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