Water Legacy – Conservation through water ReUse
Presented by Michael Vail

A Boulder based company, WaterLegacy has a mission to:

Help every citizen personally conserve water without any reduction in quality of life

Their core product helps homes convert to the usage of greywater instead of freshwater for flushing toilets. To start the discussion, Michael surveyed the meetup group to how many believe we have a looming global water shortage crisis and the response was high.

Starting out with problem definition, Michael laid out some foundational data. Today water resources are being strained through population growth and drought. In the U.S., 36 states by 2012 will face water shortages and that many water resources are at the point of non-replenishment.

So, to start to build a grey water system, classification of domestic water use is in order. The types of water are white (fresh, potable), grey (originally used domestic water from laundry, bathing, dishwashing, etc.) and black water (human waste).

The next step is the reclamation technology to provide grey water to a home’s toilets. In order to address this WaterLegacy product is the only USA designed and built full-home Greywater reuse system. The solution provides filtering/disinfecting and storage of grey water, and claims between 25-60% savings of freshwater.  This solution competes with both German and Canadian systems of similar functionality. To provide continuous operation, the system has a fail-safe, automatic design. The systems are certified and must comply with requirements of potentially 6 different regulatory bodies in the US. construction

The business value relies mainly on consumer preference since the ROI is zero for the system which adds 4,500 to a house. This may change since water today is highly subsidized :

The full cost of supplying water in urban areas in developed countries is about US$1–2 per cubic meter depending on local costs and local water consumption levels. The cost of sanitation (sewerage and wastewater treatment) is another US$1–2 per cubic meter. These costs are somewhat lower in developing countries. Throughout the world, only part of these costs is usually billed to consumers, the remainder being financed through direct or indirect subsidies from local, regional or national governments (see section on tariffs).

An example utility Denver Water, charges for  block 1 water (0-11,000 gallons used) is $1.91 per thousand gallons for inside city/county used water.

WaterLegacy has 20 units running in production and are installed in all three Colorado platinum LEED certified homes. Their product is certified by IAPMO, the international plumbing and mechanical association. Along with growing engagements in the U.S., the WaterLegacy product is competitive through value engineering with only a yearly maintenance compared to other systems requiring monthly maintenance. The opportunity for grey water reclamation systems is presented as 40K homes in 2010 based on 40-50% green home constructions of 90K homes built in Southwest.

Bioharmony – Accelerated growth of biological systems
Presented by Steve Slade

The presentation begins with an introduction of the journey from research to biological growth experimentation to development of systems of improving bio-fuel production. The starting point is with Ortho-Logic, an FDA-approved company, which produced a product that accelerates bone mending through weak-electric fields. This technology is called electric field  ion cyclotron resonance (ICR) which works by applying a specific frequency to enhance calcium production.

The next part of the presentation went on to describe how ICR in 90’s produced research that engineered plant cells efflux through the application of specific frequencies.  This technology controlled the cell membrane’s ability to pass specific ions and molecules more efficiently by acting as a catalyst. Steve indicated this research has been applied to cell cultures, amino acids, and proteins. Research areas examined plant metrics where the efflux effects had positive influences on plant height, width, root width, cell diameter, and leaf length. A major success for ICR was demonstrated in orchid growth, Steve indicated greenhouses usually have to wait a long time for orchids to bloom (this can be 5-7 years). In orchids, the ICR technology stimulated plant growth by creating bigger (he just showed larger plants) and healthier plants. This also was demonstrated for radishes which have seen 20% growth improvement (stalks, leaf size and germination).

Bioharmony then turned their efforts toward another market – improving bio-fuels production. A very attractive area on size alone, the current market for bio-fuels is $100B and growing 10%/year (with government mandates incentivizing growth). Based on initial calculations for corn based ethanol, an ICR process can save 8 cents a gallon. The ICR system provides a number of benefits: reduction of capital investment (reduction of equipment due to improved efficiency), reduction in usage of chemicals and no retrofitting of processes (by utilizing magnetic fields on existing equipment). With the existing patents owned by the company, Bioharmony has no real competitors in this market. The current objective is to work with the 183 biofuel plants in the U.S. that produces 11B gallons/year, the majority being corn-based ethanol. The 2022 goals set by the FDA in the Renewable Fuels Standards Program is to reach 36B gal/year of bio-fuel production for the U.S.

The future for bio-fuels as far as the FDA incentives are concerned is cellulosic ethanol. This fuel currently is expensive (cellulosic ethanol is presently at $2.65/gal), whereas corn-based ethanol is only $1.65/gal. Again the ICR system (tested on proteins and amino acids) provides savings at around 25cents/gal by reducing enzymes and capital costs through accelerating enzymatic hydrolysis. Based on the same process, algae production can be improved and provide more oil. Interestingly, this process can also improve yeast production for brewing and increases the speed of flavor extraction.

MobileIQ – Routing Planning for Small Business
Presented by Chris Sciora

MobileIQ is a local boulder company that helps small businesses, employing vehicle fleets, decrease the miles driven. Another area of service beyond tackling mileage reduction, is to assist businesses that spend extensive hours (3-4 hrs per day) planning routes, performing this task. Chris provided a great example to visualize the dynamic nature of businesses that need to dispatch vehicles to address on the fly. He demonstrated a scenario at 2pm with 4 service vehicles, 42 service calls, 3 missed appointments, 2 emergencies and a 30 mile service zone.

The opportunity presented is large, presently at 900K small, local businesses with 20 million trucks for service and delivery, driving 500 billion miles with a cost $1 trillion. The target of reducing the miles driven by 10% is significant – 50B miles. The environmental impact for the U.S. would be significant, and also provides a large operating cost savings. According to market research, there is a overwhelming conclusion from business owners – around 79% agree that reducing the miles driven would impact their bottom line.

As a response, MobileIQ has developed an application called Headlight, a SaaS web application that allows fleet owners to plan their routes. This product provides time savings in route planning, from 3-4 hrs/day to 10-15m /day. Transparency is a great side benefit, allowing fleet managers visibility, management control and tools to improve performance. As part of their professional services line of business, MobileIQ consults with companies and works to optimize their existing customer routes. With an 11-step plan, a program of “route balancing” is executed that provides a set of standard routes optimized for business objectives.

Results of the product efficacy compared to customer expectations are significant. In most cases, surveyed customers had their expectations exceeded by at least two-fold. For instance, many customers did not believe they can reduce their fleet; however, actual results indicate that an average of 20% of vehicles can be taken off the road. Other results included a reduction of 27% in driving hours and a reduction of fleet miles by 41%.

The current marketing strategy presented was based on direct response marketing, essentially using adworks to draw potential customers searching for the keywords “routing software”. Chris based his rational on a number of industry precepts. One principle is based on Seth Godin marketing work, in essence  your business cannot invisible target potential clients who don’t understand they have the problem that your product solves. So, it’s always better to service an existing market then trying to create one. Another insight was to automate the process of identifying interested prospects and converting them into paying customers. Based on Michael Gerbin’s e-myth philosophy, IQ navigator utilizes Google to automate the process of identifying customers looking for route efficiency for fleets. Chris indicated they were doing well with this strategy, achieving a conversion rate of 18% of clients signing up for their service. Today they are paying $2.40 a click which has improved business with a break-even in 30 days.

We had a great turnout for this meeting, thanks everyone for filling in our new venue nicely. Networking again is proving to be a very popular part of the meeting and there is plenty of space at law building  to do this now. ToughStuff worked the crowds before and after the meeting from their promotional table in the front entrance. There was a good sized crowd that wanted to see their durable solar panel from  last meeting.

Announcements

• Green tech happy hour – 4th thursday of every month, St. Julien
• CU tech transfer office, looking for chemistry/chemical engineering licensing associate – https://www.cu.edu/techtransfer/about/job_boulder_chem_lic_associate.html

Speakers

Infleksion, Brian Kromer
The Stationary Model – Stationary Compliance & Climate Change Market Profiling

Infleksion is an information company that provides Environmental Intelligence on Stationary Energy Markets. Environmental Intelligence provides valuable knowledge to a number of clients through reports and dashboards. Clients can data mine for patterns on industry compliance for emissions, (e.g. air/water/land discharge and GHG-green house gases) using filters to target a potential market.  The market datasets focus on stationary businesses (local power plants, factory/industry) versus mobile (transportation). Infleksion software and services also provide finely grained knowledge to help examine facilities by fuel type, location and equipment and this empowers the client to make a more informed decision on where to deploy their technology. Extending this solution, information on the burgeoning carbon credit market can be made part of a report. Understanding where a credit can be received, provides clients with exceptional cost savings and competitive advantage . Federal Climate legislation is validating Brian’s work with Infleksion. In June 2009 a success vote passed that was the:

first time either house of Congress had approved a bill meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change

Future energy demand is critical to understand stationary markets. Brian set the stage by examining the DOE/EIA International Energy Outlook. This graph projects demand from known consumption in 1980 projected out to 2030 of World Marketed Energy by Fuel type.  The graph(s) imply that that the increase in worldwide demand for energy sources such as oil, coal, renewables and natural gas fuels is growing significantly. How do we plan for energy types with existing and new compliance legislation? Infleksion helps model these scenarios – matching fuel type to industrial application to emission to location providing a landscape of the current environment (e.g. natural gas energy plant using a reciprocating engine complying with Colorado or Federal GHG/pollution emission standards ).

Where Infleksion breaks from the pack is it detailed knowledge on industries, machinery and regulation. It’s environmental intelligence is built on a collection of EPA, DOE and state agency datasets and other industrial information on machinery developed by its founder. Stationary datasets include Electricity Generation and Industry segments which account for 50% of the US Carbon footprint and 12.5% of the world footprint. The software product also helps to define and estimate using the new international currency denomination of climate change known as Carbon Dioxide Equivalency or CO₂e.

Carbon dioxide equivalency is a quantity that describes, for a given mixture and amount of greenhouse gas, the amount of CO₂ that would have the same global warming potential (GWP), when measured over a specified timescale (generally, 100 years). Carbon dioxide equivalency thus reflects the time-integrated radiative forcing, rather than the instantaneous value described by CO₂e.

The opportunity identified is the target market of 800K facilities in the US which are monitored for discharge to the Air, Land or Water.  Monitoring by the EPA for these operations will soon include Green House Gas (GHG) emissions.  Infleksion has entered this market with both a software and services offering. Early clients served are in the energy sector.

At the end of the presentation a number of example reports were displayed. The first slide showed natural gas transmission points by county for the whole of the US. A second slide showed Weld County, CO with one of the highest number of facilities for natural gas processing. Brian mentioned Rocky Mountains only holds 8% of all natural gas in the US, but apparently Colorado is a hub for specialized processing. Just north in Wyoming there were some of highest densities of natural gas transmission points in the nation.

Liquid Asset Development, Gregory Majersky
Take control of your water’s quality

Liquid Asset Development markets the design and the fabrication process to make water filtration systems using pervious concrete. At the core of this solution is the social cause to provide a sustainable and accessible solution for poor nations as well as developed nations to clean their polluted water supply. The current product focus is on cleaning up mining and heavy metal pollution from industrial waste water and filtering agricultural runoff such as nitrogen/phosphorous and microorganisms.

Pollution from mines has presented a problem for over 10,000 years. Toxicity from acid mine drainage can pollute a local water supply when abandoned mines are flooded and the appropriate safety accommodations have not been made. This toxicity is claimed to be more dangerous in low pH waters to aquatic life and to the local resident consuming it. Ironically, this wastewater provides value in a reclamation process, containing a number of high value metals  such as Vanadium or Tritium that pays over 1000 dollars per ounce. The issue around water needs to be addressed as growing tension around ownership and usage of clean water supplies are leading to legal battles (over water diversion and overuse) in areas such as the SouthWest states,  Great Lakes Compact and Mississippi River states. Most developing nations are protective to the point of using armed tactics to protect their water resources. Locations such as Africa where Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia count on the Nile, Central Asia water routes are being disputed by Russia and China/India where disputes and threats stem from water diversions from the Tibet Plateau. Many people rely on this water and once polluted their situation is so dire they drink without any filtration bringing upon themselves an enormous health risk.

The Tibetan plateau is the ‘Principal Asian watershed and source of ten major rivers’. Tibet water travels to eleven countries and are said to bring fresh water to over 85% of Asian population, approximately 50% of world’s population. Four of these ten rivers: the Brahmaputra, Indus, Yangtze, and Mekong have their head water on the Tibetan plateau.

Desalination is not practical on a large scale for many countries. UAE has one of the largest desalination plants in the world. Florida has the largest US desalination operation but dwarfs in comparison with 12% capacity compared to UAE’s Jebel Ali Plant. Some of the issues are the power consumption, screening organisms, marine life & debris, and pH elevation requirements. Florida’s Tampa Bay Water faced with 5 years of engineering problems and operation at 20% capacity due to marine life and growth captured and stuck to reverse osmosis filters prior to fully utilizing this facility in 2007. With pervious concrete, pre-treatment of water for higher pH and debris filtering could potentially bring down these issues and costs.

Enter the Pervious Concrete solution. This material allows for 3-8 gallons per min of water to flow per on square foot of concrete. It is approximately 15-25% void structure that utilized no sand in its construction. It recognized by the EPA for stormwater filtration as well as 30 years in parking lots for removing brake dust, brake fluid and oil. It supports a high pH environment and does well is cold conditions. It excels over carbon filters in filtering polluted waters which contain metals.

Liquid asset is in the research phase and has proven their product in extensive trials on polluted waters by removing:

• 85-99% of iron
• 60-70% sodium
• 74% zinc, 65% copper
• 60% sulfate

Their addressable market for acid mine drainage and recovery of metals is $200M/yr. annual spend and $40 Billion globally. Remediation in Pennsylvania alone for AMD is $23 Mil. / year and state-wide sludge based metals recovery could recoup millions of dollars. The pre-treatement desalination market is estimated to be $25 Billion by 2010. Greg provided more desalination markets data.

Liquid asset Development is look for startup capital at the time of this writing. More laboratory and 3rd party validation is required beyond their initial product tests with replaceable modules.  They are looking for skilled resources in hydrology, chemistry and other specialties to help expand their product to commercial applications. Their market and first stage expansion plans involve both  developing world and local commercial applications. They are looking for investor and advisors with international client contacts. With a sustainable product to provide clean water and a revenue stream to recover value metals, Liquid Assets is an attractive investment startup opportunity.

SolarTech, Lambert Bunker
Real Solar Power

SolarTech designs and delivers HCPV (High Concentration Photovoltaic) solar systems. Their product offering is an patented solar panel that claims 36.7% efficiency at 50W/cm squared and a concentrator technology that magnifies the sun 400 times. Amplification is achieved with custom Fresnel lenses and the product with tracking system supports usage in extreme wind conditions. The product roots were from Sandia National Laboratories research and has operational success on the grid for over a decade. New technology utilizing triple junction solar cells has been added to their current product. Their latest system costs have made them competitive supplying power at a competitive $1.85/W.

Globally and domestically the market potential for solar technology is huge. Market demand will be enhanced by the lucrative 43B made available from the recovery act in 2009. Previous to recover act, existing global solar revenue in 2006 was at $16B. Today there are 6000 MW of identified US projects that will utilize solar. SolarTech has chosen to narrow their focus to mid-range commercial, agriculture, remote and municipal markets that deploy in high sun conditions. Their newest product architecture is a roof-mounted system that can support large scale commercial or smaller size residential deployments. Their product line can be engineering to work with best of breed solutions and tailored to a customer’s special needs.

The plan for growth is to continue and extend a multi-channel distribution chain, including energy developers, equipment dealers, solar installers and direct first run channels. Licensing is also available to other distributors and this is the expected long-term strategy once the newest product lines have been operationalized at large scale.

The primary driving factor to solar adoption is efficiency and sustainability. Concentrators are meeting this issue by reducing the need for silicon (reduce by 1/175 material), which in turn reduces landfill by 1/3. It provides a sustainable product with 99% recyclable material.  SolarTech is innovating at the leading edge of concentrated solar and expects to see great opportunity in the next wave of solar adoption, while still sharing the triple bottom line with the community.

CLEANtricity, Daniel Sullivan
Yes Wind Can

CLEANtricity Power manufactures unique small wind turbines that capture power from wind in breezes to typhoons and generate clean electricity right where you need it. Variable area, vertical axis turbines produce energy in almost all wind conditions and service the distributed power market.

The identified revenue potential for the variable wind turbine is about $3 Billion for the “off-grid homes” market.  There are also about 37M homes in the US with property over 1/2 acre which are also potential product clients. As of 2008, this market was supplied with 10,500 units and the projected growth is approximately 30 fold in 5 years, with tax credits also supporting customer demand. This particular low-wind market is under-served with today’s technologies and CLEANtricity fills that gap in the market.

The product is a unique, patented solution that supports variable swept areas. It uses a design that self regulates its area passively and without the need of electronics. The vertical spin design has the benefit of noise reduction and less vibration making it more reliable and versatile. A normal wind turbine is optimized for a specific speed or range. If a “traditional” wind turbine needs to stop operating when wind conditions reach above category 8 (to prevent damage), then it misses out on the jump between cat 8 to cat 9 window, which offer 8x more energy.  Plus, in order to shut down a traditional turbine, you need to feather the blade or use a mechanical break which does not always work gracefully in high wind conditions. Smaller vertical axis wind turbines are significantly cheaper with no large installation costs and foundations to build.

The go-to-market strategy includes more R&D work to improve the product (such as incorporating a battery that will store power for up to 6 days). The current intellectual property is already protected with patents. CLEANtricity is also working with suppliers to ensure quality control, contracts and unit assembly are production ready. Distribution channels, contracts and training are the next step to scale out the product roll-out. With positive profitability forecasted in 2011, the expected number of units delivered by 2010 will be approximately 70 thousand and gross sales are expected to reach 3.5 Million.

The NeverEnding Story hd Thanks everyone for another great Green Tech Meetup. Sorry about the weather! We had a great turnout this month and lots of networking. We’re also happy to see new faces from the university campus. I’m sure the new crop of MBA grads and Technologists are going to be the  eco-preneurs of the future.

University Announcements

We started the meetup with a pitch by Paule Jerde, Executive director of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at CU and sponsor of our green tech meeting facilities. Paul talked about entrepreneurship focus’s on bio-tech, aerospace and green tech. Also the center collaborates with university groups like the  Tech Transfer Office that facilitates moving intellectual property from inside the university into private sector commercialized products. The Deming Center works to support a two-way path between business and academia, supporting their MBA students and technology groups and building bridges out to the business community.

General Announcements

• Angel Capital Summit is looking for venture capital deal-screeners and business plans for companies that would like to participate in the summit. The summit will cover areas from biotech to nanotech to green tech (contact Dave O’brian on the member list or here on his Business Catapult Website)
• Cleantech for Obama is also looking for support and will be hosting new events
• Wind4me is also looking for support for lobbying for cleantech
• CU TEAM (Transforming Energy and Markets) event is coming up, matching MBA business plans with business CEO’s, check out events here.
• Nocoentre entrepreneur group is looking to attract members to come up to their Ft. Collins Group
• Puneet Pasrich organized a tour of Xcel’s Denver chilled water plant and refers the group to check out  the following programs and calendars for other energy related events

Presenters

Rich Gostenik, Green Diamond Tire
World’s safest and most environmentally responsible tire

Rich started his talk describing an abandoned attempt for disposing of old tires, an artificial tire reef in Florida, now currently a Superfund EPA cleanup site.  This idea was adopted in a number of coastal state areas and other locations in the world to help promote aquatic life. Unlike sunken ships, tires can be swept away and potentially leech chemicals.

Green Diamond Tire helps to reduce the number of tires going to landfill  by remoulding and allowing the tire to be reused, doubling the lifetime of the tire. With this process, an average remoulded tire can be created with one extra gallon of oil, versus 7 gallons to create a new one . Landfills in the US have enormous amounts of scrap tires, to the tune of 6-9 billion. This is compounded annually by an extra 300 million tires. Of the 300 million about 60 million are recyclable by the green diamond process.

The process to rebuild the tire was started in Iceland, using industrial diamonds, about 1.5lbs. The remoulding process covers the tire bead to bead to rebuild it’s traction. Radial tires

can’t used in this process due to type of remoulding process. Test studies are touted to show 36% better traction and 32% lateral control. These test results show superior performance over winter tires such as Bridgestone Blizzak

and Micheline Alpine  The new remoulded tire competes well in the “beaded/studded” tire market with two additional benefits  1) Does not create road damage  2) Does not have increase noise emission over a regular tire.

We had some great questions from the group at this point. Paraphrasing the answers for a few here: Once the tire has been remoulded it can’t be recycled again,  the average lifespan of the remoulded tire is the same as the original tire. Also rolling resistance is not decreased such such as in a winter tire. The tire also seems to sit somewhere between the retread and new tire category but still meets all safety requirements such as the GSA Tire schedule.

The product is selling well in Scandinavia with 10% market share in Icelandic winter tires, and in Sweden with sales estimates of over 70,000 tires in 2007 winter market. The market for this tire is healthy even in locations below the “snow belt” with sales in locations such as Mexico, Central America and the lower American states. The current infrastructure for processing tires exists in factories in Europe, Sweden, Czech Republic, Iceland and others. Currently the expectation is to build a new plant, in Ft. Collins. This plant would use wind energy and be built to platinum LEED standards

Travis John, Water Logic International
Water Purification

Travis introduced his industrial waste water treatment company and our first water based green tech solution we’ve seen at our meeting. This is a fast growing area, some say the next frontier right after we tackle the energy challenges. Travis quoted the MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Sarah Slaughter who calls water the next oil. For many worldwide and here at home, treating water effectively and economically with new technology is a necessity.

Water Logic is a fee-for-service company that treat and manage water. There focus core clients are primarily with individual customers that have specific problems with treating or removing specific toxins to their water streams. The technology is based on electrocoagulation, which has been around for some time. This technology can be tuned to remove specific pollutants, ( Travis used an example of natural arsenic coming from a processing plant and a coal plant removing iron from pockets of water it encounters). Also it is great a removing heavy metals, grease and dissolved contaminants. Some of the competing technologies in the water purification space are ultraviolet or reverse osmosis but these do not necessarily work on the specific areas that electrocoagulation excels at. Another benefit of this technology is that it does not create a secondary waste stream that needs to be treated a second time like some chemical processes. The resulting sludge is not have high-bound water content, such as a chemical treated effluent and is handled much easier.

The industry for water treatment and filtration is estimated to be 42 Bill by Goldman Sachs and they have made a number of investments in this area.  The Water Logic solution is a standard cell that can be stacked together to allow it to scale up to large scale processing (Travis mentioned up in locations they have processed up to 430 mil gallons of water).  Individual cells can process from 5-500gal/min and can scale up to the number of cells the customer requires . Also the system uses DC power, which has greatly reduces the electricity consumption. This solution not only has it’s niche areas to excel at (where ultraviolet/reverse osmosis, etc can’t work), it can also be half the price of chemicals.  Their product meets and exceeds EPA discharge standards.

Wayne Morrow , Starfield Controls Inc.
Building brains

The starfield green value proposition is energy-efficiency and material savings through centrally controlled lighting systems for buildings. Their system uses a digital bus (with various secure/protected protocols: Zigbee

, Z-way, DALI-digital addressable lighting interface) for lighting control thereby eliminating the need for individual switches (digital light accessed by a bus command) for each building light and whole load of copper wire (claimed to be as much as 900x less copper) . Digitally controlled lighting systems also have the benefits of saving electrical usage through various algorithms such as “automatic-off” for a group of lights after a “occupancy sweep” or dimming lights appropriately when sensors indicate natural/external lighting sources exist.

Energy efficiency and cost is also a driving factor here. California has time-of-use based utility rates and regulations to drive more efficient energy use. Growing popularity of LEED based building standards is also driving digital lighting adoption from which they can derive LEED credits. With commodity prices for copper/iron are adding to building construction costs, architects are examining lighting options. Another interesting trend is that large scale building may build LEED standards to reduce utility and building costs but avoid the costly certification process and still gaining the cost advantage.

There are several competitors in the market, Johnson, Lutron, Schnieder working extensively to provide systems that are LEEDs compliant.  The growth potential in the market is estimated by Starfield as 1% penetration or 4Bil for all non-residential buildings in the US. There is a large shift to LEED certification, with 856 School projects alone being constructed to this standard, validating the market. Starfield works in new construction projects using advanced building information model systems to retrofits of existing buildings.

Ram Narayanamurthy, Ice Energy, Inc.
Hybrid Cooling Solutions

Ice Energy® manufactures a “phase-shifting” air conditioning device that air-conditions a house by storing ice generated in “off-peak” electricity periods and uses the ice/refrigerant to cool the house during the peak hours with minimal energy usage. This provides the potential of 30% A/C electricity savings if you take into account “time-of-use” rates of the electrical grid.

There is a key green argument for using a cooling system that shifts 95% of its electricity consumption to the night (when the cost is lowest) it lowers the grid peak so that new power plants need not be built. It also offers a cost saving of 10-20% for cooling your house since it make ice during the cool hours of the night. Given that we have a power grid system built in the 19th century and most grids are utilized at 47%, reduction in the peak usage is key to utilities that will in turn are incentivizing customers to shift to non-peak usage of the grid.

Afro Samurai: Resurrection trailer

Refrigerant is essentially used as a battery – which allows alternative energy (wind, solar, etc.) available on the grid but generated at different times of the day to be used (at peak time).  As demonstrated both wind and solar are usually not peaking when electricity demand is the highest. The cooling unit is self contained but it can also be tied into existing cooling systems in the house. It is also very efficient in use of electricity, cooling a building of 300 sq ft. for an equivalent 100 watt or 2 light bulbs. The current solution can only be used for cooling and not heating. There is a significant savings in green house gases generated by this grid with this approach (56 Nitrous oxide, 40% CO2).

The company is partnering with net-zero building construction companies for both residential and commercial. It also has a healthy residential market and is significantly cheaper then putting solar PV into a home investment being around a 4-5K investment versus 20K. There is also the potential for larger scale solutions, one that Denver is proud of is the distict cooling center downtown.download code conspiracy the dvd