Startup Toolbox

Jay Parkhill May 5th, 2008

There is a lot of talk, of course, about the facts that (i) the U.S. has the highest per-capita (and overall) rate of CO2 emission in the world, and (2) that China is catching up quickly.  This podcast from NPR puts some facts to the story.

NPR previously profiled a family in North Carolina that worked hard to reduce its CO2 output and succeeded in getting itself well below the North Carolina average.  For contrast, NPR then profiled an “upper middle class” family in Beijing with a 3 bedroom apartment, a car and a house in the country that makes no real effort to conserve.

The result?  Excluding air travel, the North Carolina family trying hard to conserve and the Beijing family that doesn’t are basically even on CO2 emissions.  The American family travels more and farther by plane, so factoring that in put the Chinese family in the lead (in the best sense) by a wide margin.

This kind of data, even though anecdotal, is really fascinating.

• Cleantech , energy

Jay Parkhill April 25th, 2008

I am a volunteer with the California Clean Tech Open, a business plan competition for cleantech startups.  We have an event coming up next Thursday, May 1 at SRI in Menlo Park to provide networking opportunities especially for entrepreneurs and research institutions.

The CCTO gets terrific participation from the entrepreneurial and investor communities and is a great place to network and meet people who share an interest in the cleantech space.

Details on next week’s event are here. Come check it out!

• Cleantech , business models

Jay Parkhill March 15th, 2008

Time Magazine online has a piece on "environmentalism 2.0" and the promise of technology to lead the planet out of the climate mess technology has created.

Environmentalism 2.0 - TIME

I love technology and I am really fired up about the level of attention climate issues have gotten in the past year or so.  Still, every time I see one of these pieces I remember a line from Jared Diamond’s book Collapse.  I don’t have the book in front of me, so to paraphrase: technology has never solved any problems without creating a whole set of new ones (if you don’t believe this I have some Yucca Mountain real estate to sell you).

Fossil fuels have enabled many things (like this blog post).  We desperately need a non-greenhouse gas-emitting replacement for them, of course, and the sooner the better.

At the same time, let’s not forget to keep an eye out for the unintended consequences. Maybe in the next go-round (assuming we squeak through this one) we can figure out how to address the problems before they become crises. 

P.S.  Dear Time editors: please stop referring to things as "___ 2.0".  Do you have any idea how 2007 that sounds?

• Cleantech

Jay Parkhill January 14th, 2008

I just stumbled across this great quote from VC Matt Trevithick at Venrock. It is part of an interesting interview on Earth2Tech in which (in part) Trevithick wonders aloud whether the VC model is going to work well in the alternative energy sector.

The quote about the internal combustion engine is brilliant, though. He must mean that in the same way that people talk about Microsoft products not being very good- it hasn’t stopped Microsoft from massive success, and internal combustion’s flaws haven’t stopped it from being about the most successful single product ever (not counting sliced bread).

For the record, I think Trevithick’s point was to compare the relative efficiencies of gasoline and electric motors with their fuel sources. Gasoline packs a huge amount of energy into its volume, but the engine doesn’t extract it very well and creates lots of waste. Electric motors are very efficient by comparison, but batteries are lousy.

The real gem in the interview, though, is where Trevithick starts to break down the alt-energy field into IT-based businesses like demand-response company EnerNOC that make easy VC investments and “pure energy” ideas like solar and biofuels that may not be good places for venture capitalists to play. I’ve wondered about this too. The latter category requires so much infrastructure development that it seems like a tough job for all but governments and corporate giants.

• Cleantech , legal

Jay Parkhill November 27th, 2007

I installed the TED Model 1000 in my house last week and the results have been interesting, if not revelatory. The device hooks into my circuit breaker panel and has a separate display that plugs into any outlet in the house. When set up, it shows exactly how much electricity we consume, updated every second. I can add the rates I pay and see how much I am spending on a per-second basis as well. It is fascinating to see the difference when we turn on/off a single light.

I have a couple of observations from a week of using the thing:

1) We have a usage “baseline”, or several actually. In the middle of the night (grr, insomnia) with all the lights out and everything closed down, we have an ambient drain of about 0.15 kwh. During the day, even with all the lights off, it is higher- more like 0.6 kwh. I haven’t figured out why this is exactly. I’m starting to suspect that the refrigerator works harder in daytime when it gets opened and closed regularly.

2) Savings will come from a few big changes like trying to use the dishwasher less (or maybe not at all), and a lot of small ones. I tend to leave lights (or music) on in a room if I leave, but know I’ll reenter in a couple of minutes. I can now quantify exactly how much that costs me and I’m inclined to do it less.

I also have a wish: the device has a USB port, but apparently it isn’t functional. I’d really love to work through the data in greater detail on my computer, so I wish the TED’s makers would turn on the port and build some software to let me analyze consumption patterns.

I’d also like more granularity, but that isn’t realistic. I’d like to see the data measured on a per-outlet basis so I could figure out *exactly* how much energy each electrical device I own draws. That’s beyond the scope of the TED, though.

The TED cost $150, plus a few dollars to have an electrician hook it up. It was a pretty nominal cost for some very interesting data. People say they made up the cost pretty quickly with the money saved on electrical bills. We’ll see how long that takes.

• Cleantech , green

Jay Parkhill November 1st, 2007

I attended the California Clean Tech Open Finals this week, a business plan competition for emerging companies in the clean technology area. The companies were impressive and the event sold out at 900 tickets- both great signs for the sector.

Having reflected on it, two thoughts stick in my head about the event:

1) The tradeshow format (someone I know likes to refer to it as a “science fair”) is brutal, and perhaps hardest on new businesses. With no context (esp name recognition) other than the information the companies present it is very hard to tell which companies have real prospects.

2) One of the evening’s speakers was Noah Horowitz from the NRDC. He gave a fascinating talk about the power drain of consumer electronic devices. Per my recollection, a 2 or 3 tuner digital video recorder such as Tivo uses as much energy per year as a refrigerator. An Xbox360 or PS3 uses huge amounts of peak power, and if inadvertently left on will drain as much electricity as two refrigerators per year.

I had no idea I had so many refrigerators in my house. If nothing else, the event prompted me to buy a TED 1000 to display real-time electricity usage in my house. I’ll be interested to see how many more refrigerators I have hiding in my house.

• Cleantech

Jay Parkhill October 15th, 2007

Blog Action Day has put out a call to post about the environment today, and this is partially in response to that.

The cities of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose have pledged to reduce landfill waste to zero by the year 2020. That is an ambitious goal- zero doesn’t leave much margin for error (or any, actually). I wondered how they planned to accomplish that. Recycling and composting go a long way, but those last few percentage points are going to be hard-fought.

On similar lines, I read about a study yesterday from the University of Victoria, Canada finding that according to the computer models used in the study, the European Union’s stated plan to reduce industrial carbon emissions by 50% by 2050 (even if adopted worldwide) will fail to meet the goal of limiting a global average temperature increase to 2°C. Even 90% reductions would eventually push temperatures over the 2°C and something very close to 100% reductions are necessary to limit the increase.

My first reaction to this is that 100% industrial emissions reduction is impossible. That means no carbon emissions at all- how can this be done?

My next thought is that distinguishing between “industrial emissions” and everything else is a nice way of saying “basically all emissions everywhere”. I guess that allows people to burn wood to heat their homes, but for all practical purposes if infrastructure needs to be created to eliminate carbon emissions from industry it won’t make much sense to maintain a carbon infrastructure for consumer uses.

This leads me to thought three, which is that if the data are accurate, they certainly clarify a lot of things. Peak oil/coal/gas issues become secondary if we have forty-three years to stop using all of them almost entirely. Alternative energy sources need to become not just mainstream but the default.

And thought four is that I sure hope the study was wrong somewhere, because zero is an awfully small number and we’re going to be right up against the wire if that’s the target we need to hit.

• Cleantech

Jay Parkhill October 12th, 2007

The term “cleantech” has always bothered me. It’s so broad that its meaninglessness becomes quickly apparent as soon as one starts to look at all the different sectors it covers. At a mini-conference I attended yesterday, though, panelist James Horn from VC firm Noventi made a useful point about the term.

He said that people use the word “cleantech” in much the same way that they used “internet” in the 1990s- it is a term of convenience that exists in large part because the space is still new enough that the general public doesn’t recognize many of the sub-categories. Just as general “internet” business has given way to “content delivery networks”, “social networks”, “Software as a Service”, etc., so will “cleantech” be used less as people become familiar with the different flavors of energy, waste remediation, materials, etc.

I like that idea, not least because it reminds me what a huge mindshift occurred in the 90’s when the Internet was new, before it got woven so tightly into the fabric of society. I’m sure hoping the cleantech principles get adopted so quickly.

Bonus neologism: I got an email from Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, in which he talked about the growth of “green collar jobs”. I love that term.

• Cleantech , neologisms

Jay Parkhill August 18th, 2007

I became a lawyer in part because I love words and writing and analyzing how people use language. That’s why I am inaugurating a new occasional series on this blog devoted to “neologisms”- clever turns of phrase that capture an idea especially well. Here are the first two entries:

Duke Energy’s Chairman and CEO James Rogers talks about energy issues as in need of “cathedral thinking“- just like Europe’s great cathedrals took centuries to build, weaning the world off carbon-based fuels is likely to take a similar amount of time. It is a brilliant phrase- though I don’t know if Rogers coined it- because it evokes grandeur, an epic scale, enduring structures and also a long time frame for planning, development and construction. As head of a company built on carbon-based fuels that probably sees the end of its lifeblood somewhere in the distant, but foreseeable future, it works perfectly to capture the pace at which Duke is comfortable working on the issues as well.

Meanwhile, on Terrapass’s blog Adam Stein talks about “magic pony thinking“- where some environmentalists reject certain proposed solutions because they aren’t sweeping enough and put forward an idea like “dismantling the suburbs and trading cars for light rail and bicycles”, in Adam’s words. Adam gives full credit for the term to the John and Belle blog, and ultimately a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

“Magic pony” is a powerful turn of phrase. It is an incredibly derisive way to lambast another viewpoint as failing to address (perceived) real world facts. It’s a gem of a phrase, but also a double-edged weapon that seems as likely to lead to a flame war as a thoughtful comparison of viewpoints. Maybe sensing this, Adam offers up “distraction theory” as well, a slightly less perjorative way of saying the same thing. Fighting words, all the same.

• Cleantech , green , neologisms

Jay Parkhill August 9th, 2007

Ford Motor Company CEO Alan Mullaly has opined that US CAFE standards are preventing car companies from addressing global warming and energy security concerns. Mullaly apparently hedged when asked straight-on if he supported a European-style gas tax that could cause gasoline prices to rise dramatically, but it sounds like that’s what he meant.

“I’ve never seen a market distorting policy like CAFE,” Mulally said.

Mullaly goes on to say that CAFE forces carmakers to produce small cars in order to meet the regulations, but consumers want big ones. What this really seems to mean is that Mullaly thinks gas prices are too low, so there is not enough incentive to get people out of big, full-inefficient cars. Replacing CAFE with a gas tax could make pump prices rise, which would make people think harder about how much of their paycheck they want to hand over at the gas station.  He offered Europe’s high (and highly taxed) gas prices as a leading factor in the relatively smaller car sizes in Europe.

It is an interesting argument: carmakers want to do the “right thing” by the enviroment, but consumers won’t let them.  I suspect Mullaly is at least partially correct.  Higher fuel costs might help swing the balance toward smaller cars.

At the same time, Mullaly’s reasoning falls well short of solid.   The success of the Prius belies the argument that consumers just aren’t interested in efficiency.  Maybe the small cars Ford makes just aren’t sexy enough.  Europe is also so different from the US that it’s tough to make an apples-to-apples comparison.  Are high fuel costs the main driver there or do Europe’s narrow streets have something to do with it as well?

More to the point, if Mullaly is saying CAFE doesn’t work because low gas prices cause a mismatch between consumer demand and carmaker requirements, wouldn’t the gas tax help that problem? Do we still need to scrap CAFE as well?

• Cleantech