In a recent international conference on ‘Climate Change: Technology Development & Transfer’ held in Delhi, the Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh began his speech by stating that climate friendly and environmentally sound technologies should be viewed as global public goods.

The panel, also chaired by the Maldives President after his country’s recent underwater stunt, called for the Northern countries to do (much) more than just emissions reduction. The statement also comes shortly after media reports suggest India could change its national position on climate change to drop the ‘deal-breaker’ tag put on it by the West.

The BIG question: Will India change its official position ahead of Copenhagen?

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The big drawbacks are the cost ($1600 retail price) and the need for electricity.  While standing, the DH9 uses 80 Watts, and while actively filtering, it uses 500.

Researchers in Stuttgart, however, have solved one of those two problems:  their system is completely based on renewable, on-site energy. 

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Last week, the Internet celebrated its 40th birthday! Forty glorious years that saw not just the transition from ARPANet to the now popular Internet but also Web 2.0 and what not! The Internet has been a revolution–in the making! The Internet that we know of today has been around for a little over a decade. That is also the time period when awareness and action on the “global” climate crisis has been phenomenal. And the link, evident!

According to the Internet Governance Forum, Internet consumes up to one trillion kilowatt hours of electricity per year, amounting to around 5% of the world’s total electricity consumption. The ‘tools’ of the IT sector are also manufactured using metals of various kinds. So the question remains, can Internet really help solve the climate crisis? The answer, on behalf of a generation grown up with the Internet, a firm Yes!

Here are five ways how Internet is helping fight climate change:

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The discovery of a tiny bowl-shaped molecule which collects carbon dioxide right out of the air has beckoned some creative solutions to global warming.

By genetically engineering microbes to manufacture the handy molecule, scientists hope to make it useful as an industrial absorbent for CO2 capture. That could help clean up smokestacks from dirty coal-fired power plants, but it’s also possible that the molecules could be used for pulling carbon dioxide right out of the ambient air.

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Tickets are $55 in advance and $95 on-site, but OPEN was kind enough to offer Green Options readers a bargain discounted price of $40. The discounted tickets can only be purchased through this link: http://tinyurl.com/OPENforum-DISCOUNT.

Here is a brief overview of the Cleantech panel sessions:
Session I: Where’s the Green in Clean? Investment Opportunities, Valuations and the Funding Gap in Cleantech.
Session II: Innovations in Energy: Viable business propositions after Market Corrections.
Session III: The Stimulus Act: The Impact of Government Policy on Cleantech Start-ups and Investors.
Session IV: Workshop: Crafting your personal brand to transition into the Cleantech sector.

For more information on OPEN Silicon Valley Forum ‘09 Cleantech sessions, click here.
For a full schedule of events click here.

In other words, it’s still down from last year, but deals are still happening and money is still available, he said. “The amount of investment is not continuing to plummet; it’s stable,” Kachan said. “Some might say we’ve reached bottom.”

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I say this not because there was a lack of enthusiasm in the air-absolutely the opposite-rather I say it because a more zoomed-out perspective on cleantech has begun to crystallize, and with that everyone from VC’s to the entrepreneurs bootstrapping their way through the battlefields of innovation has recognized the value of niches within the ‘ecosystem’ of cleantech.

This, of course, is a fitting metaphor for the area of innovation hoping to save us from ourselves. The area of innovation slated to reinvigorate our intuitions about what it means to work alongside nature as opposed to taking it for granted. At the same time, the principles of business and innovation surrounding growth of capital via monetization requires these innovations to return deep profits for those invested. Here’s how that duality played out in real-time:

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Speaking from the American Wind Energy Association’s annual conference and expo in Chicago, CEO of Leviathan Energy, Dr. Daniel Farb, said he expects “that with the very fast return on investment the Wind Energizer can deliver, sales will be quite strong.”

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Rooftop falcon-cams and electric-car chargers on streetlights may sound like things out of the future, but for the city of San Jose, California, the future is now.

Okay, I’ll admit it. Having grown up on the East Coast, for much of my life all I knew of San Jose was that Dionne Warwick apparently didn’t know how to get back there.

But take one look at the LEED Platinum-certified City Hall; the Falcom-Cam that keeps watch of once-endangered Peregrine Falcons that now nest annually on the building’s roof, and; the electric car charging station across the street, and you’ll get a peak into the future of urban sustainability.

The thing about San Jose, Mayor Chuck Reed said to me during a phone call we had last week, is that “innovation just happens” happens in the Silicon Valley. Obviously not every city has the advantage of such a robust technologically innovative base, but like any other city, the hard part, explained Reed, is implementing policies to facilitate the development of that innovation.

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That’s the advice from Amy Vernetti, a managing director at headhunting firm Taylor Winfield. She says many of the green jobs are coming from areas that probably don’t leap to mind when you think of cleantech, such as companies developing fuel additives and air-filtration technologies. “These are hidden gems in the market,” she says, adding that some of them are “hiring like crazy.”

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With all sorts of claims being made about clean energy and clean tech, it is more than a mere academic exercise to explore what those terms really mean. One way of defining something is by defining what it is not. For example, the large bucket-wheel excavators like those used in the open-cast lignite mines of western Germany are not clean tech. And here’s why…

At 300 feet tall and 600 feet long, the largest bucket wheel excavators are the biggest land vehicles ever made. Though they only dig at a maximum of 0.37 mph, these machines move 240,000 cubic meters of material daily, about as much as a football field dug to 100 feet deep.

Because they continuously dig, transport, and dump material twenty-four hours a day these machines require 16 megawatts of externally supplied electricity; and there are twenty-two currently in use in the four open-cast lignite mines in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. 

Bucket wheel excavators have been working these lignite fields since 1933, playing an instrumental role in fueling the Hitler machine with coal-based synfuel. Over the years, the mining activities have scarred the land and created massive canyons, reaching up to 500 metres deep and over 10 Km wide (see a 360 degree panorama of the lignite coal mine in Garzweiler). Continued…

The scale of the Rhineland lignite operations is such that entire communities have been razed and their occupants relocated to new villages, to make way for the dirty excavation of a dirty fuel.

After the land has been mined, reclamation efforts have fallen short of repairing local ecological services provided by wetlands and forests.

An estimated 30,000 people have been relocated by lignite operations in the Rhineland. Fifty-eight villages have vanished thanks to mining activities in the region, including some that date back to the Roman Period.

The latest to give way to the encroaching mining operations is the village of Otzenrath. Current plans are to work the fields for another 25 years, and if that is the case, more villages will be slated for demolition, erasing thousands of years of history and culture from the map. Continued…

The arrangement now, is such that, landowners no longer receive land in exchange for their property, only cash (parcels of land were once part of the package); with acreage at a premium in the German countryside, this can put a real pinch on local farmers who may lose a sliver of their land that they are never able to put back into productivity.

The Rhineland lignite mines are currently working at depths of up to 350m, and will dig up to 500m deep, depending on the depth of the lignite layers. At such depths, it is imperative for effective extraction to keep the earth dry, so ground water is drained out by a chain of pumping stations.

Most of this water goes unused and ends up in the Rhine and Maas rivers, lowering the water table in the region and concentrating the contaminates in what is left. The end result being poor quality water and less of it, and an ecosystem that may take thousands of years to repair itself.

Lands that were once prized for their rich top soil are never fully restored such that they can sustain productive agriculture. Even after the lignite mining pits are reclaimed, the soil left over is not suitable for vegetable farming or productive animal grazing because the good top soil (or, “overburden”) has been scraped off and remixed with the slag leftover from burning coal at local plants.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the poor fuel quality of lignite, losing as much as 60% of its energy to the atmosphere as waste heat, and more carbon dioxide, particulates, and sulphur dioxide than bituminous and subbituminous coal.

There you have it, the evidence has been presented, and the case has been made. I will let you decide for yourself, but by my own calculations, bucket-wheel excavators are decidedly not clean tech.

Images: 1., 2. Wikipedia; 3., 4., 6., 7. BK59; 5., 8. © Forbidden Places, used with permission of author; 9. Courtesy of oeke-energie.de

A Cambridge, Massachusetts-based desalination start up has closed on a $10 million round of funding to develop its proprietary technology to produce clean, potable water from salt water using one tenth the amount of energy used in traditional desalination plants.

As we reported last month, Yale researchers Rob McGinnis and Dr. Menachem Elimelech have developed a proprietary desalination system called Engineered Osmosis that they say could produce clean drinking water from seawater or other wastewater at half the current cost. Now that their new company— Oasys Water—has secured Series A funding, it can proceed with the development of its potentially revolutionary commercial desalination platform.

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After congressional leaders reached compromise on a 789 billion dollar economic stimulus package that includes investment for smart grid and broadband infrastructure, there were lots of smiling faces around Mountain View, Cali., the headquarters of Google Inc.

President Obama’s stated desire to invest in smart grid and broadband infrastructures syncs quite nicely with Google’s obvious desire to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure but it also will benefit the company’s recent incursion into smart metering.

While the specifics of Wednesday’s compromise have yet to be released, the Senate version of the stimulus slated $7 billion for broadband and $20 billion for smart grid investment, with final figures likely to be smaller. [update: CNET reports that smart grid investment was pared down in the final package to $11 billion]

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Don’t think you can rise up to the X PRIZE ultracapacitor challenge? Maybe you should go for MIT’s Clean Energy Prize instead.  The competition, which is intended for university students, will award $200,000 to “jumpstart a business venture on an emerging clean energy innovation with significant market potential.”

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Mohr Davidow Ventures partner Will Coleman, who moderated a cleantech-financing panel at the event, asked panelists to guess when the IPOs would come back. “The second quarter, which doesn’t mean the markets [will have] reopened,” said Gary Vollen, managing director of the Stanford Group Co. “I think the third quarter, probably,” guessed Jeff Lipton, managing director of Jeffries & Co. Inc.

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It’s a reflection of the economic environment, said Ron Pernick, a principal at research firm Clean Edge and a co-producer of the conference. “There haven’t been any exits to speak of, which tells you something,” he said.

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