Clean Tech and Beer? Where Do I Sign Up?

I scour the news for the latest emerging technologies each day and highlight only the most important emtech developments in this semi-regular digest–including some stories where there’s no clear-cut opportunity for individual investors.

It’s my view, especially after the tech meltdown in 2000, that successful tech investors are informed tech investors. And success in this sector involves keeping an eye on both developed and developing technologies. Trends move swiftly as technologies advance; having a broad view of emerging trends makes it easier to discern true investment opportunities from transitional, whiz-bang ephemera.

On the developmental side, a new project is underway in sun-soaked Southern California that could represent a big step in making solar farms a real possibility for power generation.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES) and Tessera Solar have come out with SunCatchers. They exhibited their four newly designed solar power collection dishes at Sandia National Laboratories’ National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF). 

SunCatchers are new dishes that should be commercially available by 2010. SES has been working to find ways to use the century-old Stirling engine, an external combustion engine that’s similar to a steam engine and incredibly simple to build and maintain. 

In 1996, SES was formed and acquired all design and engineering patents on the solar Stirling dish engine technology that had been developed over nearly three decades by some of the world’s top engineers and scientists in Ford Advanced Development Operations, McDonnell-Douglas Aerospace & Defense and Boeing Aerospace & Defense.

Shortly thereafter, SES launched two strategic, collaborative public-private partnerships with the Sandia National Laboratory and the US Dept of Energy (DOE).

Over this period, SES has reengineered the SunCatcher technology, improving its design, performance and cost. Those innovations enabled the collector to achieve the world’s highest solar-to-electricity conversion efficiency record and readied the technology for high-capacity production and worldwide commercialization.

Its partner Tessera Solar–which has no relation to Tessera Technologies (NSDQ: TSRA), a diversified tech company that concentrates in micro-electronic solutions for commercial and consumer devices–built the solar concentrators and SES stuck a Stirling engine on the dishes to serve as a collector.

I’ve never been a big fan of buying photovoltaic (PV) companies because no technology has really stood out–there are at least three major silicon-based panel designs and dozens of thin films–and once a real breakthrough occurs, all the others will go begging. Also, at this point “breakthroughs” are happening every week. Until the field is winnowed down to four or five major designs in the key strategic sectors, identifying a long-term winner will be exceedingly difficult. And you have to be pretty lucky to catch a short-term mover. I’m not that lucky.

What I like about this story is the inclusion of the Stirling engine. But the engines are still binary: They either operate or they don’t. On a cloudy or rainy day, for example, they stop working. This “breakthrough” is great for very sunny areas but won’t help San Francisco or Portland.

Another story showed up in an article in Scientific American. Apparently, Xcel Energy (NYSE: XEL) is talking about charging a fee to folks on its Colorado grid who install panels after April 2010.

That’s a somewhat odd decision because Xcel is working with a very cool Smart Grid company, Gridpoint, on a $100 million Smart Grid City. It’s one of the more farsighted utilities operating today. When I first read the story, I thought that this new grid maintenance fee was an attempt to help solar panel companies and contractors by pressuring people to buy and install solar panels before April.

I mean, if you put up photovoltaic panels, you have to buy and install the panels, buy metering systems, pay a fee for utility expenses like meter reading and infrastructure support. Now these customers face another fee to link to the grid.

Maybe the goal is to anger clean-tech buyers to the point where they just find a way to go off the grid entirely. It’s also ironic that the new policy goes into effect on April Fools’ Day. I hope Colorado’s residents are just being punked.

All joking aside, I’ll go on record here and state that this is a stupid idea. Wouldn’t it make more sense for Xcel to incentivize PV ownership and discourage fossil fuel use?

Levying such a charge against normal customers would generate much more money; individuals who have PV systems installed represent only a negligible percentage of the company’s overall customer base. What’s more, these solar customers keep Xcel’s antiquated grid running without the addition of a new power plant. And the company could offer work with solar subsidize Gridpoint systems–a move that would benefit all parties involved.

I’m not sure what’s up here, but it’s a story that’s definitely worth following.

Perhaps this is an inadvertent thumb in the eye to Xcel, but Manitou Springs, CO is hosting the first solar-powered beer festival. The Craft Lager Festival is going on this coming weekend, 8-9 August. This year’s motto is “Drink a Beer, Save a Tree.”

Now that’s a sentiment I can get behind. I’m holding out for the Craft Bourbon Festival before I fully commit, though.

Is Manitou Springs is in Xcel’s service area? I doubt it’s a sponsor. Email or tweet me if you manage to attend America’s first solar-powered beer fest.