We included Amprius, which was launched in 2008 as a spin out from Stanford University, on our list of 13 battery startups to watch in 2013. The startup has developed a battery based on research from Stanford’s Yi Cui, and its lithium ion batteries use a nano-structured silicon material for the anode part of the battery.

A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Amprius’ nanostructured material allows the anode to be shrunk fourfold, delivering a fourfold increase in energy density.

Battery energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery per given volume. Amprius says its initial batteries can deliver 580 and 600 watt hours per liter, and its next-gen batteries can deliver 650 and 700 watt hours per liter. Traditional lithium ion batteries are operating at closer to 400 watt hours per liter.

Another one of the challenges that Amprius says it has overcome when building this battery is that it has had to engineer the silicon to make it stable enough to be charged and discharged repeatedly over time. The more stable the silicon is the longer the life time of the battery. Amprius says the anode can be charged and discharged more than 500 times while retaining 80 percent of the original capacity (a requirement for original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs).

Amprius says it is supplying its batteries to unnamed smartphone and tablet OEMs and is also working with OEMs to design its batteries in custom ways to fit into new consumer electronics. The next-gen batteries are supposed to go into pilot production later this year.

Amprius has raised at least $25 million from investors including the ones listed above as well as IPV Capital, and Trident Capital. The company has an R&D lab in Sunnyvale, Calif., and an R&D lab and pilot production line in Nanjing, China.

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Investor Steve Jurvetson next to a pulse fridge that cools a D-Wave quantum computer

As you can see in this photo from venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, D-Wave uses a pulse fridge to cool the quantum computer to .02 degrees above absolute zero, and they use Helium-3 in the cooling process.

Quantum computers use a different type of processing compared to traditional computing. As GigaOM’s Jordan Novet explained it earlier this year, “rather than working with binary yes-or-no questions — ones and zeros — quantum computing is more probabilistic, also allowing a combination of zero and one to simultaneously answer many questions with quantum bits of information, or qubits, and tell users more about the likelihood of a situation. It’s not necessarily useful for all kinds of computing, but it could solve problems that current computers can’t.”

Keeping quantum computers that can perform such functions cool can be a tricky process. It’s highly energy intensive and can get expensive. But if the quantum computers are not cooled down, the molecules — which are being manipulated to store data — move around chaotically and can’t be manipulated and read.

Earlier this year physicists at UCLA developed a new cooling process that immerses charged barium chloride molecules into a super cold cloud of calcium atoms. That research is being funded by the Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

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The company is looking to use the funding to help commercialize its batteries, which they’re calling Aurora, and Eos Energy hopes to deliver those to the market in 2014. According to a filing, this B round has been under development for over a year, and the company also says in its release that it is already in the process of raising a series C round, too.

Eos Energy is testing out its first batteries with New York utility ConEdison, and the two are using a state grant to install batteries on the New York grid. The company says it also has other utility partners in the works.

Scientists have been working on using air as the cathode for batteries for half a century. A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with an electrolyte in between. Air, of course, is abundant, light weight, and doesn’t require a heavy casing to contain it inside a battery cell. Also theoretically air can achieve a high energy density, or amount of energy that it can store.

Eos Energy tech innovation comes from founder and inventor Steven Amendola who discovered a breakthrough with his original design of the bi-directional air cathode that could last for 10,000 cycles (or around three decades). The company has told me that its initial battery could cost $160 per kWh, lasts 30 years and be made up of everyday benign materials.

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The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has completed a study that comes up with two ways to use compressed air technology to store wind energy in underground chambers, the national lab said Monday. The two ways both use data and computer modelling to figure out the best sites that could successfully bank wind energy to be used at a later time.

Compressed air, as its name suggests, makes use of an electrically powered air compressor that sends pressurized air into a storage facility, which can be man-made or an underground reservoir. The pressurized air is let out later to run a turbine and generator to produce electricity. As much as 80 percent of the electricity used to compress air can be recovered when the pressurized air is used to generate energy, the lab said. Power losses are common when converting one form of energy to another.

Power in under ground caves

Utilities in the Northwest have a good reason for taking a look at energy storage technology. Wind power makes up about 13 percent (8.6 GW) of the power supply for the Northwest, the national lab said. Wind power tends to be most plentiful at night, when demand is at the lowest. Storing wind power for use during the day would help utilities meet their customers’ demand and manage their grids, which run smoothly when there is a balance of supply and demand. That prompted the Bonneville Power Administration to work with the lab to look into whether compressed air would be a good fit.

Many U.S. utilities or power producers have done preliminary studies or even pilot projects to check out different types of energy storage technologies, including various types of batteries. Often their regulators require them to gradually increase the amount of renewable energy they supply to their customers. Wind and solar have been popular choices, but they don’t generate a steady supply of electricity around the clock. Here is where energy storage comes in handy to help utilities manage their supply and demand.

The researchers were looking for two suitable underground sites for storing compressed air. They used data from gas exploration in Washington state and a computer model that simulates the flow of fluids underground. The idea is to see how much air a site can hold and how easy it’d be for the air to be harvested for power generation. For the study, an ideal underground storage would be at least 1,500 feet deep and 30 feet thick, and it should be close to transmission lines, the lab said.

Pacific Northwest

They found two locations, a place by the Columbia River, just across from Boardman, Ore., and another one in the Yakima Canyon that is roughly 10 miles north of Selah, Wash.

Sasquatch watches over the lobby of Facebook’s data center in Oregon

The scientists then sketched out two different processes for storing and re-using energy. At the Columbia River location, which is close to a natural gas pipeline, a compressed air storage plant can use natural gas to heat the compressed air and in the process boost the amount of electricity that can be produced.

At the Yakima location, the facility can use geothermal heat to run a chiller, which will in turn cool the air compressor to make it run more efficiently. Geothermal energy also can heat up the compressed air when it’s released from storage.

Bonneville will now take the results of the $790,000 study and do a round of cost-and-benefit analysis to figure out if compressed air makes for a good business case.

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Nikola Tesla. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Last night I tweeted a link to this video, about the legendary scientist Nikola Tesla pitching Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and commented that the truth is sometimes funnier that comedy. And I was surprised by the sheer number of people who agreed with that sentiment. I went to sleep thinking about that reaction, and also thinking about it in the context of the decline of long-term thinking in our society.

If Tesla (I assume you know who he is) did indeed walk into a VC meeting, he wouldn’t get the attention or the money for his idea because it wouldn’t fit the time-scale of what venture-capital investments have become. Having followed the business of technology for a long time, I have seen that time-scale get shorter and shorter. I guess it’s the price to be paid for the excesses of the internet bubble of the 1990s.

The Bubble After Effects

During that time the business changed from funding innovation to funding concepts and eventually to projects. The fallout of the internet bubble was that venture-capital firms shifted focus. This shifting time-frame is one of the main reasons we are seeing fewer and fewer investments in hardcore technologies and more of the dollars being shifted to the softer aspects of technology.

Yes, bloggers like me like to harp on the fact that many investors are infected by short-termism. But let’s not forget that some of these folks have taken big risks, and sometimes have failed big, too.

Cleantech has ruined many reputations and resulted in billion dollar loses. Yes, there are a couple rare big bet successes that will come out of cleantech, like Tesla Motors and Nest, but the overall trend has been losses.

Now many of the investors that aggressively backed cleantech are trying to find a more cautious approach to cleantech that more closely aligns with the traditional short VC time frame. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers, which lead the charge on cleantech investments only to be left wounded, has recently changed tact in many ways, and in particular to go after social so it can get back into the quick returns on its investments.

That’s the trend that all investors, in some respects are, moving toward. They’re all looking for the next Facebook or the next Twitter, but no one wants to look for the next Juniper or the next Intel or even the next ARM. I am not saying Facebook and Twitter are not great companies and have not scaled dramatically and impacted the world. What I am pointing to is the fact that Silicon Valley funds fewer and fewer silicon companies.

Why are we assuming that we are all done with developing new kinds of chips for uses that we are not even imagining yet? Are we done inventing the routing technologies of the future?

It’s hard to invest in the future

Think of it this way: Had Vinod Khosla not backed Pradeep Sindhu to work on Juniper, we would all be living in Cisco’s vision of the internet future and using its hardware, which it would have made and sold at its own pace and at its own prices. Today, if you need to build a big company like that, you need to have deep pockets. Luckily Andy Bechtolsteim has those and that is why Arista Networks exists and is proving to be a major disrupter.

The point is not to just rant, but to note that there is a lot more innovation to be done. All of today’s stars — from Dropbox to SnapChat to every little hot company that pops up — is built on those basic building blocks, and we have to continue to make better, cheaper and beefier building blocks.

Yes, I understand that there is a chill around chip stocks, and Wall Street investors are showing more interest in pokes than petabyte speeds. I don’t necessarily think that this kind of rational thinking is bad for the investors, but when it comes to fundamental innovation, it points to a a real challenge ahead. And forget what Wall Street thinks, isn’t venture capital really risk capital? Risk, unfortunately, is a four-letter word around these parts these days.

Failure is an option

Elon Musk in front of the frunk

Forget chip startups, does anyone think that the Sand Hill Road firmament could have funded Amazon Web Services, a disruptive economic force, if they had a chance? Probably not. How about the iPhone? The same story. If you look at those two examples, and add Google’s self-driving car, Google Glass and what companies like Tesla are doing, you understand that patience is a virtue. Unfortunately, patience is in short supply in the Valley these days.

I wrote this on the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’ death, and I want to resurface it:

A dear friend put it best when he said that Jobs allowed himself the freedom to dream big and most of us need to learn from him and supersize our dreams. While that is true of everyone, the Silicon Valley of 2012 needs to pay heed. Silicon Valley of quick flips, petty jealousies and rampant short-termism needs to remind itself of a greater purpose than a public offering. Change is more than a headline. It takes patience. It is more profound. And it is thinking about more than just us.

Maybe this video is a reminder to all of us that while we might be living in great times, the future is still to be invented.

More about the video: The video is in support of a Kickstarter campaign that hopes to collect enough money to build a statue of Nikola Tesla. While to many Tesla might be a car, in reality Tesla was a scientist who worked on difficult things. As an aside, we at GigaOM are fortunate that our New York offices are in the Radio Wave Building, the very building where Nikola Tesla lived.

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Think of water rushing in through the open hatch of a submarine, and you get an idea of the forces at work underwater. Atmospheric pressure and the weight of the water combine to create pressures that compound with increasing depth. At a depth of 400 meters (almost a quarter mile), for example, the pressure is that of 40 atmospheres, one atmosphere being the pressure we experience at sea level. Subhydro envisions installing large concrete tanks at depths of 400-800 meters, and the deeper the better for maximizing energy generation.

When the “hatch” is opened, water is allowed to flow into the tanks through a turbine that drives an electric generator. The more and larger the tanks, the longer the generation can go on. When the tanks are filled, the turbine can be reversed to pump out the water, a process that draws on the power grid and consumes energy. In this way, the pumped storage plant functions like an underwater battery that can be re-charged, much like a hydroelectric plant on dry land pumps water into an upper reservoir after it has passed through a turbine.

According to Subhydro, the efficiency of the underwater plant is about 80 percent, comparable to efficiencies achieved at conventional plants. Integrating the pumped storage plant with wind or solar farms could create a grid storage system that harnesses excess renewable energy generation to pump out the tanks and flood them during peak hours of production.

Another approach to underwater grid storage is in the works at a depth of 80 meters in Lake Ontario, just off shore of Toronto. There, Hydrostor will begin building underwater tanks that will hold compressed air. Surplus energy from renewables (wind, solar) will provide the energy to compress air from the atmosphere and pump it in to the tanks. To put energy back into the grid, the air is allowed to surface, driving generators as it expands back into the atmosphere.

Hydrostor is partnering with Toronto Hydro to build the 1MW/4MWh compressed air energy storage demonstration facility. The system will run at 70 percent efficiency, according to Hydrostor. Earlier this month MaRS Cleantech Fund announced an investment in Hydrostor’s tech.

Clearly, there are still some hurdles to overcome before energy companies everywhere take the plunge. The environmental impact of offshore submerged facilities will need to be considered, as will the building materials themselves. To withstand the underwater pressure, Subhydro is working with research partners to develop thin concrete reinforced with steel fibers, while Hydrostor’s system will use inflatable polyester bags to hold compressed air. Building underwater facilities is itself energy-intensive, so whether the process can be made cost and energy-effective will determine whether cleantech is ready to get its feet wet.

Image via Knut Gangåssæter/Doghouse

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For example, rural Kenyan farmers can easily spend 30 percent of their income on fertilizer, but 80 percent of that fertilizer can be wasted because there is little data collected about the best places and times to use it. The lack of info isn’t just from the farmer’s perspective. Aramburu says when he met the CEO of a major fertilizer company recently, he asked him what he knew about his customers — his response: “very little.”

Re:char CTO Luke Iseman (L) and founder/CEO Jason Aramburu (R) showing off an early prototype of SoilIQ

A soil data cloud in the sky

The two young entrepreneurs latest project emerged from this black hole of information. Working within French telco giant Orange’s first accelerator program, called Orange Fab, Re:char plans to build a $5 plug-in device, called SoilIQ, for an Android phone that can read the moisture levels in soil. During our interview, Iseman takes a very early prototype of the device out of a pouch and shows me how it plugs into the Android phone and taps into the phone’s computing power to detect moisture levels between two screws.

Down the road such a gadget could be developed to pick up other soil data, like fertilizer-level readings. Iseman, an avid gardener, schools me on NPK — nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — which he says are the holy grail of fertilizer readings. When SoilIQ is a commercial product, farmers could buy the gadget to take these types of readings, and enhance their farming productivity and the efficiency of their fertilizer use.

But the real value of such a system will likely be in the data collection, and the data analytics and services. The hourly and daily micro readings, which are coded with GPS data, could be used to create a cloud-based location data map of the quality and details of the land. This information could be used to launch data-focused services for both farmers, fertilizers companies, government groups, and others.

Re:char envisions using the data to launch a subscription service for farmers that can alert the farmers to the most fertile land, or even if there’s the danger of crop disease anywhere in the region (maize rot is a huge problem in rural Kenya). Fertilizer companies could use such data to offer better products to farmers, and potentially learn more about the end farmer customer (fertilizer can change hands ten times in Kenya until it reaches the person who will use it, says Aramburu).

Such land data could even be valuable outside of the farming communities. A massive data soil map in the cloud could help determine things like land values, or land ownership issues.

SoilIQ is part internet of things, part sustainability, and part data analytics. The entrepreneurs are actually very focused on developing tools that encourage the more efficient use of resources, which could (and should in my opinion) be the next-generation of cleantech focus.

The core concept also reminds me of what Safecast has been trying to do with its grass roots nuclear radiation sensors and data mapping in Japan. Safecast is bringing that concept to air pollution in L.A., too.

Orange interest

For telco Orange, which has a substantial presence in Kenya, such a system could help them increase mobile data use among customers. The Android devices obviously send the data to the cloud over the cellular networks. And Android phones — as Google announced this week at Google.io — are being used by 900 million people globally.

But potentially even more important is the branding involved. As Orange’s Executive Director of Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, told me in an interview at the Orange Fab event on Monday night, the mobile phone is often times the first branded product that a customer in a developing country has. That brand in turn has a unique ability to transition into offering core services, like mobile banking, and credit.

Orange has a mobile payment system, Orange Money, that is growing nicely and Re:char could plug into it for its planned services. And if SoilIQ becomes a killer app for the bottom of the pyramid, Orange would have a key position in it. Orange is interested enough in Re:char’s new idea that it not only brought the company into its accelerator program, but is investing in its angel round.

Re:char hopes to close an angel round by the end of the program, and later this year raise a series A round. By the end of the three months, Re:char also plans to have its soil moisture-reading gadget developed enough to move it into production.

If you’re a backyard composter or gardener — like Re:charge CTO Iseman — you’re probably wondering if you can get your hands on SoilIQ one day. Aramburu and Iseman tell me that they’d like to make it available in the U.S., too, so the gardening hobbyist could collect their own data.

Clearly, the team is in the very early stages of making SoilIQ, so a lot of their plans will hinge on these next few months. They plan to keep running the kiln bio charcoal business, and think SoilIQ could even help grow that business, too. They also might split the businesses in two down the road.

Ultimately if they can deliver a simple, easy to use, and cheap device, and convince Kenyan farmers to start using it, they could be on their way to unleashing data from Kenya’s rural landscape.

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One of the underwater Streetview cameras, on display at Google I/O.

Google launched Streetview for the world’s oceans in cooperation with Underwater Earth the at the end of last year, and has mapped a total of six sites so far, including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia as well as reefs in Hawaii and the Philippines. Vevers explained that his organization’s Catlin Seaview Survey has been using divers carrying custom-made cameras that shoot photos every three seconds, with divers being able to cover about two kilometers during every expedition.

That’s slow — maybe too slow. The world’s coral reefs are receding quickly, which has been one of the main motivations behind the project. “We set up our project to reveal the reefs of the world,” Vevers said, adding: “People don’t want to protect anything they can’t see.”

However, Verers said showing off the beauty of coral reefs to the world is only “half the story.” The project has also been working on image recognition technologies, with the goal of mapping species and giving scientists around the world access to new material to work with.

So why did Google get involved with the project? Foulkes said that it wasn’t driven by commercial motivations, but freely admitted that it was also about showing off the capabilities of Google Maps. One example: Vevers’ team uses Google’s business photos tool, which is meant to give stores the ability to upload panoramic photos, to create its underwater photospheres.

Vevers’ plan is to capture and reveal all of the world’s coral reefs within the next three years. “We feel this is very much a race against time,” he said. That’s why the project now wants to enlist amateurs in its quest as well. Divers can simply use their cell phones in water-proof cases and then upload their photospheres to Google Maps. And he urged volunteers to become active soon: “What happens in the next ten years is likely going to affect our oceans fo the next 10,000 years.”

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The artificial leaf’s titanium dioxide and silicon nanowires are arranged in an array that actually resembles a microscopic forest of straight pines. The key to achieving good solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency is the integration of the components — the nanowire semiconductors that absorb light, an interfacial layer, and co-catalysts for the water splitting reaction — in a structure that resembles and functions like a chloroplast.

Plants are so efficient at turning sunlight into sugars partly because of what is termed the “Z-scheme”: the daisy chain of molecules that deliver a charged electron from a chloroplast to molecular energy production in the cell. The artificial leaf uses the Z-scheme, too, but with the silicon nanowires responsible for the hydrogen generation and the titanium dioxide nanowires contributing to the formation of by-product oxygen. The use of two semiconductor materials allows for a large part of the sunlight spectrum to be harnessed (the silicon works off visible light and the titanium dioxide uses UV), while the forest-like array of nanowires increases the surface area for the solar-to-fuel reactions, which are helped along by embedded catalysts.

The artificial leaf has a conversion efficiency of 0.12 percent, comparable to that of natural photosynthesis. To be commercially viable, the efficiency number will have to get into the single digit percentages, and companies like MIT spin-off Sun Catalytix have already chosen to refocus their efforts away from artificial leaf tech. Replacing the current-limiting titanium dioxide anode in the system is the Berkeley researchers’ next target for improving conversion efficiency.

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On Thursday solar installer SolarCity announced that it has signed up Goldman Sachs, and other investors, to create a $500 million fund to support leases for solar panels for home and business owners. With that much money, SolarCity can install some 110 MW worth of solar panels.

Solar leases are a contract between the building owner and SolarCity, whereby SolarCity pays the upfront cost of installing the system, owns and maintains the panels, and the building owner pays for the monthly electricity for the power from the panels over around 20 years. As Ucilia noted on GigaOM Pro today, the residential solar leasing market alone is expected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2012 to $5.7 billion in 2016, according to GTM Research.

Some banks and even companies like Google have been willing to put hundreds of millions into these types of funds. SolarCity has been able to raise $1.7 billion in funding over its lifetime to finance installations from groups like U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. Other solar financing companies — and the competition is now getting fierce — include Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance.

There’s such a demand for solar leases and financing that even some companies are falling behind on getting funding for these businesses. SunPower said earlier this month that demand for its residential solar leases is far greater than the money available to finance them. Power company NRG Energy also wants to retry getting into this space, after trying out this market awhile back.

It’s not just banks and corporate do-gooders that want the opportunity to make a decent return — some 10 to 12 percent in some cases. Crowd-funding is starting to appear as an interesting blip on the radar. Startup Solar Mosaic says that it’s now raised $1 million from its crowd-funders for its solar panel systems, which offer around a 4.5 percent annual yield. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that commercial‐scale solar panel systems can reach returns of 8 percent to 14 percent in states like Hawaii, Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

As big power players, upstart solar financiers and even everyday crowd-funders grow these funds and receive the returns, this market will start to expand significantly. As a boom of solar panels continues to hit the U.S., various parties can make significant money off this transition. Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects that residential solar panels could be installed on 2.4 percent of U.S. houses by 2020.

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What followed those milestones has been an interesting mix of attention on Tesla from the media and bloggers — including surprise, extreme 180-degree about-face, and a general lovefest — as well as attention from Wall Street, which bifurcated into newly won-over Tesla-believers and disturbed Tesla shorters. What most of these people fail to realize is that the road to true innovation in the auto industry takes a very long time.

On the blogging front, for example, in a Business Insider post on Wednesday called What Everyone Got Wrong About Tesla, a writer chronicles the criticism of Tesla over the years. The writer didn’t include my least favorite article from all of 2013 written on Tesla, by Henry Blodget, editor-in-chief of Business Insider, called “The Tesla Nightmare Shows Why Today’s All-Electric Cars Are (Basically) Dead On Arrival.”

It’s not that electric cars won’t struggle (see my long investigative piece on Fisker), but that many people just don’t get how the ecosystem, technology, and marketplace work and are so quick to make declarations about electric cars for the sole purpose of getting attention and — if you’re a blogger — page views. Tesla has actually emerged as a success story, not in the last week, but gradually over a decade by overcoming hurdles every day.

Another company took a very long time to twist and turn, and finally come out on top, too: Apple. And some of Tesla’s most gushy recent love-fest posts are about its comparison to the design-centric gadget maker: Tesla is the new Apple, Would Apple really buy Tesla? (no), and Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. Like the legions of Apple and Jobs fanboys, Tesla and Musk are now on the way to developing their own fanboys that will track their every move and product.

When it comes to investors, short interest (the amount of shares that investors have sold short, expecting the stock to drop in price) in Tesla since the company went public in 2010 has been nothing short of remarkable. According to Bloomberg, “short interest in Tesla was 40 percent of available shares as recently as April 19, more than 11 times the average of companies in the Russell 1000.”

But following Tesla’s milestone’s last week, short interest dropped by 17 percent in the five days through May 13, noted Bloomberg — Tesla shorters were forced to “buy $276 million worth of the automaker’s shares, pushing the company toward the biggest rally in the Russell 1000 Index (RIY) this year.”

I don’t remember a company in recent years, other than maybe Apple, that has had such massive skepticism from media and investors, followed by such intense love. This week there’s Apple-style product rumors buzzing about Tesla showing off a self-driving Model S, and launching a battery-swapping service (that would actually be cool). Usually it’s the love-hate relationship unfolds the other way around. The internet is a weird place.

Tesla actually made it past its most recent dangerous startup phase over half a year ago. Back in November 2012 Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla had “made it through the Valley of Death,” and reached its goals for scaling up Model S production.

Musk might be a media and stock puppeteer (see the 5 lessons from the NYT, Tesla dust up) but as a leader of a public company it’s not in his best interest to publicly lie. Tesla was clearly on its way to success back then — after nine years of overcoming hurdles. The earnings and stock are just a delayed sign of that performance. And before that Musk made it through the darker periods of the company in 2008, by personally floating the company and even borrowing money from friends.

The reality is that Tesla has just started on its full court press on announcements, media coverage, and stock growth, and is hoping for a marketcap that rivals the big auto companies. These are 10 milestones that Tesla hopes will enable it to hit a $43 billion marketcap.

Tesla will also no doubt hit some hurdles as it tries to transition into a larger auto maker — if anyone remembers it delayed its Model X launch by a year to the end of 2014. But it’s actually pretty hard to be an independent new automaker, and true game-changing innovation is even harder and takes a very long time.

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Adding energy storage reflects the evolution of the company, which started off as a solar cell and panel maker before it entered the power plant development business. SunPower has carried out pilot energy storage projects in recent years and worked with different energy storage technologies, including advanced lead acid and zinc bromide batteries.

But lithium-ion batteries “will likely be the first technology to have an impact,” said Jack Peurach, executive vice president of products. The emergence of electric cars plays a role in making lithium-ion battery the front runner for being paired with solar, he added.

SunPower & Flextronics Factory in Milpitas, CA

SunPower executives didn’t provide details, such as the timing and battery suppliers, for its energy storage plans. But the discussion puts SunPower on a growing roster of solar energy companies that are offering or plan to offer energy storage.

SolarCity, for example,  has been bundling lithium-ion batteries from Tesla Motors with its solar energy systems and applying for a California program that subsidizes energy storage installations. One Roof Energy is working with battery maker Silent Power to roll out products. Korean conglomerate Hanwha Group, which runs a solar panel manufacturing subsidiary, is an investor in both OneRoof and Silent Power. SunEdison has done a pilot project with a battery system from startup Seeo.

Energy storage will be part of SunPower’s plan to expand its reach in the commercial and residential market, where it sells power purchase agreements or leases via its dealers or its own project development business. The company designs the power purchase agreements for its commercial and government customers and leases for homeowners. Power purchase agreements and leases work in similar ways: business or home owners sign a long-term contract of up to 20 years and pay a monthly fee for the solar electricity from the SunPower solar energy systems on their rooftops.

SunPower’s foray into the energy storage business will prompt more comparison with SolarCity, which started in 2006 as purely a solar installer. SolarCity is most active in the residential and commercial markets, but it scored the first utility project last year. As a result, the two companies have been competing more intensely in recent years.

In fact, a lawsuit filed by SunPower against SolarCity and five people last year highlighted that rivalry. The lawsuit accused five former SunPower employees of stealing confidential data and brought the data with them when they went to work for SolarCity. The two companies settled on Dec. 31, 2012, and a judge dismissed the lawsuit in January, SolarCity said in its 2012 annual report. It didn’t disclose the amount of the settlement.

SunPower executives didn’t say whether they will sell energy storage in the United States first or in other regions. Werner said that, for now, energy storage makes financial sense only in markets that offers government incentives. That would include California, Germany and Japan.

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On top of that Tesla says CEO Elon Musk plans to buy $100 million worth of common stock, of which $45 million will be bought in the offering, and $55 million will be bought directly from Tesla.

Tesla says it will use part of these funds — the notes specifically — to pay back the entirety of the loan to the Department of Energy early, and will also use some of the funds for other general corporate purposes. Tesla raised a $465 million loan from the DOE and has previously said it will pay that back in half the time it’s been allotted. So, that goal of half the time, has now been condensed even further.

Tesla has talked about raising more money for awhile, and many have speculated that company would want more funds to grow. This will be Tesla’s fourth offering (an S-3!). Back in 2011, Tesla also used a follow-on offering combined with a private placement to raise funds, and did so again, raising $221 million, in late 2012. The company went public in the Summer of 2010.

Tesla’s shares have been on a tear recently, and traded over $90 per share this week. On this news, Tesla stock was up 5.49 percent in after hours trading.

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Peer-to-peer car sharing service appeals to the urban and young people, and  that partly explains why college campuses and large cities like San Francisco have been the labs for companies such as RelayRides and Getaround.

One of the benefits of this type of the service is the ability for customers to rent a car by the minute or hour, something that traditional rental car companies don’t allow. But for San Francisco-based RelayRides, an increasing number of its customers are paying for daily, weekly or even monthly rentals, said Steve Webb, the company spokesman. The majority of RelayRides’ revenues come from those types of rentals, he said.

That trend is good news for car owners who are able to part with their cars for an extended period of time. They could make more money with fewer renters. That also cuts the amount of time the car owners would need to meet with their customers — RelayRides switched to promoting the in-person exchange of keys last year when it pushed for a national expansion.

The peer-to-peer car sharing market is growing but remains very small. To scale up, a car sharing service has to market well and sign up a large network of cars, create an easy way for car owners to manage rentals and get paid and for renters to reserve and find the types of cars they want. A good customer service unit to settle any dispute and resolve insurance and other issues is also a must. As GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher pointed out, getting people to feel comfortable using the service remains a hurdle. Webb said many car owners prefer to meet their renters in person before handing over the keys.

Still, RelayRides decided it wanted a way for renters to access cars without having to arrange for a meet up. It announced yesterday the purchase of a competitor, Wheelz, which has developed software that allows renters to find, reserve and unlock cars using their smart phones. An electronic device installed inside the car makes unlocking with the phone possible.

This automated tech was something RelayRides used to hire people to install regularly. But it was too costly and time consuming that the company largely ditched that effort, though it still offers it to car owners who rent out their cars frequently, Webb said. The device and software aren’t proprietary technology and are designed for running fleet services. Buying Wheelz gives RelayRides its own technology that it can then customize and compete more effectively against the likes of Getaround, which gives the car owners the unlocking device that they can install themselves.

Will the long-term focus for peer-to-peer car sharing be a long-term trend? What do you guys think?

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That first RE.WORK summit will take place on 19 September, which is also the second day of GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference in London. The RE.WORK program will kick off with a focus on the areas of: the internet of things, 3D printing, nanotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, computing systems and sensors.

“We’re trying to showcase emerging technologies and breakthrough ideas,” summit founder Nikita Johnson told me. “It’s all about reworking big challenges that we’re facing in the future. We want to bring the technology and science aspect, but with mission of positive impact.”

While the first of these summits will focus on technology, others will have different themes: one in December will deal with urbanization, RE.WORK Health will take place next year, and still others will handle energy, education and the environment. The first three meetings will take place in London, with others set for Dublin, Berlin and other European cities. Events will also be followed up with smaller meet-ups, Johnson added.

Apart from Solve For X, other initiatives in this space include TED, to a certain extent (RE.WORK looks to be a bit more collaborative and interactive) and the engineering-led Global Grand Challenges Summit.

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What are the challenges of growing a solar installation company? SolarCity provides some good insight into that question as it reports earnings for the first full quarter since it became a public company last December.

Raising funds to support its financial product offerings, signing up a greater number of new customers, expanding its operations, and shortening the project completion process are just some of the issues outlined by SolarCity’s executives during their discussion with financial analysts yesterday.

These issues are nothing new, of course, but SolarCity’s financial results help to quantify some of their costs. Given that the solar market is still young, most of SolarCity’s competitors are private and often much smaller.

The California company installed more megawatts of solar energy projects during the first quarter than it initially anticipated (46MW instead of 41MW). But it didn’t raise its 2013 installation forecast, which remains at 250 MW this year. SolarCity boosted its first-quarter sales to $28.2 million but posted $31 million in losses.

“At this stage, we still find ourselves delivery constrained. It’s a matter of scaling our residential operation as well as bringing in our commercial projects on schedule that prevent us from increasing the guidance from 250MW right now,” said CEO Lyndon Rive during the conference call. “We are just focusing our operational capacity.”

SolarCity runs on a business model that is quite different from many of its competitors. The company does the sales, engineering, installation and maintenance with its in-house crew. Rivals such as Sungevity, OneRoof Energy, Sunrun and Clean Power Finance farm out the installation and maintenance work to roofers and other installers. Some of them want to build their brands and invest in marketing and sales to consumers while others sell their financial products and services to installers. Vivint, which has built a large home security system business before getting into solar, operates more like SolarCity.

SolarCity’s model requires much more capital to scale up the business. It needs to hire and train more people, maintain trucks and other tools of the trade and set up shop in expanding its reach across the country. It also has to aggressively court consumers.

The company does business in 14 states, and in March it announced a plan to set up operations in Nevada. The company saw its operating expenses grow from $24.7 million in the first quarter of 2012 to $34.5 million a year later. It serves home and business owners, as well as schools and government agencies. It’s getting into the utility market, too. By the end of the first quarter, SolarCity had accumulated 54,416 customers, and most of those customers are in the residential space: 33MW of the 46MW it completed during the first quarter went to homes.

Raising enough money to finance leases and power purchase agreements is another big challenge for SolarCity and its competitors. With leases or power purchase agreements, customers pay a monthly fee for the electricity generated from the solar panels on their rooftop. They don’t own the panels, however, since they didn’t pay for the high upfront costs of the equipment and labor that can run around $20,000 for an average system in places like California.

The investors that give the funds that support those financing options own the solar electric systems, and they get to take advantage of a 30 percent federal investment tax credit and count on revenues from the monthly payments for the duration of the contracts, which usually run 20 years. As of May 10, SolarCity has enough funds to finance 158MW worth of projects.

SolarCity is a formidable fundraiser. In its 2012 annual report, the company said it had raised $1.7 billion to finance installations since its inception from companies such as U.S. Bancorp, Google, PG&E and Credit Suisse. SolarCity also puts in its own money in some of the funds to finance the installations. The pressure to raise money consistently is even greater now that SolarCity is a public company and must not only show growth but also generate profits at some point. It doesn’t want to be in a situation where the demand for its leases outstrips the funds available, something that happened to SunPower during the first quarter of this year.

SolarCity also needs to shorten the amount of time it takes from selling solar panel systems to installing each project. It has 195MW of backlog, some of which are planned as multi-year projects. But overall, the company wants to sell and install the equipment during the same month, Rive said. To accomplish that, the company is constantly looking for ways to simplify the installation process by using different designs for racks and other components. It also invests in software to reduce the time it takes to apply for permits and complete the sales process.

SolarCity has been an interesting company to watch since its start in 2006. It was one of a crop of venture-backed companies in the emerging residential solar market. Now, how well the company can grow its business and make a profit will be used by investors to evaluate other solar retail service companies that want to go public.

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The companies range from hardware startups that can help customers in developing countries use their phones in new ways, to data companies that are focused on things like identity verification and keeping cloud-based transactions secure. The telco selected companies that were creating a positive impact “on the way we use networks to improve our lives and businesses,” said the Chairman and CEO of Orange, Stephane Richard. The 6 startups were selected out of more than 100 applicants.

Working with startups isn’t really about funding companies — the startups have a potential to receive $20K from the program, but that’s more a token gesture than anything else. The real value of the partnership comes from the startups gaining access to Orange’s massive distribution channels, partner program and marketing heft. For example, startup Fenix International could work with Orange’s African operations to distribute its off-grid batteries.

Because Orange has such a large footprint in the developing world, the company has a particular focus on building apps and hardware for “the bottom of the pyramid.” Orange’s Executive Director of Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, told me in an interview at the launch event on Monday night that the mobile phone is often times the first branded product that a customer in a developing country has, and that brand then has the unique ability to transition into offering core services, like mobile banking, and credit.

During the accelerator program, called Orange Fab, the startups will have a chance to visit Paris, and at the end of the program will have a demo day to feature their progress. Here’s the first 6 out of Orange Fab:

1). Fenix International: We’ve covered this four-year-old San Francisco-based startup many times. The team has built a battery that can be used off grid to charge mobile phones and other electronics, and which can connect to various mini power generation systems like small solar panels, a bike charger, or the grid. The target customer is an entrepreneur in a village that sells cell phone charging, and SIM cards (hence why Orange is interested). These entrepreneurs are already selling these services but often times use shoddy and toxic car batteries for charging. Fenix already has distribution deals with carriers Vodafone and MTN.

2). Re-char: Re-char is a startup that makes a kiln that turns bio waste — woodchips, agricultural waste or leaves — into a bio-based charcoal. The startup has delivered about 1,200 “climate kilns” to farmers in Western Kenya. But with the Orange accelerator program, Re-char plans to build an Android-based device that can connect to a cell phone and can test the quality of the soil, including water content, and pH levels. Farmers would use these devices, and accompanying data service, to test and figure out which plots of land are arable and how much fertilizer to buy and where to use it. Beyond the services and product for farmers, the data from the testing and field mapping could create a valuable data base that could potentially be used by fertilizer companies, non-profits or government programs.

3). Phone Halo: This startup has built a location-based system that can use your phone to find lost belongings, like your keys or your wallet. The company uses quarter-sized button trackers that can be placed on devices — or potentially embedded in devices — to deliver an auditory ring when you need to find one of the lost items. The company has been working with consumer electronics companies to make third-party branded products.

4). AlephCloud: The team at AlephCloud is focused on creating secure connections between devices and across systems from Dropbox to box to email to Amazon. With the growth in the consumerization of IT (you know, like everyone in your office buying their own iPhone and using their own Dropbox account), distributed security systems will increasingly be needed.

5). Virtrue: Virtrue has developed an identification verification system that uses data and algorithms to verify identities across platforms. The service is intended to help companies and consumers reduce fraud and is prefaced on the idea that verified data is much more valuable than unverified data.

6). Talkdesk: Talkdesk is software that can enable a company to set up and operate a distributed call center. The software is browser-based and offers support for sales and marketing.

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In a global survey of 1,514 consumers 18 years or older, Cisco found that 57 percent would put their trust in a driverless vehicle. The answers varied wildly depending on country, with 95 percent of Brazilians embracing the concept of a silicon chauffeur. In Japan skepticism is still very high with only 28 percent willing to give up direct control of their cars.

In the U.S., where many of these autonomous vehicle technologies are being tested, acceptance was above the global average at 60 percent. What’s more those Americans surveyed weren’t just a bunch of wild risk-takers: 48 percent said they would trust a driverless car to ferry around their children. In general, western Europe was less accepting of vehicle autonomy than North America, and rapidly developing regions of the world like India and China were the more enthusiastic.

Of course, consumer perception of a technology depends largely on how it’s presented to the public. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk last week made that very point when outlining Tesla’s future autonomous vehicle plans, saying he didn’t like the connotations of the term “driverless car” because it implies a complete ceding of control. Musk’s term of choice is “autopilot.”

But according to Andreas Mai, Cisco director of product management for smart connected vehicles, the survey didn’t sugar coat its question. Its exact text: “Imagine a car on the road that is controlled entirely by technology and requires no human driver (i.e. Johnny Cab from Total Recall). How likely would you be to ride in such a car?”

I’m generally a proponent of connected car technologies and look forward to the day when advanced sensors and ad hoc wireless networking would largely automate my daily commute. But I have to say if presented with that question on Cisco’s survey my answer would “no.” I would be willing to give my car autonomy in many situations, but the idea of being reduced entirely to passenger status doesn’t sit well with me. If Cisco’s survey is truly representative of the public’s current mindset, then we’re a lot closer to creating a driverless highway network than I ever imagined. (For information on the connected car, see GigaOM’s infographic)

Of course, as with any industry produced survey, you do have approach Cisco’s numbers with some healthy skepticism. Cisco isn’t Ford or Google, but it certainly has some skin in this game. It produces the security software and router hardware that would be used to deliver connected and autonomous car services. In general, though, Cisco tends to produce very thorough industry reports such as its Visual Networking Index of internet traffic.

Cisco asked some other interesting questions in its survey. For instance, it found that consumers are eager to connect their vehicles to the internet of things if they can get tangible benefits. Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said they would allow remote monitoring of their driving habits if it produced savings on their insurance premiums or auto repair bills.

Another 64 percent said they would be willing to share even more personal information, such as their height and weight and entertainment preferences, for the creation of a unique driver profiles. In a such a scenario, your car could recognize a specific driver by voice imprint and adjust the steering column and seat position automatically and then immediately tune the entertainment system to favorite presets. A surprising 60 percent said they would even provide their automaker or a third-party company with sensitive biometric information like fingerprints or DNA if it could help make their vehicles secure.

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RelayRides says it will acquire, among other things, Wheelz’s DriveBox technology, which enables Wheelz users to unlock and drive away in a rented car, without having to meet with the owner and get a key. Picture it basically like one of Zipcar’s unlocking and verification systems.

When RelayRides launched its business, it used to install this type of unlocking and verification technology in the users’ cars, but the installation process was lengthy and expensive. Later RelayRides started working with GM on connecting this type of system with GM’s Onstar technology. However more recently, RelayRides started opting for manual key swapping as a main option.

RelayRides staunch competitor Getaround launched its service around a box that car owners install in their cars themselves and which renters can use to automatically unlock cars using their smart phone. With Wheelz’s DriveBox tech, RelayRides can get back into the business of making car swapping more automated and easier for customers.

RelayRides has raised $13 million from Google Ventures, August Capital, General Motors, Shasta Ventures, and General Motor Ventures. Wheelz has raised at least $14 million from Zipcar and Detroit-based transportation investors Fontinalis Partners. The companies wouldn’t release terms of the deal.

The market for this type of peer to peer car sharing is still very early. Also execution and making people feel comfortable with the systems is key to growing this industry.

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This means you could create an IFTTT recipe that lets your Hue bulb turn a different color, or blink when a file is uploaded to your Dropbox, an email comes in or it’s going to rain. IFTTT already has a partnership with Belkin’s WeMo, so hooking it up to the Hue seems right on track.

To me, the IFTTT partnership is the most exciting, but others may like the geofencing aspect that can automatically turn on or change the light’s settings as a Hue user arrives home — without the user even having to take their smartphone out of their pocket. That, plus a feature that lets users schedule their use settings on a calendar as opposed to resetting them every day were added in response to user demand.

Philips has been riding a wave of success in the developer community since launching the lightbulbs last October. Despite the $200 price tag for a starter kit containing three bulbs and $59 price tag for each bulb, many tech-savvy people are picking them up and playing with them. In March it opened up its software development kit to make that play easier and give larger companies the tools and support to integrate the bulbs into their own connected home products.

Today’s features just tie it even more into a developing network of connected devices that can communicate with each other over the web — a vision the creators of the Hue seem to embrace based on my discussion of how they view the internet of things during a podcast in March.

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Alcatel-Lucent launched GreenTouch in 2010 with the stated goal of making wireless and wireline networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today in the long term. Three years later the consortium — which has grown to include 53 vendors, carriers and research institutions — is releasing its first set of recommendations to green up the telecom industry.

The recommendations are a long list of technologies and network topologies, some of which would require mere software tweaks to current equipment while others would require new telecommunications standards and a new generation of network equipment, said Thierry Klein, GreenTouch’s technical committee chair and head of Bell Labs green research.

New small cell topologies could drastically reduce the power necessary to run mobile data networks since smaller the cell radiuses require less power necessary to maintain a connection, Klein said. Those networks would have to be managed much differently than cellular systems are today, however, with cells automatically shutting off and turning on to meet the real-time capacity demands of subscribers.

“We’re talking about adjusting the resources of the networks on the microscopic level,” Klein said. “We can create a power profile for the equipment that’s much more proportional to its use.” Basically, carriers have to commit to running only as much network as need at any given moment.

GreenTouch is also recommending infrastructure sharing, which would require operators to virtualize their own networks a common set of base stations, towers antennas and core routers. On the wireline side, GreenTouch has developed a new technique for delivering fiber connections to homes called bit-interleaved passive optical networking (BIPON), which reduces the energy required to deliver high-speed broadband by a factor of 30.

Thierry Van Landegem

GreenTouch said if fully implemented, the recommendations would meet its 1,000x improvement goal on wireless network, but would only get about halfway to the same milestone on wireline networks. But GreenTouch Chairman Thierry Van Landegem claimed that taken together these recommendations could reduce the operational energy consumption of all of today’s communications networks by a staggering 90 percent by 2020.

In an interview I pressed Van Landegem on that number, but he insisted he wasn’t talking about a 90 percent efficiency improvement but actually cutting the energy consumed by all the world’s communications networks to one tenth of 2010’s levels. That’s even accounting for the facts that many more networks will be built, billions more people will have access to those networks, and average mobile and wireline data consumption will skyrocket in 2020, Van Landegem said.

If GreenTouch can live up to that promise — and if the mobile industry follows its recommendations — such an energy reduction truly would be an impressive feat. And Van Landegem said GreenTouch is just getting started: “Reducing energy by 90 percent is conservative as we have many projects underway whose effects were not taken into account in that number.”

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The estimated 30,000 power plants worldwide account for about 40 percent of global carbon emissions. While about 80 percent of these plants can be found on a map, there are still unknowns about what these plants are doing, like what fuel they use and how much electricity they generate. The ASU scientists hope to source this information by turning Ventus into a competition: the player who provides the most useable information within the first year will get a trophy and be included as an author on a research publication, plus (according to the website) gain serious street cred “among our very elite, newly-formed global group of citizen scientist enviro-nerds.”

To contribute to Ventus, users are asked to input the exact location of a power plant, its carbon dioxide emissions, what fuel it uses, and its electricity output. Not all of these pieces of information are needed, and users can also edit existing information for 25,000 power plants that have already been mapped, using data from the Center for Global Development. The researchers are specifically hoping to target people who live near or work at power plants, especially the thousands of new facilities in the developing world about which little data exist.

Using Ventus’ Google Maps interface seems simple enough, but as Nature News points out, a previous crowdsourcing effort to map dams wasn’t all that successful. But if the power plant data does start pouring in, researchers should be able to better track fossil fuel emissions, and apply this knowledge to tackle one of the largest contributors to climate change.

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There’s a few things you need to remember about Bloom Energy. First, manufacturing fuel cells is a very difficult business, and one that is capital intensive with low margins. Fuel cells take fuel (natural gas or biogas) and combine it with oxygen and other chemicals to create an electrochemical reaction that produces electricity.

Customers can buy several Bloom Energy servers to deliver distributed power on site at a building, and that can have a lower carbon footprint than grid power. Competitors include ClearEdge Power, which recently scored a deal with Verizon, and the publicly-traded FuelCell Energy.

But Bloom Energy has actually gotten some breakthrough traction in the market over the past couple of years, particularly with data center operators. Apple, eBay, AT&T, Adobe, Google and others have bought Bloom fuel cells (or the power from the fuel cells) for both their data centers and building operations.

Primack reports that Bloom Energy’s latest funding was an extension of a round raised in 2011, at a pre-money valuation of $2.7 billion. The lead investor that put in $100 million wasn’t named, but Primack says that Credit Suisse put in $30 million of the round.

Because the fuel cell business is so difficult (read my The pain point for Bloom Energy and other fuel cell makers), Bloom Energy is most likely not profitable even after 11 years. Bloom Energy CFO Bill Kurtz told me that the company was “half way to break even” in the Summer of 2012. Primack previously reported that Bloom’s retained earnings through Q3 2012 stood at negative $873 million, with $113 million left in the bank, and with positive gross margins on a pro forma basis. Bloom has a goal to be profitable in 2013.

Existing investors did not participate in the round, according to the report. Previous investors included Kleiner Perkins, NEA, DAG Ventures and GSV Capital. Bloom Energy was previously working with broker Advanced Equities (like on this round in the Summer of 2012) to raise funds, but Advanced Equities has since shut down. The broker was charged for misleading investors back in 2009 for fund raising for Bloom Energy, was fined and shut its offices.

We’ll be interviewing Bloom Energy’s VP Mission Critical Systems, Peter Gross, and eBay’s VP, Global Foundation Services, Dean Nelson, at Structure in San Francisco next month.

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Founded only last year, GridCOM’s technology uses something called quantum cryptography to generate codes using photons (tiny packets of light) that shield communications among a network of electronic equipment from the computers that control power transmission to smart meters. Quantum cryptography uses physics (instead of math like conventional encryption does) to secure cyber communications.

GridCOM’s approach is quite different from the conventional mathematically-based encryption methods traditional used to protect communications over the Internet, said Duncan Earl, co-founder and CTO of GridCOM and a former researcher in the Cyberspace Sciences and Information Intelligence Research group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. These conventional methods have worked fairly well and have been around long enough to be affordable, but they also don’t offer the speed and potency that some owners of sensitive energy data might want, Earl said.

The startup, based in Carlsbad near San Diego, recently raised a round of seed money from Ellis Energy Investment. Earl declined to disclose the amount but said Ellis is “committed to funding us for the next two years.”

Smart grid cyber threats

GridCOM is counting on a growing concern by utility executives over the security of their networks. Up until now, cybersecurity attacks on utility grids have been pretty rare. The grid hasn’t been vulnerable mainly because the computers and other equipment historically used by utilities have been mostly analog, not digital, and they have been designed with proprietary, customized technologies for each utility’s closed-off network.

The push to deploy smart grid technologies, however, is transforming the grid to include more digital devices with common technical standards and communication protocols. In addition, the reliance of the Internet for some of the network creates a vulnerability that didn’t exist before.

While utility executives are thinking more about cybersecurity these days, they don’t necessarily want to spend much money to enhance it, as this report by the U.S. Department of Energy pointed out. The report said evolving regulations on cybersecurity, which is a fairly new problem, also makes it difficult for utilities to draft and deploy good plans.

The secret security sauce

GridCOM’s core technology lies in the quantum server that will generate lots of “keys,” each of which is a string of 200 random bits of 0′s and 1′s that can encrypt a message very quickly. The startup’s customers will be able to download as many of those keys as necessary. The keys can work within 4 milliseconds, which is the amount of time that a utility’s machines will need to communicate with one another should there be an emergency on the grid, Earl said. Conventional encryption methods take longer and allow for a hacker to eavesdrop and disrupt the communications.

The source of the keys comes from what’s called “quantum entangled photons.” Say what? Well, when a light source goes through a crystal, it generates a pair of photons that are twins with polar opposite characteristics. Those photons share a bond called entanglement, which makes it difficult to distinguish them and figure out what message they have encrypted. To break that encryption, the hacker will have to figure out which photon has which characteristic. And the act of measuring a photon will in fact alert the quantum server of the intrusion.

Sounds hard to crack? The encryption and detection system is “nearly unbreakable,” says Earl. Each GridCom system is consisted of a quantum server, eight receivers and fiber optic lines. The startup plans to make money by charging a subscription fee, which in the near term would be $50 per device per month.

GridCOM still has to prove that its technology could do wonders in real life, though. Quantum cryptography has long been a subject of academic research, but it hasn’t been widely adopted. Using it for the typical email and Internet or even cellular communications is too expensive.

Those communications involve so many devices and high levels of data traffic that each network will need quite a few of quantum servers to generate tons and tons of keys, Earl said. Communications between machines in a power grid, on the other hand, happen less frequently. There are a handful of quantum cryptography companies out there, such as ID Quantique in Switzerland, Earl noted.

GridCOM is only in the early stages of developing its technology. It is now engineering the quantum servers and assembling them itself. The company aims to deploy a test network of 20-mile radius in the San Diego area by the end of this year. It would like to do a larger demonstration project with a first subscriber in 2014, Earl said. The company also plans to target the oil and gas industry.

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Details of the solar panel investment

I shared details on both the solar panel project and the car before, but let me step back and recap a bit. In October 2011, we added 41 solar panels to our southern-facing roof in southeastern Pennsylvania. Each panel is rated for 230W of Direct Current (DC) so that works out to an array of 9.43kW DC. In our family of four, with two work-at-home adults, we average around 7,500 kWh of electricity usage. So the system may be a bit oversized for our needs — about 125 percent — but we planned ahead. It’s a four-bedroom house so we thought that the next occupants could have at least one more family member and therefore use more electricity.

At the time, we were quoted a price of $5.50 per watt for the project. When you multiply that price times the 9,430 watts of the system, you get the total cost: $51,865. That’s just the gross cost, however. We received a 30 percent Federal tax credit for $15,560 and a state rebate check of $7,100, bringing the net cost to around $29,205. Our typical electric bill for a year had been roughly $2,500, which makes the break-even point around 11.7 years.

Adding an electric vehicle one year later

A year after the solar panels were installed — they generated 13.8 MWh in the first 12 months and you can see the real-time stats here — we opted to add an electric car to our garage. So we traded in an Acura RDX and, after shopping around, replaced it with a 2013 Volt. This was to be our primary car, just as the Acura was. We have another vehicle in the garage, but it’s a rarely driven sports car: A 2007 model that just passed 18,000 miles on the odometer.

Since the Acura was our primary vehicle, we racked up miles quickly. Even though we both work from home, my wife and I are often driving the two kids to activities or head a few miles into town most days for food or other goods. With the Acura we were averaging about $250 per month on gas as a result. Now, with the same general driving habits, we pay a maximum of $50 on gas in a given month.

With the Volt — you can see driving stats for that too — we’ve already turned 7,228 miles in the six months of ownership. That’s normal driving behavior for us: We typically drive about 15,000 miles on the main car. Of those miles, 5,255 have been solely on battery power and the car reports our gas mileage at 125.33 MPG so far. Even though we’re averaging 1,250 miles per month, we’re only filling up the gas tank once — or maybe twice — in a given month. The tank is small too: Just over 9 gallons.

So what does this do to our solar panel payback? It cuts it nearly in half to around six years. How so?

The reduced payback on our investment

Three-quarters of our driving is powered by electricity. Even with the addition of the Volt, which we charge every night, we still don’t have an electric bill. We’re at the point where we’re much closer to using all of the electricity our panels produce, but we’re not there yet. And we’ve cut down on our gasoline expenditures as a direct result of both the car and the solar panel system, saving around $200 per month that we used to spend.

That works out to $2,400 a year in gasoline savings and when added to the $2,500 in electricity bills we’re no longer paying each year, you get $4,900 in net cash flow savings. Divide that figure in to the net cost of the solar panel project and it works out to 5.96 years before break-even. Best of all, the payment for the Volt is slightly less than the Acura payment was, but I don’t consider that as part of the solar panel payback.

There was a recent intangible benefit gained by the solar investment, as well. Just before we bought the Volt, we decided to refinance our home. The appraiser added $30,000 in value to the house just for the solar panel array. That gave us the best possible rate because of our LTV, or loan to value, ratio.

Without that extra boost in the appraisal, we would have had to pay more in fees to get our low rate or simply have a marginally higher rate. I don’t consider this part of the payback either, but it sure helped!

This post was updated at 7:22 am, May 13, to reflect to correct Federal tax credit percentage.

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