Today sees the launch of www.lowcarbonentrepreneurs.com, a website providing information entrepreneurs need to start new businesses that take advantage of the emerging green economy.

The site helps people explore the commercial possibilities of low carbon technologies, providing an overview of the sector and links to more detailed information on funding and networking opportunities.

“Our goal is for the website to be a ‘one-stop-shop’ of information for would-be and existing entrepreneurs.” Andrea Carroll, one of the five founders explains.

The site is funded by Challenge Europe, a three year programme initiated by the British Council to encourage enterprising people from across Europe to create a project that makes a real difference to climate change.

The greenest of all the world’s clean tech projects has run into funding problems. ITER, the giant multinational programme that is building a demonstration nuclear fusion reactor has seen its projected cost increase from Euro 5 billion to Euro 13 billion.

It’s not uncommon of course, for big and ambitious scientific projects to run over budget. But now is a particularly bad time to do so, when axes are poised to swing over public fund research budgets.

The European Union was due to pay Euro 2.7 billion in cash, with other in kind contributions, towards the building the experimental reactor which will reproduce the nuclear fusion reaction that occurs in the sun and stars. ITER also has money from the US, China, Japan, India Russia and South Korea.

But as the host of ITER, it would be embarrassing to let the project, at Caderache, in the south of France, falter. Now the European Commission is proposing to divert Euro 860 million from other programmes to rescue the reactor.

Euro 100 million in 2012 and Euro 360 million in 2013 will be taken from the research budget of the EU’s 7th Framework Programme. The Commission also proposed to transfer a further Euro 400 million of unused funds from other budgets.

ITER is a risky project, both technically and financially, but it has the potential to provide a safe, clean and inexhaustible source of energy for the future.

As the Commission noted, this is an immense prize – especially when you consider that the EU had a trade deficit in energy of nearly Euro 400 billion in 2008.

That is the kind of figure that puts the cost of ITER into perspective.

The technology of white organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) is poised for commercial delivery on the back of an advance in manufacturing techniques that removes the need for expensive vacuum coating processes.
The development, announced on Friday by GE Global Research at the International Symposium on the Science and Technology of Light Sources, held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, involves a switch from vacuum coating to solution coating. GE has developed the technique in collaboration with the imaging technology company, Konica Minolta (KM).
Announcing the milestone, Anil Duggal, GE’s OLED lighting technology leader, told delegates, “GE and KM have done what many in the OLED research community thought was not possible: We have produced high-performance white OLED lighting devices with a commercially viable lifetime, using solution coating rather than vacuum coating processes. This allows us to make use of the high volume roll-to-roll manufacturing infrastructure that already has been perfected in the printing industry.”
In addition to improving manufacturing efficiency, GE said it has made steady progress in the lifetime and lighting quality of OLED lighting devices produced from roll-to-roll manufacturing. The resulting OLEDs currently operate at 56 lumens-per-watt efficiency
GE and KM have plans in place to manufacture OLEDs using high-speed, roll-to-roll processes rather than the vacuum-based batch processes currently used by companies in the OLED display industry.
Roll-to-roll processing is key to making OLEDs commercially viable for general lighting applications, since wet coating is the highest throughput manufacturing method for applying the organic materials and sandwiching them between two electrodes.
Researchers and product development teams from GE and KM have been working together on OLED technology since 2007. The two companies are aiming to launch the first flexible OLED lighting product in 2011.

Renewable energy sources accounted for a full 62 per cent of the new electricity generation capacity installed across Europe in 2009, according to the latest data.

This is an increase from 57 per cent in 2008 and amounted to 17 gigawatts (GW) of a total of 27.5 GW generation capacity installed in 2009. Wind energy accounted for the largest share of the new capacity, providing 10.2 GW, or 38 per cent.

In absolute terms, renewables produced 19.9 per cent, or 608 Terawatt hours (TWh) of Europe’s electricity last year.

While it may sound impressive that almost one fifth of Europe’s electricity comes from local, sustainable sources, the majority of this – 11.6 per cent – comes from old and well-established hydro-electric generating stations. It is acknowledged that the difficulty of finding suitable sites means it is hard to increase the contribution from hydro-electric power.

Of the sources where there is scope to increase production, wind currently accounts for 4.2 per cent of the 19.9 per cent of electricity that comes from renewables, biomass 3.4 per cent, and solar a lowly 0.4 per cent.

So, in terms of the new renewables capacity added last year, 37.1 per cent was wind power, 21 per cent photovoltaics, 2.1 per cent biomass, 1.4 per cent hydro and 0.4 per concentrated solar power.

The remainder of the capacity added last year came from gas-fired power stations, at 24 per cent, coal-fired power stations, 8.7 per cent, oil, 2.1 per cent, waste incineration, 1.6 per cent and nuclear, 1.6 per cent.

These details come from Renewable Energy Snapshots report, published by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The report concludes that if current growth rates are maintained, in 2020 up to 1400 TWh of electricity could be generated from renewable sources, accounting for approximately 35 – 40 per cent of overall electricity consumption in the EU.

Depending on the success of parallel efforts to increase electricity efficiency, this would contribute significantly to the fulfillment of the European Union’s target of producing 20 per cent of all forms of energy from renewables.

But there are still many problems to be resolved in making the most of renewable electricity. The EU has grand plans for offshore wind farms to the north and massive solar farms in the Mediterranean. This will mean ensuring fair access to grids for electricity from disparate, intermittent renewable sources, substantial public R&D support, and changing current electricity systems to accommodate renewable electricity.

The European Commission has ordered the development of a standard that will allow electric vehicles to be charged anywhere in Europe, a move that it hopes will open up the market for electric cars in the same way as the single GSM standard inspired the rapid growth of the mobile phone market a decade ago.

The two European Standardisation Organisations bodies CEN-CENELEC and ETSI were handed the mandate to develop the standard by Commission Vice-President Antonio Tajani earlier this week.

If it can push the development through, all plugs and connectors will use the same standard all across Europe, irrespective of the manufacturer, battery or socket type, or of the power rating of the electrical supply. The standard is due to be ready by mid-2011.

Tajani who is responsible for Industry and Entrepreneurship said electric cars are no longer an abstract concept. “In the very near future these will be on our roads. To pave the way for their commercial success we cannot afford to have incompatible systems leading to a fragmented market in Europe.”

The European Commission’s mandate has three objectives:

to ensure that electric vehicles can be safely charged by their drivers;

to ensure that electric vehicle chargers, including their removable batteries, interoperate with the electricity supply points and all types of electric vehicles. This would allow users to recharge their electric vehicles anywhere in the EU by using the same charger.

to support a system of smart-charging will allow users to charge vehicles at off-peak times to get the lowest price and most efficient use of energy.

There’s no mention in the Commission’s note of whether roaming electric car drivers will have to pay the same exorbitant rates as roaming mobile phone users.

Two companies in Cambridge, UK, have set up a demonstration of how mobile phone networks and home energy management systems can be integrated, to save power without the faff of remembering to turn things off when leaving the house, but still being able to come back and find everything turned on and ready to go.

Using a femtocell – a small mobile base station designed for use in the home and small businesses, the system detects when a mobile phone leaves the house, turning off the lights, televisions and other home appliances automatically. The service, developed by ip.access Ltd – a femtocell specialist – and AlertMe.com, which specialises in home energy management systems, switches everything back on again when the residents return.

The system also enables mobile phones to control electrical devices in different parts of the house, using a series of commands and automatic triggers.

The information on the presence or absence of a mobile phone in the house is routinely gathered by the femtocell. Integrating it with the AlertMe energy management system enables this presence/absence information to be used to set light and power preferences, which are activated automatically when a subscriber arrives home.

Electrical appliances can also switch off automatically to save energy a few minutes after the last person has left the house.

And if that is not effort-saving enough, this system also turns a mobile phone into the whole-house equivalent of a television remote control – allowing the phone to be used to switch appliances on and off remotely. So for example, you can switch off the downstairs lights once snuggly tucked up in bed, or turn on the kettle in as soon you get through the door.

But there is a lot more to this than tea and convenience, according to Andy Tiller of ip.access. Using a femtocell to personalise mobile services enables the mobile phone to become a powerful controller for all kinds of applications in the home. “And because it’s a network-enabled feature, it works with any handset – there are no applications to install.”

As the founder of AlertMe.com, Pilgrim Beart notes, “The mobile phone is increasingly the remote-control for your life. Most people carry their handset everywhere they go, making it an ideal control device.” And because everyone already has a mobile phone, there is no extra cost involved.

This looks set to add a whole new dimension to channel hopping.

Quantum dots – they sound so cute don’t they? Cute and useful, as is increasingly evident.

While the big – if long-term – prize from their application may be in quantum computers, the dots (aah!) are already proving their worth in various aspects of life sciences, such as in providing the ability to label single cells and then track their real-life movements, or as vehicles for delivering drugs to tumours.

Quantum dots have also opened up the route to a new generation of light-emitting diodes that require very little energy to display high quality colour.

It has also been theorised that quantum dots could be used to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of photovoltaic cells, by capturing the ‘hot electrons’ which are lost as heat in conventional silicon-based cells. This is projected to increase the efficiency in capturing the energy in sunlight from the 31 per cent maximum that is possible currently to over 60 per cent.

In 2008 a group of researchers at the University of Chicago showed that the cooling of hot electrons can be slowed down in quantum dots. Now a group at the University of Texas, led by Xiaoyang Zhu, has taken the next critical step of working how to take captured electrons out of quantum dots.

Zhu discovered that hot electrons can be transferred from photo-excited quantum dots made of lead selenide, to an electron conductor made of the widely available material titanium dioxide.

“If we take the hot electrons out, we can do work with them,” Zhu says. “The demonstration of this hot electron transfer establishes that a highly efficient hot carrier solar cell is not just a theoretical concept, but an experimental possibility.”

While the researchers used quantum dots made of lead selenide, Zhu says the method will work for quantum dots made of other materials, too.

A lot more science and a lot of engineering need to be done to translate this step into a doubling of the efficiency of photovoltaic solar cells. In particular, there’s the issue of connecting to an electrical conducting wire.

“If we take out electrons from the solar cell that are this fast, or hot, we also lose energy in the wire as heat,” says Zhu. “Our next goal is to adjust the chemistry at the interface to the conducting wire, so that we can minimise this energy loss. We want to capture most of the energy of sunlight. That’s the ultimate solar cell.”

Enecsys Limited is making headway in its bid to open up the mass market for solar power with the launch of its first photovoltaic micro-inverters. The products were on show last week at Intersolar Europe in Munich, Germany.
The Cambridge University spin-out says its micro-inverters will increase energy harvesting whilst reducing installation and maintenance costs. Although it has not announced the prices yet, the company promises that overall costs will be 20 percent lower than existing photovoltaic systems.
In conventional photovoltaic solar installations panels are strung together and linked to a central inverter that changes the direct current from the panels to alternating current for feeding into the grid. This means the performance of the whole system is compromised if there is a fault on an individual panel.
The micro-inverters made by Enecsys are designed to be installed behind each solar panel, meaning a reduction in the output from one panel has no effect on the other panels. In addition, this eliminates the most common source of system failure, which is a fault on the central inverter. It also removes the safety hazard created by having large voltages flowing through the central converter.
In addition, Enecsys micro-inverters will make systems more flexible. As panels no longer need to be linked together they can be installed anywhere on a roof.
The company says its micro-inverters have a life expectancy of at least 25 years, matching the life of solar modules to which they are connected.
The three versions launched operate with both European (220-240Vac, 50Hz) and North American (110-120Vac, 60Hz) electricity grids.
Each micro-converter comes with a built-in wireless communication system, allowing for the remote monitoring of the performance of each solar module and providing the insight needed to optimise the operation of the installation as a whole.
Field trials are underway currently with lead customers. The full commercial launch is expected later this year, at which time pricing information will be available.

Beware of claiming to care about the environment if you don’t mean it: your body language will expose you as a “green faker”, according to research carried out by Professor Geoff Beattie, at Manchester University’s Sustainable Consumption Institute.

Beattie examined the gestures and speech of people with differing views on the environment as they talked about carbon labelling, global warming and their lifestyles. Each speaker revealed a fascinating connection between what they were saying and what they actually believed, according to Beattie’s book: Why Aren’t We Saving The Planet? A Psychologist’s Perspective, published tomorrow by Routledge.

Based on the research Beattie, head of the university’s School of Psychological Sciences, says there is a need to pursue, understand and change the implicit attitudes which make us buy green, or not, as the case may be.

“This material shows for the first time a behaviour clash between what people espouse openly and explicitly on green attitudes, and what they hold unconsciously and implicitly. Explicitly, people may want to save the planet and appear green, but implicitly they may care a good deal less,” Beattie claims.

Given that these implicit attitudes direct and control much of our behaviour in supermarkets, and elsewhere, it is important to understand them. “This research shows there are green fakers out there, who say one thing but believe another. We need to work on the hearts and minds of such individuals to produce attitude change,” says Beattie.

It turns out financial catastrophe has an upside: it is good for the planet. That at least is one conclusion of the latest audit of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions, covering 2008.

Policy measures meant emissions were falling anyway, but with the advent of recession in mid-2008, the rate of fall accelerated. As a result, the European Union is on track to meet its Kyoto Protocol target of reducing total emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

In 2008 greenhouse gas emissions in the 27 countries in the EU were 11.3 per cent below 1990 levels, according to the European Environment Agency’s (EEA) annual inventory, published in the past week. Compared to 2007 levels, emissions in 2008 were 99 million tonnes, or 2 per cent lower. Better than this, the Agency is expecting to see an even sharper decline on the back of the recession when the 2009 figures are gathered in.

The recession sparked a reduction in emissions from several sectors, including manufacturing, construction and transport. Another factor in play was the huge increase in oil prices, a double whammy that further contributed to a fall in emissions across the transport sector.

This meant that for the first time since 1992, emissions from international aviation and maritime transport fell in the European Union. These two sectors account for about 5.9 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions, but are not accounted for in measuring progress towards Kyoto targets.

At the same time, there was an increase in coal prices and a fall in natural gas prices, prompting heat and electricity generators to switch from coal, to less-polluting gas.

On a brighter note, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was not all down to an invidious trade-off between one non-renewable fuel and another, or a result of economic devastation. The use of biomass and other renewable sources of energy, including wind and hydroelectric power also increased significantly in 2008, according to the EEA.

But what the figures highlight is that currently there is a straightforward equation in which more – or less – economic growth equals more – or less – green house gases.

And so, the figures once again underline the need for more investment in clean technologies, to break this one-for-one relationship and foster the development of sustainable, resource-efficient, economic growth.