Green
technology has always been perched on the verge of
the big time. Advocates of wind power, solar cells,
and hydrogen vehicles promise that any day now, they’ll
blossom from science-fair projects into major businesses,
competing squarely with the cars we drive today and
the energy sources we use now.
But trying to disrupt well-established industries such
as transportation and utilities is a risky proposition.
No one’s sure how quickly green tech will be adopted,
which puts a premium on astute timing — and endurance.
Some signs, though, indicate that the tipping point
could be near. Big companies are placing their bets.
“We expect the wind industry to grow at double-digit
rates for the next 10-plus years,” says Steve
Zwolinski, CEO of General Electri c ’s wind-energ
y division, which employs 1,800 people globally. And
around the country, imaginative people are working to
expand markets for green technology, building prototypes,
cultivating public support, raising money, and collaborating
with others interested in fostering its growth. To understand
the innovative a pproaches being applied to reinventing
the world’s energ y economy, Fast Company visited
three leaders of green tech’s latest charge.
2. REAPING THE WIND
Jim Gordon was only going over to Walter Cronkite’s
house for coffee and muffins one morning in August 2003.
But for Gordon, an entrepreneur trying to build America’s
first offshore wind farm, this was a high-stakes coffee
klatch. The most trusted man in America had recorded
a series of radio and TV ads for a group that opposed
Gordon’s project, and Gordon knew that it would
be a tough slog to get the wind farm built with such
a respected journalist serving as the public face of
his foes. Gordon, who built and operated a handful of
natural-gasfired power plants around New England in
the 1980s and 1990s, knew that he’d have to deal
with opponents when he decided to try to build a wind
farm in the middle of Nantucket Sound (between Cape
Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard, where Cronkite
had a home). “We ’ve had opposition on all
of the projects we ’ve developed,” he says.
“By nature , energy projects are controversial,
and sometimes people don’t want to live near them.”
Still, Gordon says, “I wasn’t prepared for
the ferocity.” A wellfunded group, the Alliance
to Protect Nantucket Sound, cropped up and recruited
Cronkite and historian David McCullough as its spokesmen.
Senator Ted Kennedy wrote an editorial in the Cape Cod
Times opposing the project. His nephew, Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., had spoken out against it too — despite serving
as the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense
Council, which supports wind power in genera l . (Though
Gordon’s wind turbines would be visible from the
famous Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, Robert Kennedy
has said he opposes this plan because “we wouldn’t
build a wind farm in the middle of Yosemite.”)
Even though wind-power technology was finally ready
to compete with traditional oil- and gas-burning power
plants — especially with oil prices spiking —
Gordon quickly realized that the technology would be
only half the battle. His plan might be innovative and
earth-friendly, but if he wanted it to fly, he’d
have to battle on an entirely different front. Image
making, public relations, advertising, and lobbying
would ultimately determine his project’s fate.
Gordon sold his natural-gas-fired plants in 1999 and
began exploring the possibility of developing a large
wind farm. To
him, the site in Nantucket Sound made infinite sense.
“Over
the past 20 years, the technology has made quantum leaps,”
he says, “and the indigenous re n ewa ble energy
source we h a ve in New England is wind.” Within
New England, Nantucket Sound offers some of the most
consistently strong winds. It didn’t hurt that
Gordon’s Boston-based company, Cape Wind Associates,
could erect its 130 wind turbines, each rising 420 feet
from the water, without buying or leasing the land beneath
them; it would only have to navigate a complicated permitting
process involving 17 state and federal regulatory agencies.
(Cape Wind plans to buy its turbines from General Electric.)
At peak capacity, Gordon says his wind farm would produce
enough power to supply the entire Cape, plus the islands
of
Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, while emitting
zero pollution.
It could reduce utility bills for consumers and businesses
in
Massachusetts. And besides pumping out 23,000 tons of
sulfur dioxide every yea r, the Cap e ’s existing
power plant was involved in an oil spill in nearby Buzzards
Bay in 2003. The p ower plant’s smokestack rises
500 feet ab ove the Cape Cod canal, higher than Gordon’s
turbines would. Still, his opponents charge that the
wind farm will be unsightly, hurt tourism and fishing
in the region, kill migrating birds, and pose a hazard
to passing planes and boats.
So Gordon and his small company have been executing
a complex and persistent plan of public information
and lobbying to try to win approval for their project,
which would be the biggest wind farm in the United States.
“We spend about 70% of our time on the engineering
and design of the project,” he says, “and
30% on public-advo c a cy issues.” He has hired
Republican and Democratic lobbying firms in Washington,
as well as a separate lobbying and PR firm in Boston.
They ’ve helped set up meetings with several of
the state’s congressional representatives. (Ted
Kennedy has so far declined to meet with Cape Wind.)
The company ran its own radio ads during the Democratic
National Convention in July. One delved into Cape Cod’s
history of windmill use, which dates back to the American
Revolution, when salt produced on the Cape from seawater
pumped by wind power helped supply Georg e Washington’s
army. Gordon has visited an offshore wind farm in Denmark
that is located near a popular recreation area and brought
a delegation of Danes to the C ape to talk about that
project’s impact on tourism and property values.
“They said that they were concerned initially,
but now they advertise visits to the wind farm in their
tourist brochures,” Gordon says. One-on-one conversations
can change opinions in a way that radio ads can’t,
says Chris Sherma n , Cape Wind’s manager of project
development. So the company has sent reps door-todoor
on the Cape and participated in more than 400 public
education events — some organized by opponents
of the project. “People are concerned about energy
independence and environmental issues, and you try to
capture those in a 60-second ad, but it’s impossible,”
Sherman says. “Hands down, the most successful
thing is sitting behind a table at an event like the
Barnstable County Fair. It puts a face on the project.”
One of the most important face-to-face meetings was
Gordon’s conversation with Cronkite in the summer
of 2003. Cronkite
had not only appeared in television and radio ads that
questioned the wisdom of erecting wind turbines in Nantucket
Sound, but he had also written a column on the topic
that was syndicated in more than 175 newspapers.
“I called him on the phone,” Gordon says,
“and he was gracious enough to invite me to his
home and give me two hours of his time.” Gordon
says he showed Cronkite nautical maps indicating the
turbines would be built in an extremely shallow part
of the sound that most large boats avoid. He presented
pictures of what the turbines would look like from shore
— “tiny half-inch sailboat masts on the
horizon,” as Gord o n describes them. Gordon spoke
with Cronkite on the last Monday of August 2003. Later
that week, after speaking with scientists from an oceanogra
phic institute, Cronkite decided to ask Gordon’s
opponents to stop running the ads that he’d recorded.
He spoke with the Associated Press and local newspapers,
telling them that he felt the project deserved a full
review by the Army Corps of Engineers. He wrote another
column, this time urging the corps to “clear its
bureaucratic cobwebs and expedite this matter so urgent
to our health and Earth’s future .” Cronkite
made clear that he wasn’t yet a proponent of the
C ape Wind project but that Gordon had at least managed
to persuade him to keep an open mind until government
agencies such as the corps weighed in. Gordon hopes
construction of the $750 million wind farm will begin
in late 2006 or early 2007 and take about two years
to complete. He says that despite the opposition, he
wouldn’t rule out trying to build a second wind
farm. “The pioneer always has to face the slings
and arrows,” Gordon says. “But we ’re
paving the wa y, making it easier for our next project,
or for those who come behind us.” “I envision
it,” says Gordon, whose family has owned a summer
house on the Cape for 30 years. “When I walk on
the beach, I see it out there .”
3.
HERE COMES THE SUN Matt Robinson, clad
in a long white lab coat and blue gloves, is tending
to a shiny silver machine called a Mini-Labo. It resembles
a pasta ma ker, but it doesn’t churn out lasagna
noodles. Here in the clean room at Palo Alto-based Nanosolar,
Robinson feeds a thin ribbon of aluminum foil through
the machine; when it emerges, it looks as though it
has been coated on one side with a flat black paint.
Robinson is testing the process by which Nanosolar hopes
to make a new kind of lightweight, flexible, and low-cost
solar cell. The black paint is actually a solution containing
millions of nanoparticles that are made to be “self-assembling”
— that is, they align themselves into the structures
necessary to transform the sun’s photons into
electrons. This is called the “light-absorbing
semiconductor layer,” one of a dozen different
chemical strata that will be applied to a sheet of foil
to enable it to generate electricity from the sun. Nanosolar’s
product is still in the test phase, and the Mini- L
abo isn’t designed for large-scale production.
So after a few feet of foil have spooled out of the
machine, Robinson leans in close and adds a bit more
of the solution to a reservoir, using what looks like
a small eyedropper. Nanosolar chief executive Martin
Roscheisen chronicles the test with a camera.
If it seems simultaneously high tech and hand-to-mouth,well,
that’s life at this low-key company headquarters,
adjacent to the Palo Alto dump. Roscheisen is a successful
Internet entrepreneur who sold his previous company
to Yahoo for $450 million. He and Nanosolar embody the
n ew ethos of Silicon Valley innovation, postbubble:
less hype and more concern about wringing the greatest
possible value from every dollar. He financed the company
with a combination of venture c apital and government
grants. And he created a frugal corporate culture that
aims to get the recipe for its new solar cells right
before it moves into full production.
The purse strings may be tighter these days, but the
ambitions are still big. Along with industrial giants
such as Sharp , Kyocera , and BP, Nanosolar is after
the solar industry ’s golden ring: a reliable
photovoltaic cell that can produce electricity from
sunlight at a cost that is competitive with electricity
from the existing power grid. According to Roscheisen,
it costs roughly 32 cents to produce a kilowatt hour
of electricity using existing solar-cell technology.
(One kilowatt hour is about enough juice to run one
dishwasher cycle.) That’s about three times the
cost of electricity purchased from the local utility,
which was likely generated by a plant that burns coal,
oil, or natural g a s. “Our eventual goal is to
generate electricity at less than the grid cost,”
Roscheisen says, although he concedes that the company
’s early products won’t hit that mark everywhere
in the world.
Sunlight is fre e , of course. The added cost comes
because it’s still so expensive to manufacture
solar cells relative to the p ower they dribble out.
To solve that problem, Roscheisen wanted to get a sense
for how solar cells were being made and what breakthroughs
academic researchers were achieving. He visited factories
around the world and spoke to researchers at Cambridge
University, Sandia National Laboratories, the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology, and Stanford . He discovered
that one new approach to producing solar cells involved
“printing” them in much the same way ma
gazines like this one are printed: by rolling a flexible
sheet through a machine, layering on liquids, and then
drying them, eventually yielding a sheet that can convert
photons into electricity. Roscheisen funded the company
’s early research himself, and with angel investment
from friends such as the founders of Google, but eventually
he decided to raise $6.5 million in venture c apital.
The company received an additional $10
million in research grants from such agencies as the
National Science Foundation, the California Energy Commission,
and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Researc h
Projects Agency. Roscheisen decided to focus the company
on creating solar cells that would be used on the roofs
of buildings and by utilities that wanted to generate
vast amounts of electricity. “That’s the
largest application area today, and we can come in at
a much lower cost, with easier installation,”
he says. Nanosolar’s product will be 100 times
thinner than conventional panels that are placed on
rooftops, and weigh one-twentieth as much. Next year,
Nanosolar will set up a factory for a first generation
of solar cells slated to hit the market in 2006. But
first, Roscheisen knows, Nanosolar has to perfect its
recipe and figure out how to crank out large quantities
of high-quality cells. With big rivals breathing down
its neck, there ’s not a moment — or a dollar
— to be wasted.
4. ON THE ROAD TO HYDROGEN
Kyo Hattori is standing in a parking lot, gushing about
the
hydrogen-powered Nissan he drove yesterd a y. “It
was smooth and quiet,” he says. “Very nice.”
What’s odd about the praise is that Hattori works
for Toyota, Nissan’s archrival. “We at Toyota
felt strong stimulation from the back,” Hattori
says, poking me emphatically in the spine with his fore
finger. Here at the California Fuel Cell Pa rtnership
in West Sacramento, engineers from car companies and
fuel distributors such as Shell and ChevronTexaco are
working in tandem to define some of the standards and
procedures for fueling, operating, and maintaining fleets
of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. And though the garagelike
work bays that belong to each automaker are off-limits
to competitors, one important element of the collaboration
is the regular chance to testdrive one another’s
vehicles to see how the latest generation performs.
The odds are stacked against replacing an established
technology such as the gas-powered internal combustion
engine overnight. But the partnership’s members
realize that those odds become a lot less daunting if
they can rely on a well-oiled alliance. While car companies,
fuel companies, fuel-cell manufacturers, and government
agencies had all been conducting their own experiments,
the partnership’s West Sacramento site, opened
in 2000, provides a technological sandbox where they
can all play together. “We use the word ‘coopetition’
a lot here ,” says Catherine Dunwoody, the partnership’s
executive director. “These engineers are extremely
competitive , but they have lots of reasons to cooperate
if they want to see the United States develop an infrastructure
to support hydrogen vehicles.” The 20 partnership
members — ranging from BP to Volkswagen to United
Technologies to the U.S. Department of Energy to Hyundai
— conduct their own research and development.
But they wanted to be able to share a single hydrogen
fueling station so that they could make sure that it
was designed to work with all of the vehicles, and vice
versa. Partnership members also share some equipment,
such as an indoor, carsized treadmill for testing. Shared
equipment, as well as the regularly scheduled group
test-drives, promotes interaction among the members.
The partnership also holds regular open houses, inviting
the public to the facility for test rides. That’s
vital, says Adam
Gromis, program specialist at the partnership, because
many consumers have one association when they hear the
word “hydrogen”: the Hindenburg . While
hydrogen is susceptible to leaking and igniting more
easily than gasoline, it actually has much less explosive
energ y by volume. And the only output from the tailpipe
of a hydrogen car is warm water va por.
By 2007, the partnership hopes to help its members put
300
fuel-cell vehicles on California’s roads. Currently,
there are
just 37. The vehicles are still prohibitively expensive
. One
Toyota staffer, Darryl Uma l e , puts the price of a
prototype hydrogen- powered Highlander SUV into context
by re marking, “You are looking at 20 Lamborghinis.”
But Toyota is here , alongside General Motors, DaimlerChrysler,
and others, to try to bring that price down and to make
hydrogen-powered vehicles a viable option. “Everyone
who’s involved with the partnership knows that
they need one another to succeed,” Dunwoody says.
“If any one of them were to try to do it alone,
they couldn’t ma ke it work.”
