Who woulda thunk: light sweet crude oil can be made entirely from algae.

Right now, the biocrude is just a proof of concept from the folks at Solazyme in South San Francisco, but Harrison Dillon and Jonathan Wolfson (left and right, respectively, in the photo) are serious about turning algae into biodiesel, jet fuel, food oils and high-end cosmetic oils.

As I discuss in my Sunday column, posted online today, Solazyme is just one of dozens of startups that are chasing the dream of “growing” liquid fuels inside the tiny one-celled plants.

The payoff could be huge: if successful, algal fuels could reduce our dependence on petroleum and help cut the carbon emissions that cause global warming. But as I lay out in the column, the challenges are daunting: Read the rest of this entry »

February has been a lousy month for renewable energy proponents.

First, we had the studies suggesting biofuels cause more global warming than oil.

Now we have an paper by UC-Berkeley energy guru Severin Borenstein  (left) arguing that solar power is an economic loser. “We are throwing away money by installing the current solar PV technology,” Borenstein told Matt Nauman of the Mercury News.

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So much for the halo effect around ethanol and other biofuels.

It turns out that the impact of producing and using biofuels causes twice as many greenhouse gas emissions as petroleum-based fuels, according to two new studies published in the top-tier journal Science. (The Science studies aren’t up yet, but here’s the New York Times’ version of the story, and here’s the Washington Post’s.)

Biofuels produce fewer direct emissions. But growing the crops to make them displaces food crops, which forces farmers to clear more vegetation off the land to produce the food crops. The world’s rainforests are being destroyed especially quickly, the studies say.

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I was in New York City earlier this month, and saw this in the window of the Barney’s New York department store. It seemed perfect for green-obsessed Silicon Valley, so I thought I’d share.

My cell-phone pix turned out horribly, so the image at right is courtesy of wallyg, who posted his much-better version on Flickr.

Here’s the whole song. (And no, Virginia, I’m not singing it for you – there’s no way you could get enough eggnog in me for that! Besides, whoever wrote this thing has no sense of rhythm — there are WAY too many syllables in it):

THE 12 GREEN DAYS OF CHRISTMAS

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my pro-green true love gave to me:
12 tons of tofu,
11 solar panels,
10 New Age gurus,
9 organic carob bars,
8 tickets to Burning Man,
7 sustainable ostrich farms,
6 compost toilets,
5 rolls of recycled gift wrap,
4 fair trade futons,
3 free-range sustainably farmed organic hens,
2 vegan chefs,
and a Prius in a pear tree.

Merry Christmas!

Except for a few persistent naysayers, there’s a broad public consensus that we need to take action against global warming. We’ll see how well that resolve holds as we start learning about the upfront costs of changing our carbon-spewing lifestyles.

In my Sunday column, I talk about some of those costs.

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It’s official: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has denied California’s two-year-old request for permission to implement its own greenhouse-gas rules for automobiles.

We all knew the feds were going down this road – the Bush Administration argues that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant, so it maintains that environmental regulators don’t have any authority to place limits on carbon emissions. (It doesn’t matter that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise — as we well know, George W. Bush believes the president is a law unto himself).

But California and 16 other states — which represent roughly half the market for cars sold in the U.S. — are seeking to curb auto emissions as part of their efforts to fight global warming. Under the Clean Air Act, California needs to get a waiver from the U.S. EPA before it can implement its own rules. Other states can then choose to follow the California rules or the federal rules.

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If California — and for that matter, the country — has any hope of making major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, we’re going to have to use a lot more solar power, especially in sun-drenched places like the South Bay.

In my Sunday column, I praise an innovative financing plan devised by Cisco DeVries, chief of staff to Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, that could help overcome the biggest barrier to widespread solar adoption: installation cost.

Under DeVries’ proposal, which has gotten preliminary approval from the Berkeley City Council, the city would front the $15,000 to $20,000 installation cost, and the homeowner or business would pay it back through a voluntary, customized surcharge on their property taxes.

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Like many people, I’d pretty much given up on the idea of Silicon Valley creating good manufacturing jobs like it had in the post-WWII defense boom or the early computer era. Too much competition from foreign countries and even other states that have cheaper land and labor costs. Our economy is largely an hourglass, with high-end corporate and R&D and sales jobs on one end and lower-paid service jobs on the other.

So I was amazed to discover a little pocket of the valley economy — companies that are trying to use a new material called CIGS to make solar cells — that are actually building manufacturing lines in San Jose and Santa Clara.

In my Sunday column, I look at five young companies that are building plants here and discuss why they decided that Silicon Valley — not China, not Oregon, not Texas — was the place to be. The answer in a nutshell: a supply of skilled workers eager to try something new, easy access to venture capital, the chance to mingle with the best minds and local governments that understand tech companies’ needs. Read the column to learn more.

In Silicon Valley, nothing has quite the buzz of clean technology — cleantech for short.

Sure, lots of entrepreneurs are creating new Web 2.0 and social networking companies, hoping to be acquired by MySpace or Google. And virtualization technology, which allows a single computer to efficiently mimic multiple machines, is the industry-of-the-week after VMWare’s sizzling IPO Tuesday and Citrix Systems’ $500 million purchase of Xensource Wednesday.

But cleantech — with its oh-so-humble goals of saving humanity from global warming and solving our energy needs — is the kind of industry in which you can get rich and feel good about yourself. Uber-venture capitalist John Doerr calls cleantech “the mother of all markets,” and VCs invested $1.28 billion in the sector last year.

Mother’s little helper is the government, which is promising to give billions of dollars in direct funding to the industry and support it indirectly through various other energy policies.

Tune in to KQED’s “Forum” program Friday at 10 a.m. PDT to hear me and three other panelists discuss the green technology boom and government’s role in promoting it. It’s a call-in show, so feel free to call or email the program with your questions.

(UPDATE: The show has already aired but you can listen to an MP3 recording of the broadcast here.)Download link

My fellow panelists are:

1) Dan Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory and a professor at the University of California-Berkeley.

2) Ira Ehrenpreis, general partner and leader of the cleantech investment practice at venture firm Technology Partners.

3) Jim Sweeney, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University.

The Mercury News published a two-part series this weekend, complete with multimedia slide show, that raises some hard questions about California’s energy future.

Part 1 of the series by Sarah Jane Tribble looks at how difficult it will be for California to cut greenhouse gas emissions by relying on conservation and renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

The state is already likely to miss its goal of electric utilities getting 10 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2010, Tribble reports. Looking further out, renewables face a host of challenges, including the cost of building transmission lines and storage capacity to shift power from the times and places where it’s generated (sunny roofs during the day and isolated windy mountains) to where and when it’s actually needed.

In the second part of the project, which appeared today, Tribble takes a close look at nuclear power and asks: should California reconsider its official opposition to nuclear?

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