There are a few industries that are going to continue to grow and Data Centers are one of them. Found this article in the LA times. Please enjoy.

By Roger Vincent, Los Angeles Times

While most of Southern California’s office rental market remains as anemic as the economy, one niche is experiencing robust growth: heavily secured offices where businesses house their all-important computer servers.

Nearly all of us send and receive signals through data centers every day. Simple tasks like browsing a website, paying a restaurant bill with a credit card or making a phone call may require their services.

In Los Angeles County, there are only about a dozen of these specialized buildings that protect the precious data of banks, oil companies, stores and all manner of other firms. But the need for them is exploding and more are on the way, real estate experts said, and the next generation will have perks for workers unheard of in the past.

“There is a huge disparity between demand and supply, and that disparity is projected to grow over the next five years,” said real estate broker Michael Siteman of Jones Lang LaSalle.

The soft economy is helping drive demand, he said. “Companies are trying do more with less, and the only way to do that is to automate.”

These days, automation requires electronic data stored and processed on servers. The innocuous-looking metal boxes are so crucial to corporate America’s ability to function that they are nurtured with obsessive care.

Some companies keep their servers in special rooms on site, but many others prefer to have them at an outside location that has reliable backup power if the lights go out and security worthy of the crown jewels.

At the Garland Center office building on the edge of downtown Los Angeles, visitors are photographed before heading down to a sprawling underground bunker built in the early 1980s by First Interstate Bank as an earthquake-safe haven for its computer operations. After passing a second guard station, guests to one server center operator reach a locked door that requires both retina and fingerprint scans to open.

After that buildup, the chilly, dimly lighted room inside is unremarkable. Rows of well-ventilated metal lockers house stacks of black servers, one to a shelf. Some of the larger clients cluster their servers inside custom-made chain-link cages.

Although the Garland Center is an ordinary office building above ground with white-collar tenants such as the Los Angeles Housing Department, its three underground floors house servers for 3,000 companies and institutions.

The businesses, whose identities are kept secret, rent space for their servers from data center management companies that are tenants in the Garland building. Managers such as Net2EZ keep their rooms cool and secure and can also take care of their customers’ servers.

Many businesses, though, insist that only their own technicians get access to company servers no matter where they are, said Michael Higgins, senior vice president of Internap Network Services Corp., another retail provider of data center space.

Internap recently signed a $12-million lease for an industrial building in Redondo Beach that is being upgraded to a data center intended to make life more pleasant for the people who put in long days and nights with the equipment inside.

“It will have Ft. Knox infrastructure with a bevy of amenities,” Higgins said. “Customers want to feel like they’re at the office or at home.”

The facility, set to open next year, will offer visiting tech teams such comforts as personal offices and lounges with Starbucks coffee, food vending machines, big-screen HD televisions with satellite feeds and video-game stations.

Higgins hopes such offerings will give workers a welcome break from the monotonous white noise of the electronics-filled server rooms. “They spend endless hours patching and replacing their gear,” he said.

Atlanta-based Internap is opening it first Southern California facility because the region is a leader in three of the top categories of data center users: entertainment, media and social networking.

“Customer demand led us there,” Higgins said.

Potential users include Internet companies that post streaming videos and online game operators that host thousands of players at once.

Setting up servers is a substantial investment. A server costs up to $75,000, and a good-size company might need 100 servers. That could cost more than $75,000 a month to rent from a data center because each server uses 1 megawatt of electricity.

Why so costly? Power. Data centers buy electricity wholesale through the biggest “pipes” available from providers such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to meet the demands of power-hungry servers. They also buy tons of water for the elaborate cooling systems that keep the server rooms from overheating.

Then there are the diesel generators ready to flip on at a moment’s notice to keep the electricity flowing in case of a power outage — for up to 30 days at the Garland Center. There, a team of engineers with a $2-million computer system works round-the-clock to make sure the backup system is functioning properly.

The backups are enormously expensive but provide peace of mind for data center customers, said broker Jason Warner of Jones Lang LaSalle. “More redundancy is the trend.”

Los Angeles County is one of the country’s largest data center hubs, with clusters around downtown Los Angeles and El Segundo. Several transpacific fiber communications lines terminate in the One Wilshire Building downtown, while El Segundo and Redondo Beach have the advantage of being near Los Angeles International Airport and in the territory of Southern California Edison, which sells power to businesses at a lower price than the DWP does.

The late 1990s saw a boom in data center openings, most of them in older buildings in downtown Los Angeles, including the landmark former Terminal Annex post office and a former Robinson’s department store. Many of the centers were built on speculation.

Demand fell off with the Internet bust of the early 2000s, and it took until about 2007 for demand to catch up with supply. Now the rise of gaming, social networking and cloud computing, all of which require banks of servers, is driving the demand for more data centers.

Developers aren’t building on spec this time, Internap’s Higgins said. “Now we have contracts and customers.”

roger.vincent@latimes.com

There was a great article in the New York Times Called Tax Plan to Turn Old Buildings “Green” Finds Flavor which really shows what is happening in the Clean Tech space. Please enjoy.

By JUSTIN GILLIS

A business consortium that includes Lockheed Martin and Barclays bank plans to invest as much as $650 million over the next few years to slash the energy consumption of buildings in the Miami and Sacramento areas. It is the most ambitious effort yet to jump-start a national market for energy upgrades that many people believe could eventually be worth billions.
Focusing mainly on commercial property at first, the group plans to exploit a new tax arrangement that allows property owners to upgrade their buildings at no upfront cost, typically cutting their energy use and their utility bills by a third. The building owners would pay for the upgrades over five to 20 years through surcharges on their property-tax bills, but that would be less than the savings.
The consortium is led by a company called Ygrene Energy Fund of Santa Rosa, Calif., which has already won an exclusive contract to manage a retrofit program for a half-dozen communities in the Miami area, with the city expected to join in a few weeks. It is in the late stages of completing a contract with Sacramento, and is seeking deals in other cities.
State and city officials are optimistic they may have found a way to tackle one of the nation’s biggest energy problems — waste in older buildings — without new money from Washington. If enough building owners sign on, private capital would be put to work paying for retrofit projects that promise to save local businesses money while creating thousands of new construction jobs.
“We are so used to reaching our hand out and saying, ‘Washington, we need this,’ and ‘Tallahassee, give us that,’ ” said Edward MacDougall, the mayor of Cutler Bay, Fla., a Miami suburb that took the lead in setting up the deal in that region. “This is really a home-grown mechanism where we don’t need to do that.”
The consortium was put together by the Carbon War Room, a nonprofit environmental group based in Washington set up by Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur and billionaire, to tackle the world’s climate and energy problems in cost-saving ways. With the United States government nearly paralyzed on climate policy, he said, his group is seeking a way forward.
“We see this as the first of hopefully many, many, many projects, and a big step in the right direction,” Mr. Branson said in an interview last weekend in New York.
In the past three years, half the states have passed legislation permitting energy retrofits financed by property-tax surcharges, and hundreds of cities and counties are considering such programs. While the situation poses some risks, and programs aimed specifically at homeowners have run into a snag, many jurisdictions are moving forward with plans to focus on commercial properties.
Environmental groups have lauded the trend as one of the most exciting developments in years regarding climate change. They point out that wide use of such programs could cut emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from power plants by reducing electricity demand.
“It’s a big deal,” said James D. Marston, head of energy programs for the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that has worked with Carbon War Room in developing the approach. Over the long haul, he said, “we’re talking about tens of billions of dollars in investments, and energy savings that are 10 times that amount. If you do this correctly, you would be able to shut down a third of the coal plants in the country.”
While that may take a while, there seems to be little question that the new approach could draw substantial private capital into the market for energy upgrades, which have historically been difficult for many midsize and smaller businesses to finance.
As envisioned for Miami and Sacramento, the plans will work like this:
Ygrene and its partners will gain exclusive rights for five years to offer this type of energy upgrade to businesses in a particular community. They will market the plan aggressively, helping property owners figure out what kinds of upgrades make sense for them. Lockheed Martin is expected to do the engineering work on many larger projects.
The retrofits might include new windows and doors, insulation, and more efficient lights and mechanical systems. In some cases, solar panels or other renewable power might be included. For factories, the retrofits might include new motors or other gear.
Short-term loans provided by Barclays Capital will be used to pay for the upgrades. Contractors will offer a warranty that the utility savings they have promised will actually materialize, and an insurance underwriter, Energi, of Peabody, Mass., will back up that warranty. Those insurance contracts, in turn, will be backed by Hannover Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies.
As projects are completed, the upgrade loans, typically carrying interest rates of 7 percent, will be bundled into long-term bonds resembling those routinely issued by governmental taxing districts. Barclays will market the bonds. Retirement funds have expressed interest in buying these bonds, which will be repaid by tax surcharges on each property that undergoes a retrofit.
Perhaps the most serious risk is that fly-by-night contractors will be drawn to the new pot of money, pushing energy retrofits that are too costly or work poorly.
“Contractors are cowboys,” said Dennis Hunter, chairman of Ygrene. He promised close scrutiny of the ones selected for the Miami and Sacramento programs.
Ygrene is one of about a dozen start-up companies around the country pursuing such deals. The company appears to have substantial momentum, but some of its competitors have already stumbled, telling property owners they qualified for retrofits but then failing to deliver the necessary short-term financing. Still, many people are optimistic this approach will get off the ground.
“This is a game-changer,” said John D. Kinney, whose company, Clean Fund of San Rafael, Calif., has raised $250 million to invest in such projects. The company just used the technique to help finance a large solar installation at a development called Sonoma Mountain Village in Rohnert Park, Calif.
Experts point out that, with modern techniques and equipment, a retrofit can typically cut a building’s energy use so much that the project pays for itself in as little as five years. The most famous recent example was the refurbishment of the Empire State Building, which cut energy use by nearly 40 percent, turning it into one of New York’s greenest buildings.
The new financing approach is called Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE.
For decades, cities and counties have created special taxing districts to finance improvements that benefit private property, such as street lights or sewers. Bonds are issued to pay for the projects, then repaid with surcharges on tax bills. If an owner sells, the surcharge stays with the property.
Several years ago, the city of Berkeley, Calif., hit on the idea of using that approach to finance energy upgrades on private homes. The idea took off, and 25 states and the District of Columbia soon passed PACE legislation. One of the most successful programs to date has been in Sonoma County, Calif., where retrofit projects exceeding $50 million have been financed.
While the initial focus was on homeowners, those programs slowed last year when an arm of the federal government that oversees the mortgage market took a hostile stance toward such projects on residential property, on the grounds that they add risk to mortgages. In most states, a lien associated with a retrofit project would have to be paid ahead of the mortgage if the property went into foreclosure.
A legal and political battle is under way to try to force the Federal Housing Finance Agency to reverse its stand. So far, it appears that PACE programs for commercial properties pose fewer legal complications.

...a less efficient building might see a decrease in property value.

Have you ever measured your personal carbon footprint? If your answer is “no”, you can use the calculator on the GGP website or the website myfootprint.org has a free carbon footprint calculator you may want to check out. My results you ask? If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle we would actually need 4.34 earths, or I have 8.17 metric tons of Carbon that I need to offset. Did you fare any better/worse?

After rating my carbon footprint today I realized some simple steps I can take in my home to reduce not only my carbon footprint but my monthly bills as well.  The personal carbon footprint calculator reminded me of how important it is for large buildings to perform similar tests, energy audits, and make changes based on the results in order to:

• run more efficiently
• be more sustainable
• and save money

Recently the GGP Energy team came across an article online, “Practical sustainability: making energy management a priority” , addressing Enterprise Energy Management (EEM) and the effect it can have on a building’s efficiency. The booming EEM industry provides the technology to essentially:

• Determine where and how energy is being used
• Identify areas of waste
• and Make corrections to save on energy consumption and cost

Improving your company’s image through a conscious effort to have a more sustainable building, while experiencing personal savings can’t be a bad thing, right?

One USA TODAY article foresees mandated energy consumption reports for all commercial buildings in the U.S. that could significantly change property values, by providing more information to customers. Meaning, a less efficient building might see a decrease in property value. Do you think a more informed consumer group can persuade owners to take on the responsibility of addressing their building’s energy efficiency with EEM technology?

The EEM technology usually serves multi unit facilities best and claims to have “the most positive impact on your bottom line”. The team at GGP Energy takes a similar approach to energy solutions with our EcoFlow line. We can essentially perform an energy audit for your facility, and after a (in most cases) free month trial installation of our product line, we can show you the energy and resource savings you will see.

At GGP we continuously take pride in the fact that we can provide “practical” and efficient solutions to combat energy consumption. Now, do you think I can get bonus points on my carbon footprint test if I mention that I’m an employee of GGP Energy?

-Alison Hanby
Sustainability Consultant

This Negawatt concept has been brewing for some time now. This was in Fierce Energy today.

Utilities face common challenges: The need to ramp up renewable resources, cost-effective investment in generation, planning for the future and managing reliability, to name a few.

There is no cleaner, more sustainable or cost-effective kilowatt than the one you can avoid generating. The rollout of intermittent renewable sources such as solar and wind have increased the relevance of demand response as an important resource. This is why demand response has emerged as an early example of smart grid technology, enabling electricity users to reduce consumption in response to grid needs or market-price events.

To date, most demand response for commercial and industrial customers has been in the form of standby programs in which customers are only participating one or two times a year. To meet energy reduction goals–whether state mandated or self-imposed–utilities need to find newer and more innovative ways to engage energy users to get them to participate in demand response on a more frequent basis. Customers need compelling financial incentives along with simple and actionable information that motivates them to engage.

Addressing these challenges within the context of the customers’ operational constraints is extremely important. Customer needs are often at odds with the objectives of the state and utilities, which tend to hold back broader adoption. While utilities and transmission operators want predictability, control and on-demand reserve supplies to ensure everyone gets the power they need, energy users want the lowest cost supply and the flexibility to use electricity whenever they want in order to run their businesses in the most productive manner possible. A further barrier is that price signals tend to be too simplistic. The typical energy consumer has a hard time understanding the exact implications of what earning or saving $0.50 per kWh in a certain time period really means. This lack of clarity and direction often leads to inaction.

Providing information in terms the customer can relate to and act upon tends to have much greater impact. Rather than simply telling customers that they can earn at a given rate for a few hours, it makes more sense to frame it on their terms. Using technology to quantify and clearly present the value of a reduction against specific curtailment scenarios motivates energy users to take measurable action.

The so-called “negawatt” concept is many steps closer to becoming a reliable resource for utilities with the inclusion of customer-centric and utility-focused solutions. -Barb

Here is a great article we found in Bloomberg and we were certainly happy to read it. One of our four major products at GGP Energy is our Lumen FLOW product line which does offer LED lights and we certainly hope VantagePoint Capital Partners is correct. Please enjoy.

VantagePoint Capital Partners, the Silicon Valley investor that helped bring Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) public, expects prices for LEDs to “plummet” within three years as competition intensifies to satisfy surging demand for energy-efficient lights.

Prices for LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, may fall 90 percent by 2015, said Alan Salzman, chief executive officer of the San Bruno, California-based venture capital company, said in an interview.

Incandescent bulbs are being phased out in Europe. In the U.S., efficiency policies will eliminate the 100-watt bulb in 2012. LED makers stand to gain a bigger share of the $40 billion a year global lighting market. Bulb companies including General Electric Co. (GE) and Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV (PHIA) are producing LEDs, and Salzman said startups that are developing low-cost LEDs will take a slice of the market.

“We’re just at the beginning of the LED phase,” Salzman said. “There’s very little quality product yet even on the shelves.”

VantagePoint has invested about $750 million in 32 clean technology companies. Those include four that make LED products: Switch Bulb Co., Bridgelux Inc., Huga Optotech Inc. (8199) and Glo AB.
Timing of Boom

Salzman said that within five years, the use of LEDs for general lighting purposes may grow to more than 50 percent of the market from less than 1 percent today. Analysts including Ben Schuman at Pacific Crest Securities Inc. said it may take more time than Salzman suggest for the LED boom to happen.

“About half of lighting is residential, and it’s going to take longer than five years for payback periods for residential lighting to expand the market beyond early adopters,” said Schuman, who follows LED maker Cree Inc. “More recently, folks have become more optimistic about the consumer market. But I still think it looks like we’ll see industrial and outdoor, followed by commercial, followed by residential.”

Salzman said that it’s the commercial market that may take more time to develop.

“All consumer stuff will go,” Salzman said. “Commercial, where you have the fluorescent tubes — that will take a little longer. I think it’s going to be one of the fastest clean-tech sectors to flip.”
Lighting Costs

A basic LED bulb will save U.S. consumers as much as $7 a year in energy costs compared with incandescent bulbs, and they’ll last for about 30 years, according to Salzman.

“If it’s $20 for the bulb, it’s a three-year payback,” he said. Salzman expects LED prices to drop to about a quarter of a cent a lumen by the end of 2012 from 1 cent now. By 2015, the price could be a 10th of a cent, he said.

Lumens are the unit of measure for light output. Incandescent bulbs are typically measured in watts, the amount of energy they consume. A 60-watt bulb produces about 800 lumens, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website. The global lighting product market is estimated at $40 billion to $80 billion a year, Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated in an October report.

There were an estimated 2.7 billion type-A bulbs installed in the U.S. last year, the most common size used in almost all basic lighting, comprising 1.7 billion incandescents, 990 million compact fluorescents and 240,000 LEDs.
Semiconductor Light

LEDs make light from semiconductors instead of the heated filament used in conventional incandescent bulbs, and they use less energy. Switch Bulb, a company backed by VantagePoint that formally launched in April, says its products use 85 percent less power than incandescent bulbs and, unlike compact fluorescent bulbs, don’t contain mercury.

Switch Bulb plans to begin selling its lamps later this year for about $20 to $30, according to Brett Sharenow, the San Jose, California-based company’s chief strategy officer.

Its products are designed to replace conventional 40-watt, 60-watt, 75-watt, and 100-watt bulbs. It will use less energy and produce as much as 1,700 lumens.

Bridgelux, another VantagePoint-backed company, is developing an LED manufacturing process that it says can reduce costs by about 75 percent from currently available products, which typically use semiconductors with a synthetic sapphire or silicon carbide substrate. The Livermore, California-based company demonstrated in March its gallium nitride-on-silicon technology, which produced 135 lumens a watt.
Production Expanding

Bill Watkins, Bridgelux’s chief executive officer, said the company’s manufacturing process can use existing semiconductor fabrication lines, and he expects to expand production by working with chip companies. That business model will “drag down these capital costs,” Watkins said in an interview.

VantagePoint has ranked in the top 10 of New Energy Finance’s league tables for venture capital investments in four of the last five years, based on the number of deals completed.

Two of the companies it has backed have completed initial share sales in the last year, Tesla and biotechnology company Solazyme Inc., and another, the solar-thermal technology developer BrightSource Energy Inc., registered April 22 to raise as much as $250 million in an IPO.

VantagePoint has also invested in Taichung, Taiwan-based Huga Optotech, which makes the wafers and chips used in LED lighting, and Lund, Sweden-based Glo, which uses nanotechnology in its LED chips.

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Herndon in San Francisco at aherndon2@bloomberg.net

Found this article in Forbes (you can also find it here at Altenergystocks which is Tom’s personal blog) and loved it. Clean Tech is picking up momentum every day. This article shows large companies and major universities sprinting toward the Clean Tech space.  Please enjoy.

I recently interviewed Richard Domaleski, CEO of World Energy Solutions (NASD:XWES). World Energy is a comprehensive energy management services firm whose core offering is extremely price competitive energy sourcing (that is, finding an energy provider to supply all of a client’s energy needs at the lowest possible cost.)
world energy logo.png
They achieve competitive sourcing using an electronic energy exchange designed to achieve much better price discovery in what is traditionally a very opaque market. According to Domaleski, a recent KEMA study showed that only 7% of large commercial, industrial, and government customers are sourcing their energy online; the rest are using traditional brokered or paper-driven deals. World Energy currently has about 5% of the market, leaving plenty of room for growth. Among their current customers are the General Services Administration (the Federal Government’s procurement arm), several state governments, General Dynamics Land Systems, and Brown University, to name a few.

They also partner with Energy Service Companies (ESCOs). ESCOs sign energy customers up to a “Performance Contract” under which the ESCO is paid a fixed fee in order to deliver a defined set of energy services (lighting and temperature levels, for example), and the ESCO makes energy efficiency improvements using their own capital to reduce energy use while still delivering the defined energy services. The lower energy use quickly repays the ESCO’s out of pocket capital cost, leading to lower (and stable) energy bills for the customer, and a healthy profit for the ESCO.

Domaleski says that 143 such ESCOs and other procurement companies now use World Energy’s procurement platform to source their energy. When I asked for names, he cited non-disclosure agreements but was able to say that one prominent one was SAIC (NYSE:SAI). Yet adoption of World Energy’s platform is not universal. One prominent ESCO they pitched but did not convince is the leading pure-play publicly traded ESCO: Ameresco (NYSE:AMRC).

Is it Green?

Getting electricity and natural gas at lower prices may be a compelling proposition for World Energy’s customers, but environmentally concerned investors should think twice before calling it green. A lower price for energy is more likely to discourage than encourage energy conservation, and hence lead to higher, not lower energy emissions. Energy sourcing may or may not include the sourcing of green power or Renewable Energy Credits (RECs.) A REC is a way of accounting for all the green or environmental attributes of a MW of electricity.

World Energy draws a distinction between “physical green power” and RECs, with the former being produced from renewable sources on the same ISO as the customer, and the RECs often produced somewhere else in the world. I don’t think this is a very useful distinction, since the actual power produced is often not the same as the power consumed due to both proximity and timing issues. A simple example of why this is so can be seen in the case of a supermarket that signs up for 100% locally produced wind power. While a nearby wind farm will indeed be producing the same number of kWh as the supermarket consumes, the supermarket keeps its lights on and continues to run its refrigeration even when the wind is not blowing at the local farm. In this sense, “physical green power” is just normal electricity with bundled RECs.

What really makes a REC (or “physical green power”) green is additionality. If the price of the REC is enough to ensure that a wind farm that would not otherwise have been built is indeed built, then the REC is additional. World Energy’s ability to extract the lowest possible price for RECs may work to undermine the additionality of those RECs. After all, which is more likely to increase the chances of a wind or solar farm being built: a $10 REC, or a $20 REC?

Low Price as a Gateway Drug

Yet it’s hard to see saving money as a bad thing, and I find World Energy’s numerous ESCO partners very encouraging. If World Energy’s procurement platform enables ESCOs to offer potential customers performance contracts at lower prices, more such customers will sign up, and receive the energy efficiency improvements that are the ESCOs’ bread and butter.

World Energy also offers energy efficiency improvements to their direct customers as well as helping those customers capture the utility incentives available for energy efficiency and Demand Response programs. Demand Response companies like Comverge (NASD:COMV) and EnerNOC (NASD:ENOC) may use World Energy’s demand response exchange, but also compete with them to sign up customers directly. As with ESCOs, World Energy does not say which Demand Response providers use their exchange, but they did say that they have 20 leading providers signed up.

One of the most significant barriers to energy efficiency is simply the complexity of options on offer. Although the internal rate of return on efficiency investments is very high, the absolute number of dollars available from energy efficiency is seldom enough to sell a facilities manager. Facilities managers seldom have an incentive or expertise to save energy, although this is improving as companies become more energy aware and make changes to employee incentives to fit the new goals. Yet it is still generally difficult to get most facilities managers to give energy the attention it needs in order to capture the available energy savings. Lower energy prices, on the other hand, are easy to grasp and communicate to higher-ups. If World Energy and ESCOs working with them can offer a facilities manager a one-stop shop for both lower energy prices and additional energy savings, they’ll be much more willing to take action, even with weak internal incentives. One step World Energy has recently taken to make this decision much easier is their strategic investment in Retroficiency a company whose technology will allow World Energy to conduct virtual energy audits for clients based on the detailed energy usage data they are already collecting. This will allow facilities managers to easily identify the particular buildings in their portfolios most likely to benefit from more detailed energy audits and retrofits.

Other Businesses

World Energy also runs other trading platforms, most notably the platform for trading carbon credits under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). With New Jersey pulling out of the ten-state RGGI climate initiative, I thought it would be interesting to get Domaleski’s perspective, but he was unable to comment due to a confidentiality agreement with RGGI. This exchange is part of their Green green product line, which accounts for approximately 5% of World Energy’s business and includes other environmental commodity trading as well as RGGI.

At the urging of a utility, World Energy has also recently launched a wholesale energy exchange. This exchange enables utility and municipal customers to find the best price for power from World Energy’s 500 suppliers. This must be a useful service, because in the four years since the exchange was launched, they have signed up 70 large customers. The company’s Wholesale division accounts for roughly 15% of revenues.

Conclusion

The move to internet based energy sourcing seems like an inevitability, and World Energy has a powerful first mover advantage. While online procurement of energy may not be green in and of itself, the savings on offer serve to get building managers in the door. If World Energy or its ESCO partners can then include significant energy efficiency and green power in the mix, we have the formula for a significant shift towards a more energy efficient economy.

In this sense, World Energy may be a lot like Wal-Mart. Customers come in the door for low prices, but then find it easy to buy energy efficient products as well.

The Pentagon put together their first Energy Plan. This is important because it does a little more to legitimize the sector as a whole. This article was in the Wall Street Journal.

In a bid to save lives and money, the Department of Defense on Tuesday presented its first plan to change how it uses energy on the battlefield.

The strategy, which will be fleshed out this summer with a more detailed implementation plan, constitutes the Pentagon’s promise to develop more energy-efficient weapons, embrace non-oil energy sources and demand more energy-conscious behavior from the troops.

The plan is the Pentagon’s broadest effort yet to come to grips with its huge and growing reliance on energy to carry out military operations. That energy dependence has proved especially costly in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to soaring fuel bills and a dangerous reliance on vulnerable fuel convoys.

“The less [energy] we need, the more operationally resilient we will be,” Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn said at a briefing. “We will increase military effectiveness while lowering our costs.”

The goals of the new strategy are to cut energy demand by forces in the field and to accelerate the development of alternative-energy supplies, such as renewable sources and biofuels. The military hopes the new plan will pay dividends both on the battlefield, by creating more lethal and more agile troops, and in budget-conscious Washington, by saving money over the long term with more-efficient gear.

The Defense Department is the biggest single energy consumer in the U.S., spending $15 billion on fuel last year. The Air Force alone uses more oil than some small countries. Some 80% of convoys in Afghanistan are devoted to carrying fuel. Because of the threat from roadside bombs and ambushes, Marines estimate one service member is killed or wounded for every 24 convoys.

The new strategy’s focus is on operations, including training, deployment and support of military forces in the field. Those activities account for about 75% of the Pentagon’s energy use. Only one quarter of the energy is consumed on bases.

While the energy strategy is new—the product of a congressional mandate in the 2009 defense authorization bill—separate branches of the service have been grappling with energy problems for years, with mixed results.

The issue has gained greater urgency due to the high price of oil and the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. forces over the last decade have gotten bigger and heavier and gobbled up increasing amounts of energy that require a costly and vulnerable supply system. In World War II, a soldier consumed an average of a gallon of fuel a day; in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers consume about 20 gallons a day, with half going to electricity generation.

“It’s absolutely necessary, because the cost of energy has become a critical aspect of military operations,” said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But he said the real test for the Pentagon’s new plan will be how it is executed over the long term and across the different services.

At combat outposts in Afghanistan, the Army is already fielding a new generation of more efficient electric generators and experimenting with smart grids that can further reduce fuel needs. Both the Army and the Marines are using small, portable solar panels to help troops in the field power their ever-increasing array of batteries.

The next priority is to diversify energy supplies, with a special focus on reducing the military’s dependence on oil by increasing investments in biofuels and renewable energy. “The realities of global oil markets mean a disruption of oil supplies is plausible and increasingly likely in the coming decades,” the energy strategy concludes.

The Navy, for example, has experimented with biofuel-powered F-18 fighter jets and is developing the “Great Green Fleet,” an aircraft-carrier strike group that will be powered exclusively by alternative fuels and aims to ship out by 2016.

Vice Adm. William Burke, the deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics, recently described such acquisitions as the most important part of the Navy’s energy-saving push.

He advocated an acquisitions policy “such that we are willing to spend an extra dime here to save a dollar down the road, rather than the other way around, which is what we frequently have done.”

Write to Keith Johnson at keith.johnson@wsj.com

Although nobody actually has a crystal ball it is clear some folks are certain traditional energy prices will be on the rise.  We found this article by Laura Slattery, in the Irish Times, please enjoy.

ENERGY PRICES will rise later this year, Bord Gáis Energy has warned, with the higher costs cancelling out the dampening effect of last month’s sell-off in commodity markets.

The latest Bord Gáis Energy Index notes that the anticipated rise in natural gas prices in the final quarter of 2011 will also push up electricity prices. The wholesale price of gas increased in May, although the wholesale price of oil, coal and electricity all fell.

Overall wholesale energy prices fell 5 per cent last month, according to the index, but remain 27 per cent higher than a year ago.

The price increases may put pressure on consumer prices later this year.

Bord Gáis Energy trading analyst Michael Kelleher said the decline in the index was the result of the broad-based sell-off in commodity markets, which occurred on the back of weak economic data in the US and fears surrounding inflation in China. “Futures markets are predicting relatively stable prices for the remainder of the summer, but a return to higher prices in the fourth quarter of this year. This is primarily due to expected higher natural gas prices,” he said.

The majority of gas prices in Europe are linked to the oil prices that had prevailed six months earlier. As a result, with oil prices exceeding $100 per barrel in the first and second quarters of 2011, gas prices in Europe will advance in the second half of the year. “These higher gas prices could also result in higher electricity prices, as gas is one of the main fuels used in power generation in Ireland,” Mr Kelleher said.

The natural gas element of the index rose 2 per cent last month. Gas prices fell to 52p per therm in the first week of May because of a higher level of imports via the Norwegian Langeled pipeline and lower exports to the continent. But by the middle of May, prices had rebounded to over 58p as maintenance at various UK and Norwegian terminals reduced deliveries.

The oil element of the index fell 4 per cent, following a plunge in crude oil prices in the first week of May. After ending April at $126 per barrel, Brent crude oil fell to trade at a low of $105. Prices recovered to trade in a $109 to $117 range for the remainder of May.

With the civil war in Libya appearing to reach a stalemate, some of the upward pressure on oil prices caused by short-term geopolitical volatility eased.

The electricity element fell 9 per cent, as electricity prices dropped to €62.20/megawatt-hours in May. The drop can be attributed to good availability of thermal generation and significant output from wind generation. In April, several of the large, efficient power generation plants were not available but this was not the case in May, Bord Gáis said. Wind generation saw peak levels of 1,318 megawatts in May due to the unsettled weather.

The coal element fell 2 per cent, as the fuel traded at about $128 per tonne in the first week of May, only for prices to fall $6. An oversupply of Colombian coal to the European market resulted in the commodity finishing the month at $122 per tonne.

The report follows recent comments by the International Energy Agency, which said the world was likely to enter a “golden age of gas”, in which the importance of gas was boosted by environmental regulations on coal and uncertainty over nuclear power.

If certain conditions are met, the IEA expects gas demand will overtake demand for coal before 2030 and come close to demand for oil by 2035. By this point, at least a quarter of energy demands will be covered by gas. In this scenario, gas demand will grow by an average of 2 per cent a year, compared with a 1.2 per cent growth in annual total energy demand.



There is no question eventually electric grids will be smart grid enabled. What that actually looks and tastes like is still a very large question. There are some very big issues up in the air, for example, how to effectively take stress off the grid at the peak times. More importantly how to do this without disrupting users on the grid. Others question whether the relief come from a storage device or a renewable source, or a combination of the two.

The question has been asked, “Does the USA, actually have an energy issue?” For now, no, but if we are not careful we could wind up with some of the same issues as our friends in India and Pakistan where blackout happen regularly.

Here is an nice article we found and thought was relevant. Please enjoy.

With fossil fuels becoming scarce and emerging economies adding to demand, the energy industry is facing unprecedented upheavals, as witnessed by the rise of renewable energies and the need for energy efficiency; the challenges are enormous.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are part of the equation. Widespread use will put added stress on a grid that was not designed to handle EVs. To minimise the impact and integrate EVs as a permanent feature, new capabilities will be required to turn the grid into a smart grid.

The power drawn from a single socket during an EV charge is equivalent to that of an entire house or apartment at maximum load. In France, electricity consumption records are frequently broken and public alerts advise consumers to cut back on their electricity use.

To minimise the impact and integrate EVs as a permanent feature, new capabilities will be required to turn the grid into a smart grid.

A recent study predicted the UK’s spend on EVs is set to increase to £7bn (US$11.4bn) by 2014. This is a very tough target; however, with the recent and ongoing hikes in fuel price, EVs offer consumers a chance to reduce running costs, as well as a real opportunity to lower carbon emissions. So the question is, will there be enough electricity if everyone starts driving EVs?

The goal is to deliver a comprehensive charging solution comprising chargers and related services to optimise the charging load according to the vehicle’s needs and the power available in the grid. What’s more, the chargers can inform users of their availability and charging status, and even alert the vehicle’s owner when the charging process is complete. The chargers will eventually be able to identify and select the renewable energy sources available in the grid on the basis of the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept. In V2G systems, cars can provide an additional energy source, injecting electricity into the grid during consumption peaks or emergencies caused by storms, broken cables or other unexpected events. Energy stored in an EV battery could also be used to supply residential needs.

The power drawn from a single socket during an EV charge is equivalent to that of an entire house or apartment at maximum load.

If we look at the situation in the US, there is already a business model based around harvesting the stored power in electric vehicles. At peak times of the day, electric vehicle owners can be paid to give energy back to the grid and then benefit from cheaper rates when the energy demand is low. There is a growing number of members signed up to companies where this scheme works, with members benefiting from significant cost savings.

There are some barriers to overcome, and it’s important that vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to the electric vehicle market work together. Schneider Electric has long recognized the importance of this technology and is using its knowledge, experience and proven track record in electrical manufacturing to develop complete charging solutions that are reliable, safe and simple to use. In addition, the company is accounting for the future development of the smart grid to ensure the technology is future-proofed.

The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Automotive World Ltd.

David Greaves is Business Development Manager for electric vehicles at Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is the global specialist in energy management and achieved sales of €19.6bn (US$28.35bn) in 2010 through an active commitment to help individuals and organizations ‘make the most of their energy’.

For further information about Schneider Electric:

UK: www.schneider-electric.co.uk or call 0870 608 8 608

International: www.schneider-electric.com or call +33 (0) 141 297 000

As you may or may not know we knows the guys at Bloom and always love to see them continue to take the market by storm.  Here is a nice article by in Green Tech Media by Eric Wesoff. Please enjoy and please contact us with any questions about Bloom Energy.

Going by headlines, one would think that Bloom Energy invented fuel cells and pioneered their commercialization. In reality, fuel cells were invented in the 1800s and there is a large crowd of fuel cell firms going after the same stationary fuel cell market. They have in common a strong technological focus, a dependence on subsidies, and a tendency to lose enormous sums of money. Vendors in this sector include FuelCell Energy, UTC, ClearEdge Power, Acal Power, Ceres Power, and Idatech.

We’ve covered the fuel cell industry in this market summary and we’ve looked at Bloom’s ability to garner subsidies, amongst many other articles on this sector.

FuelCell Energy (Nasdaq:FCEL), a 441-employee fuel cell power plant manufacturer, had revenues of $28.1 million in the first quarter of 2011 and will be announcing its Q2 results on June 7. Net loss for the first quarter of 2011 was $11.7 million. The firm reported revenue of $69.8 million in 2010 compared to $88.0 million in 2009. Net loss for 2010 was $58.9 million.

FuelCell Energy builds molten carbonate stationary fuel cells for use at wastewater treatment facilities, universities, pump stations and other sites that need low-emission baseload distributed generation. Production levels are currently at 35 megawatts annually compared to production of 22 megawatts in 2010.

FCE received some good news this week. POSCO Power, an independent power producer based in South Korea, placed a two-year, 70-megawatt, $129 million order comes for the firm’s fuel cell kits. POSCO Power is a subsidiary of POSCO, a global steel producer. This is the largest order ever received by FuelCell Energy.

South Korea adopted a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) in 2010 with 350 megawatts of renewable energy per year mandated through 2016, and 700 megawatts per year through 2022. Fuel cells operating on natural gas and biogas fully qualify under the RPS.

POSCO Power will assemble the fuel cell components to create the fuel cell module and add electrical and mechanical balance of plant to complete the power plant. In addition to the revenue generated by the sale of fuel cell kits, FuelCell Energy receives a royalty for each complete power plant built and installed by POSCO Power, under a licensing agreement signed in 2009. Including this order, POSCO Power has ordered 140 megawatts of fuel cells.

Bad news looming in the upcoming Q2 results is the non-recurring charge of $9 million to repair and upgrade a group of 1.2-megawatt fuel cell modules produced between 2007 and early 2009. The upgrade stems from a performance shortfall due to a type of sealant and design, not the stack itself. In total, 16 modules totaling 19.2 megawatts will be affected with 14 of the modules located in South Korea and the remaining two modules located in the U.S.

FuelCell Energy’s stock jumped more than 35 percent on the news on Tuesday, but settled down to $1.77 per share on Wednesday.

Declining prices, government incentives, demand for cleaner power and improving technology have begun to revive the fuel cell industry. In the U.S., fuel cell incentives include a federal tax credit for 30 percent of the cost of a fuel cell. California kicks in another $2.50 per watt. The U.K. has a feed-in tariff for micro CHP, which readily applies to fuel cells.

Without a doubt, there are some applications for which fuel cells make perfect sense, such as premium power for the military, remote sites, construction industry, travel, etc. But fuel cell firms have learned the hard way that they must focus on the requirements of specifically addressed niche markets.

Here, again, is an updated list of the top three profitable publicly held fuel cell firms:

1.
2.
3.

Maybe we’ll see some profitable fuel cell companies in 2011 or 2012.