On Thursday, March 26, 2009, Tesla Motors announced they are now taking orders for the Model S, the much anticipated follow on to the Tesla Roadster. The Model S is an all electric family sedan that can travel up to 300 miles on a single charge. The S is listed as seating 7, thanks to a couple of child seats in the “way-back.” There’s even additional trunk space under the front hood.

The Model S can be recharged in 45 minutes using a 480V outlet, though I’m not sure where you get one. You can also recharge using 110V and 22V outlets with longer recharge times. The battery pack comes in 3 sizes, equating to 160, 230 or 300 miles. The battery pack can be swapped out in 5 minutes, which could lead to battery swapping stations as a business.

Tesla Motors is still relatively unproven with regards to mass production. they have delivered only 300 Roadsters so far. They are looking to receive $350 million in federal loans to build an assebly plant in San Jose, California. The Model S should qualify for a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government, but that still leaves you with a price tag of nearly $50,000. They do provide some long term savings with less maintenance (no oil change) and and expected cost to drive 230 miles of about $5.

Last night I attended a panel titled “Clean Technology - Sustainable Growth: Innovating and Implementing in the Developing World.” The panel was at Santa Clara University and sponsored by the California Clean Tech Open and the university’s Engineers Without Borders student chapter. Outside the theater there were some displays set up showcasing some of the SCU Engineers Without Borders projects, including the low pressure solar distillation apparatus pictured on the right. Other displays showed low cost building insulation derived from denim and pictures from previous projects.

The main assembly began with a presentation by an SCU-EWB co-chair, Yasemin Kimyacioglu, about the low pressure solar distillation project. The apparatus uses an array of solar tubes and coper pipe to pre-heat the water. An electric powered vacuum allows the water in the pressure cooker to boil at 57 degrees Celcius, rather than the normal 100 degrees. The purified steam runs through a condensing coil which utilizes the original contaminated water as a coolant. The prototype is nearly complete and testing will begin soon. There are still some technical hurdles to overcome before deployment, such as elimination of the contaminants from the pressure chamber.

The panel began immediately following the SCU EWB presentation. It was moderated by R. David Hague, VP of Business Development at GreenMountain Engineering, a consulting firm focused on renewable energy and clean technology. The panel included:

• Patrick Freeburger - Co-founder of BuildFast, winner of the CCTO 2007 prize for Green Building
• Rebeca Hwang - Co-VP BASES Social E-Challenge and Judging Chair for CCTO
• Dr. Ashok Gadgil - Senior Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• John Rockwell - Managing Director, Element Partners, a clean technology investment firm

The bulk of the panel session centered around the problems with deploying clean technologies in the developing world. One of the main problems is a difference in values. Each panelist had a personal anecdote illustrating the common misunderstanding of the problems people in the developing world face. For example, Ms. Hwang described a project to deploy water filters in Nicaragua only to find the local men would rather spend their money on beer. Dr. Gadgil told of an unsuccessful attempt to utilize cheap, single family open space housing plans in Afghanistan, where extended families live together with separate areas for the men and women.

Mr. Rockwell pointed out that the only way to be successful in the developing world is to figure out how to make money. Mr. Freeburger described how his company, BuildFast, changed their business model from building complete housing solutions to providing key materials and knowledge to local builders. Dr. Gadgil pointed to SELCO in India as a good example of meeting the needs of the local people. They provide renewable energy solutions to Indian homes and businesses which could not normally afford them. They are able to replace kerosene lighting with CFLs powered by batteries charged by solar arrays. The service provides pre-charged batteries and the lighting solution delivered where needed replacing kerosene with a clean, more affordable, better lighting solution.

Understanding the culture, the value and needs are more important in many ways than the technology. You can be the foremost authority on water decontamination, but unless you really understand the local situation, your solution will probably not be successful. You are simply adding to the junkyard of Western technologies in the third world, as Dr. Gadgil called it. Sometimes you need to learn before you can teach.

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.

We just finished up our final presentation for the CCTO about an hour ago. I think the presentation went well. Nate did a great job. There were 5 or 6 judges for the pitch. They seemed pretty impressed with the delivery, but I’m not sure they bought into the product concept. One of the problems you run into when pitching a home product to investors is that they can easily view themselves as the customers. In our case this was a bit of a disadvantage. Some of the judges have very high-end home automation systems so they see our solution as more low end, like something you would find at Home Depot. But our pricing strategy is not meant for the low end. It is targeted more at the middle to high end. Many of the judges seemed to think we either had to go for the extreme high-end or the commodity pricing.

Anyway, I think the pitch went well and we said everything we wanted to say. Unfortunately I don’t think the audience was completely receptive to our story, so I don’t think we’ll be winning this competition. We definitely got a lot out of participating in the CCTO, so definitely no regrets. Now we have to start moving forward with the plan regardless of the outcome of the CCTO. We’ll find out those results on October 29 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The awards event is open to all, you can go to the CCTO site to register. I think we’ll have an opportunity to present our plan there in exhibit sessions.

Today the final submissions of the presentation slides for the CCTO were due. While we did make some final adjustments today, the slides have been pretty much done for a couple days now. I guess we’re getting a little better not waiting for the last minute. Now the only thing left for the CCTO is actually making the presentation on Wednesday. After that we have to wait until October 29 to find out who wins.

Today we had the opportunity to give a pitch to a mock CCTO judging panel. The pitch was at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) in Palo Alto. The mock panel was made up of a VC, an academic and a CCTO member. The pitch was to follow the same structure as the real pitch sessions next week, that is: 15 minute presentation using 10 slides followed by 10 minutes of Q&A.

As planned, Nate gave the pitch (picture above). I recorded it on my video camera so he could review it later. He did a good job. The only real rough patch was when a couple slides came up in reverse order, but he smoothed over it fairly well. I think he took about 13 minutes. The Q&A session started out more as a critique of the presentation, which was useful as far as fine tuning the presentation, but didn’t really give us a feel for the Q&A process. It also lasted more like 15 minutes rather than 10. Overall the feedback was quite positive.

We have a couple days to refine the slides. The final version is due on September 30. Our final pitch is on October 3.

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.

Well, it wasn’t the last minute, but it was close. Nate and I submitted our business plan to the CCTO at 11:49PM, 11 minutes before the deadline. We even managed to catch the second to last BART train out of Berkeley. In fact, I’m on BART right now writing this on my Treo.

There are still a few things in the plan we would like to improve, but over all we we’re pretty satisfied. The version we submitted is 0.8. We’ll probably get to 1.0 before we go to any investors. Next up we have a grant application due followed by the pitch dress rehearsal on September 28. I wonder when we’ll get to the real work…

By the way, here’s the Aptility logo:

There are only two weeks left until we have to turn in the final business plan for the California Clean Tech Open. There was not a workshop this week so Nate and I could focus on our planning. Recently we have been spending a lot of time thinking about exactly how we want to proceed with the business. We had some really good meetings this week with some technology guys in both embedded software and microprocessors. We also had a productive discussion with one of Nate’s past colleagues, Rob. Rob has really helped us shape our ideas into something on which we can execute. We’ve finally settled on a direction and are now focused on the business plan. Nate is focusing on rewriting the marketing and financial sections of the plan and getting some help from a marketing professional named Wendy. I am focusing on sustainability and operations.

I have found a ton of resources on the web to help with sustainability issues from both a planning and reporting perspective. I’ve gotten a lot of great information from sites like the Global Reporting Initiative, the EPA’s ISO 14001 site, and various corporate sustainability sites. I’m really starting to understand how we need to apply sustainability metrics to all aspects of our business and product planning and execution. A lot of the operational issues and product benefits are becoming quite clear.

The main thing I’m struggling with right now is quantifying the impact of the materials and manufacturing going into the product itself. It’s hard to find all the appropriate data to quantitatively close the loop on the life cycle of the product. I have found a lot of data from sites like the Energy Information Administration, but not a lot of the specifics I need pertaining to the semiconductors, PCBs, and housings which will make up our product. I can apply the G3 reporting concept of boundaries to limit the problem, but I’d really like to be able to do a full environmental balance sheet for the product. Maybe as we get further into development I can get some of this data from our suppliers. For now I can focus on the Design for Environment (DfE), Supplier Network Management, Environmental Management System (EMS), and End-of-Life Practices (EoL) we will need to establish to create a sustainable company.

Nate and I are already trying to set a precedence for employee contributions. We are only commuting to our office in Berkeley a few days a week (though that will increase for the duration of the CCTO) and when we do commute, we do so using public transit where possible. Nate is able to take BART from San Francisco to Berkeley for his commute. I have to drive to Fremont, then I take BART the rest of the way. We even try to locate our meetings with others at locations which encourage public transit such as BART. So far we haven’t had to dive in to the whole arena of supplies and equipment, but that will all come soon enough.