Green News: U.S. Patent Office loosens rules for green technology

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is trying to cast a wider net to catch more green-technology inventions.

The USPTO on Friday announced that it has changed the patent application process to attract more green technologies into an accelerated patent program.

The Green Technology Pilot program was created last December to encourage more inventors to apply for patents relating to green technology. If accepted, those patent petitions will get priority screening under the one-year trial program.

On Friday, the USPTO eliminated the need for green technology patent applications to comply with the classifications specified by the USPTO. The classifications requirement narrowed the definition of green technology more than is necessary, it found.

"This will permit more applications to qualify for the pilot program, thereby allowing more inventions related to green technologies to be advanced out of turn for examination and reviewed earlier," said David Kappos, undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and director of the USPTO, in a filing in the Federal Register.

The initial target was to have 3,000 patent petitions examined in the first year, with a goal of dramatically cutting down on the average review process of 30 months.

So far, there have been a total of 950 requests with only 342 request for accelerated review granted.

The green technology program is designed to encourage development of businesses with products that reduce use of fossil fuels and protect the environment. It's not yet clear how much commercial impact the expedited review process will have, experts told Scientific American earlier this month.

Often, green-tech products are incremental improvements on existing techniques from multiple fields, many of which are patented, they said. Still, accelerated examination of an invention could help entrepreneurs incubate green-tech companies faster.

According to a notice from the USPTO, Inventions are eligible for the program if they include discoveries related to renewable energy, more efficient use of energy resources, or reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Source: news.cnet.com

Wastewater-to-fertilizer plant captures nutrients

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies later this week will dedicate a system that converts wastewater from sewage-treatment plants into fertilizer while recycling valuable phosphorus and nitrogen.

On Thursday, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) in Suffolk, Va., will host the official opening of the facility, the second commercial-scale plant to use Ostara's technology. Long-time clean water advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is an investor in the company through his involvement with VantagePoint Venture Partners, will be a speaker at the event.

Ostara's reactors isolates nutrients from wastewater at sewage treatment plants to make fertilizer.

Because of environmental regulations, some wastewater treatment plants separate nutrients using bacteria to prevent them from being discharged into waterways. Ostara's technology can be added to these plants to convert the separated wastewater into a sellable product called Crystal Green, explained Ostara CEO Phillip Abrary.

Instead of treating that wastewater with chemicals and disposing of the solids, the HRSD facility has installed three vessels that take in wastewater and mix it with the saltmagnesium chloride. Water moves upward into the cone-shaped tank, called a fluidized bed reactor, which prevents the solid material from settling and causes crystals to form through a chemical reaction.

The white crystals are ammonium magnesium phosphate, which is sold as high-phosphate fertilizer pellets to nurseries, turf, and specialty agricultural companies. The technology, which can capture about 85 percent of the available nutrients, can also be used in plants where nutrient build-up is a problem, said Abrary.

In Virginia, these reactors will replace a process that relies on adding chemicals to the wastewater. The sale of fertilizer, handled by Ostara, will finance the sale of equipment and operations. Ostara's first facility in Oregon also purchased the equipment and projects a payback in five years, Abrary said.

Green News: U.S. unveils new push for more efficient cars, trucks

President Barack Obama unveiled a government push on Friday to boost auto fuel economy for model-year 2017 passenger vehicles and beyond, and introduce a truck efficiency target for the first time.

Obama's policy initiative was characterized by leading environmental groups as an especially welcome step in the wake of the BP Gulf Coast oil spill.

"I believe it's possible in the next 20 years for vehicles to use half the fuel and produce half the pollution that they do today," Obama said at a White House ceremony.

Separately, Canada announced similar steps for heavy trucks and hopes to propose a draft regulation within several months.

Cars and trucks account for more than 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption and more than 25 percent of domestic carbon pollution, environmental statistics show.

David Doniger, policy director for the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said tougher standards for cars and the first-ever efficiency goals for trucks will save consumers billions of dollars in fuel costs.

"These are important steps to cut our oil dependence and carbon pollution," Doniger said in a statement.

The new rules for passenger cars, sport utilities, pickups, and vans will be carried out by transportation and environmental regulators.

California, a leader in the effort to curb vehicle emissions, will play an important role in developing an efficiency framework for the rule that will run from 2017-25.

Green News: IBM to help people monitor energy use

IBM is hoping its new smart metering system can help homeowners learn to use energy more wisely.

Working with energy consultant Hildebrand, Big Blue has embarked on a new project designed to let people view their energy consumption in the home. Hildebrand's monitoring technology analyzes real-time electricity usage, even for individual appliances, to show folks just how much juice they're grabbing.

In a 30-month research project geared specifically for the U.K. and Bulgaria, Hildebrand installed small energy monitors at different homes in five European cities--Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester in the U.K., and Plovdiv and Ivanovo in Bulgaria. Using IBM's software, the homeowners view online information that displays their electricity use, figures out the cost, and compares it with usage by other people.

"Giving citizens more information and better control over their energy use will cut down on costs and consumption as well as reduce their overall impact on the environment," Guido Bartels, General Manager of Energy and Utilities at IBM, said in a statement. "With this collaboration, we can demonstrate how smart and connected communities can be more energy conscious and, in turn, more sustainable."

Though the goal of the project is to help consumers make better decisions on how to manage their power needs, the study will also help researchers monitor the people themselves to measure their attitudes toward energy conservation.

On its end, IBM is supplying the Informix database software to grab the huge amount of data flowing through the system. The challenge is to capture time-series data, which are "pulses" of data that arrive at regular intervals. That can pose a problem for traditional databases, according to Hildebrand, but in initial tests, the Informix software proved up to the task.

"In the first proof-of-concept, we simulated 3 million homes sending readings once a minute and we were able to capture nearly 50,000 readings per second using only a quad-core, dual-processor Intel server," Clive Eisen, chief technology officer at Hildebrand, said in a statement. "In the second, we moved to a slightly larger server and found we could deliver analytics response times of between one and three seconds for a similar load. You don't need to understand the technical details--the point is that suddenly, energy monitoring for 3 million homes or more became a practical proposition."

This latest project is part of IBM's Smarter Planet program and follows the Smarter Building initiative to track and conserve energy use in buildings and factories.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/greentech

A Climate-Change Chameleon

"The climate world is divided into three: the climate atheists, the climate agnostics, and the climate evangelicals. I'm a climate agnostic."
A direct—some would say brash—man with a penetrating stare, it's hard to believe India's Environment and Forests Minister, Jairam Ramesh, is agnostic about anything. This is the man who dressed down Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year when she pushed for India to adopt binding emissions targets. He was the first politician of a major nation to question the United Nations' claim that the Himalayan glaciers were melting at a rapid pace. And he's spearheaded his country's very own climate-change research institute—a direct challenge to the U.N.'s now-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That record makes Mr. Ramesh one of the few policy makers in the world in a position to push a new, more economically rational approach to climate change—and debate the politics of it, too. It helps that he isn't media-shy. And like many Indian men, Mr. Ramesh has a penchant for the dramatic: "You have unlimited time!" he tells me, hands outstretched, as we settle down to a chat in his darkened office, with a single spotlight shining on the minister himself.
India is a "high-growth, low-emission" economy, Mr. Ramesh explains. "We contribute only about 5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and even if we grow at 8% per year, by 2020, we would still be contributing only about 8% of world greenhouse gas emissions." He jabs at the air above his head to make his point, lowering it with each phrase: "So here is China at 23%, here is America at about 22%, and you have Russia at about 9% and India at 5%. So clearly about 45% of the emissions are coming from two countries. . . who don't want to do anything about it."

Source: climatechallengeindia.org

Tuning the energy innovation engine at MIT

BOSTON--The MIT Energy Conference here on Saturday covered a little bit of everything--"China speed," climate change, financing gaps, government policy, nuclear and natural gas, and, of course, science experiments--as entrepreneurs, business people, and academics tried to get their arms around big-picture energy challenges.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has become a hotbed for clean-energy innovation over the past four years, attracting students and faculty to the field, some of whom have spun out promising companies.

Driving toward a cleaner energy future

        

At a showcase there, local companies and researchers working in wind, solar, biofuels, storage, and efficiency displayed some of their ongoing work. But at the conference, discussion focused more on conventional energy sources, policy, and financing.

Science fiction? 
The nature of global energy picture is well understood: growing demand in coming years, particularly from developing countries, is expected to result in more fossil fuel consumption and continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Governments around the world are expected to devise policies that improve national security by cutting imports of oil and other fuels.

Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency, at the MIT Energy conference in Boston.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

But Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, gave a lunchtime talk that cast those general trends into actual numbers. And the outlook, to put it gently, issobering. The IEA, which was established after the oil shocks of the 1970s to manage the strategic oil reserves forOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Developmentmember countries, compiles statistics on energy and future projections for supply and demand.

Stabilizing carbon dioxide levels at 450 parts per million in the atmosphere--a level that is projected to result in an average global temperature rise of about two degrees Celsius--would require an "energy and environment revolution" with investment in the trillions of dollars, Tanaka said.

Among the technology assumptions in that scenario are a cost on carbon emissions, energy efficiency measures at large scale, and a massive build-out of low-polluting energy generation. That includes the construction of 18 nuclear power plants, 17,000 wind turbines, two or three huge hydroelectric dam projects, and 94 concentrating solar power plants every year between now and 2030.

"This is the scale and magnitude of the infrastructure investment...Can we do that? he said. Without large-scale deployment, the target of 450 parts per million is "science fiction," Tanaka said.

China speed 
It's well known that China's rapid economic growth is being fueled by a massive expansion of energy consumption and that the country has deep reserves of coal. But a panel of experts on China argued that China is becoming not just a giant consumer of energy, but a producer of energy technology as well.

Chinese manufacturers have become global players in solar, wind, and batteries, aided by national policies that encouraged rapid deployment of these technologies. But Chinese government leaders have a more holistic approach to clean energy, which also includes investment in research and development, said Julian Wong, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

"As China's place in the world rises and it gains strength economically and politically, it has experienced a growing sense of insecurity that drives a sense of being self sufficient, not just in energy but also science and technology," he said.

In nuclear power, for example, Chinese companies are deploying technologies originally developed at other countries and improving on them, said Andrew Kadak, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. In China, there are 26 nuclear plants under construction, while there are about that many in consideration in the U.S. "While we're talking about government loan guarantees, what to do with nuclear waste, China is building," Kadak said.

Differences in the political system are one reason that China moves so fast, said Hongmei Zhang, deputy general manager at the center for technology strategy and development at Chinese power supplier ENN Group. For example, the government plans to implement another five-year plan for energy starting in 2012.

"There are some cultural differences. To be honest, Chinese people tend to listen better. When our president Hu says something, we say, 'Yes, sir,'" she said. But in the U.S., people respond to directions by saying "Says who?" or offering second thoughts, she said.

Despite China's break-neck industrial build-out, the country faces a number of challenges before it will become the "cradle of new energy technology," said Ning Li, dean of the school of energy research at Xiamen University in China, which is doing research on nuclear, wind, and bioenergy.

"A great deal of work is going on but energy technology takes a long time to be accepted," he said. "(China) stands a very good chance to (make new energy and environment technology) for the world. And in the process, we will all profit and benefit from it."

A successful financial formula? 
In the U.S., the federal government has pumped tens of billions of dollars into electric car battery manufacturing, smart grid programs, and energy research through the ARPA-E agency.

But that doesn't mean that entrepreneurs and investors have cracked the code on how to successfully fund a green tech start-up. Because there's been a learning process, many venture capital investors probably would not make the same investments today as they would have a few years ago, said Steven Taub, senior vice president of investment strategy at GE Financial Services.

During a session on financing, conference attendees identified a number of gaps in the "energy investment pipeline," ranging from finding early-stage ideas to project finance for large-scale deployment projects.

Panelists agreed that national governments have a significant role to play, but they could not agree on what exactly that role should be. In general, there was consensus that the U.S. federal government should fund more research and development in energy, but less agreement on how to create the conditions for clean-energy industries to grow beyond the labs.

If a start-up company is able to develop a technology that generates electricity lower than the cost of coal, then it will be adopted regardless of government subsidies, argued David Anthony, venture capitalist at 21Ventures.

But the U.S. also needs to provide loan guarantees to companies that want to scale up energy companies and manufacture goods, said Howard Berke, senior adviser of Good Energies and former CEO solar company Konarka, who calls himself a "green Republican."

"It's our Achilles heel as a nation. We don't have a long-term strategy to secure a manufacturing complex in the United States. When we innovate it, somebody else produces it," he said.

Bill Aulet, a senior lecturer on energy innovation at MIT's Sloan School of Management, finished the conference on an optimistic note, saying that entrepreneurs are the most valuable "renewable resource." "We need to solve this problem not with dictates from above but from innovation from below," he said.

Source: news.cnet.com

The hybrids are coming in Europe

Chevy showed off the Volt in Geneva, along with its Opel equivalent, the Ampera.

(Credit: Wayne Cunningham/CNET)

Hybrids are big in Geneva (photos)

  

GENEVA--As hybrids gained ascendancy in the U.S., Europe showed little interest, with diesels proving more popular. But if the 2010 Geneva auto show is any indication, that preference is about to change.

Toyota showed two hatchback hybrids, one under its own brand and one as a Lexus, with both building on the successful Prius power train. BMW and Audi both showed luxury hybrid sedans as concepts, with feature lists that show them ready for production, and Volkswagen announced a hybrid version of its Touareg SUV.

Chevrolet is growing its presence, and brought its Volt to the show, while Opel's Volt equivalent, the Ampera, drove over 300 miles from Germany to Switzerland as a publicity stunt to show the practicality of the car. The Volt and Ampera are the only ones of the current crop to use series hybrid technology, with the wheels driven solely by electric power.

This influx of hybrids can be explained by upcoming European emissions regulations, which are likely to put a damper on diesel production.

Originally posted at Geneva Auto Show 2010

Source: news.cnet.com

It takes a village (of scientists) to reinvent energy

National Harbor, Md.--Attending the ARPA-E Summit this week was sort of like roaming the halls of clean-tech high school, one investor quipped when I asked him what he thought of the conference. It's an analogy that holds up pretty well.

There were the popular "kids" that everybody wanted talk to--high-profile green-tech investors like John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. Authority figures who set the rules were out in force as well, including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, multiple senators, and other high-level Department of Energy officials.

Looking for a clean-energy home run (photos)

   

And then there were the nerds, the folks who loved taking science classes and building things back when they actually were in high school. These are the types of people who use a vocabulary most of us can barely follow--chemical compounds or industrial processes that you never heard of--because they have deep expertise in a particular field.

As usual, the politicians and money people got lots of attention. But in my mind it's really the class geeks who should be the rock stars at an energy innovation conference.

ARPA-E, which stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, was funded for the first time last year with a $400 million budget to award grants to companies and researching pursuing breakthrough clean-energy technologies. On Tuesday, Secretary Chu said that agency is structured around specific technology goals that have a chance at being developed within a few years.

For example, ARPA-E this week announced its grant solicitations for grid storage to complement wind and solar power, for energy-efficient air conditioning, and for efficient power electronics for wind turbines or LED lighting. The agency has already awarded $151 million to researchers developing methods for storing carbon dioxide underground and improving electric vehicle energy storage.