SUNGREEN SYSTEMS INC PARTNERS WITH BYD AMERICA CORP TO DELIVER SOLAR POWER TO THE SOUTHWEST

Two fast growing companies in L.A.’s alternative energy industry are joining forces.

SunGreen Systems Inc.,（”SunGreen”） which develops and installs solar-energy systems, has signed a cooperation agreement with BYD America Corp.,（”BYD”） a provider of photo-voltaic solar panels and other technologies.

BYD will supply SunGreen with panels from its parent company in China, BYD Company Limited, which is 10% owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. SunGreen will integrate the panels into systems for commercial and residential customers in California, Nevada and Arizona. The two companies will also cross-promote each other in their marketing materials and campaigns.

“It’s an ideal match,” said SunGreen Chairman Y.Y. Lin. “We take great care to source only top quality panels. As testimony to their quality and expertise, BYD has already signed deals with the City of Lancaster, KB Home and the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power.”

“We’re impressed with SunGreen’s combined experience in real estate, green tech and architecture.” said BYD Business Development Manager Junguo Huang.

The two companies signed a Memorandum of Understanding on October 25, 2010 to commence their cooperation immediately and continue at least through December 2011.

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Floating islands, inspired by nature

It would not be accurate to call Floating Island International, the business led by Bruce and Anne Kania, a mom-and-pop operation–for one thing, although they are married, Bruce and Anne don’t have children–but that description gives you a sense of the scale of their startup. With fewer than a dozen employees, the Kanias are tucked away in the small town of Shepherd, Montana (population: 208) and the firm’s annual revenues are less than $1 million.

But Floating Island International already lives up to its name: Its man-made islands can be found in New Zealand, China, South Africa and Canada as well as in the U.S. Its customers include U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, American Electric Power and Disney World, which suggests that they may be onto something. And the Kanias’ ambitions seem to know no bounds.

“I’m pretty sure we are going to be one of the most successful businesses of all time,” says Bruce.

Bruce, who is 57, is an inventor and entrepreneur who worked in prosthetics, textiles and sporting goods (he invented a broadhead arrow). Then, about a decade ago, he came up with the idea of turning plastic trash into man-made floating islands that canclean polluted water, spur the growth of fish, provide species habitat and sequester carbon.

Not to mention create beachfront property.

“We’re learning how to grow real estate,” he says.

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Joseph Nye on global power shifts

BYD

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China’s BYD Aims for Total Zero Emissions Solution

The Chinese company known as BYD—that’s Build Your Dreams—has an audacious plan to solve China’s energy and environment problems. Readers of this site might know BYD as the carmaker backed by famed investor Warren Buffet—and as the top contender to bring Chinese-made electric cars and plug-in hybrids to the United States.

But it may come as a surprise that BYD views the U.S. market as somewhat irrelevant, and doesn’t see high-volume sales of its all-electric e6 or the BYD F3DM plug-in hybrid as that high of a priority.

That’s because BYD’s Chairman, Chuanfu Wang, has a much bigger vision. “The goal is to create a zero emissions ecosystem,” said Michael Austin, a Chicago-based BYD vice president with marketing and public relations duties. “And you don’t create the zero carbon zero emissions ecosystem by just producing a whole bunch of electric vehicles.” BYD’s electric and plug-in hybrid cars, now available in China, will go on sale to U.S. private consumers as early as 2012.

“They own the chemicals. They own the mines. They refine the chemicals. They make their own cans for the cells. They did their own windings,” Austin said. “They did every component of the build, and that total vertical solution got them in a place where they had the lowest cost, so they could control the market.”

And what they did for batteries, they also did for cell phones. Currently, 30 to 40 percent of the world’s cell phones, regardless of the brand, can be traced back to BYD. Now they are applying the same scale to solar panels and to automobiles. They have 100 million square feet of factory space. They make every component of the vehicle, except the tires and the safety glass. And for the past two years, the company’s F3 sedan has been China’s number one seller.

BYD needs its massive scale of manufacturing to match the size of the Chinese auto market. Last year, China bypassed the United States to become the largest automobile market in the world, and it continues to grow at an impressive rate. “If BYD were to sell tens of thousands of electric vehicle in Tianjin and in Beijing, it would create a worse environmental condition than China has today. All they have are coal-burning plants,” Austin said.

Instead, BYD wants to couple solar energy generation with massive amounts of stationary energy storage using its batteries. Then, add efficient lighting at home—BYD also makes LED lighting—and electric cars for the road. “If you discharge to those energy storage plants to electric vehicles, then you have zero emissions.” Voila! The ecosystem is complete.

Austin: “We don’t want to just sell electric vehicles in our U.S. dealerships. That’s not selling the zero emission story. We want to sell solar panels. We want to sell solar-shaded parking. We want to sell LED lighting. We want to sell energy storage for your home, and charging stations coupled to energy storage, so we can do DC-to-DC quick charging. Oh, and you can use solar panels to charge your energy storage, that’s now powering your vehicle.”

BYD wants to work down the price of its electric car—without any subsidy—to $20,000 or less. Austin says that the price of BYD's EV batteries is currently at $350 per kilowatt hour. “That’s lower than everybody else. Nobody else is even close to that,” Austin said. “And that’s where we are at today.

It all comes full circle, when you consider the effects of the Chinese economy on the price of gasoline. “BYD is completely convinced that the emerging markets are going to eat up all the gasoline. When China and India emerge, the price is going to skyrocket,” Austin said.

The price in the U.S. and the developed world, that is. The Chinese government will continue to subsidize its gas to around $1.50 a gallon, according to Austin. “They don’t curb their consumption. So, we’ll get screwed with high prices, and they’ll continue to consume at incredible rates," he said. Consider that less than six percent of Chinese currently own cars, but that around 30 percent now have the financial means to buy a vehicle. “There are 330 million cars yet to be sold,” Austin said.

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China and the Future of Rare Earth Elements

A recent diplomatic spat between China and Japan has heightened territorial tensions and called attention to China’s growing forcefulness with foreign powers. One of the more intriguing aspects of this development was China’s suspension of the export of “rare earth” elements (REE) to Japan. REE comprise 17 metallic elements with a variety of modern industrial and commercial applications ranging from petroleum refining to laptop computers to green energy applications to radar. China produces roughly 95 percent of the global supply of REE and Japan is the largest importer. China’s disruption of REE shipments to Japan has caused alarm among other importer countries, bringing new urgency to the search for new supplies and substitutes.

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A look at China’s auto industry

Predicting the future is arguably the most important and hardest task facing strategists. One way of loading the dice in their favor: scrutinizing the demographic, technological, environmental, macroeconomic, and other long-term forces constantly shaping the global economy. The most eye-opening implications typically lurk at the intersections where multiple trends (and dozens or more subtrends) interact with one another, often in complex and not-so-obvious ways. Moreover, to analyze trends successfully, executives must develop a fine-grained understanding of the potential impact for specific geographies and industries.¹

Only a dozen years ago, for example, authoritative predictions for the coming decade envisioned no more than a few million mobile-phone users throughout Africa. Local income, consumption, technology, infrastructure, and regulatory conditions seemed to hold little promise for significant growth. Less than ten years later, though, Nigeria alone had 42 million mobile subscribers—80 times more than initial forecasts predicted—as growth skyrocketed, largely as a result of the interaction between just two trends: improved income levels and cheaper handsets. This was a massive growth opportunity that global telcos missed but African and Middle Eastern players captured, to the tune of more than $100 billion,² by developing low-cost business models.

How can company strategists spot the next big opportunity or looming threat in their industries before it’s apparent to everyone? In this article, we’ll describe a four-step methodology for making global trends part of a scenario-based strategic-planning process. By bringing together trends and their interactions, industry-specific insights, and problem-solving techniques, this approach helps create quantitative, actionable, and unbiased scenarios for what might happen in the next five to ten years. Better scenarios, in turn, can help companies challenge conventional wisdom, pressure-test existing business models, identify market opportunities, and develop more innovative products and services.

To illustrate our thinking, we’ll look at an intriguing example—how Chinese automakers could defy conventional wisdom and steal a march on competitors in developed markets by succeeding there much more quickly than expected in a future characterized by natural-resource constraints, unceasing innovation, a growing role for governments, and a shift of economic growth and power to emerging markets.

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Solar, Wind Energy Storage May Save Both Power and Money

Large-scale energy storage, which is especially useful for incorporating significant amounts of variable solar- and wind-generated electricity into utility grid systems, is becoming a hot topic.

Projects in several states are examining a variety of energy storage technologies under development by private companies. Among them are:

• In New York state, Beacon Power Co. is developing a 20-megawatt project that uses flywheel technology to store electricity.

• In Minnesota, the company Xcel Energy has reported success with a 1-megawatt battery storage system it is testing.

• In Wisconsin, President Obama recently visited a small company called ZBB Energy that plans to add workers as it develops large-format batteries that the company says will allow inexpensive, cost-effective storage of solar and wind energy.

• In California, the mayor of Los Angeles recently announced that the city's municipal utility would work with one of China's largest companies, BYD, to develop a 5- to 10-megawatt renewable-energy storage station in the mountains about 100 miles north of the city.

Throughout the country, as utilities increasingly offer time-of-use rates, owners of residential or business solar photovoltaic systems may be able to take advantage of a similar approach by producing more electricity than they use at high-priced peak times and limiting most of their own usage to lower-priced off-peak hours. Similarly advantageous time-based pricing plans may be available to owners of plug-in vehicles.

The California Public Utilities Commission sees large-scale energy storage as a possible alternative to building more generation capacity to meet peak demand, Mr. Nelson adds, and the CPUC oversees Self-Generation Incentive Program grant funding for installations associated with fuel cells.

Also exploring renewable-energy storage is Los Angeles, which recently announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding for the construction of a giant battery storage station for electricity generated from wind and solar resources.

The agreement "is an important step forward in building technology that does not even exist yet that will revolutionize how utilities across the country store their renewable energy," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said.

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One Nation Under Green

More than 50 years ago, the United States created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to foster innovation in space technologies, national defense, and information technologies. One result: the creation of the Internet. In 2007 Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in an effort to mimic DARPA’s success and ensure that America remains a world leader in science and technology. NEWSWEEK’s R. M. Schneiderman spoke with the director of ARPA-E, Arun Majumdar, to learn more about the future of the agency and how its projects will help spur innovation in green cars.

How aggressively should we be pursuing electric cars?

One of our mission statements is to enhance energy and economic security for the United States. Part of that is to reduce our imports of energy from foreign countries. Obviously our biggest import is oil. I think electric cars are an option we need to pursue very aggressively. But I think an internal-combustion engine will still be around. The biggest obstacle in the electrification of cars is the battery. The challenge in that is that the energy density of the battery, which controls how much energy you can pack in a certain amount of weight, is just not enough today. And today’s batteries—lithium-ion batteries—the costs are just too high. To use a football analogy, lithium-ion batteries are like a running game. But you need a passing game as well.

So what’s the passing game?

We are funding a whole portfolio of approaches that range from zinc-air batteries, magnesium-ion batteries, lithium-air batteries, lithium-sulfur batteries, etc. We don’t know which ones will succeed in the end. It’s too risky for the private sector to invest in. So we said, let’s give this a shot and perhaps a few of them will become business-ready, and then the private sector will pick them up.

In terms of green car technology, where do we stand in comparison with other leading nations?

China is moving very aggressively, and they are building up their infrastructure. They are doing the right thing for their own country. I believe we are still ahead in R&D and innovation. But in terms of deployment of clean energy technology, China is probably the most aggressive in the world. I personally feel that the fact that China is building up its infrastructure in clean energy is a huge opportunity for the United States. And we should grab that and develop innovative technologies out here, manufacture them out here, and sell them to China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.

To what extent would doing so help U.S. manufacturers and create jobs?

There are huge opportunities. If we create a battery that is 10 times better in costs and performance, if one of our teams succeeds and we keep our production out here, this is an opportunity, which is analogous to the chip industry. Just like you have Intel inside almost all computers, we could have a battery inside all the electric plug-in hybrids in the future. That’s a humongous global market, and no one has the battery yet.

Will those jobs stay in the U.S.?

That’s a difficult question. What keeps me awake at night is not whether we will innovate. We will. But my worry is that it will scale elsewhere in the world. We need to keep these innovations inside the country and help them create green jobs. I’m not a policy wonk, but the government is the biggest purchaser of energy. And if we could use that purchasing power in some way and create a platform to pull some clean energy into the market and create demand, I think that would be healthy, and it would allow many companies that are innovating right now to put a manufacturing plant out here in the United States.

How much should Congress be investing in your agency to stay competitive with other countries?

ARPA-E is supposed to be DARPA-like. DARPA was started in 1958. But the first appropriated budget was in 1962. So in 1962, the DARPA budget was $246 million. You could do the math and see what it should be today; it would be more than $1 billion.

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Buffett : Business is coming back

California Enacts Energy Storage Law to Help Prepare for More Solar, Wind

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a law believed to be the first in the country requiring utilities to begin planning for ways to store electricity that could be dispatched as needed.

The measure, opposed at various stages by many private and public electricity providers, is considered to be an important step in preparing for the future integration of large amounts of solar and wind energy into the state's electricity grid.

The new law, Assembly Bill 2514, requires the California Public Utilities Commission to begin proceedings by March 1, 2012, to consider targets for all but very small electricity providers to procure "viable and cost-effective energy storage systems."

Private electric companies would have to adopt a procurement target by Oct. 1, 2013, and reach a first-stage goal by Dec. 3, 2015. A second goal for storage achievement would be set for Dec. 31, 2020.

Publicly owned utilities would have to set a target by Oct. 1, 2014, and reach a first-stage goal by Dec. 31, 2016. They are to be given a second-stage goal to be achieved by Dec. 31, 2021.

As a legislative analysis of the new law mentioned, however, at present "there are no commercially available batteries that could cost-effectively store the large amounts of electricity that can be produced by large-scale wind farms or solar facilities. Another form of electricity storage that is already in use in California is pump storage, where water is pumped into a reservoir at night and then released through turbines during the day to produce electricity. Additional research is taking place to develop other storage devices using compressed air, flywheels, fuel cells, and other innovative technologies. In addition, the utilities are currently engaged in pilot projects to determine the viability of different energy storage projects and which technologies perform most effectively in different environments."

The China-based battery and electric-vehicle company BYD has been a leader in developing battery storage for solar and wind energy, and the company recently announced an agreement to work with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to develop a utility-scale storage facility with a capacity of 5 to 10 megawatts.

The storage center, believed to be the largest currently planned in the United States, would be built at the Pine Tree Wind Farm in the Tehachapi Mountains, a renowned wind resource region where extensive wind energy development is now getting under way.

BYD also has been working with the homebuilder KB Home to set up model homes in the city of Lancaster, Calif., that combine battery storage of electricity with solar arrays and electric vehicles. BYD, one of China's largest employers, this year announced that it would establish its North American headquarters in Los Angeles.

The news release from the attorney general's office said, "Energy storage is important for an expanding renewable energy future because solar and wind power are not available at all times. Increasing storage allows California to take greater advantage of its renewable resources while making our electric power grid more reliable.

"Expanded storage will also protect public health by reducing the need for the most polluting 'peaker plants' that only operate during peak demand, usually during the summer when air conditioners in the state are in most intense use."

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Recent Power Storage Deals:
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and BYD Partner for Grid Energy Storage Solution (LADWP)
Spain Endesa signs cooperation agreement with BYD (Endesa)
BYD signs power storage station contracts (with China Southern Power Grid)
BYD unveils initiatives to spotlight new energy drive (with Hunan Power Grid)