CLEANTECH BUZZ: Powering innovation

Just when you thought lithium was king of long-life, high-powered batteries, along comes Contour Energy Systems – a cleantech outfit founded by a group of big-hitting chemistry and battery boffins – to tell us they've found a better way to make batteries last longer and work harder, using fluorine ions. Fluorine batteries have the potential to have in the order of eight times better energy density than lithium batteries, reports Greentech Media. But according to Maurice Gunderson – a partner at a VC firm that's backing Contour Energy – a two- to three-fold boost in performance is a more realistic projection. And there's more power on demand.

Fluorine batteries already exist, says Greentech Media's Michael Kanellos but, with a carbon monofluoride structure, they aren't particularly efficient. "Contour has developed a process to vary the basic formula that will allow a battery component to contain more, or even fewer, fluorine atoms to carbon atoms, depending on the desired result and application," he says. And the first lot of these new and improved-type batteries are set to roll out later this year, the company having recently-opened their first factory in Azuza, California.

Catching rays

While a lot of effort is invested, these days, in devising ways to minimise damage from the sun's harsh rays, there are also bands of scientists trying to work out how best to harness them. Which is why a team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California has embedded selenium in zinc oxide. According to research reported in the Applied Physics Letters journal, the combination of the two makes a relatively inexpensive material that could boost solar power conversion by making more efficient use of the sun's energy. The team found that even a relatively small amount of selenium, just 9 per cent of the mostly zinc-oxide base, dramatically boosted the material's efficiency in absorbing light, reports Science Daily.

Prize fight

How do you nurture innovation in the cleantech world when funding, both public and private, can be so hard to come by? You make it a competition, of course. After the Gulf oil disaster, the California-based X Prize Foundation offered $US1.4 million in prize money – courtesy of philanthropist Wendy Schmidt – for new technologies to clean up oil spills, says New Scientist. Competitors will be invited to test their technologies next year, in a 203 metre by 20 metre tank owned by the US government's Minerals Management Service. And now, news that American alternative energy company DownEast Power Company is launching its own competition, in the quest for new technologies in the field of biomass. The Maine company plans to offer up to $US5 million to proposals that could help revitalise its biomass generation facility, says ZDNet's GreenTech Pastures. And to maximise its chances for success, it has teamed up with Hypios, which offers a social network for crowdsourcing.

 "Researchers are exploring ways to make solar cells both less expensive and more efficient; this result potentially addresses both of those needs," says author Marie Mayer, a University of California doctoral student based out of LBNL's Solar Materials Energy Research Group, which is working on novel materials for sustainable clean-energy sources. "The great thing about solar," she adds, is that "if you can dream it, someone is trying to research it."

Necessity, still the mother of invention

The other, other way to inspire cleantech innovation, according to Stuart Hart – a professor at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and chairman of the university's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise – is by serving the needs of consumers at the base of the economic pyramid.

In an interview with New York Times "Green" blogger Jim Witkin, Hart says developing markets like India and China are fertile ground for advances in cleantech because they provide a setting of “nonconsumption,” in which basic needs go unmet or are, at best, badly served. This can motivate innovators and entrepreneurs "to drive complexity and cost from their products and the business models they create to sell them," says Witkin. And then once tested and proven in the poorer communities these new solutions can “trickle up” to the developed world, where they can be modified for wealthier markets.

Hart sees this approach working best in industries like small-scale solar, LED lighting, and point-of-use water purification, says Witkin. And many such companies – like India's Selco Solar, which designs, installs and services simple, low-cost systems combining solar panels and storage batteries – are now well positioned to move up the economic pyramid. Selco visits customers every three months during the one-year warranty period to ensure everything's working properly, says Witkin. And it collects depleted batteries and returns them to the manufacturers for recycling. And all this despite government policies that subsidise kerosene prices and tax solar energy use!