Battlefield: Earth

Hydropower entrepreneur Chris Catlin is frank about his personal investments in oil, and they appear to be doing all right. He’s drinking vodka at lunchtime in swank Santa Monica surroundings, his enormous frame draped in expensive clothing and sprawled out on a leather bench. “Oil just blows renewables out of the water in terms of energy density,” he says, waving his hand dismissively, “it’s going to be a hell of a challenge to replace it.”

Even if Catlin is pessimistic that we’ll rise to that challenge gracefully, he intends to make a profit trying. Five years ago, when gas was two dollars a gallon, he founded Bourne Energy, a Malibu-based company aiming to manufacture new varieties of hydro-electric equipment to harness tides, waves, and river currents. Since then, the flow of capital toward alternative energy and other green technologies has risen, along with energy prices, from a trickle to a torrent which last year equaled tens of billions of dollars. Much of that money comes off one street in Silicon Valley, and the Bay Area has already become a green tech hub. But the Southland is also a potential center of the emerging industry, potentially creating millions of skilled jobs and transforming energy production, transportation systems, waste disposal, water reclamation, landscaping, structural design, and every other fever dream. We looked into a few of the mad scientists hoping to do well, do good, and do the hustle.

The Money

As a former energy futures trader, Catlin understood in the early ’80s that that industry was changing. As a surfer, sailor, and diver, he understood the formidable power of the tide. Now he’s an impassioned advocate of hydropower, already the cheapest and most utilized of all renewable energy sources. “Solar is insanely expensive,” he says through a piece of salmon, though he admits it might do for the Australian outback. Nuclear and biofuels are also overpriced, he says, though he grudgingly gives windmills due credit.

Presently Bourne is focused on its RiverStar system, in essence an underwater windmill. The rotor hangs from a floating hull secured in place by a cable strung across the river. Each self-contained unit will be easily mass-produced with standard steel-press equipment of the type used to manufacture cars, Catlin says, and installed in whatever quantity necessary for a given application. Each would cost $20,000 and produce enough power for 12 American houses at two to three cents per kilowatt-hour over its lifetime. That beats by a wide margin coal power prices, at upwards of 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, a standard of economic feasibility commonly used by energy investors. The device’s effect on navigation is unclear, though Catlin says it would not interfere with barges.

Patents are pending on what Catlin says are Bourne’s revolutionary wave- and tidal-generation devices. TidalStar is conceived as a pair of floating rotors that harness tidal current in both directions. OceanStar, the wave generator, will be a giant, horizontal, fin-like device with turbines along one edge, moored 300 feet underwater. A mile-long section of fin will produce about 1,000 times as much as a RiverStar unit and will appear as little more than a line of whitewater far offshore.

Bourne and its nine employees are in the process of raising the approximately $4 million they need to produce and install prototypes of RiverStar and TidalStar over the next year, possibly in India and New Orleans, respectively. The following year, Catlin wants to raise another $4 million to build an OceanStar prototype somewhere north of here, where the waves, if not the people, are fiercer.

Nothing Like the Sun

Despite its high cost, solar energy has lately become the most fashionable green tech enterprise, and there are signs that the industry will become lucrative. Prodded forward by California’s self-imposed renewable power mandates, 3,500 megawatts of solar power production has already been contracted for construction statewide. Per those mandates, 15,000 to 17,000 more megawatts of renewable energy capacity will have to be built over the next 12 years, and most of that will be solar. Whoever can produce the most power for the least cost will win the contracts to build that capacity, likely totaling $45 to $50 billion-with-a-B.

Last November, Google announced that it was embarking upon an effort to produce enough electricity to power San Francisco with renewables – and at a lower cost than coal. One of their first investments was $10 million in eSolar, a company that hopes to cut the price of utility-scale solar thermal production to below that threshold.

Business incubator Idealab created eSolar in January 2007 and is nursing the company in its headquarters in downtown Pasadena. Public relations man Stephan West says that eSolar is in a sensitive developmental period – and is not yet divulging details about either its technology or finances. Instead, he directs me to the company’s vague and good-looking website. Executive VP Robert Rogan, meanwhile, says only that eSolar’s system requires less capital than do those of its competitors. Given that Idealab has weathered several shareholder lawsuits over the years, perhaps it’s no surprise that they’re keeping a veil of secrecy over their latest venture.

According to that good-looking website, eSolar hopes to beat its several established rivals, such as Palo Alto-based Ausra and the Israeli company Solel, both of which are on similar quests to cheapen existing solar technologies, by harnessing economies of scale. Its power plant model involves a field of mirrors focusing solar rays on a central tower to boil water that then drives turbines. This model has been around for decades, but eSolar’s plants will be made up of modular units designed for easy assembly and mass-manufactured to cut costs: one plant might have 20 modules, and each module – a cluster of mirrors around one tower – will be able to produce 25 megawatts.

Asked for comment on his competition, Ausra Executive VP John O’Donnell says that his company’s plants, which will heat molten salt in long tubes with parabolic mirrors, will be less expensive to manufacture and use half the land that power-tower models do. “Everything is cheap until you build it,” he says. “$10 million is just a drop in the bucket.”

Salt and the Earth

Across town in Santa Monica, SolarReserve is also taking a stab at solar thermal. Founded in January by private equity firm US Renewables Group, the company plans to produce power-tower solar thermal plants similar to eSolar’s. Like Ausra, SolarReserve’s plants will use molten salt rather than water as a thermal element.

“We did water at Solar One,” CEO Terry Murphy says of the advantage of molten salt. “That’s why we did Solar Two.” An environmentally innocuous mix of sodium and potassium nitrates similar to garden fertilizer, the salt – unlike water – has a high capacity to retain heat. By storing hot salt in insulated containers and using it when needed, SolarReserve will smooth out electricity generation amidst weather changes and also be able to continue generating during evening peak hours.?This technology will bring the price of solar down to 10 to 15 cents a kilowatt-hour, Murphy says.

SolarReserve was created in collaboration with Rocketdyne and has an exclusive purchase and warrantee agreement with that company for all parts necessary to build their plants. That factor, Murphy says, will give them a great advantage over rivals when procuring financing for plant construction, an important factor since a utility-scale solar thermal plant might cost more than half a billion dollars.

A few miles east of Idealab, behind a nondescript stucco cluster off the 210 freeway, Soliant Energy spokesman Marc Cortez is about to show me to the garage where company engineers are putting the finishing touches on a unique prototype solar collector.

On the way out to it, we pass a giant array of conventional solar panels undergoing testing in the adjacent lot by Soliant’s rivals at EI Solutions. They’re the flat, black, 12-percent-efficient silicon panels that one often sees atop homes and businesses. Hoping to supplant these, Soliant has designed a collector that concentrates solar rays with a lens onto a piece of photovoltaic material about the size of an eraser head, normally achieving three times the efficiency of the conventional panels.

Soliant co-founder Brad Hines used to engineer NASA telescopes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an experience that helped him design the key element of his company’s product, the concentrating lenses. After that, he worked for 14 years as an engineer with photovoltaic manufacturer Energy Innovations, another Idealab company and ironically the parent of EI Solutions next door (the solar industry is still a very small world). In 2006, he founded Soliant with colleague Michael Deck and shortly thereafter the two won a first round of venture capital from a consortium of green technology investment firms.

Built with the help of a $4 million Department of Energy grant, the prototype array is about three feet by six and can produce 600 watts on a clear day. It looks like a row of square headlights mounted on a rack that rotates them along two axes to track the sun. Like the conventional panels, Soliant’s collectors are not designed for utility-scale production, Cortez says, but would be attractive to a commercial operation with lots of rooftop square footage and high energy demands, such as a factory or a warehouse.

Soliant has set up a manufacturing plant in Mexico and expects to bring its product to market within a year. The very prototype I’m looking at, Cortez says, is headed back to the Department of Energy in a few weeks for testing to fulfill the terms of their grant.

Of Shit and Shinola

Like a worm wiggling across a dung heap, Karen Bertram of International Environmental Solutions transforms garbage into sustenance.

Deep in the suburban wastelands of Riverside County is the Romoland headquarters of IES. From afar, their facility appears to be just another random industrial formation, a large steel-framed edifice with a stack above a vast, incomprehensible array of tanks and tubes. The leaders of the Norco Equestrian Society, who want to deal with their horse manure backlog, a few Indian businessmen on a mission hosted by the Department of Commerce, and an immaculately-dressed Hemet city councilmember are already there when I arrive, milling about the machinery behind IES vice president Toby Cole.

Beneath the stack is IES’s Advanced Pyrolysis System, a century-old technology with which the company harnesses the river of waste pouring from our homes and businesses. The machine is not discriminating: It devours anything except nuclear waste, including caustic chemicals, sewage, and biomass. It certainly eliminates the need to sort recyclables. “It loves plastic,” says Bertram, the company president, as we stand before a conveyor belt feeding a stream of ground-up garbage into the thermal oxidizer tank. Metal and glass spit out the end unchanged. Everything else is reduced in volume by 92 percent.

Bertram is a tiny woman with boundless energy. Throughout our tour of the facility she talks nonstop and battles the incessant ringing of her BlackBerry. A lawyer by training, she started a little pyrolysis operation in Long Beach back in 1993, and in 2001 founded IES with 72 small investors. Now she’s supposedly entertaining an offer of $20 million from some unnamed venture capitalists. That doesn’t stop her from handing me a huge folder of graphs and tables, investor-relations material demonstrating the merits of Advanced Pyrolysis. She says IES still welcomes small expressions of faith.

The technology overview is simple. Ground up waste is fed into a huge airtight cylinder, the thermal oxidizer, which is made of two-inch-thick steel and in which county inspectors once detonated a bomb. There it is heated to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit in an oxygen-free atmosphere, and it separates into gasses such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide and a dry carbon substance similar to charcoal. The flammable gasses are combusted to heat more incoming waste or run through fuel cells to generate electricity. The char is a good fuel and a potent fertilizer. The useless gases are blown out of the stack, but Bertram claims that by utilizing emission controls, pyrolysis creates fewer pollutants than would be produced by burying waste. I ask Cole about the white plume blasting out above us as the machine runs. “It’s mostly condensation,” he says, “if it wasn’t so cold you wouldn’t even see it.”

But according to a Berkeley advocacy group called the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), whose members consider the promises of pyrolysis advocates a fraud, the Romoland plant is even dirtier than two nearby conventional incinerators. Pyrolysis, says David Ciplet of GAIA, releases toxic metals such as mercury and lead along with oxides, and wastes raw materials that could be better recycled. Bertram dismisses these claims as having “no basis in fact” – a paltry argument, especially from a lawyer.

IES is only permitted to process 50 tons of waste daily, but it has applied for permission to handle more. The plant hasn’t yet cleared the bureaucratic hurdles to become a power-provider, either. But that eventuality is close at hand, Bertram says, and within three months IES will be selling enough electricity to power about 260 homes. Their fuel will be medical waste, for which they’ll charge $20 a pound.

Bertram’s ambitions extend further, as well. One day, she hopes, IES will produce a million gallons of biodiesel from algae raised in tubes, perhaps fed by carbon dioxide scrubbed out of the stack above us.

The Miser

Blessed with cheap energy for decades, our society has become accustomed to wasting it copiously. Conservation is the cheapest and most sensible way to cut our energy bills, and it requires no wizardry.

Through his Venice-based company, Sun Illumination, Inc., conservation advocate and entrepreneur Karl Roth has long been hoping to produce a set of devices that capture and distribute sunlight around buildings. But after a fruitless decade of effort he is still the sole owner and employee of his company, and he hasn’t yet secured any of the ostensibly easy capital flowing toward green technology. He drives a beat-up old hatchback and depends on an unreliable hobo to maintain the company computer. While developers of a fanciful scheme to build an island in outer space have recently raised $10 billion for their efforts, he says ruefully, Sun Illumination has been unable to scrape up a measly three hundred grand for a device that might spare the world a noxious cloud of coal smoke. He blames venture capitalists, who he says won’t bother with anything that needs less than $50 million, and the business and environmentalist communities, which have embraced solar panels at the expense of more sensible conservation measures such as his.

“We need to start thinking like the Indians,” he says, demonstrating with an equation that a $70 investment in florescent lighting can be equivalent to an $18,000 investment in photovoltaic panels. “We need to start doing with what we’ve got.”

In a reasonable world, Roth’s invention would have been adopted centuries ago. It consists merely of a sun-tracking reflective dish that focuses sunlight through a hole in the roof, at which point it is distributed around the building by a number of ordinary mirrors. The system would remove the absurdity of simultaneously paying for heat-generating lamps and air conditioning. It would improve the feel of the inside of a building and increase worker health and productivity. It would be hugely advantageous for any factory or warehouse in the Southwest that shells out thousands a month for lighting while the sun blazes down outside. Each dish provides the equivalent of 54 100-watt bulbs, which might save a typical Wal- Mart $100,000 annually. The invention is simple and inexpensive, and there doesn’t appear to be a catch.

An electrician with a vocational education, Roth came up with his idea 20 years ago after watching a program about future technologies that featured a fiber optic daylighting system. That system was wildly expensive, though, so he started thinking of ways to cheapen the basic concept. Now, he’s struggling to raise the $9,000 he needs to secure international patents on the result. He says potential partners have offered money, but he wouldn’t give them any managerial power at the company, and they backed out. “You can’t just work hard and have a great idea and be successful,” he concludes bitterly.

Roth puts down two fives for our overpriced orange juices, then retracts one. “Why don’t you go ahead and cover one,” he says.

We part as I wait for the bus. Roth asks me if I can get him $3 million. “I’ll see what I can do,” I say.