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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Last night’s talk at Catalyst for Thought was on the subject of validating one’s market, which happens to be the core of the business I ran for almost 30 years. Thus I heard a great number of my own words reflected back to me, e.g.,

Where most new businesses go through the steps: 1) design, 2) build, 3) sell, it’s a good idea to consider this drastic re-write: 1) sell, 2) design, 3) build.

So many times I’ve asked people, “So you think you need to raise a few million dollars of venture funding, which, if you get it at all, will come at an enormous cost to you? Wouldn’t you rather have a few million dollars in purchase orders from customers?”

Bottom line: you can have a very short business plan if you have a very long customer list. And it’s not as hard as it seems.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Uncategorized

Geothermal (Ground-Source) Heat Pumps (GHPs) make use of a completely different set of principles than the kind of geothermal we commonly discuss. Where the latter relies on the transfer of thermal energy from one fluid to another, like an egg placed in boiling water, the former relies on the principles of refrigeration, i.e., the evaporation and condensation of a substance in an enclosed space.

But considering that many people are unaware of this, how large an effect does public ignorance have? It’s huge, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, which dubs this effect a GHP “energy crisis” in their recent report: (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLy6jkF0z5w]Here’s a recent interview I did with a writer for “Environmental Science and Engineering Magazine” for support of an article he’s writing on clean energy. He’s a young guy, straight out of college, but I thought he did a terrific job in asking solid, penetrating questions.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s the birthday of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose murder in 1940 I believe to be one of the most significant events in recent human history. Where Stalin was a vicious thug, Trotsky was an intellectual. Who knows what would have happened had the budding Communist Party been run with a kind of enlightenment, vs. the cruel and systematic oppression that eventually brought its demise?

Trotsky said, “Learning carries within itself certain dangers,” which, coincidentally, is a remark I echo near the end of my current book:

So should I “put a period” on this, walk away, and go enjoy the days I have left on this planet as it chokes, starves, and bombs itself to death? Even if I found that tempting, it’s not an option, since, now that I know the truth, I’ve fallen into the grasp of Emerson’s great adage: “You can have truth or repose, but you cannot have both.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Nuclear

Only a few people, a dozen or so at most, have English language adjectives derived from their names them that are in common parlance: Jeffersonian (often modifying “democracy”), Keynsian (economics), Dickensian (England), etc. While I haven’t done a study on the subject, I would say that the term “Orwellian” is about as common a term formed like this as you’ll find, usually used to describe the self-contradictory (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Biomass

A reader wrote in with a question about his plans to get in the ethanol business, using a certain feedstock in which he’s an expert.  Indeed, one of the most interesting things about biofuels is the enormous diversity of feedstocks.

The plant pictured here, Arundo donax, a type of cane that is highly prized for its growth rate, and the diversity of soils and climates in which it grows.  But the energy density of all terrestrial plants is at least 30 times less than algae, which is the main reason for the interest in the latter.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

It’s the birthday of John Philip Sousa, the “March King,” born in 1854. Best known for his patriotic music, the U.S. Marine Corps Hymn “Semper Fidelis,” and of course “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Sousa loved a rousing live performance, and generally reviled the phonograph, as he believed that it would result in people’s singing less. In fact, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Sousa performed at Willowgrove Park, a wonderful old amusement park that meant a great deal to me as a boy growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs.  (Now, of course, it’s a shopping mall.) 

I often wonder what the great patriots of history would say about what and whom we’ve become. Of course, I tend to look at the question through the lens of energy. Thus I ponder what Sousa might think about our de facto energy policy, blithely borrowing an incremental billion dollars a day and sending it offshore to buy another ten million or so barrels of oil, empowering our sworn enemies, and ruining our environment.

If Sousa had trouble with the phonograph, I can’t imagine he’d look on this self-destructive energy policy too kindly.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Solar Thermal

I wrote recently that it’s impossible to predict the ROI associated with solar thermal (aka concentrated solar power or CSP).

What I was referring to was utility-scale CSP. Personally, I think the future will hold significant reductions in costs and improvements in effectiveness, making this technology quite workable at the multi-megawatt scale. It’s certainly not there now, but we need to keep in mind that it’s a fairly new technology, whose R&D lags PV and wind by several decades.

So what’s the ROI? (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I want to call readers’ attention to the post a few minutes ago by guest-blogger Don Harmon, who I think has nailed the issue.

It seems to me that this is the time for private investors, banks, and Wall Street to join in to make America once again a world leader in the Renewable Energy markets. Or, sit back and watch us all be downgraded to a third world country.

I’m sad to report that I hear this kind of thing all the time. One of my clients in New York who has a breakthrough in waste-wood pelletization doesn’t even attempt to push this technology in the U.S. “I’m through squandering (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Here we go again!

Another major Solar Power company here posts record losses:  http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20111103-727087.html

This comes on top of the Solyndra fiasco, and the news of Ener1’s bankruptcy and also Beacon Power!  What is going on here in the U.S. with the renewable energy sector?  How many more ventures will fail in the next year?  Can anyone blame private investors for not wanting to invest in this market sector?  What will it take to bring investors to the table in our own Country to build a stake in our renewable’s future?  (more…)

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