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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I’m an unabashed fan of California’s parks – national, state and regional. Every weekend, I go hiking in one of them. And it never ceases to amaze me that I can climb a mountain, walk along the beach or trek through ancient redwoods, all within an hour’s drive of my house.

But it’s easy to take the parks for granted. Indeed, the administration of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks we won’t mind if the state closes 48 state parks — 17 percent of the total — and halves the number of lifeguards on state beaches to save a few million dollars as part of the budget crisis. (Full details about the proposal in this story by the Merc’s Paul Rogers. Links also include a full list of parks targeted for closure.)

As I discuss in my Sunday column, which we’ve already posted online, the public has shown a declining interest in nature for a long time. And a lot of the blame lies with our obsession with technology.

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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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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.

Mary Nichols, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, holds one of the most powerful jobs in state government: she’s in charge of figuring out how California is going to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases 25 percent by 2020.

With so much power to over our economy, her personal investment portfolio (the whole list is available here) needs to be totally free of conflicts of interest.

In an interview with me and my colleague Paul Rogers Tuesday, Nichols said she sold 24 of her 86 investments, including about a dozen energy companies. Most of the sales came after the San Francisco Chronicle publicized her holdings in Chevron, BP and other energy stocks in a front-page story Aug. 18.

But in my column today, I urge Nichols to take a harder look at her holdings and divest additional investments. ARB’s global-warming rules will affect building codes, car and truck emissions, appliance standards, forest management, the fuels used by state power plants, even the paints put on cars.

What California does will ripple through other states, especially if we proceed with plans to develop a multi-state system for trading carbon emissions credits.
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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.

Southern California musician John True has never gotten close to the fuel economy advertised by Honda for his Civic hybrid. Instead of the 49 mpg city/51 mpg highway listed on the sticker, the jazz pianist says he averaged just 32 mpg in 6,000 miles of mixed driving.

Rather than just complain about it, True has filed a class action lawsuit against Honda, reports MediaNews. (AutoblogGreen has also published an interview with True in which the Ontario, Calif., resident discusses his experience with the Civic hybrid and why he filed the suit.)

I think True faces an uphill legal battle, since Honda’s ads clearly stated that “mileage may vary.” But the discovery process could open up a lot of interesting documents about hybrids and just how hard or easy it is to achieve the stated fuel economy. 

True’s suit also intensifies the already spirited debate over hybrids’ fuel economy advantages. (The last time I wrote about the topic, I got 48 comments from readers, second only to my post about the iPhone. And the version of the MediaNews story on the Mercury News Website has already generated 33 comments, some supporting and some opposing True’s position).

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