The alternative-energy revolution was chugging ahead at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit on Wednesday, where three green-technology companies hoped to turn the auto, electric and new-fuels industries on their heads.
The companies sketched out unique plans to recharge electric cars, find more efficient energy from the sun and make diesel from vegetable oil using an unusul cost-effective process.
Half of Nevada can generate all the energy the US needs, says Bob Fishman
All claimed they would make for a cleaner world with fewer greenhouse gases contributing to global warming. Here are the startups:
Coulomb Technologies is a big supporter of electric cars – because it wants to provide the electric stations to re-energize them.
“The plug-in vehicles are coming,” says President Praveen Mandal. Toyota, GM and Mercedes all have plans, with cars reaching the market starting next year.
Coulomb wants to address the inevitable shortage of charging facilities by installing his public-phone-sized stations to tickle charge cars when they park.
He will begin to install them in San Jose in December and he hope for trials in cities in New York and Florida. The stations communicate with a central server, keeping track for the electric fees drivers accumulate. Revenue at the company, he claims, could rise from $1.5 million presently to $20 million by 2011.
Mandal’s plan for electric cars is simpler than the one being promoted by high-profile startup Better Place, which wants charging stations to swap fully charged batteries for a motorist’s depleted one.
The Palo Alto startup Ausra views solar energy in a new way. Many solar companies use silicon or thin-film technology to generate electricity from photo voltaic cells. Ausra CEO Bob Fishman thinks solar can be used more effectively to create heat and steam for industrial processes or electric turbines.
Small mirrors, controlled by software, concentrate sunlight onto large-scale installations of cells, creating efficient, utility-size projects. One in Las Vegas produces 700 megawatts a year.
The company funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Vinod Khosla says it is close to a number of commercial orders. “You should think of Ausra as a solar boiler manufacturer,” Fishman says.
He also likes to think big. With half the state of Nevada, the technology could generate enough energy to power the U.S., Fishman claims.
From a financial perspective, the company’s energy is cheaper than electricity generated from photo voltaic cells and competitive with natural gas, he said.
Renewable Fuel Products boasts of a new way to make diesel fuel from vegetable oil without the hydrogen and methane that other alternative-fuel processes require.
The process also is portable and therefore can be set up where the vegetable oil is made or the fuel is needed. “Our technology fits on the back of a trailer,” says Peter Bell, co-founder. “What this allows is distributed refining.”
Bell said the technology is being tested at the University of California at Davis and is presently producing 10 gallons of diesel fuel an hour.
