Monthly Archives: February 2012

Global CCS Institute

With key contracts signed, Summit Power’s Texas CCUS project on track for July groundbreaking | Global CCS Institute

The Texas Clean Energy Project, a 400-megawatt, coal-fired plant designed to perform carbon capture, use and storage recently cleared two key milestones and is moving towards a July groundbreaking.

In February, TCEP inked a deal securing supplies of water and, on Valentine’s Day, the project announced agreements for engineering, construction and maintenance services for the new plant outside Odessa, Texas.

I’ve been keeping an eye on TCEP since last autumn when, on behalf of the Global CCS Institute I spoke with Laura Miller, the charismatic ex-mayor of Dallas who, after leaving public office moved to the Summit Power Group to help advance CCS solutions by becoming TCEP’s project manager.

TCEP is on track to be the world’s first integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) poly-generation facility, as well as one of the world’s cleanest coal-fueled power plants.

Summit Power’s Texas facility is designed to snare 90 per cent of the CO2 it generates, as well as 99 per cent of sulfur dioxide, 90 per cent of nitrogen oxide, and 99 per cent of mercury. Of the roughly 2.5 million standard tons of CO2 the plant will capture annually, about four-fifths will flow via pipeline to West Texas, where it will be shot into the ground to enhance oil recovery. TCEP’s remaining CO2 will be fed to a chemicals production facility to make urea, a feedstock for fertilizer.

Miller explained via email that of its 400-mw gross electric output, TCEP will sell 200 mw to a local utility (more on that below), about 85 mw will power commercial operations to make urea and compress CO2, and another 100 mw will be used internally to run project components.

Sited in Penwell, Texas, about 15 miles west of Odessa, TCEP is scheduled to come on line in 2015. If it can hit that deadline, the project will likely be the second US commercial CCUS facility to be sending CO2 to the oil patch: Southern Co’s 582-mw Plant Ratcliffe Project is currently under construction in Mississippi and is scheduled to fire up in 2014.

With a price tag of US$2.4 billion, TCEP is being financed mostly by private sources and has also been granted US$450 million from the Department of Energy’s Clean Coal Power Initiative.

The recent news: On 14 February, TCEP announced that it had signed engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts, as well as a 15-year operations and maintenance (O&M) contract for the new complex. According to a company press release:

The two, firm-price, turnkey EPC contracts that guarantee price, schedule and performance for the integrated coal gasification combined cycle (IGCC) project were finalized in December by the project’s three EPC contractors: Siemens Energy Inc.; Selas Fluid Processing Corp., a subsidiary of The Linde Group; and SK Engineering & Construction, a major Korean contractor. The total value of the EPC contracts is approximately $2 billion.

Selas Fluid Processing and SK E&C will supply a complete chemical block capable of producing syngas by gasifying Powder River Basin coal. A portion of the syngas fuels a Siemens power block, and the balance is used for the production of granulated urea. The chemical block captures 90% of the CO2 from the syngas and compresses the CO2 for sale to the mature, enhanced oil recovery (EOR) market in West Texas. The chemical block EPC contract also includes coal handling, coal gasification based on two Siemens SFG-500 gasifiers, gas cleanup, mercury removal, ammonia and urea production facilities, sulfuric acid plant, water treatment, CO2 compression, site preparation, plant buildings and other goods and services.

In the second EPC contract, Siemens Energy will supply a nominally rated 400MW combined cycle power plant capable of operating on syngas and natural gas. The power block is comprised of an SGT6-5000F gas turbine capable of operating on high-hydrogen syngas or natural gas. The power block includes an air-cooled condenser for plant cooling, which greatly reduces the water needed for the project, and a high-voltage switchyard.

A separate, 15-year O&M contract was also signed for the complete, turnkey operation and maintenance of the entire 600-acre facility, including day-to-day operation, and short term and long term maintenance. The contract, signed by Linde’s Gases Division, includes guarantees of performance and availability by Linde’s Gases Division and Siemens for the full 15-year contract period.

TCEP has cleared most of the other major milestones necessary to begin construction. It has signed a 25-year power purchase agreement to supply 200 megawatts of electric power to the municipal utility of San Antonio, CPS Energy. Whiting Petroleum Corp has agreed to a 15-year deal to buy the plant’s CO2 stream. And Summit has also signed a long-term deal with an un-named company to purchase the plant’s urea output.

Until recently, water supplies were an open question. Texas has been hammered by a millennial drought over the past few years. While the facility is designed to operate using minimal net amounts of water, securing water rights was a lingering challenge. TCEP tied up that loose end in February as well, Miller wrote, with a contract to buy “brackish underground Capitan Reef water” from a landowner west of the project. TCEP will pipe in the water and desalinate it on site.

So what next? Miller wrote to me that TCEP is hoping to close financial terms in June, and to break ground in July.

Before then, only one substantial hurdle remains. TCEP faces a frustrating glitch in the federal tax code, requiring the partnership to pay about US$150 million on its US$450 million federal grant. Summit Power is working with lawmakers to get an exception passed for the quirk. The effort is being led by US Sen. John Cornyn (R., Tex.) and US Congressman Mike Conaway (R., Odessa, Tex.).

Recently, the stakes got higher for TCEP’s success. Delays have slowed a similar project, Hydrogen Energy California (HECA), being planned for a sitebetween San Francisco and Los Angeles. As originally conceived, partners BP and Rio Tinto were working with the DOE to develop an IGCC facility, fuelled by a 3:1 mix of coal and petroleum coke, with full CO2 capture for enhanced oil recovery.

Last May, SCS Energy took over the project, and subsequently tweaked the design to also produce urea, similar to TCEP’s approach. According to an Energy Dept. source involved in the project, the revisions improve HECA’s economic viability and the project is currently progressing through front-end engineering design.

Writing for the Institute, NRDC’s George Peridas recently summarized the obstacles HECA has navigated:

After years of development, the project as we knew it came to an end. The price of power that was required to make the project viable (reported to be in the region of $300/MWh) was, unsurprisingly, not one that tickles the interest of local utilities.

Subsequently, the project changed ownership and management (from Rio Tinto/BP to SCS Energy) and is now undergoing design changes before proceeding with the permitting process afresh. Reportedly, these entail the co-production of fertilizer at the plant, and the use of out-of-state coal for the majority of its fuel needs.

It is not yet clear if and how fast the new version of the project will proceed, but we will likely know more in the coming months.

GreenBiz

Will Greener Shoes and Uniforms Bring Nike More Olympics Gold? | GreenBiz

Will Greener Shoes and Uniforms Bring Nike More Olympics Gold?Nike hopes to win both green and gold at this summer’s Olympics in London.

On Tuesday in New York City, the sporting-goods giant unveiled a new line of sportswear designed to help Olympians go faster, farther and longer. Nike is manufacturing its 2012 Olympic kits using less material — and more recycled plastics — than in the past.

The announcement came as part of a series of “cutting-edge, lightweight performance innovations designed for the track, the basketball court and beyond for this summer,” CEO Mark Parker said.

To me, the most visibly different ecoinnovation is Nike’s Flyknit shoe design.

Instead of the conventional assembly of fabrics, rubber, leather and other materials, the Flyknit comprises a single piece of a flexible mesh knit, a strong yet pliant fabric that fits like a sock over a wearer’s foot.

Eliminating so much material cuts each shoe’s weight by approximately 20 percent to about 160 grams. That may not sound like much, but multiplied by the 40,000 steps it takes to run a marathon, that totals about the weight of a car — a ton or so — that elite marathoners will no longer need to lift, said Martin Lotti, Nike’s global creative director for the Olympics.

U.S. Olympic team members Carl Lewis and Abdi Abdirahman discuss Nike's Flyknit shoe.Less material also means lower environmental impact. It’s an example “that sustainability can improve performance,” Hannah Jones, Nike’s vice president of sustainable innovation, told me.

Nike is rolling out two versions of the Flyknit: a racing flat and a training shoe. Athletes from Great Britain, Kenya, Russia and the U.S. plan to wear the Flyknit at the games. At the event this week, 10-time gold-medal winner Carl Lewis spoke with 2012 Olympic team member Abdi Abdirahman (both pictured at right) about the Flyknit shoes.

A similar idea helped shape the company’s new line of Olympic uniforms. Here, Nike has boosted its use of recycled polyester to produce lighter fabrics for a variety of shorts and tops – and even a wearable racing skin called Nike Pro TurboSpeed. It’s basically a speed suit that’s covered in dimples, which act like the surface of a golf ball, reducing drag by creating a thin layer of turbulence as an athlete cuts through the air.

By making the fabrics from discarded plastic bottles, the recycled polyester fabrics cut energy consumption by roughly a third compared with virgin materials.

Next page: How recycled plastic helps athletes as much as the environment

The national basketball teams from Brazil, China and the U.S. will wear Nike Hyper Elite uniforms made from plastic reclaimed from 22 recycled bottles (pictured below). The shorts are ethereally light, weighing just about 5 ounces, a quarter of the weight of uniforms worn by today’s NBA pros.

Lighter uniforms translate into less fatigue, more comfort and better performance, said Deron Williams of the New Jersey Nets, who endorses Nike and is expected to play for Team USA in the 2012 games.

These products, the USA Basketball tank top and Nike Pro TurboSpeed track suit, are made from recycled plastic bottles.Soccer players tend to be a bit smaller than basketball players, so just 13 bottles are necessary to make each of their kits. Still, it adds up: Nike’s reuse of plastic bottles has diverted more than 82 million of the containers from landfills.

Speaking with me after the announcement, Lorrie Vogel, Nike’s general manager of Considered Design, told me how competitive Nike’s designers are.

“It’s a company full of ex-athletes, where we’re constantly scored on our performance, and green-design benchmarking is no exception,” she said.

I wondered if that competition makes Nike protective of its proprietary-materials innovations. The recipe for an ultra-lightweight shoe that may be worn on the Olympic podium this summer is worth protecting.

The company shares sustainability know-how strategically, Jones told me. New product or new material design recipes are typically strictly confidential, but design tools and shared materials knowledge is just the opposite, she said.

Jones, pictured at right, believes that among the many industries pushing the sustainability frontier, sports gear makers are among the most collaborative. For example, Nike and its competitors, Adidas and Puma, “recognize the benefit of sharing the recipe for green rubber with our suppliers,” she explained. “We know that if our competitors start ordering it too, the price will fall, supplies will improve, and that will lead to the faster change on a larger scale.”

Hannah Jones, vice president of sustainable innovation at Nike, discusses the company's Olympic innovations.Consistent with that collaborative approach to competition, Jones reminded me that today’s announcement follows a burst of intraindustry green-design initiatives that Nike has announced in the past 18 months. These include:

  • Waterless dyeing. Earlier this month, Nike announced it was rolling out a water-free dyeing method. Though limited in application for now, the approach has the potential to radically reduce the enormous volumes of water the industry consume using conventional methods to color textiles.
  • Zero toxins. The waterless dyeing fits into a broader push to cut toxic emissions to nil. Last fall, as part of a coalition that also includes Adidas, C&A, H&M, Li Ning, and Puma, Nike released a roadmap toward a goal of achieving “zero discharge of hazardous chemicals for all products, across all pathways in our supply chain, by 2020.” The initiative ties together separate efforts in water reduction, organic cotton, green chemistry and materials traceability and sustainability.
  • Design tool sharing. Throughout 2011, Nike launched a series of proprietary tools to help designers speed up their selection of sustainable materials. Nike released its Environmental Apparel Design Tool, a data set and calculator incorporating more than a decade’s worth of knowledge about material attributes. The company uses a similar tool for its Considered Design methodology to assess the impact of its products.

As part of her ongoing “How She Leads” series on women in sustainable businesses, Maya Albanese interviewed Hannah Jones for GreenBiz.com earlier this month. Check out their conversation here.

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View the full article here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/23/will-greener-shoes-uniforms-bring-nike-more-olympics-gold

GreenBiz

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple | GreenBiz

Green Gamification Takes Root in the Big Apple

In my green lexicon, “gamification” gets a special prize: it’s among the clunkiest words to enter the sustainability conversation, yet may just have some of the greatest potential to alter the behavior of consumers, employees and households.

Businesses are fast picking up on the promise. Gamification has unique synergy with green behaviors, with a knack for turning virtuous green actions — such as carpooling or switching to CFLs — from worthy but kinda joyless chores into tasks that earn rewards, gain recognition, and can turn ambivalent consumers into eager eco evangelists.

As part of Social Media Week‘s sprawling, 12-city lollapalooza of digital media events, the New York series included a panel entitled “Gamification: Combining Social Media & Game Mechanics to Promote Sustainability” that I caught late last week.

The panel brought together two recently sprouted startups with two established green brands.

Practically Green and The Mutual are both building businesses predicated on the power of gamification to alter green behavior, attract advertisers, and help organizations spur change.

Joining them were two groundbreaking companies, each born from innovative new approaches to recycling,Recyclebank and TerraCycle, each of which is increasingly using gamification to extend its reach.

Here’s a quick run down of how these companies talked about how gamification is changing their businesses.

A Social Media Approach to Greener Behaviors

Practically Green helps organizations become greener by using technology and social networking to educate, motivate and reward people for making green changes to their work and home life.

Conceived in 2009, founder Susan Hunt Stevens took her inspiration for the Boston-based company from LEED, the exhaustive guide to designing and building greener buildings.

But instead of LEED’s focus on building insulation or low-flow faucets, Stevens’ approach tallies up over 400 green behaviors, from commuting by bike to buying local produce.

Speaking on the panel, Stevens described the program as “LEED meets Weight Watchers,” for its blend of points and behavioral reinforcement through peer groups.

One of the challenges with sustainability, Stevens said, is that communicating how and why to do it is tricky. “The content can be technically complex. Some of it is political for some folks. And much of it is preachy.” Gamification breaks down the complexity into small, learnable steps, and depoliticizes the issue, she added.

Working with large organizations including NBC Universal, Eileen Fisher and the Seattle Mariners, Practically Green customizes workplace programs where staff sign in, and register their green behaviors, earning points and badges along the way.

For companies looking at ambitious sustainability programs, Stevens said, the program offers a easy-to-deploy, web-based solution that can quickly speed up employee involvement with green programs. This, by the way, is one way Practically Green earns revenue: charging a dollar or so per month per employee to companies it engages with.

(For more, Practically Green’s Stevens spoke with Chrissy Coughlin for Nature of Business Radio here at GreenBiz last September.)

‘Groupon for Good’

Not yet a year old, The Mutual is a Brooklyn-based startup that has been called “The Groupon for good.”

To join, a member picks a pledge level — say $10 per month — and a charity to steer the donations towards: options include think tanks such as World Resources Institute, conservationists such as Oceana, and climate groups like Carbonfun.org.

The Mutual, in turn, relays four-fifths of the donation to your charity, and uses the remainder — a share that’s on par, or less, than the take of a typical charity fundraiser for overhead — to grow its network of members and business partners.

Members, in turn, are rewarded with perks from business members looking to connect with a big pool of green-minded consumers.

For example, using FourSquare, I checked into a recent Mutual event at Brooklyn Brewery, and thereby qualified for a contest, discounts at the brewery, and earned points online at themutual.com.

“I describe us as a social enterprise that rewards people for donating to charity with Perks from great brands,” said founder and CEO Dan Vallejo.

The startup is scaling fast, with the bulk of early participants from the Bay Area, New York and Boston.

Green Gamification’s Greatest Success Story

Now eight years old, Recyclebank offers one of the best known success stories in the power of green gamification.

Recyclebank’s original business — and still its core offering — is an ingenious system that rewards household recycling. It does so by tracking and identifying how much recycling a given household is putting out on the curb.

In around 300 cities in the U.S. and U.K., public garbage trucks automatically weigh recycling bins, use radio tags to identify which home the material came from, and records the transaction to a web site. Consumers can then track the volume of their recycling online.

That’s all well and good, but the real carrot is the points that the recycling earns for the household. The more a home recycles, the more points they earn.

Consumers can convert those points with a network of scores of well known brands that participate in the tracking program, offering perks that can be redeemed for products and services from the likes of WalMart, Coca Cola to Procter & Gamble, to Bed Bath & Beyond.

The model has proved scalable and increasingly adaptable. Cities like it because it boosts recycling rates, which lowers their landfill costs since more trash is diverted to reuse. Consumers, and especially households where kids get highly involved, like the rewards scheme. And the marketing partners are on board for access to consumers who have proven be top quality prospects, with a high likelihood of redeeming the perks, using the products, and spending more.

That was just the beginning though. In recent years, as Samantha Skey, Recyclebank’s chief revenue officer, told attendees, Recyclebank is proving its business model works for more than just recycling.

The company is expanding its business model, marketing partnerships, and web technology to extend to many other frontiers of green behavior, such as e-waste recycling, responsible junk disposal, and energy reduction.

Growing from Worm Poop to Packaging Reuse

TerraCycle, the Newark, N.J. based brand has evolved into a $20 million-a-year operation, since it was founded in 2001 by Princeton University dropout Tom Szasky.

In a few short years, the company has pivoted but not abandoned its original focus on “worm poop” fertilizer — the innovative organic plant food, packed in recycled bottle, that was brewed from worm-rich compost piles — towards a broader focus on packaging reduction and reuse.

Partnering with schools and numerous major consumer packaged good companies, TerraCycle is capturing both pre- and post-consumer packaging waste to upcycle it: such as converting Capri sun bags into satchels, pencil cases, and other merchandise.

What’s the gamification angle here? Albe Zakes, TerraCycle’s global vice president, media relations, explained: Since TerraCycle’s community skews heavily towards kids and moms, a teachable-game fit the bill.

Partnering with Manhattan-based Guerillapps, TerraCycle developed Trash Tycoon. Played in Facebook, players earn points, and privileges by cleaning up a small town, and building sustainable businesses from the trash. It works like a mash-up between SimCity and Farmville, but with a decidedly green wrinkles. Treehugger.com, for instance, provides real-time news feeds of eco-current events that appear in the game.

Customized to help kids learn about waste and recycling, Zakes explained the game is being customized so that virtual activity mirrors and reinforces the real-world efforts of its classroom brigades, the groups of school kids who raise funds — and compete with other class groups — by recycling packaging materials.

Balancing Real and Virtual to Boost Sustainability

Threading through the discussion was a concern that converting virtual do-gooderism into real world action is a challenge. The panelists acknowledged that there’s a risk that they may be able to induce a player to click a mouse — say, to “like” a green action, or to win a badge — but may not be able to actually spur that person to do the deed.

In Practically Green, Stevens explained, finding the mix of virtual incentives and balancing them against real world programs in the workplace is as much art than science. What’s more, she said, the workplace is a powerful arena in which to educate and stimulate such behaviors, because many people are driven more by peer perception in work environments than they are in their private lives.

This spurs competitive behaviors and, interestingly, lowers the risk of false claims where folks claim to have completed a green task, such as recycling their office paper: “Their friends and colleagues know, and they notice, and will call out their friends if they’re cheating,” explained Stevens.

For TerraCycle, which built its business in part from the fabric of social dynamics at schools, Zakes explained its game actually complements and extends an existing foundation of existing actions.

Still, at the splash screen of the game, there’s this encouragement: “Trash Tycoon is great, but make sure to get outside and collect some actual recycleables once in a while.”

Held in collaboration with Baruch College’s Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity at the City University of New York (CUNY), the panel was curated by Ashok Kamal (a graduate of Ziklin’s MBA program) who co-founded Bennu, which provides social media marketing for green businesses.

For a broader look at the origins and breadth of gamification, check out Kamal’s overview of the gamification phenomenon here in GreenBiz.

Last but not least, you can watch a video of the full panel presentation from Social Media Week through the group’s website. Scroll to the very bottom of the page, where you’ll find two video links. The lower of the two is the first 90 minutes, including the four company presentations. The video above that is the final half hour, comprised mostly of Q&A.

Joystick photo via Shutterstock.

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Read the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/22/green-gamification-takes-root-big-apple

GreenBiz

Venture capital investment in cleantech shrank by 4.5% in 2011 | GreenBiz

Why Sinking Cleantech Investment Data Aren't the End of the World

In cleantech, as in most realms of emerging technology, venture capital acts as a sort of incubator for the youngest, most promising technologies. That’s why it’s a cause for concern when venture capital investment slows or shrinks.That’s just what happened last year. In 2011, venture capital investment in early-stage cleantech companies fell by 4.5 percent, to $4.9 billion, compared with the 2010 tally, according to a round-up of full-year data by Ernst & Young published Feb. 1, based on data from Dow Jones VentureSource.Whether this downtick is cause for concern is open to argument. The question links to hot-button issues being debated in Congress, on the campaign trail, and in the media. I, for one, believe that given the headwinds facing cleantech, the numbers are cause for optimism. They’re good news, but I wish they were better.figure 1To make my half-full case, note that cleantech venture capital investment has been resilient despite both economic and political headwinds. Last year’s funding remains 29 percent higher than its 2009 total, when overall venture flows crashed in the wake of the global financial crisis.

What’s more, cleantech is nurtured by other streams of capital. As I reported last month, global investment in mature renewable energy technologies — new wind farms, solar panels, and the like — expanded by 5 percent, to $260 billion last year. That rise helped put total investment in renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid and related technologies over the trillion dollar mark last year.

Still, I’m a worrier. And there are reasons to furrow my brow at these numbers.

However promising cleantech may be, venture capitalists are finding more alluring options in other sectors. Cleantech’s decline comes despite a 10 percent rise of overall venture capital investment. Globally, for the year, investors placed $32.6 billion into 3,209 venture deals, according to Dow Jones Venture Source.

So while cleantech retreated, investment in healthcare and IT startups remained roughly steady. The big winner? Consumer information services — think Twitter, LivingSocial and Zynga — pulled in $5.2 billion, up 23 percent from the prior year.

But before I complain any further that clean technology shouldn’t be losing out to Twitter, let alone Facebook, here’s a bit more on what went down in cleantech over the past year.

• Battery technology is hot. Energy storage continues to attract interest, and growing flows of money. Venture investment in batteries rocketed up by 253 percent. And this is bound to accelerate. Growing volumes of electric vehicles, plus the graduation of wind and solar from emerging-tech status to mature technology, are all driving demand for energy storage, in a dizzying array of niches.

And while some segments of battery manufacturing are mature — increasingly subject to the sorts of commodity price dynamics driving down prices of solar PV — there is arguably bigger potential for scientific discovery to upend today’s batteries.

• Investment is tilting towards more mature plays. Cleantech companies already generating revenue garnered 69 percent of the funding, up from 50 percent in 2010.

• M&A exits dominate. Given the parlous state of IPO offerings, mergers & acquisitions continue to be the main path to maturity for cleantech players. In 2011, a total of $2.9 billion in M&A deals involved cleantech startups, some 79 deals, according to Ernst & Young’s analysis.

• IPO drought lingers. Just five companies IPO’d in 2011, not many more than the three that listed a year prior. Biofuels dominated last year’s public debuts, with Solazyme, Gevo, and KiOR. Intermolecular, a semiconductor R&D company focused on cleantech listed in the final quarter, as did Rentech, a clean energy solutions provider. The five raised a total of $688 million.

The low count of IPOs for cleantech is an indicator of a growing backlog and is one reason why new cleantech investment may be slowing. Without a clear line to exit, venture funders will steer their money to sectors where it’s easier to cash out.

Thus, Facebook. Good things may yet come of Facebook’s super-hyped IPO. Perhaps it will improve the atmospherics around cleantech IPOs?

But on balance I find the din disheartening. The very big IPOs by Twitter et al. smack of hype. To emphasize my point: Facebook’s pending IPO is likely to raise around $5 billion, more than was invested by VCs in the entire cleantech sector last year. Indeed, Facebook’s valuation is verging on speculation, maybe even magical thinking. The offering is slated to value the total company at $100 billion.

Compared with the foaming enthusiasm for all-things-Facebook, it can feel like cleantech has drifted into a period of backlash, however undeserved. Investment continues apace to be sure, but the narrative around cleantech is growing more polarized.

Long-time cleantech investor Ira Ehrenpreis put it this way, as quoted in GreentechMedia.com: “While I’ve never been more bearish on U.S. cleantech, I’ve never been more bullish about global cleantech.”

Blame domestic politics for the widening gap in cleantech prospects here compared with global markets. Leading the negative push—recklessly so—are House Republicans, who seem intent on vilifying federal support of renewable energy, using Solyndra’s failure as a political bludgeon against President Obama. Likewise, the GOP presidential aspirants have retreated on cleantech: far-right opposition of climate change is so dogmatic, even discussions of cleantech have become off limits despite the fact that practically all the Republican candidates have championed renewable investment in the past.

Meanwhile, media find it hard to resist the counter-intuitive appeal of the “cleantech is failing” tale, and are amplifying the meme. Picking up on the GOP’s talking points, the tally of stories of Solyndra’s failure far outpaces coverage of the fact that it’s been a record year for solar capacity growth in the U.S. Or that plummeting solar prices are a windfall for buyers of the technology, enabling even energy-poor regions such as India to light up.

Witness Wired magazine’s February story “Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust.” While its author, Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin, actually offers a reasonably measured take on the impact of cheap natural gas and the Solyndra scandal, you’d have a hard time figuring that out from the headline or the explosive artwork illustrating the story (at right, by Dan Forbes).

Lurid pictures of exploding wind mills, fiery biodiesel canisters, and a shattering PV panel left me thinking that John Doerr must be on the verge of switching back coal heat for his mansion. Meanwhile, elsewhere on Wired.com, the breathless all-technology-is-pretty-much-cool coverage of green developments continues apace.

Wired’s schizophrenic take on cleantech is not unique, but it deserves special attention because the magazine has been such a vocal, effective champion for innovation as a driver of economic growth. The editors’ tabloid take on cleantech is sure to gather clicks: scores of contrary comments and irate tweets suggest the story has generated a lot of attention.

But in gunning for controversy, Wired goes off target, loosing sight of the bigger, better idea that cleantech is a near-ideal innovation catalyst for U.S. economic growth. That’s why we should keep our fingers crossed that venture capitalists will keep steering more money into the sector too.

See the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/06/why-sinking-cleantech-investment-data-arent-end-world