I went to the California Clean Tech Open (CCTO) 2008 Launch event in San Jose. It was held at the City Hall Rotunda, which is a a pretty cool building right next to the City Hall tower. There were exhibits around the floor from past CCTO teams as well as some sponsors. Outside the hall there were some hybrid and electric vehicles from Lexus and PG&E. The host for the evening was Marc Gottschalk, one of the founders of the CCTO. Marc recapped the CCTO from the past two years and talked a bit about changes for 2008.

One of the guest speakers was San Jose’s mayor, Chuck Reed. He discussed the city’s “Green Vision” which is a 15 year, 10 point plan for the city.  Some key point he mentioned are to create 25,000 clean tech jobs, reduce per capita energy use by 50%, and receive 100% of our electrical power from clean renewable sources. The mayor also challenged the solar industry to come up with a way to deliver residential solar energy at zero cost to the end consumer.

Another guest speaker was David Rodgers of the Department of Energy. One of his key points was the effort by the CCTO and the DoE to duplicate the CCTO in other regions across the country. Marc mentioned that requests have come in for help establishing similar competitions all over the world. It would be nice to see this focus on clean tech start-ups gain some serious momentum.

The 2007 Award Ceremony for the California Clean Tech Open were held today in San Francisco. The event was held in the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. It started with an exhibit area where each of the finalist team had an opportunity to present their companies to anyone attending the event. Attendees included press, investors, and various other industry affiliates. We had a poster set up with a flier hand out explaining our product and business proposition. We talked to quite a few different people from a wide variety of backgrounds. This reminded me of a trade show that was open to the public. You just never know who your talking to at any given time, and any contact could provide you with an important connecton, so you have to take them all seriously. This lasted from 4:30 - 5:30 PM.

The main program ran from 5:30 - 6:30 PM. It was kicked off by Marc Gotthschalk (left), one of the founders of the CCTO. He was followed by a series of speakers including David Rodgers (top right), Deputy Assistant Secretary, Energy Efficiency, Department of Energy; Jeff Byron (bottom right), Commissioner, California Energy Commission; Noah Horowitz, Senior Scientist, National Resource Defense Council; and Tim Woodward, Managing Director, Nth Power. David Rodgers announced that the DoE had decided to provide each of the winners an expense paid trip to Washington, D. C. to pith their plans to the commercialization group at the DoE. Jeff Byron of the CEC pointed out that California, as a nation state, would be second only to the U. S. as a whole in the consumption of gas. Noah Horowitz of the NRDC pointed out that the current climate crisis has developed environmental heroes in unexpected places, noting that WalMart is responsible for selling over 100 million Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs).

Next in the program were the awards. This section started with the presentation of a CCTO Alumni Award, for the most successful companies from last year’s competition. The award was presented by Rebeca Hwang, Judging Chair for the CCTO. The runner-up is EDC Technologies, last year’s winner in Smart Power and the winner is GreenVolts, last year’s winner for Renewables which recently closed $10M in funding. This year’s winners are as follows:

Smart Power

Winner: Lucid Design Group - Real-time information feedback drives energy conservation
Runner-up: Federspiel Controls - Wireless supervisory control of HVAC systems
Sponsor: AMD
Presenter: Larry Vertal, AMD

Energy Efficiency

Winner: NiLA, Inc. - LED stage set lighting for the entertainment industry
Runner-up: Ahwahnee Technology - Advanced area lighting, disruptive alternative to LEDs and fluorescents
Sponsors: PGE, SDGE, SCE
Presenter: Sharareh Moaddeli, SDGE

Renewables

Winner: 1-Solar - Low-priced long-life inverters for solar PV
Runner-up: Tahoe Water Systems - Self-contained solar/wind based water
Sponsors: PGE, SDGE, SCE
Presenter: Todd Strauss, PGE

Green Building

Winner: BuildFast - House kit for low-income and post-disaster housing
Runner-up: Enverity Corporation - Environmental data management software
Sponsor: Google
Presenter: Bill Weihl, Google

Transportation

Winner: Syncromatics - Automated vehicle location for transit line efficiency
Runner-up: Hum Cycles - High performance electric sport motorcycles
Sponsor: Lexus
Presenter: Kimberly Gardiner, Lexus

Air, Water & Waste

Winner: Microvi Biotech - Waste-free water treatment technologies
Runner-up: EarthGuard - Environmentally friendly plastic packaging
Sponsor: ENVIRON Foundations and Grundfos
Presenters: Alfan DeLorne, ENVIRON Foundation & Poul Doft Fredriksen, Grundfos

Thanks to all the volunteers at the California Clean Tech Open. It was a great experience!

For additional coverage, check out the California Clean Tech Open site and Green Wombat.

CLEAN TECH AWARDS EVENT GALA!
Monday, October 29 - Evening

Anyone. Everyone. Clean Tech Professionals. Curious Minds.
Tackle Global Warming. Great Food. Awards Presentations.

SPEAKERS
Brad Barton, Director of Commercialization, U.S. Department of Energy
Jeff Byron, Commissioner, California Energy Commission
Noah D Horowitz, Senior Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council
Tim Woodward, Managing Director, Nth Power

An organic buffet dinner and wine will be served by Living Room Events.

Please register early - Event Details

This week I had my first taste of writing a grant application. Even though we were very tight on time, Nate and I decided to apply for a grant from the California Energy Commission’s Energy Innovations Small Grant Program. It is part of their Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program aimed at smaller grants. The recent grant solicitation was related to their Electricity Program. The main problem was the due date: September 27, and it required sending a hard copy to San Diego, which meant we had to get it out via FedEx earlier today. It was quite a battle since we just finished up our business plan and didn’t have much time for the grant. Oh yeah, and we had to finish the first draft of our pitch presentation too. Anyway, the grant application turned out pretty well. We won’t get the results until February 2008, but it would really come in handy to help us deploy our prototype systems next year. There will be a Natural Gas solicitation sometime this fall. If we decide to submit a proposal for that one, I’m sure we’ll allocate a lot more time.

As I mentioned, a preliminary version of the pitch presentation was due today. This is for a “dress rehearsal” pitch on Friday. Nate is going to be delivering the pitch. He had his first run through today. It has some rough edges, but over all it was pretty good. Rob, whom I’ve mentioned before, helped once again by giving some great feedback on the pitch. It should be much smother for the Friday rehearsal. Our CCTO mentor, Ed, will be there Friday as well, so hopefully we’ll get some more feedback and have a sleek pitch ready to submit on Sunday. The actual pitch is on October 3. I have the utmost confidence that Nate will be stellar.

I’ve been riding BART to Berkeley whenever I go to the office. It’s pretty convenient and I can even work when I’m on the train. I even loaded a BART QuickPlanner application on my Palm Treo 650 phone so I always have access to schedules and station locations. The goal is to make Aptility a sustainable company, so every little bit helps. When possible, I simply work from home to avoid commuting at all. Unfortunately, BART only goes as far south as Fremont, and I live in San Jose. I have to drive up to Fremont, BART to Downtown Berkeley and then walk to our office. The drive to Fremont is about 15 miles as opposed to 43 miles to the office in Berkeley. So I’m saving about 56 miles per round trip, which is almost 2 gallons of gas in my Ford Escape Hybrid. That’s equivalent to about 40 pounds of CO2 emissions according to terrapass. Plus I get in about two miles of walking in Berkeley.

Next up: “green” business cards.