A WAVE ENERGY company:

Finavera Renewables
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia
Founder and CEO: Jason Bak
Finavera Renewables, a Canadian company with roots in Ireland, aims to produce electricity by harvesting the kinetic energy of ocean waves. In 2007 Finavera had a year of milestones. It received the nation’s first preliminary permit for an offshore wave energy plant; successfully tested its wave energy device, the AquaBuOY; and signed the first commercial wave energy power purchase agreement with California’s Pacific Gas & Electric Company. At the end of the year the company also received the first federal operating permit for a wave energy plant. Though its volumes are still small—the PG&E pilot plant, due in 2012, will produce only 2 megawatts—the technology is easily scalable. Experts estimate that wave power could eventually meet 10 percent of total U.S. demand.

A GEOTHERMAL company:

Chena Power
Location: Chena, Alaska
Founder and CEO: Bernie Karl
Bernie Karl’s modest ambition to make his Chena Hot Springs Resort’s energy self-sufficient and to keep his ice museum frozen in the Alaskan summertime led him to become a pioneer of low-temperature geothermal power. Karl and his engineer Gwen Holdmann helped Connecticut-based behemoth United Technologies Corporation develop its PureCycle geothermal system, whose ability to run on a lower temperature differential than standard geothermal power plants will greatly expand the market for carbon-free geothermal power. One promising market is spent oil wells, which often bubble with hot water. In October 2007 the Department of Energy awarded $724,000 to Chena Power to generate electricity using the wastewater produced by oil wells in Prudhoe Bay.

BIOFUEL companies:

Amyris Biotechnologies
Location: Emeryville, California
Co-founders: Jack Newman, Kinkead Reiling, Neil Renninger
Amyris is reengineering the metabolism of yeast to ferment sugar into a pure hydrocarbon fuel. Using the company’s patented DNA manipulation process, yeasts can be programmed to produce substitutes for gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel. Amyris’s synthetic products are more energy-rich than ethanol and cleaner-burning than fossil fuels. Prior to focusing on biofuels, Amyris’s young scientist-founders established their reputation by creating yeast that could produce cheap, synthetic artemisinin, part of a potent cure for malaria. The company is now working on scaling up its fuel production and lowering costs. It aims to have its gasoline substitute on the market at under $2 a gallon by 2010. Its backers have promised to grow Amyris into a $10 billion company in five years.

Verenium
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
CEO: Carlos Riva
Verenium aims to produce biofuel using the tough, fibrous “cellulosic” parts of plants, such as grasses and corn stalks, wood chips and husks, rather than the starchy parts that are more easily and cheaply converted to ethanol. To find the right bugs to break down cellulose into sugar, Verenium’s researchers have gone “bioprospecting” for microorganisms in the guts of termites, wood-boring beetles, and other creatures that can withstand extreme temperatures, acidity, and pressure while digesting almost anything. Verenium’s Jennings, Louisiana, pilot plant broke ground in early 2007. If the technology proves out, the company plans to build a full-scale plant that will produce 30 million gallons a year at about $1.80 per gallon, fully competitive with grain ethanol.

GreenFuel Technologies
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Founder and Chief Technology Officer: Isaac Berzin
GreenFuel is working to produce diesel fuel from algae that feed on the carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks. Algae, the fastest-growing plants on earth, can double their mass in a few hours’ time and produce orders of magnitude more biomass per acre than plants grown in soil. After years spent selecting the best algae and developing the ideal “bioreactor” environment with the right nutrients and the right amount of light to produce ideal growth, tests in 2007 at the Red Hawk power plant in Arizona looked promising. Though the company has experienced some technological setbacks, founder Isaac Berzin remains optimistic that when it scales up he can cut capital costs enough to beat oil at $60 per barrel. The fact that the algae keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere is an extra bonus, one that could add greatly to the company’s profitability if carbon is regulated.

CLEAN COAL companies:

Alstom: Chilled Ammonia
Location: Chena, Alaska
Inventor: Eli Gal
Alstom, the French energy giant, is using a “chilled ammonia” process developed by chemical engineer Eli Gal to remove carbon dioxide from power plant gases. A pilot plant to demonstrate the technology began construction in 2007 in Wisconsin, organized by the Electric Power Research Institute and supported by more than thirty U.S. utilities. In 2008 Alstom intends to install a demonstration scrubber at the 1,300-megawatt Mountaineer Plant in West Virginia, the nation’s number one industrial emitter of carbon dioxide. The plant’s operator plans to build a commercial-scale, $325 million chilled ammonia scrubber in Oklahoma in 2011, selling the captured carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery.

Carbozyme
Location: Monmouth Junction, New Jersey
Chairman, CEO, and Chief Technical Officer: Michael Trachtenberg
Carbozyme is developing a liquid membrane technology for removing carbon dioxide from power plant smokestack gas. Trachtenberg’s jelly roll design is informed by his background in neurobiology: a special membrane filled with an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase removes carbon dioxide in much the same way that our bodies take carbon dioxide from blood stream to lungs. Eventually, six-foot cylinders of Carbozyme membranes will each process a ton of carbon dioxide a day from the flue gas of a coal-burning power plant. Commercialization of the process is still several years away.

Ergo Exergy
Location: Côte Saint Luc, Quebec
CEO: Michael Blinderman
Ergo Exergy is developing a technology called Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), which uses fire ignited inside a coal seam to turn coal into natural gas, which is then piped to the surface. Coal gas produced underground is less costly than coal that is mined, pulverized, and gasified in a power plant. It also creates far less environmental damage than coal mining. Ergo Exergy’s first commercial project, located in South Africa, opened in 2007. It produces gas for $1 per million BTUs, one-third to one-sixth the cost of gas made in a surface gasifier. CEO Blinderman aims to produce electricity with carbon capture and sequestration for $30 a megawatt-hour, less than half the cost of an IGCC plant with carbon capture and not much above the cost of pulverized coal today without carbon capture.

SOLAR THERMAL technology companies:

Ausra
Location: Palo Alto, California
Chairman and Founder: David Mills
Ausra is developing utility-scale solar thermal power technology and aims to provide its first 177 megawatts of low-cost electricity to California consumers in 2009. Ausra’s goal is to become a major power provider by providing large-scale, low-cost solar electricity. The company’s Australian founders were persuaded to move to Palo Alto by their major backer, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Ausra’s technology places long strips of glass over a flat piece of metal to create a “Fresnel reflector,” employing the same basic principle as a lighthouse lens to concentrate sunlight onto long, straight, water-filled pipes. The sun’s concentrated rays on the pipes turn the water into relatively low-temperature steam, which is converted into electricity using turbines perfected in the nuclear energy industry. There is no solar tracking software or moving parts, and there is only water inside the pipes—all decisions designed to drive costs to their lowest.

BrightSource Energy
Location: Oakland, California
Chairman and Founder: Arnold Goldman
Power towers, not troughs, are BrightSource Energy’s preferred configuration for its solar thermal technology. Unlike Ausra, BrightSource uses rather elaborate technology, such as special curved heliostats that move every fifteen minutes to track the sun and focus it on the collector. In a BrightSource power plant, thousands of heliostats will concentrate sunlight onto seventy-meter concrete towers whose oil-filled receivers convey heat to highly efficient, supercritical steam turbines. Each tower with its array of heliostats will produce 20 to 40 megawatts of power. Founder Arnold Goldman aims for a plant that can convert up to 20 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity, a far higher efficiency rate than Ausra can achieve, though with higher infrastructure costs.

SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC technology companies:

Innovalight
Location: Sunnyvale, California
President and CEO: Conrad Burke
Innovalight is developing a thin-film solar cell with potential to harvest light energy far more efficiently that anything on the market today. Using nanotechnology, the company has created a silicon powder that can be printed like ink on a thin flexible film. By varying the size of the nanoparticles, called quantum dots, Innovalight can tune them to absorb the full light spectrum, harvesting light much more efficiently than traditional photovoltaic cells. The company produces its powder from cheap, unpurified sources of silicon; when producing at scale, it expects to cut costs by a factor of ten compared to growing ingots and sawing silicon wafers. Laboratory experiments have indicated that Innovalight’s technology may be the first to create multiple excited electrons, or “excitons,” from each incoming photon: this could push the efficiency of the new technology far beyond the 33 percent theoretical boundary of silicon wafers. By late 2009 the company aims to produce 100 megawatts a year of flexible solar material at the remarkably cheap price of 30 cents per watt.

Miasolé
Location: Santa Clara, California
Founder and Chairman of the Board: Dave Pearce
Miasolé developed a novel technology and manufacturing process for printing thin-film solar cells using sputtered ink. Miasolé’s solar ink uses a compound semiconductor made up of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS) printed on continuous rolls of stainless steel foil. The printed foil is embedded in material as rugged as tarpaper, making it tough enough to be used as roof shingles. Miasolé’s commercial production has been delayed by problems scaling up; while its research and development product achieved 10 percent efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, its commercial production lines have as yet been unable to meet that rate.

Energy Innovations
Location: Pasadena, California
Chairman and CEO: Bill Gross
Energy Innovations is developing a rooftop concentrating solar power system called the Sunflower; their aim is to produce rooftop solar electric power that is competitive with grid electricity prices. The Sunflower produces electricity at a lower cost than traditional photovoltaics by using a specially developed lens that concentrates sunlight through a glass funnel onto a small square of the world’s highest-efficiency solar cell. The technology brings costs down by minimizing the amount of pricey photovoltaic material used and employing cost-effective solar concentrators and sun-tracking devices to concentrate the sun’s energy. Energy Innovation says its first commercial units, which resemble banks of stadium lights, will be available sometime in 2008. Chairman Bill Gross is the founder of Idealab, a Silicon Valley technology incubator that has spun off forty companies since its founding in 1996; another of its companies, Esolar, is developing concentrating solar towers for utility-scale power production.

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