Thursday, Khosla Ventures and Virgin Fuels, the venture capital arm of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, announced that they invested an undisclosed amount in Gevo, a startup in Pasadena, California, that develops advanced biofuels, including butanol.

The company was founded two years ago by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, together with Khosla Ventures, which also provided the initial funding.

“Butanol is the primary focus right now, but they [Gevo] have other molecules that they are working on,” said Samir Kaul, general partner at Khosla Ventures.

Compared with ethanol, butanol is more similar to gasoline and has higher energy content—meaning more miles per gallon. It’s also less corrosive and can be transported in existing pipelines and used directly in gas tanks without being blended with gasoline. And it can be produced from biomass. All these factors make it a promising alternative fuel. The problem is that the micro-organisms that are used to turn biomass into butanol have had a low yield, resulting in high production costs.

The researchers at Caltech, led by chemical engineering and biochemistry professor Frances Arnold, have genetically modified micro-organisms to make them produce butanol and other new biofuels more efficiently. Gevo, which currently has 33 employees, is now developing the technology and the production processes.

According to the newly appointed CEO, Patrick Gruber—who previously founded and served as CTO for the first commercially successful bioplastics company, Cargill Dow/NatureWorks—the biofuels Gevo develops can be used not only in automobiles but also in trucks and airplanes. (The use of cleaner jet fuels is a goal of Virgin Atlantic, which earlier this year announced a joint biofuel demonstration with Boeing, Virgin Fuels, and engine maker GE Aviation.)

Mr. Gruber won’t disclose any details on the company’s future products. A pilot plant will be built shortly, but a first commercial-scale plant lies some years ahead.

“Big capital assets take time to build,” Mr. Gruber said.

Last month DuPont and British Petroleum announced that they will build what they claim will be the first biobutanol demonstration facility in the U.K., but according to Mr. Gruber, Gevo uses a different approach.

The fact that butanol is coming up as a new alternative fuel candidate doesn’t mean Khosla Ventures doesn’t believe in ethanol. After all, Khosla has invested in a number of ethanol companies, such as Mascoma, Range Fuels, and Cilion.

“I think you have to think about this as a trajectory,” Khosla’s Mr. Kaul said. “Beyond ethanol you have other molecules like butanol, diesel, and gasoline molecules that come from renewable resources. I think you are going to have a whole suite of biofuel molecules in five or 10 years, and there are going to be different uses for all of them.”

According to VentureWire, the round was in the $10 million range.

]]>Marie AlpmanCleantechhttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22418#0Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:58:18 GMThttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22418http://www.redherring.com/Home/22388

6N Silicon, a startup that hopes to address the global shortage of high-grade silicon currently plaguing the solar industry, has attracted initial funding of $5.7 million, the company said Tuesday.

Mississauga, Canada-based 6N says it has developed a new way of turning dirty, inexpensive, metallurgical-grade silicon into solar-grade silicon.

Scott Nichol, 6N’s president and founder, was reluctant to go into any details of the approach, which he described as a "low cost metallurgical process" with several patents pending. He said only that the process promises silicon with acceptable quality for use in the solar industry at a "significantly lower" price than high-grade silicon, which runs about $70 per kilogram.

Solar companies used to rely on scrap silicon from the electronics industry, but the strong growth of solar has caused a silicon shortage. Purifying cheap metallurgical silicon as an alternative is a goal attractive not only to 6N but also to players like Dow Corning, SolarWorld of Germany, and Norway’s Elkem. There are also other small companies, such as Germany’s Solarvalue and CaliSolar in Menlo Park, California, that follow this route (see Solar: Doing the Dirty).

"But nobody has been able to get the purity of metallurgical silicon to the point that it’s good enough for solar in a cost-effective way without blending it with high-grade electronics silicon," said David Berkowitz, general partner with Ventures West, one of the two Canadian investors backing 6N Silicon, the other being Yaletown Venture Partners.

Mr. Nichol said the funding will be used to build a pilot line, which will be in operation sometime during the summer, producing about 70 tons per year of solar-grade silicon. Besides the venture funding, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, a nonprofit corporation of the Canadian Government, is contributing $3.8 million to the project.

The “Nano Risk Framework” creates a six-step process to help companies identify, assess and manage potential risks—and decide whether it’s safe to move on to the next phase in the development of a new product.

“There is really no guidance out there that companies can look for to actually address these issues,” said Scott Walsh, project manager at Environmental Defense.

The tailored size, shape and surface chemistry that give nano-particles their sought for properties also make them potentially dangerous. There is not enough understanding of how toxic some of these materials are and how they interact with the human body.

Government agencies are looking at the question but so far there are no regulation specifically targeted towards nano-particles. Berkeley, California is the only city that requires companies manufacturing nano-sized particles to report their activities (see The Wild, Wild, Nano West).

According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, there are already 475 consumer products made with nanotechnology, including stain- and wrinkle-resistant clothing and glare-free sunglasses.

“But in a lot of the cases, information on how these products have been assessed for their safety is not publicly available,” Mr. Walsh said.

The framework is supposed to help companies not only to assess risks during the whole life-cycle of the product, but also to make the information available to people outside the company.

Pankaj Dhingra, CEO, of Nanostellar, a startup developing nano-engineered metal catalysts, based in Redwood City, California, said DuPont’s framework has helped his company better understand the risks associated with its products both to employees and the public.

]]>Marie AlpmanGeneral newshttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22338#0Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:24:22 GMThttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22338http://www.redherring.com/Home/22343

Solar-energy services company Recurrent Energy confirmed on Friday that it had received $10 million in a first round of funding.

San Francisco-based Recurrent installs, owns, and operates solar-power systems for real estate owners who want solar energy on their rooftops but don’t want to operate the systems and invest the capital to build them.

According to CEO Arno Harris, "solar as a service" is a rising trend.

"The market is red hot," Mr. Harris said. "Customers want to buy energy in a form that reduces their exposure to long-term utility prices and reduces their operational risk associated with energy."

Earlier this month Tioga Energy, A Sunnyvale, California, startup, raised $10 million for a similar service (see Tioga Launches with $10M). Other competitors are San Francisco-based MMA Renewable Ventures and SunEdison.

Recurrent Energy targets big owners of real estate. That includes retail chains like Wal-Mart but also shareholder-owned property groups. Mr. Arno wouldn’t name the customers the startup has signed since its founding last year.

Recurrent takes care of the whole process, from finding solar-friendly sites on customer buildings to delivering the power at prices that are "lower or the same" as those offered by utilities, Mr. Arno said.

"A lot of the innovation that we do is around the pricing schemes," Mr. Arno said. He did not provide details.

The $10 million was invested in March by venture firm Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, California, and New York’s JEM Partners, but it wasn’t confirmed by Recurrent until Friday.

The company said it plans to almost triple the capacity of its Albuquerque, New Mexico plant, which produces so-called back-contact solar cells that Advent claims provide higher performance at lower cost than traditional silicon cells.

“With this round of funding we plan to expand to about 70 MW, probably by late next year,” said Rusty Schmit, CEO of Advent Solar.

Advent’s funding came one day after solar concentration technology developer Silicon Valley Solar announced a $10.2 million A-round with Bessemer Venture Partners as lead investor. The Santa Clara, California-based company has developed technology that optically concentrates sunlight before it hits the silicon—the most expensive part of a solar cell—so it can be used more efficiently.

Lowering production costs is a key challenge for the solar photovoltaic industry. Advent Solar is one of many startups that use thinner silicon layers and place contacts—which normally give solar panels a “striped” look—on the back of each cell. The design also allows for a simpler assembly of cells into the module according to Mr. Schmit.

Advent’s technology was originally developed by the U.S. government’s Sandia National Laboratories. Rival SunPower of San Jose, California, also makes back-contact solar cells.

Advent has so far raised $110 million and has 175 employees. New investors in this round include ZBI Ventures, Sun Mountain Capital and Globespan Capital Partners. Existing investors, Battery Ventures, EnerTech Capital, @Ventures, New Mexico Co-Investment Partners and Firelake Capital also participated in the funding.

]]>Marie AlpmanCleantechhttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22323#0Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:34:31 GMThttp://www.redherring.com/Home/22323