An electrifying solution for wastewater treatment

Via: Israel 21c

By Karin Kloosterman
October 12, 2008

Industrial and municipal waste doesn't go away when we flush it down the drain. It takes an enormous amount of energy for treatment plants to process it, while massive environmental and financial costs go into disposing of the leftover sludge.

Now, two Israelis are about to change the way we look at wastewater, by turning its constituents into a valuable source of power.

Emefcy (M.F.C Microbial Fuel Cell) was founded in 2007 by Eytan Levy and his partner Ronen Shechter. It aims to harness a bacteria found in nature that produces electricity as it decomposes organic matter.

Electric bacteria known to science

"The idea was found about 100 years ago, that certain bacteria under certain conditions have the ability to generate electricity," Levy tells ISRAEL21c. "The reactor has to be structured in a certain way, and generate it while consuming organic matter."

Over the years teams of scientists tried to harness the power of the bacteria. "But it was never turned into a product, possibly due to the natural barrier between academia and industry," explains Levy, Emefcy's CEO.

Levy and his partner revived the idea, and are now working with a leader on microbial fuel cells, Bruce E. Logan from Pennsylvania State University. To optimize electricity production, the eight-man Caesarea-based company has created a network of tubes made from a special polymer - the cathodes - and a network of carbon brush anodes that together promote bioelectrochemical reactions.

The net result is that bacteria form an electrical conductive biofilm over the surface of the anodes and cathodes, decompose organic matter, and produce electricity at the same time.

This bioelectrochemical reaction is performed by three main bacteria, Geobacter sulfurreducens, Shewanella oneidensisand Rhodoferax ferrireducens, already present naturally in wastewater effluent. The company's main goal, however, is to give the "electrifying" bacteria optimal conditions to digest the human and organic industrial waste in sewage treatment plants.

While the charge from each bacterium is tiny, about half a volt, the company can step it up to 220V, while each kilogram of organic contamination can produce 1-kilowatt hour of electricity, says Levy. In large industrial wastewater plants, Emefcy's solution can produce megawatts of electricity. A real power plant, Levy says.

Tiny volts that add up

He believes the enormous cost savings of about 30-50 percent per year on various practices, can allow a power plant to achieve a return on investment (ROI) within two to three years. The solution has a number of financial benefits, he points out: the sale of generated electricity, treatment plants save money on aerating the sewage, the process reduces the amount of raw sludge for disposal by up to 90 percent; and working with this system can generate carbon credits.

The Emefcy solution can be an add-on to existing plants, and is expected to be on the market by 2010.

Levy and Shechter are specialists at inventing solutions for making the wastewater treatment market more efficient, and environmentally sound.

Before Emefcy, they founded AqWise, a company which specializes in creating tiny plastic beads to house and aerate bacteria, in order to increase the breakdown of biological waste in treatment plants. Today AqWise has 30 installations around the world.

With Emefcy, Levy and Shechter plan "to reinvent the wheel in the wastewater world," says Levy. "We realized we were incorrect," he explains. "Treatment plants are spending energy to purify wastewater and there is something wrong with that. Wastewater has energetic value."

Emefcy has received seed funding of $1 million from Israel Cleantech Ventures, additional undisclosed support, and a grant from the Office of the Chief Scientist in Israel.

Solar vendors strive to lower costs amid setbacks

Via EE Times Asia:

7 October 2008

Amid uncertain markets and policies, solar panel makers are gearing up factories with an objective of pulling down costs to a competitive level.

One market watcher said she will review her forecasts for solar panels according to the financial crisis in the U.S., along with uncertainty about renewal of federal tax credits and a pullback of major solar plans in Spain.

"Without incentives, we don't have a market," said Paula Mints, principal analyst, Navigant Consulting, speaking at a solar event sponsored by the IEEE.

Other speakers also gave their insights about a lack of federal funds for research in solar energy. Tim Anderson, associate dean of research at the University of Florida, said he hopes this scenario will change soon.

"The impact in the academic community is that no one goes to do research in photovoltaics because there's no funding available," he added. "But the promise of more money to come is out there, and people are adjusting to take advantage of this," he noted.

Expansion toward better cost
On the commercial level, a group of companies is expanding production of solar cells toward driving mainstream costs. "We're building the equivalent of a large scale nuclear power plant per year," said Richard Swanson, president of SunPower Corp., one of the top 10 solar panel makers.

SunPower has recently completed a second plant capable of employing 400,000 wafers a day and has plans for plants in Malaysia that will use as many as a million wafers a day. "We know how to produce panels that cost $1.50 per watt by 2012, and we have detailed quarterly plans to achieve it," said Swanson.

Startup Signet Solar shipped its first solar panels in October from a new factory in Germany that will be able to develop by early 2009 sufficient panels each year to generate up to 130MW. The company plans to set up another plant in India soon.

"I think you will see a trend toward large 10MW to 20MW solar installations which will be very efficient," said Rajeeva Lahri, chief executive, Signet.

Applied Materials is supplying equipment to Signet and a handful of other panel makers now ramping up large scale operations, said Mark Pinto, chief technology officer and manager, energy group, Applied.

Waiting for a good cause
"It took 20 years to get to the point where a solar factory could produce 10MW of capacity a year, but by 2010 we will see gigawatt factories," Pinto said. "We are no longer a factor of 10 away from competing energy sources, we are within a factor of two or less today," he added.

Pinto discussed the outlook for Applied and the solar business in a video interview with EE Times.

"Although production has been rising rapidly, panel prices have actually increased in the last six years from historic lows from 2001 to 2002," said Mints.

"This is a market that was unprofitable until 2004," she said. "You can't blame them to hope for profits. The industry was willing to sell at a loss to keep share," she added.

New trends
Meanwhile, new and promising technologies are emerging. Russ Jones, business development manager, Boeing's Spectrolab, described his company's solar concentrators. They use 500 times optics to create solar cells as small as 1sqcm. "Lab versions of the gallium arsenide cells have hit record efficiency levels up to 40.7 percent, nearly twice the level of most commercial cells shipping today," he said.

"We believe 50 percent efficiency of the solar cells can be met in the coming decade," he added. "We think we have an interesting new vector to help solar cells succeed," he noted.

James Gee, founder and chief scientists, Advent Solar shared insights about a new design for cells and modules his company will create starting next year according to a research he conducted while at Sandia National Labs. The Ventura modules employ a pre-patterned electrical circuit sheet on the back of the module rather that a wire grid on its front to reduce manufacturing time and raise cell efficiency.

"Free power has been thrown away due to non-optimal designs," said Gee. "It's time for a completely new process that gets around the current fundamental limitations," he added.

- Rick Merritt

Intellectual Ventures Sets Up Asian Base in Singapore

- Gabriel Chen, AsiaOne Business Segment, 3 October 2008

A LEADING American firm that patents inventions and invests in the inventions of others is basing its regional headquarters here.

The move by Intellectual Ventures (IV) will boost Singapore's aim to be the global hub for commercialising intellectual property (IP), a catch-all term meaning legal rights protecting how certain products are made and marketed.

In IV's case, it patents inventions and files patent applications in more than 30 technology areas, including nanotechnology, biomedical devices, software and consumer electronics.

The firm, which is helmed by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold, said yesterday that it chose Singapore because of its 'pro-business environment' and 'strong intellectual property protections'.

Dr Myhrvold said that when he and his colleagues founded the firm eight years ago, they wanted to focus time and resources on invention as a full-time activity - not as a sideline to other projects. He said this focus had brought success in the United States.

Dr Myhrvold, who completed a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics by 23, said they were thrilled their invention efforts were generating growing interest among Asia's leading inventors.

'Expanding our invention efforts to Asia allows us to support even more inventors and to expand our initiative globally,' said Dr Myhrvold, who is also a prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer and master French chef.

Mr S. Iswaran, Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry, who attended the launch of IV's Asian headquarters yesterday, spoke of the potential of IP.

Mr Iswaran said that while the IP generated in Singapore and beyond will benefit the economy, there are also opportunities to exploit it internationally.

'We believe that Singapore's strategic location at the confluence of IP creation and commercialisation...positions us well as a base for global companies to create, manage, and commercialise IP in the region and beyond,' he said.

IV is staffing the Singapore office at Gateway Building with 22 professionals, including business executives, technologists and IP law experts but that number will grow in the near future.

IV will also open offices in Tokyo, Bangalore, Beijing and Seoul.

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NEWSWEEK

From the magazine issue dated Nov 22, 2004

FACTORY OF THE FUTURE?

MICROSOFT ALUM NATHAN MYHRVOLD RUNS A FIRM THAT DOESN'T MAKE ANYTHING, BUT IT'S HOARDING THE KEY TO A NEW BUSINESS AGE: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.

The offices of the highly secretive Seattle-area start-up, Intellectual Ventures, are filled with evidence of the multiple hobbies of its polymath founder, Nathan Myhrvold. The multimillionaire former chief technologist at Microsoft is a scientist, so there's a collection of antique microscopes in his office. He is a photographer, so striking pictures of nature adorn all the walls. He is an avid writer, so antique typewriters line the hallway. And since he is also a paleontologist, the full-scale head of a T. Rex lords it over the lobby. It's actually a replica of the model used in the second "Jurassic Park" film.
The dino's ferociously bared teeth hint at elements of Intellectual Ventures' bold business plan. Myhrvold and his partner, former Microsoft chief software architect Edward Jung, have created the quintessential company for the 21st century. It doesn't actually make anything: it outsources, offshores and offloads nearly every task performed by regular corporations. It has no factories, machine shops or marketing teams. Only patent attorneys populate the quiet hallways. The five-year-old firm's plan is to create or buy new ideas, accumulate patents--exclusive rights to use the inventions--and rent those ideas to companies that need them to do the gritty work of producing real products. Because today's businesses are constrained by their need to make money, Myhrvold says, "it is irresponsible for them to think wildly outside the box." He wants to fill that innovation gap--"We are thinking wilder, crazier thoughts than anyone else."
To generate patentable ideas, Intellectual Ventures hired a dozen top scientists as part-time consultants to participate in several all-day gabfests each month, which the company calls "invention sessions." Lawyers transcribe the discussions, which can range from biotech to nanotech to solid-state physics, and follow up on the most promising ideas with patent applications. One participant, Dr. Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, says: "We are thinking about how you can solve problems that have never been solved before." Since the company has been holding sessions for only a year, it has likely produced about a hundred ideas whose patent applications won't be processed--or start earning any money--for at least three years.
But spinning new ideas is only a small part of the plan. Sources familiar with Myhrvold's strategy say that he has raised $350 million from some of the largest companies in high tech: Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia and Apple. Google and eBay also recently invested. With this large bankroll, the company is out buying existing patents in droves. (Myhrvold won't comment on these activities, but sources say he has already purchased about 1,000 patents.) The strategy is to set up a sort of patent marketplace. Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. Intellectual-property experts say his plan is audacious and unprecedented, customized for a new, rapidly dawning business environment.
In this new world, intellectual property is every company's most prized possession--and biggest vulnerability. It has al--ready become America's No. 1 product and export: last year in the United States, for example, movie sales in theaters and as DVDs and videos exceeded the overall sales of steel. Intellectual property is now an asset with independent value that can be bartered, sold or battled over. Large companies have always accused their rivals of capitalizing on their ideas, of course. But now companies with more patents than actual products and a few bloodthirsty lawyers on the payroll have no reason to strike partnerships; they are out to win lawsuits. And the biggest companies with the most products that conceivably trample the most patents are sitting ducks. Last year, for example, Microsoft was ordered to pay $520 million for violating the patent of one employee firm, Eolas, which claimed to own the way users could get videos or songs inside a Web browser (Microsoft is appealing).
This is where Intellectual Ventures steps in. It is buying patents from all corners of the high-tech world, including those that could pose legal threats to its powerful investors. An Intellectual Ventures e-mail sent to law and consulting firms last year, and obtained by NEWSWEEK, says the company is "interested in purchasing patents and applications in the areas of software, e-commerce, communications, semiconductors, consumer electronics and computer architecture--basically, just about anything that deals with bits." By buying all these patents, Intellectual Ventures ensures they cannot be used against its investors by gadflies like Eolas.

But Myhrvold also intends to make money for his backers, not just to protect them. This is where the critics start to get anxious. "We're concerned that these giant pools of patent rights are going to prevent entrepreneurs from entering markets, as opposed to being used to promote innovation," says one worried Silicon Valleyventure capitalist. But Intellectual Ventures could do many things, observers say. It could demand licensing fees from its investors' rivals, companies like Yahoo and Amazon. It could also corner the market in a new technology, like a speedier silicon processor, and charge microchip makers a tithe to use it. Or Myhrvold could change directions altogether and start building actual companies around the best ideas.

Myhrvold and Jung won't exactly say. But they charge that Silicon Valley companies have stolen other people's inventions for too long while slashing their own R&D budgets. Referring to Intellectual Ventures' portfolio of patents as his own, he says, "If giant corporations are making billions of dollars off my ideas, I want something for it, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that." He expects his business plan will draw controversy, but notes, "Everything new in life is opposed by somebody." He also cites as a model the electronics companies that pool their DVD patents. Manufacturers that want to make DVD players now have to pay these consortiums small fees for the rights. Yet even with this tech tax, the cost of players has dropped sharply during the DVD boom.

Where is all this headed? Myhrvold reflects on his early days at Microsoft when he was criticized for selling pure software, a collection of ethereal bits unattached to something tangible like computer hardware. Today, this "ethereal" industry is one of America's largest, and Myhrvold repeats almost as a mantra, "Intellectual property is the next software." In other words, he expects a whole new industry of firms like Intellectual Ventures that deal only in the currency of ideas. He is so sure of it, he has even adopted a new hobby: studying for the patent bar exam.

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Failure Is an Option

What do you do when what you need to know hasn't been thought of yet?

Andrew Bast

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Jul 13, 2008 | Updated: 11:55 a.m. ET Jul 12, 2008

If there is a marketplace of ideas, Edward Jung and Nathan Myhrvold want to profit by it. The two Microsoft alumni formed Seattle-based Intellectual Ventures in 2000 to be the go-to place for creative thinking. Instead of developing new products, Intellectual Ventures has developed a portfolio of inventions, or "invention capital" as they call it, which the firm has patented and licenses to other companies. Jung, currently the chief technology officer, spoke last week from his office in Seattle with NEWSWEEK's Andrew Bast about what makes ideas valuable and why success often means putting up with failure. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Can we start with the seemingly most obvious but probably most perplexing question: What is an idea?
Edward Jung: We think of an idea as an action that causes a reaction, and that reaction creates products of value. I'll give two examples. If you made a diagnostic device that could give you early treatment of cancer, there is some very definite value: extended lifetimes, economic value, products that you could put on the shelf, and so on. But then there are other ideas like pandemic control that would clearly create a lot of value for society and people in general, but it is a little hard to figure out how you would charge for it. That is one of the things that would differentiate pure ideas from extremely applied ideas. Once you have an idea like solving pandemics, though, sometimes someone will figure out how to create economics around that, even though nobody knows how to do it today.
What, then, is a good idea?At the heart of it, Intellectual Ventures is a capitalist company, so to us a good idea is nominated by some notion that it could be reduced to something practical. You could have an idea that is literally quite concrete, like how do you make your cell-phone battery life better. Very practical. But if you go back to the pandemic, that's also a good idea because it benefits society in general. So what we've done internally is divide goodness into many different categories, many time domains and many levels of certainty that we can actually create some economic value out of it. Some of our crazy future ideas are very risky, but because we do it at such a large scale, we can do a few of those as well as ones who are safer, more nearer term and more easily translated into economics. But good also depends on the area of technology you are in. So a good idea in computer science is measured differently than a good idea in life science.
Much of capitalism's genius is its incessant pressure to innovate. To that end, are good ideas losing out because they're not economically viable?
Let's say you're a public company. Your shareholders have a certain time horizon they have been trained to look at, and it is very difficult for your to invest outside of it. So if they are pressuring you for every quarter's results and you fail to meet those results, you're punished and naturally you're not going to be investing further down the chain. If part of your brand is to be very future-looking, however, then your shareholders will have much more patience. What is economic depends on where you've positioned yourself. We have a whole part of what we do that is positioned very far in the future. Because we work on intellectual property and not necessarily on product, by our nature we have investors who tend to be more patient. That allows us to operate in a domain that is further out in terms of its economic value. Other companies do this too. If you're big enough, you can invest a good amount in research.
A company like General Electric, for instance?Or Microsoft, who has a pure research group. It's actually one of the largest research groups in the industry, and that's because they have a lot of money. We can push even further out, because people's expectations aren't that we are going to produce the product, but we are going to produce the infrastructure to allow other people to create products. In that sense, we can expand the definition of what is economic to think about. I think that's valuable.
If you have to take so many leaps, then how do you gauge risk?
Ultimately, it's similar to taking that stack of papers and dropping it off the top of a staircase, right? There's a bit of "who knows?" and reality will eventually tell you. A lot of what we do is roadmaps. We can sit down and think about—and we've done this—with the rising costs of health care and the shift to chronic diseases and the change of demographics in civilized countries and the way socialized medicine is working, really what is going to happen to health care in the next 10 or 20 years? What needs to happen? What will be the economic pressures and therefore where are innovations necessary? We can think about that without the constraint of, "What is our business today?" In that context, ideas have a much purer value. For example, if an idea requires a complete change in the way socialized medicine works, well, OK, that's a pretty risky idea. It has to be a really fantastic idea to change something like that. That context, both what's happening today and the pure form of what needs to be solved allow us to try and assess that risk.
Wouldn't you say that human beings are most innovative when their backs are up against the wall?
This is a matter of opinion, but I think when people's backs are to the wall, that's not when great ideas come up. That's when great ideas get funded. Right now there's a lot of stock thinking about alternative energy, because we feel that our backs are coming up to the wall. That's not the best way to fund innovation, but it shows you that creating the incentive or capital will get more people to develop the ideas. I happen to think that when you find a great inventor, they invent all the time. You can't stop them, in fact. At one of our first invention sessions, the icemaker in the refrigerator broke. Inventors, among other things, seem to need caffeinated beverages, and immediately you had three or four top-notch inventors inventing new icemakers.
On the spot?
On the spot. They said, "The icemaker broke. Oh, hey, why do icemakers work this way? Well, here's a better way to make an icemaker. No, here's another way." And instantly, we had several new icemaker inventions. Now, we can create lots of new inventions and ultimately we can't pursue them all. So we have a process we call triage, and those didn't make it in triage because icemakers weren't as interesting as some of the other problems we were solving. But it goes to show that inventors will invent, if given the opportunity. You don't have to wait until your back is up against the wall.
What kind of education makes the most innovative people?
That's a hard one to answer. It's not the educational background as much as it's the personality that develops and much of that comes from the context in which they were raised and obviously some is genetics. It is interesting that we're operating globally now and you tend to see more flexible inventors—big idea inventors—coming out of the U.S. instead of a lot of other countries.
Why is that?Among the countries we operate in, by many metrics the U.S. actually has the worst education system. Why is it that we kind of have the worst education system but the best innovation track record? It's because, I believe, culturally we have a lot of people who have no fear of failure. The beauty, not of our education system, but of our culture, is that we will rebound from failure. Once I talked to a huge multinational company in Asia. When the CEO walks down the hall, everyone stands up and bows. I gave a talk about how many failures I had in starting new groups at Microsoft. At the end, I put a timeline down of my failures and I turned to the chairman of the company and all of his CEOs and said, "If I was at your company, when would you have fired me?" He pointed at the timeline and said, "Frankly, probably in your first year." I told him that if that were the case, I probably wouldn't have lasted long enough to create things of real value that I did at Microsoft, then, would I? Ultimately, most common among the great inventors we work with is that they have no fear of failure, no respect for the boundaries of their education, yet they are self-aware enough to take input from others.
Is technological innovation different from innovations in politics? Or can Karl Marx and John Adams readily be compared to Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison?
I have a different way of categorizing political and technical ideas. I actually think those guys came up with what we would call today great business-model ideas. They're not necessarily all about capital, but they have to do with how to organize people or processes to accomplish a goal. So I don't differentiate political ideas from others. I do however divide ideas into ones that are potentially win-win versus those that are more zero-sum. In general, because technology fuels economic growth, there are a higher proportion of technology ideas that are win-win than political ideas. To the extent that you end up with a political idea like capitalism that creates a lot of growth, maybe there is a win-win there, though a lot of people argue that there are a lot of losers in capitalism. Look at the pandemic example I gave earlier. There is a huge social component there. It's not just technology.

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