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Do these struggles represent the beginning of the end for green technology?

Overall, it looks like business as usual for Silicon Valley, which, of course, is good. Only one in ten start-ups ever make it, VCs like to say. Failure makes you stronger. Some CEOs are visionaries and others are professional managers geared toward scaling up companies, etc. etc.

Remember all of those articles with journalists yammering about how green technology needs a Netscape moment? Well, this is it. But it’s not the moment when Netscape zoomed in its IPO. It’s the moment when it got absorbed into the gaping maw of AOL. Netscape became irrelevant, but life went on. The Internet, in fact, became even larger. Netscape’s demise simply proved that the so-called First Mover Advantage is vastly overrated.

Computing didn’t die with Sperry Rand either.

The analogy between green and computing isn’t perfect. Green technologies often require far more capital and time to get to market. Many also have to compete against existing technologies — like coal and incandescent light bulbs — that have spent decades winnowing out costs and building up manufacturing infrastructure. But VCs have thrown away large amounts of capital on companies serving the web, too. Anyone remember Akimbo? @Home? AltaVista?

Green technologies tend to get subjected to a higher level of scrutiny. Some critics seem emotionally dead set against the industry. Incumbents want to undermine it. Many entrepreneurs also grossly underestimated the technological challenges. Still, the reaction seems to go over the top. The founder of Friendster didn’t have to commit the public equivalent of self-immolation because Facebook succeeded and Friendster didn’t. But the public seems to want blood from every green company that fails to achieve corporate immortality.

Case Studies

Examine the two prominent collapses. Aptera wanted to make three-wheeled cars. Both Google and NRG Energy invested in it while Darrell Issa, the Republican Congressional Representative that championed investigations into Solyndra, sought to get federal loan guarantees for the company.

The Aptera 2e was a blast to drive. After emerging from the car during a test drive in San Francisco in 2009, individuals on the sidewalk stopped to take my picture and ask me questions. I felt like the Man of the Future: if only I had worn my silver skin suit.

But buy it? Three-wheeled cars have been nonstarters for years. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion crashed during its public debut. Sidecars as a fashion statement went out with the Third Reich. The only truly successful three-wheeled vehicle has been the wheelbarrow. Aptera had one really interesting aspect to it: the body was made from a high-tech composite that is stronger than metal but far lighter.

Range Fuels, meanwhile, wanted to produce cellulosic biofuel with a variant of the Fischer-Tropsch process. FT, however, has only been popular with countries and regimes — Apartheid-era South Africa and again the Third Reich — cut off from oil imports. Companies with arguably more advanced processes leveraging biology — Solazyme, Gevo, and Amyris — all pulled off IPOs.

Range Fuel’s success in landing VC fund and government loans was to some degree due to its fortunate timing. It emerged at the dawn of green tech investing, when VCs and others were optimistic and desperate for new ideas to fund. At the time, many also mistakenly believed that the same skills required to succeed in computers would directly map to green. Mitch Mandich, a former Apple exec, served as CEO. Few people would now think, “Fuel additives, all-in-one desktops that come in five designer colors. It’s all just sales. Hire him.”

Now look at Google terminating the RE<C Program, an initiative to develop technologies that could produce electricity at cheaper prices than coal. A noble ambition, but not one for a software company. Google was building heliostats, or mirrors, for solar thermal power plants. Imagine being an engineer on that project. You’re in the company cafeteria where everyone is talking about deep linking and you’re trying to steer the conversation to reflective surfaces. All of your closest peers are at Brightsource Energy, 3M and DuPont. You might as well have a hairy mole on your upper lip.

Google, however, is not giving up on green energy. It desperately needs to get a handle on its energy consumption. It will continue to invest in solar farms, as well as use Google Ventures to get an early look at technologies like the AC-DC converters from Transphorm. In other words, it will begin to act more like Intel Capital than a nonprofit.

China’s trade war? Things will get cheaper and the case will drag out until everyone has forgotten it.

Only a few hit it big

And now for the positive news: Siemens will buy eMeter. For years, eMeter has been one of the most promising and successful start-ups in smart grid. If eMeter were a cloud company, it might have been able to stay independent for a longer time.

But the smart grid is an unusual market with a very, circumscribed client base. Only around 3,000 utilities exist in North America versus the hundreds of thousands of customers that want cloud services. Utilities also tend to be quite conservative. An acquisition was the logical, inevitable outcome.

Expect more to follow. Conglomerates like Siemens, Areva, Schneider, Toshiba and ABB have been on an extended shopping spree in the U.S.

So cheer up. This is par for the course.

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Amongst the many concept EVs we’ve seen at the Tokyo Motor Show this week, Toyota thinks that fuel cell vehicles still have a chance. Hence the above cool-looking FCV-R, an actual functional hydrogen car featuring a multi-LCD panel dashboard along with a driving range of around 700km or 435 miles. Alas, interested buyers will have to wait until around 2015 before Toyota launches its first fuel cell car, which is currently projected to cost around 5,000. And of course, there’s no saying on whether hydrogen fuel stations will be widely available across the nation by then. For now though, you can take a closer look at the FCV-R in our video after the break.

Continue reading Toyota FCV-R concept brings fuel cell cars closer to reality, aiming for 2015 launch

Toyota FCV-R concept brings fuel cell cars closer to reality, aiming for 2015 launch originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today, we take for granted that we will have full Internet access and connectivity to the world 24/7/365 on our smartphones, tablets and notebooks. We expect to be able to check a sports score or connect with a loved one in 10 seconds or less.

However, we don’t really consider that our smartphones and wireless device are connected to cell sites and cell towers. Which in turn are connected to the wireless operator’s main switching facility. All that needs lots of power, which after a blackout is provided by backup systems. If and when those systems run out of juice, at about 96 hours, we have a big problem.

Consider this. On Thursday, September 8, 2011, an equipment failure in Arizona caused an electric utility cascade failure, leaving millions of people from the San Diego area in the dark. One moment, power was on for a several thousand square mile area. The next moment it was gone.

In August, Hurricane Irene temporarily took out 6,500 cell phone sites on the east coast. At the end of October, a freak snowstorm left millions without power in parts of the Eastern Seaboard. Although weather problems are challenging, at least there’s usually some prior notice so utilities and cell operators can prepare. And there are often pockets where power is still available. When power goes down everywhere simultaneously, instantaneously, like it did in San Diego, it makes you think.

By 96 hours after the power shuts down, power better be turned on again, our connectivity restored, or we’ll be in the Stone Age.

That worries me.

What happens when the lights go out

When the power goes down, cell service “gets shoddy.” That’s going to happen when everyone grabs their phones at the same time. It’s the wireless equivalent of everybody getting on the same roads at the same time. But when 3G systems get congested, the coverage area of cell sites can actually shrink, resulting in potentially bigger coverage holes in addition to capacity issues.

However, just like I took it for granted when I was a kid that the wireline networks would always work, the vast majority of folks think their wireless devices should keep on working when power goes down. For shorter outages, this has mostly been the case. Like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, the wireless operators keep the systems up.

Let’s look at what happens. There are three pieces to the puzzle:

1. Our phones/devices
2. The cell sites
3. The operator’s central switching facility for a given geographic area

(There are actually a bunch more, but I’m going to keep it simple.)

Power for your phone and laptop should be easy. Phones have small batteries, and everybody should have spares, external battery packs, solar chargers, or a cheap crank charger (buy one online). It’s your fault if your phone runs out of juice. Remember, even though your handy laptop might still have power, your wi-fi will be toast, since your router/modem will be down.

The cell sites themselves are backed up. There are hundreds of thousands of cell sites across the country, and operators have put battery backup in many of them, especially sites they view as critical. Beyond battery backups, operators have the ability to attach generators to existing cell sites, or rapidly deploy COW’s (Cells on Wheels) or COLTS (Cells on Light Trucks) to augment coverage and capacity in times of a crisis, and they have done well to this point. When there is a natural disaster, there is often a staggering amount of effort behind the scenes to restore service.

The problem is that those backup batteries run of juice, and when that happens, that’s it for service in a given area or neighborhood.

That third piece that you don’t think about? Start thinking about it.

Earlier this year, I visited a central switching facility of one of the large wireless operators. It is responsible for the operation of hundreds of cell sites in a geographic area. The wireless voice and data traffic from the cell sites in the region are routed back to this location though various methods of transport.

The facility itself is about 40,000 square feet, and is a monument to sophisticated technology. Spotless, shining, largely empty, and highly automated, it felt a bit like an old Star Trek episode where the people were gone and the advanced technology kept running on its own.

One room is filled with rows of switching equipment, the only sound the whirring of cooling fans. Another area has rows and stacks of large batteries providing eight hours of primary backup power to the facility.

Another layer of redundant backup is located outside: a giant diesel generator, wisely placed on seismic mounts, with fuel to keep the facility going for another four days without resupply. Four days. 96 hours. Ever since my visit, that 96 hours figure kept on sticking in my mind. If the switching facility went down, our smartphones were 96 hours away from being stupid. No power, no connectivity. No connectivity, no smarts.

If and when the power goes down, there will be limited staff at the facility, and if there is damage, my guess is that technicians and spare parts for the sophisticated equipment won’t be on-site.And that’s assuming there aren’t other problems (i.e. earthquake) that further disrupt transport, or even worse, a bunch of bad guys who break into the facility and play ‘telecom baseball’ with a bunch of steel pipes and the equipment. Personally, I would have been a lot happier to see deeper physical security on site. Maybe even rabid security dogs roaming the empty halls.

Let’s count down the 96-hour clock

So imagine power goes down one morning. No notice, it is just out. For the first few hours, we bitch that our wireless Internet connection is slow, or that we get network busy tones for some of the calls we want to make. Through our phones, tablets and other connected devices, we get news and updates from our local municipality along the lines of: “hang in there, we are sorting it out.” If we are not stuck at work or in a traffic jam, we make our way home to our dark houses.

24-48 hours: Enter the information abyss. The next morning, many of us will not have cell service. Operators will get portable generators to key sites — but not all sites. After 48 hours, more of us are disconnected.

So how do we find out what’s happening? Our TVs and cable modems don’t work — no power! Battery-powered radio? If you are one of the rare people who owns one, you’ll still have a problem. Radio stations are increasingly high tech, and guess what, most stations were off the air during the September San Diego blackout.

48-72 hours: Your wallet is empty and so is your fridge. How will you handle even simple purchases without power, communications or cash? As we increasingly transact via credit cards, online and even cell phones, cash has become much less prevalent. If the ATMs are down, and you don’t have enough emergency cash on hand, what do you do?

Already, it seems that for a broad range of demographics, especially those under 25, cash is already dead. Or, if there are emergency radio broadcasts and the broadcasts says that emergency help is located at a certain park in a certain city, what good is that information to a GPS reliant person who never learned to read a map and doesn’t own any maps?

72-96 hours: No gas, no water. Now what? Cars have run out of gas. The roads are so clogged, they’re non-functional. Public safety will be dealing with all of these issues — with a degraded communications infrastructure. And are the pumps from your local water facility still running?  Remember, all of the sewage and water plants are increasingly automated. I don’t know about you, but I will be cranky by that point.

Acts of humans will be worse than the proverbial “acts of God.” But wait. We’ve been discussing natural disasters and equipment failures. In another scenario, what if some bad guys launched a cyber attack on the utility grids? Kind of like what “may” have happened in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 (though the government attributed it to “soot on wires”). I’m not a data security guy, but in looking up articles on utility vulnerability, I stumbled upon the Grey Goose Report, which is scarier than anything I’ve written.

The key to preventing this is keeping the power on or at least getting back up as soon as possible. On a more positive note, I visited the SDG&E (San Diego Gas and Electric) Emergency Operations Center earlier this year. They had this stuff thought out, worked out, and implemented. They maintain redundant disaster centers, redundant public and private communications systems, and an entire company dedicated to stopping the power outage clock as quickly as possible. However, stuff happens.

This is a serious threat, and we need to take it seriously

As I’ve thought about our reliance on pervasive connectivity over the last year, I’ve spoken with C-level executives from both the tech side and the utility side. They get it. But they have businesses to run, customers to serve, business targets to achieve to keep their jobs.

It is critical to recognize that the pace of our reliance on pervasive connectivity via our wireless devices is rapidly outstripping our ability to deal with the absence of those services. We need to recognize the extent that our wireless infrastructure is increasingly core to our personal, family, and societal existence. For now, it is a fragile core.

So, the next time the lights go out, look at the clock on your smartphone. Or start your stopwatch application to measure how long the power stays out. And hope the stopwatch doesn’t get to 96 hours.

Jeff Belk is Managing Director of ICT168 Capital, LLC, investing and working with wireless firms globally. He spent almost 14 years at Qualcomm, in roles including SVP, Global Marketing, and SVP, Strategy and Market Development. Belk is guilty by association as he helped make this smartphone and mobile broadband stuff happen in the first place while at Qualcomm and predicted the demise of WiMax six years ago. He really hopes he is wrong here.

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