continued, steady rise in energy prices over the coming decades (something many experts now predict), our businesses are going to be faced with a sizable expense burden as energy prices become a larger and larger line item on their balance sheets. What’s worse, there is nothing to suggest that it will level off—and why should it? The basic laws of supply and demand dictate that that when supply is constrained in the face of surging demand, prices shoot skyward.

While Bay State businesses will inevitably respond to these market signals by implementing energy efficiency measures on their own, there is an opportunity here to move faster—and in doing so, provide our businesses and our economy with two substantial benefits.

So let’s now put GHGs back on the table, and talk specifically about why Massachusetts should pass the Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA, or Senate Bill 2531)—which calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.

Benefit number one: Global competitiveness.

If we simply wait until federal legislation caps GHGs for us (and I think we all know federal legislation is coming), then the bulk of Massachusetts companies will move with the crowd. Under the GWSA, our companies will be ahead of the curve, streamlining their operations in advance of the federal mandate, and gaining first-mover advantage in the process. As energy prices rise, our companies will be better prepared to keep energy expenses under control through early action and better planning. The bottom line: our companies will ultimately be stronger and healthier competitors as a result of this legislation.

Furthermore, as the GWSA (and the Green Communities Act, Massachusetts’ comprehensive energy bill now in conference committee) substantially increases the amount of electricity derived from renewable energy, we will start to create a hedge against rising fossil fuel prices. While it won’t happen tomorrow, renewable energy will, at some point, be cheaper than traditional sources, and having a strong local supply of clean energy will allow us to pay less (perhaps significantly less) in the future.

Benefit number two: Sector leadership.

Energy transformation is non-optional—at the state level, at the national level, and worldwide. In short, we must develop technologies to replace fossil fuels not only because of climate change, but because they are finite resources. But here’s the good news: If we implement a cap on GHGs, we will unleash what is perhaps the greatest economic asset of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—our ability to innovate.

The Global Warming Solutions Act, the Green Communities Act, and the Green Jobs Act (which includes funding for clean energy R&D and entrepreneurship) will catalyze a tremendous increase in clean energy investment and new venture creation, which in turn will create jobs and grow our local economy.

Skeptical? Consider this: In a report to Governor Schwarzenegger and the Legislature, a multi-agency Climate Action Team led by the California EPA projected that California’s Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB32) will increase Californians’ personal income by roughly $4 billion and create approximately 83,000 jobs.

Worldwide, clean energy was a $77 billion market in 2007, and is expected to grow to $1 trillion by 2030. Roughly a dozen U.S. states are working aggressively to claim their piece of this prize; while Massachusetts certainly boasts all of the ingredients required to compete, let us not be complacent.

The Global Warming Solutions Act, the Green Communities Act, and the Green Jobs Act will substantially up the odds that we will establish a strong, growing cluster of clean energy companies here in the Commonwealth, and emerge as a leader in what will inevitably one of the largest technology markets in history.

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A Massachusetts energy-trading startup is gearing up to host the nation’s first auction for greenhouse gas emissions allowances. The details are still being worked out, but if all goes according to plan, World Energy Solutions (TSX: XWE) of Worcester will conduct the online auction—in which power-plant owners will buy and sell the rights to emit certain quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—on September 10.

Carbon-emissions auctions aren’t a new concept. A carbon trading market has been in operation in the European Union, where most member states are Kyoto Protocol signatories, for three years. But greenhouse emissions trading is an untested idea in the United States, where the federal government has so far failed to enact policies limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming. This federal inaction has led some individual states and regions to come up with their own ways to reduce CO₂ emissions. And we live in one of them: Massachusetts is one of 10 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states participating in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which is about to impose a cap-and-trade system that will force the region’s power providers to either lower their own carbon emissions below pre-defined limits or buy enough carbon “allowances” from other plant owners to cover their excess.

A key premise of cap-and-trade schemes is that they’re more efficient at reducing emissions than rigid pollution caps, since the opportunity to sell carbon allowances gives companies an incentive to get below their own emissions cap by innovating—for example, by installing better pollution-control equipment or switching to non-fossil-fuel energy sources. A national cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide emissions, run by the Environmental Protection Agency, has brought about drastic reductions in acid rain, at a cost-per-ton far below what analysts and industry expected.

But cap-and-trade systems only work if there’s a transparent marketplace where polluters can buy and sell carbon allowances. And to create that marketplace, the RGGI states have turned to World Energy.

The company, which went public in 2006 on the Toronto Stock Exchange, is one of many businesses that sprang up to capitalize on the wave of deregulation that swept the nation’s electrical markets in the 1990s. It specializes in online reverse auctions where clients in deregulated states who want to buy power—say, city governments looking for the best rate on electricity for streetlights—can invite potential suppliers to bid against each other in real time. Until recently, most electricity customers turning to competitive suppliers sent out paper … Next Page »

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