The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship has announced the Spring 2012 cohort, including Berkeley Energy Sciences Corporation (BESC)!  Reid Spolek (BERC VP of Events) is BESC's first full-time employee and will head up business development for the company. 

BESC is the first CleanTech hardware company to be accepted into SkyDeck. They are developing a novel approach to energy storage using a cost-effective and efficient flywheel system. Their technology has the ability to drastically reduce the price of utility scale energy storage and provide reliable, integrated grid services. The team is actively raising funding to supplement a large grant from the California Energy Commission to further develop their technology.

Four companies were accepted into SkyDeck's Spring 2012 class out of nearly 50 that applied. In the fall they will present their companies to Angel and Venture Capital partners as part of the Startup Accelerator @SkyDeck Demo Day. 

A new report issued by the organization Climate Central examines whether or not electric cars live up to their “green” reputation.  While reducing the use of gasoline is a great way to cut one’s carbon footprint in the short-term, the report finds, simply replacing that gasoline with electricity from a coal-fired power plant may not cause a net decrease in carbon output.

The report examines the electricity generation portfolio of each state, and finds that electric cars unequivocally lower-carbon than gasoline cars in only five states.  Another nine states have energy portfolios such that some electric cars (specifically cars like the Nissan Leaf, which do not operate on gasoline at all) would reduce one’s net carbon output, while others (such as the Chevy Volt which also has a gasoline engine) would not.

In general, only states with high amounts of nuclear and hydropower, which emit no carbon at all, have energy portfolios low-carbon enough to reduce carbon output once electricity is substituted for gasoline.  These tend to be states in the Northeast, where nuclear is common, and in the Northwest, where large dams across nearly all of the region’s rivers provide (ostensibly*) carbon-neutral hydropower.

In states that rely on coal-fired power plants for a majority of their electricity generation, you’re better off driving a conventional car than one powered by coal-derived electricity.  In Wyoming or West Virginia, where over 90% of electricity comes from coal, a full plug-in electric car such as the Nissan Leaf would be responsible for almost double the carbon-output per mile over a fuel-efficient hybrid like the Prius (0.9 pounds versus 0.5 pounds).

This data points not to a need to eliminate electric cars, which have great potential as carbon-emission cutting technologies, but to a need to modernize and change our electricity generation system.  According to the Energy Information Administration, about 40% of our electricity was derived from coal in 2011.  Indeed, coal represents an equal share of total global greenhouse gas emissions (35%) as petroleum (36%).  So simply transferring our carbon footprint from petroleum based in traditional cars to coal based in electric cars will not solve our climate problem.  Switching to low-carbon electricity sources is the only way to reduce the carbon emissions from our energy use.

*There have been studies done showing that dams are a major contributor to climate change due to the large amounts of methane released from all of the dead plant life in the valleys inundated by the dams.

Professor Dan Kammen seems happy to be back on campus after spending a year serving as the World Bank’s Chief Technical Specialist for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. While in DC, it was his job to be the voice for a clean energy future in a bank that still lends money to big coal-fired power plants. Even with cogent analysis to back up calls for a clean energy transition, Kammen found that old habits will die hard.

The World Bank has been funding coal-fired power projects for more than a decade in Kosovo. Kosovo’s growing economy has experienced a surge in energy demand, and many experts at the Bank contend that yet another new large coal-fired power plant will be the “least cost” option to meet this demand. In a recent SF Chronicle op-ed, Kammen stated why he thinks this is distinctly not the case.

Using research produced by his students and colleagues in the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL) here at Berkeley, he points out that an alternative low-carbon scenario including efficiency, hydropower, and other renewables would create more jobs and that “the capital cost of the scenario including a new coal power plant is more than double the cost of the low carbon scenario.” Additionally, if Kosovo wants to join the EU, a new coal plant would ensure that Kosovo would not be able to meet the EU’s 2020 climate goals. Civil society in Kosovo is strongly against any new coal plants, Kammen notes, because the type of coal they have there is a very dirty form of lignite which is causing severe air pollution.

Cases like this are not without precedent. In August 2010, the World Bank approved a $3.75 billion loan to a coal fired power plant in Medupi, South Africa, amidst environmental criticism from all over the globe. Although the U.S. ended up abstaining from the vote on this project, South African President Jacob Zuma lobbied hard for support from the U.K., which ended up approving the loan.

The major donors to the World Bank have large sway in whether these projects get approved or not, and the U.S. has so far been in support of the Kosovo project. The World Bank has also been lobbying the U.S. for a larger allocation to their loan portfolio. Kammen sees the new World Bank president Jim Yong Kim (a public health expert) as one of the last hopes in stopping the construction of a new coal-fired power plant. Bob Ichord, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department’s new Bureau of Energy Resources, could also play a role in swaying the decision.

A new World Bank energy strategy that would require greenhouse gas analysis for all electricity investments and prohibit funding of new coal-fired power plants in non-IDAcountries (Kosovo is an IDA country, but South Africa is not) has been stalled since itwasleaked in April 2011 before a meeting of the Committee on Development Effectiveness (CODE) could vote on it. Executive members of CODE include representatives from major World Bank donor and recipient countries. Reportedly, China and other developing countries refused to negotiate and vote on the proposal once it had been leaked.

Photo credit: RAEL on Flickr

We're pretty spoiled here in the Valley. Almost every major city tries to copy Silicon Valley in some way or another, because this is where the magic happens. Right?

At the "Future of Robotics in Silicon Valley and Beyond" last Thursday, Silicon Valley, for once, wasn't the example to follow. In fact, the world's best tech hub was schooled by speakers from Boston, Pittsburg and other east coast robotics clusters. 

Robotics is so unique because it is the branch of technology that most resembles humans themselves. In contrast to consumer electronics, which help us be more efficient (or less) but don’t “look” like us, robots are the closest things to artificial human beings because they are autonomous and intelligent. 

Outside the industry, robots seem to carry a slight negative connotation, in part due to apocalyptic movies and an association with secretive military campaigns. The fear that “robots will take away jobs” is an oft-asked question to these speakers, but they dispelled the myth. Indeed, robotics has an enormous potential to optimize our lives and our economy, domestically, commercially, and militarily.

This event opened my eyes to the numerous applications that robotics can have in our lives. I have highlighted a few below.

Ocean-dwelling robots for monitoring pollution and global warming

The creator of the programming language Java, James Gosling, talked about his ocean robot company, Liquid Robotics. Their technology, the Wave Glider, collects data about the ocean, sends it back to shore via satellite and propels itself by continuously harvesting energy from the thrust of waves and its attached solar panels. This means the Wave Glider can travel far into the ocean, collect data in even the stormiest of conditions with the toughest of sharks (it’s happened), and not have to come back for months or years to refuel.

The implications are huge. Wave Gliders can:

• Monitor radiation levels in the waters near Japan
• Find oil patches in water to help BP oil exploration
• Monitor marine mammals (According to Gosling, there is actually a lot of money in this)
• Monitor pollution and global warming by measuring the chemistry of the ocean, including CO2 and oxygen levels

Robots for efficient warehouses (and supply chain logistics)

Kiva Systemsuses robots to optimize supply chain logistics in a distribution center. In March this year, Kiva was acquired by Amazon for $775M, and is one of the success stories in robotics (more on that in Funding). Kiva robots can move a warehouse in a weekend without losing a single unit, provides inventory stock in real time, and reduces time wasted in having humans move products around. In essence, these robots do what we’d rather not, and eradicate the chance of human error.

Robots in the workplace

What’s good about having your coworkers in the same office? You can catch them down the hall to have a conversation, and they can pop into your cube anytime to ask a question. Willow Garage’s Texai telepresence bot allows you to do just that with your coworkers who are physically far, far away. The Texai is the height of an average human, and has a telepresence screen at head level that has the face of your coworker in Indiana. The coworker can choose to pop into your cube to say hello at any time, by commanding the Texai bot to visit your office. The Texai remote presence system is currently only in prototype and a new company has been created called Suitable Technologies to commercialize this bot.

Willow Garage has taken an interesting approach to robotics: open-source. Executives from Willow Garage, Steve Cousins and Brian Gerkey, told us about their open-sourced personal robot, the PR2, which has been distributed to many graduate students and scientists around the world so they can tinker with it and make their own bot applications using Willow’s robot operating system (ROS).

Or take it from Meka Robotics, which makes robotics systems designed to be “human-soft” that can work alongside humans in the workplace. Meka’s demonstration videos showed that their bot can hold a tool, open your beer, and pick up your lunch from the café across the street (complete delivery with the elevator ride and all). With your personal butler at work, you’ll never have to leave the office again!

Robots in the home

A theme at this conference was smoothly integrating robots into the home, to help us with tasks we’d rather not do, or to help us conserve energy without putting the extra effort. Yoky Matsuoka, VP of Technology at Nest, talked to us about Nest’s learning thermostat that learns your electricity habits, including what time you wake up and get home from work. The smart thermostat “robot” then programs itself to make your home temperature ideal at all times of the day, be it summer or winter, day or night. In the process, the Nest smart thermostat saves energy and your electric bill.

Another robot application in the home is the robot sentry, which is infinitely better than a human security guard, because it can stand guard 24 hours, seven days a week, without blinking an eye.

Robots for commercial space exploration

“Humans understand the why of space exploration,” says Tiffany Montague, Director of Space Initiatives at Google. Until recently, space exploration has been largely limited to the confines of the government and the military. The Google Lunar xPrize is one initiative that’s trying to make space exploration private and commercial. The xPrize has a total of $30 million in prizes available to the first privately funded teams to safely land a robot on the surface of the Moon, have that robot travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send video, images and data back to the Earth. Teams must be at least 90% privately funded, though commercially reasonable sales to government customers are allowed without limit.

Why Sand Hill Road and Robotics haven’t meshed so far

The debate of the day was how to boost the robotics industry in Silicon Valley, a tech hub that seems friendly to social media, and not as friendly to robotics or cleantech. The most recent success story in robotics is Mick Mountz’ $775M sale of Kiva to Amazon. Mountz was here to tell us the story of Kiva, which started on a whiteboard in his living room (turns out you can’t afford a garage in Palo Alto unless you already have an IPO under your belt). He got rejected for funding by 82 people on Sand Hill Road. Now looking back, he prefers customer funding over VC money because it’s better market validation to have customers invest. So where’s the community that understands your problem? The answer is why Kiva eventually moved to the east coast. Valley venture capitalists tend to think robotics is science fiction, forever an industry of the “future.”

Venture capitalists invest in empirically successful industries, says Helen Grenier, the woman behind iRobot (the robot that cleans your home) and CyPhy Works. Unlike the SV poster children Instagram and Pinterest, the hard sciences of robotics and clean energy haven’t seemed to fit those characteristics that warrant money-throwing. But things are getting better. In 2011, $160M of VC funding went into robotics. Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva Systems has helped warm Silicon Valley venture capitalists up to the idea of robotics as a lucrative technology with many end markets. Perhaps, here in the Valley, we will soon move from the phase of “technology as a spectacle” towards technology as a way to make our lives more meaningful, our economy ever growing, and our earth a sustainable place to live.

Photos from the event can be found here: http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/05/07/robotics-slide-show/

Wurster Hall, boasted on campus tours as the ugliest building on UC Berkeley’s campus, is home to the College of Environmental Design (CED). The college contains four departments: Architecture, Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, City & Regional Planning, and Urban Design. What might seem like an austere façade is in fact a hive of collaboration and creative production that keeps the lights on in the north tower well into most evenings in the semester.

The department of Architecture offers an undergraduate-level Bachelor of Arts degree in architecture, as well as a graduate-level Masters of Architecture degree. Both involve intensive studio explorations of architecture and urbanism, sustainability, and environmental design, with supporting coursework about structures, energy & the environment, architectural history, theory, and construction.

Another degree offered within the Department of Architecture is a Master of Science or Ph.D. in Architecture, and one focus within that degree path is Building Science. This group of faculty and students work on issues very close to BERC’s core mission: building energy efficiency and low-energy heating and cooling technologies are some among many of the Building Science group’s core topics of ongoing research. In addition, issues such as thermal comfort and occupant satisfaction and behavior are among UC Berkeley’s specialty research topics. Many students continue after the M.S. / Ph.D track into research, academia, and industry.

The Center for the Built Environment is an industry/university research collaboration closely tied to the faculty in the Building Science department. The Center was founded in 1997 and is guided by an advisory board of building industry representatives. The research projects currently being pursued at CBE relate to indoor environmental quality issues, innovative heating/ventilating/air conditioning systems, occupant comfort, and a host of other miscellaneous topics and projects, sometimes proposed by graduate students in the department. The Personal Environmental Control system product line, borne of a CBE industry research initiative, was recently proposed as a C2M project.

The Department of Architecture is rich with a variety of research and collaboration initiatives. As many state and federal initiatives are leaning towards net-zero energy buildings and communities in our future, architecture & planning students at the CED are exposed to a number of methods and practices to enable this goal. Most importantly, the concepts of collaboration, iteration, and integrative design are reinforced again and again in our time here. We'll see you at the next charette!

The 2012 SEED* Water Fair is coming up on Saturday May 5th! Our After School Program kids will be on campus from 10am-3pm presenting projects and seeing campus. We'll need day of volunteers to: 

1. Judge projects. We need 10 people as judges. If you judged last year, we'd love to have you back!. Judges need to be on Campanile Esplanade from 9:45 am-12 noon and can stay for free lunch if they want to. 

2. Lab tours. If you work in a lab on campus, our kids would love to see it! You'd pick up 10 kids, max, along with adult chaperones who know them, and a campus tour guide at 1pm and return them at 2pm. The lab tour is a half hour and the campus tour is a half hour. 

3. Setup and cleanup. Especially if you can be at the fair all day, we always need help setting up tables, projects, and easels starting at 8am, and putting them away between 3pm-4pm.

Email seed@berc.berkeley.edu if you can help!

Founded by two BERC members, solar energy start-up Xite Solar won third place overall in the Department of Energy's First Look West (FLoW) National Clean Energy Business Challenge Western Region on May 1 at Caltech. and were awarded $40,000 to start their company. The team, represented by Will Regan, a UC Berkeley Physics PhD candidate, and Will Greene, a first-year MBA student at Haas, was awarded $40,000 to invest in their start-up.

Regan and Greene met last fall when they worked together as organizers for the BERC Innovation Expo. Their company, Xite Solar, uses technology developed at UC Berkeley to improve efficiencies for existing thin film cells and enable production of high-efficiency, low-cost photovoltaics from a variety of earth-abundant, non-toxic materials.

They received very positive feedback from the judges, who said that although the company is still early in its development, they believe this is a "big idea" with significant implications for the thin film solar industry. Regan and Greene are going to be assembling a team of five students to participate in the Cleantech to Market class this fall to continue to work on the project.

More than 90 companies from universities across the West Coast, from the University of Washington and the University of Hawaii to USC and UCLA, applied for the competition in its inaugural year. Of these applicants, 30 were invited to the finals at Cal Tech.

Other finalists out of UC Berkeley included:

                                    ·         Adaptation Energy:  A Berkeley team focused on Wireless Sensor Networks that improve manufacturing productivity. Team members include Lindsay Miller (former BERC VP Membership), Yuri Yakubov (BERC VP of BIS), Ignacio Garcia-Ros (Haas MBA), Chris Hallas (BERC VP Events), and Reid Spolek (BERC VP Events)

                                    ·         Building Robotics: A software-based service for commercial energy efficiency. Team leaders include Berkeley PHD students Andrew Krioukov and Stephen Dawson-Haggerty and Carnegie Melon student Abe Othman.

The magazine is a great read for those of you who want to keep your finger on the pulse of energy research at Berkeley. From the "Letter from the editor":

"There’s a lot of energy on campus, whether you’ve seen the new buildings to house research laboratories on the northwest side of campus, or attended the BERC symposium that brought together 700 members of the UC Berkeley community to talk about carbon emissions and clean technology. In this issue of the BSR we’re putting a spotlight on energy, from biofuels to solar cells, and examining how Berkeley is experimenting with novel technology in a number of fields, to maintain an energetic and cutting-edge research community."

For more information, visit the Berkeley Science Review here.

The past few years have seen a dramatic scaling up of the solar industry from what was once a niche market to a globally emergent industry that may transform our entire energy structure.  While some may ascribe the growth of the solar industry to market forces reacting to demands of a carbon-conscious consumer base, the reality is that this shift towards renewable energy has been massively subsidized by governments, particularly in Europe and in the United States.

In a move that will cause shockwaves across the global solar power market, the German government has been scaling back subsidies for solar, including a 30% reduction in the feed-in tariff rate – the amount of money consumers get for feeding power into the grid from rooftop systems.  They are also reducing subsidies for the purchase of solar panels.

This is bad news for the solar industry in Germany.  Der Spiegel, the most influential newsmagazine in Germany, described the industry as “on the ropes”.  They cite a string of German solar company bankruptcies as evidence that the industry’s economic model relies on subsidies and cannot be fiscally self-sufficient.

And indeed, these bankruptcies have had ramifications on the other side of the pond.  California solar developer Solar Millenium is a subsidiary of a German company of the same name.  When the German company went bankrupt in later 2011, it “ceased providing any funding whatsoever” to its California operations, which also declared bankruptcy last month.  As detailed here last week, this turmoil in the financial sector of the solar industry led to the withdrawal of the IPO of BrightSource, perhaps the highest-profile utility-scale solar developer in America.

Spain provides an example as to what can happen when subsidies for an insolvent solar industry dry up.  When the euro crisis was in full swing in 2009 and the Spanish government needed to drastically cut spending, they reduced feed-in tariff subsidies to utilities significantly, causing the wholesale collapse of the Spanish solar industry.

America’s model of subsidy is quite different from that of Spain or Germany.  Instead of subsidizing the purchase of renewable energy, we subsidize its production.  The Department of Energy (DOE) has subsidized the construction of utility-scale solar, wind, and geothermal energy plants to the tune of about $17.5 billion through their loan guarantee program.  Several billion more from the DOE go into research and development through programs like the SunShot Initiative.

Still, there may be parallels to Europe that affect the viability of the U.S. solar industry going forward.  Are the companies receiving loan guarantees able to stand up on their own?  The now-infamous example of Solyndra shows how these programs can go awry, carrying away millions in taxpayer subsidy with them.

One answer could be addressing not just the supply side of the energy equation, but also the demand side.  Setting up tax codes to favor renewable energy would be a way to force the market to reorient toward those forms of energy which we consider desirable as a society.  Forcing utilities to purchase renewables, through mechanisms such as Renewable Portfolio Standards (highlighted on this blog a few months ago), achieves the effect of influencing demand without putting billions of dollars of government funding on the line.  Ultimately, measures such as these will help create a more stable solar industry, one that can stand on its own when government feel the need to tighten their fiscal belts.

BERC has had a fabulous spring semester. We’ve led the way with new initiatives like the BERCshops program, old favorites like Resources Roundtable, and a riveting Berkeley-Stanford Cleantech Conference.

Planning for our flagship event, the 2012 Energy and Resources Symposium, is already underway. There are still volunteer opportunities and sponsorship opportunities available. Please consider reaching out to us if you’d like to be a part of this great event.

What will you be doing this summer? Are you doing an energy or resource-related internship this summer? Will you be working on some groundbreaking research? Whether you’re in the area, or abroad, consider writing for the BERC blog, and let the BERC community know what you’re up to.

Finally, consider checking out the Berkeley Science Review’s Spring Seminar this Wednesday, May 2. Featuring a talk by Maggie Koerth-Baker, science editor at boingboing.net, on her recent book "Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us."

Have a great summer, and see you in the fall!

-Alex and Josh