When good green energy ideas go bad
From weird biofuels to rooftop wind turbines, many projects derailed by cost, regulation.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
The annals of green energy are filled with people who devised brilliant solutions to vexing problems, delivering more power for less money, making things cleaner, easier, and better. Many became rich and famous in the process.
And then there are the folks who were … less successful. They created systems that generated electricity, but not cheaply. They struggled to move from the lab to the factory. Some had great ideas that were just ahead of their time.
Here’s a sample of technologies that attracted considerable brainpower and resources, only to have us find that the world wasn’t ready for them yet. In the end, they were simply the wrong thing at the wrong time.
CIGS solar cells
Solar power is now one of the cheapest sources of electricity, but it wasn’t always this way. Most solar cells contain polysilicon, which was still very expensive a decade ago. Costs peaked at about $475 a kilogram in 2008, prompting the search for alternative designs. Some used a thin film of copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS) on glass or plastic.
The poster child was Solyndra LLC, which received $535 million in U.S. loan guarantees to develop glass tubes with CIGS films. Meanwhile, burgeoning demand for clean energy led to a boom in polysilicon production, and prices plunged. Solyndra couldn’t compete with its polysilicon rivals and filed for bankruptcy in 2011, triggering a political firestorm. Numerous other CIGS companies failed or were acquired in the following years. Polysilicon now costs about $9 a kilogram and dominates the solar industry.
Flywheel energy storage
Power grid operators like to keep electricity flowing at a smooth and steady pace. To adjust for surges in supply or demand, they would ramp generation up or down. But big coal or natural gas-fired plants could sometimes take several minutes to respond.
Beacon Power Corp. offered an alternative with its first commercial flywheel facility in 2011. Two hundred carbon-fiber cylinders, each weighing 2,500 lb., floated on magnetic fields and rotated as fast as 16,000 times a minute. All the kinetic energy could be converted into electricity and transferred to the grid as needed. It could also absorb excess energy from the grid.
Grid operators liked the technology, which allowed them to respond to imbalances in less than a second instead of minutes. But Beacon was ahead of its time: Existing regulations didn’t make it possible for the company to charge different rates to provide a speedier alternative. Beacon ran out of money in 2011 while waiting for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to revise its rules. Its assets were acquired by a private equity fund.
Cellulosic biofuels
The gas in your car’s tank doesn’t need to come from crude oil — you can grow it on a farm. That was the promise of a wave of companies that tried to develop cheap, renewable alternatives to petroleumbased fuels. Unlike the standard ethanol made from sugar in corn or sugar cane, this next generation would be produced from cellulose — the tough, stringy, indigestible fiber in plants or trees. That would be cheaper and easier to source than food crops. Biofuels produce fewer carbon emissions than oil because the plants suck up carbon as they grow and because it’s simpler to harvest plants than to drill for crude. The goal was to make a “drop-in compatible” fuel – one that could be used in a vehicle without modifying the engine.
It was a popular idea a decade ago as oil prices were well above $100 a barrel, but it became a tougher sell when oil got cheaper. Biofuels remained stubbornly expensive. Kior
Inc., a once-promising startup backed by the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, made fuel from wood chips. With production costs above $6 a gallon, it went bankrupt in 2014. Renmatix Inc. sought to convert wood into fuel but shifted to turning plants into specialty chemicals for the food and beauty industries. Solazyme Inc. engineered strains of algae that could be processed into fuels but eventually followed a similar path into chemicals. In 2016 the company changed its name to TerraVia Holdings Inc., and a year later it filed for bankruptcy.