Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Impact Investing in Cleantech and Internet/Software
These classic facts from science, economics and cleantech explain why more and more people get engaged in clean technology. Oil crisis, CO2 emissions, falling prices of photovoltaics .. it’s all here: 20 Powerpoint Slides That Shook the Earth
Let’s meet at this year’s EcoSummit in Berlin, March 24-25, 2011. Jan Michael Hess is organizing this Cleantech event after last year’s success (under the name Green Venture Summit). Entrepreneurs, industry players and investors meet and mingle to discuss the upcoming wave of technologies and business models. I’ll be presenting Entelios on the 23rd.
I haven’t had a lot of time to post on my blog and couldn’t tell anybody why. Now is coming out time: The truth is we have secretly collected a top-notch team and founded a startup company that combines cleantech with an Internet/software business model. As one VC said: “I only invest in companies where nothing’s dripping”.
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present: Entelios AG – Demand Response for Germany and Europe. Founded in 2010, headquartered in Munich, with another office in Berlin. Already 10 team members strong.
The founders are Oliver Stahl, Stephan Lindner and myself. Oliver has fallen in love with the Demand Response (DR) model at MIT and Harvard where he was a Sloan fellow. DR is implemented by several players in the U.S. already, and EnerNOC and Comverge are public companies. We believe it’s the ideal time to introduce DR to the European energy market, as more and more renewable, but intermittent, energy sources are added to the grid. DR is adding new reserve power and helps with peak shaving, thereby reducing the need for expensive and dirty peak power plants.
At Entelios, we believe Demand Response is the cleanest, fastest and least expensive way to address the climate change, energy security and peak oil challenges. We call it “fast green”.
I have attached a quick and readable introduction to Entelios and DR here as a PDF file. We just submitted the plan to the GE Ecomagination Challenge. Please have a look and vote for us!
More blogs will follow, if you like them…let me know. Send feedback here or via email.
MIT Technology Review May-Jun 2010
The May/June edition of MIT Technology Review lists their “Ten Emerging Technologies 2010″. “Solar Fuel” has been selected as one of the “technologies that are likely to change the world”. The article describes how organisms are used to produce fuel directly out of CO2 in the air, water, and sun light. Whereas some teams focus on modifying and optimizing the organisms, BioCee’s core competence is to provide an efficient, reliable and low-cost bioreactor. Companies mentioned in the article are Joule Biotechnologies, Synthetic Genomics, and BioCee / University of Minnesota Biotechnology Institute.
BioCee is a member of a consortium that has received one of the first ARPA-E grants in fall 2009, for the development of “direct solar fuel” technology.
Announcing the 3rd Munich Network Cleantech Conference. Curt Winnen at Munich Network is bringing together thought leaders, industry decision makers, and investors for the 3rd time. The conference is gaining significant momentum and is a regular event on my calendar. Information and registration here.
Munich Network: 3rd Cleantech Conference June 24, 2010
In the upcoming edition of CSR International you can find my article “A Call for Urgency and Action: Cleantech Venture Capital in Silicon Valley and Germany”. Fritz Lietsch asked me to write about my impressions coming to Germany from Silicon Valley. In short, Germany is a great location for cleantech, but the VC scene is horribly underdeveloped. Silicon Valley started very late in the game, but with a sense of urgency (see my posts about the Singularity and The Skoll Urgent Threat Fund) and a lot of passion (see Clean Tech Open), California claims a lot more mind share than the good gold German engineering firms. Download the article here..
My partner at the Cleantech Circle, Wasiq Bokhari, is a living rolodex of everything and everybody Nanotech. I am happy to see him interviewed on “FutureTalk” recently, where he gives an overview of where Nanotechnology is today, and its current and future applications.
Wasiq Bokhari, Managing Partner, Cleantech Circle
Greentech Media published their list of the cleantech “Top Ten High Concepts 2009″, and BioCee is mentioned as #6 on the list. Thank you very much. Now: let’s make sure there’s no misunderstanding. BioCee’s technology — the bioreactor — is actually a proven technology for several applications. It’s only the new application, using two types of microorganisms for the production of fuel out of sunlight and CO2, that makes this a “high concept”.
“BioCee and the University of Minnesota wants to take sunlight, carbon dioxide and two organisms (cyanobacteria for sunlight capture and shewanella for metabolic transformation) to produce a liquid hydrocarbon. Coal and oil are indirect: sunlight and carbon dioxide create plant matter, but then geological forces are required to turn dead trees and microbes into a fuel. Think of it as microwave petroleum: no more slaving over the Permian basin for millions of years waiting for those hydrocarbons to be done.
An added plus: It creates a market for carbon dioxide and reduces the total amount that will exist in the atmosphere.”
BioCee is the company that I co-founded with my friend, biologist, chemical and environmental engineer Marc von Keitz; other co-founders are Michael Flickinger, who developed the technology at the University of Minnesota, and Luca Zullo, who joined us from Cargill.
BioCee is a material science company, right at the overlap of biotech and chemical engineering. They produce bioreactors that make microorganisms happier and more efficient than the usual steel tanks in which they have to do their work.
The first applications BioCee focuses on are desulfurization of petroleum products (NSF gives us a grant for that), and “Direct Solar Fuel”; “Direct Solar Fuel” is the production of hydrocarbons directly from sunlight and CO2 (some kind of artificial photosynthesis). For that, BioCee was among the first three ARPA-E recipients in October 2009.
Please see my 99 second interview on BioCee which was taped at the Munich Cleantech Conference a week ago (it’s in German).
The official press release is here, and lots of excellent press article are here.
Tom Schulz explains BioCee in 99 seconds
A Thank You to the man who started us on this path
Discussing the Copenhagen conference, we started asking each other “what or who got you seriously started in Cleantech, and when?” Although many might have been interested for a long time, or — especially in Germany — might have voted Green, there is this moment when you know that you have to engage 100% to make a difference. For me, it was in 2003, when my wife and I had the opportunity to see Al Gore presenting his “Inconvenient Truth” slideshow in Puerto Rico, at Deepak Chopra’s annual peace conference.
With Al Gore in Puerto Rico 2003
Unbelievable, that it is already 6 years later, and unbelievable, how much time was lost in between. It was with Al Gore’s winning the nobel prize and (maybe even more importantly?) the Oscar in 2007 that the U.S. started to wake up.
Thank you, Al!
When did you get started?
What or who triggered you?