Green A City

BP/ Berkeley Biofuel Center Plans Unveiled

Today's San Francisco Chronicle carried as its lead page-one item a story SustainLane Government wrote about on Feb. 16, when we interviewed the new director of Berkeley's Energy Biosciences Institute, Chris Somerville, in our list of leading US cities for cleantech incubation.

Anyway, besides "unveiling" Somerville, who is a visiting scientist from Stanford at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, which is co-managing the new $500 million biofuels institute, the Chronicle also named others involved in the venture.

UC Berkeley professor Daniel Kamman stands out in the role of "Next-Generation Assessment" lead as part of the lab's socio-economic research. Kamman, a renewable energy expert with a strong background in economic impact analysis, has testified throughout California and in Congress about the potential of cleantech to become the lead engine of national, regional, and local economic development.

Our cleantech city ranking has been covered throughout the blogosphere ( Joel Makower, WorldChanging, Wired) and as of this morning has been picked up in print such as The Toronto Star ("Toronto Asleep at the Cleantech Switch"), The San Jose Business Journal, The Boston Business Journal, The Austin Business Journal and the Oakland Tribune.

Mayor Will Wynn of Austin, ranked number one, issued a nice statement for being recognized by SustainLane Government as the best in class. Austin media is also covering our scoop on its Clean Energy Incubator's test-bed work with city-owned Austin Energy as a national first.

Shouts out to Abendigo Reebs and the SL Gov staff of Richard Young, Ken Ott and Ramsay Millie for charting the course!

Top Five US Cities for Cleantech

SustainLane Government just released its ranking of top US cities for cleantech incubation clusters. Which cities are the best candidates to be the center of 21^st century cleantech economic development?

As many of you know, cleantech refers to venture-capital (VC) funded investment for sustainability related industry sectors such as renewable energy, alternative fuels, energy efficiency, green building, advanced materials, nanotechnology and material reuse.

So, without further ado, the top five US cleantech incubation clusters:

 1. Austin, TX: one of the oldest—circa 2001--and most developed clusters. Austin’s Clean Energy Incubator has a well-established VC network, university participation (U Texas at Austin) and a bonafide testbed in the form of city-owned utility Austin Energy. The last element is something that most clusters lack, but Austin lets these start-ups have at fielding testing and prototyping on a scale that normally would be only available to the big guys.

2. San Jose, CA: How could you think VC and not give a nod to the (Silicon) Valley? The Valley’s cleantech firms got about 60 percent of the state’s VC funding in 2006, up from about 30 percent in 2005, according to the “Cleantech Capital Alert” newsletter. Solar and various other cleantech start-ups are running amok here, and though San Jose State is not an academic powerhouse, it is acting as an R&D partner for the Environmental Business Cluster, as is the city of San Jose’s Redevelopment Agency.

3. Berkeley, CA: Another Bay Area city? Yep, UC Berkeley just landed a $500 million grant from British Petroleum, with additional funding from the state of California, so the Biosciences Energy Institute can become “the biofuels capital of the universe,” according to a managing scientist with institute partner Lawrence Berkeley Labs. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is another partner.

4. Pasadena, CA: Pasadena’s Entretec is working with a network of investors and partners such as the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and potentially with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs. The organization offers support to start-ups while providing introductions, events and pitch opportunities.

5. Greater Boston: The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust takes money from utility bills and redirects it into start-ups and advanced-stage cleantech companies. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, meanwhile, is ramping up its cluster of start-ups with cleantech related business plan contests, networking events and is expected to announce an incubator in March.

For the best in cleantech news, we recommend our friend Joel Makower who just blogged on our ranking, as well as the Cleantech Venture Network’s blog, which has a more government policy-oriented slant to it than some of the others that just report on which companies got how much VC funding. Tyler Hamilton, for instance, had a nice little piece recently about new technologies being developed to help cities implement congestion pricing, which is now the rage of Europe, thanks to London’s example.

Also worth checking out are Cleantech Spotlight and The Energy Blog, which analyze cleantech from an energy policy and energy news perspective.

Chicago as Living System: UrbanLabs wins design competition

Chicago-based UrbanLabs won a History Channel national contest yesterday to design a 22nd century city. The small design firm came up with a compelling design called "Growing Water" to convert the whole city of Chicago into a living system that replenishes Lake Michigan with treated wastewater.

UrbanLabs beat out teams from New York and Los Angeles to win the competition, which was judged by famed architect Daniel Libeskind, in addition to public voting through the web.

While using living systems for water treatment is not new (Vermont professor John Todd is generally recognized as the innovator of this low-tech low-impact approach), UrbanLabs has scaled up the concept to meet the needs of an entire city's watershed.

At the heart of living systems are invertebrates, fish and plants that process the impurities out of wastewater without toxic chemicals. Combined with natural oxygenation, the process makes dirty water clean enough to be reused for most needs. Seattle's High Point neighborhood completed in 2005 an award-winning stormwater treatment system that was inspired by living system design.

Besides envisioning an attractive plan for replenishing Lake Michigan's water with the the one billion gallons that Chicago now uses each day and mostly diverts to the  Mississippi, Urban Labs also integrated attractive transportation, recreational and residential elements into the design.

Kudos to UrbanLabs for coming up with a plausible solution to what will be some of this century's most vexing urban challenges: have enough clean water to use while protecting natural water resources.

Spain's Climate Change Director Visits SustainLane

Catalonia, Spain's Director of Climate Change Policy visited us at SustainLane on Friday to discuss the progress his province is making in carbon emissions inventories. He said his US State Department chaperoned trip was piqued by The SustainLane US City Rankings and we spent much of the visit comparing our sustainability research.

Inaki Gili Jauregui came to SustainLane's San Francisco offices as part of his visit to US cities to investigate which cities are taking the biggest steps in inventorying carbon emissions that contribute to global climate change. Catalonia, which is in northeast Spain and includes beautiful Barcelona, has already inventoried about 40-50 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions by working closely with industries ranging from cement factories to energy producing companies.

The rest of the province's carbon emissions come from "things that you and I do" such as transportation, and those have yet to be inventoried completely. Spain is developing goals for reducing greenhouse gases as part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set goals for industrialized nations to reduce their carbon emissions.

Jauregui met with city officials in Chicago (#4 in the SustainLane City Rankings) and San Francisco (#2) as his interest in both cities came from their high rank in our study. Because of the recent greenhouse gas inventories both cities had conducted in 2003, he said such efforts may exceed the rigor of inventories that cities are undergoing in Spain.

Spain's overall greenhouse gas reduction goals as part of Kyoto are being conducted by provinces such as Catalonia and Andulacia and then are fed up into a national model for calculation. The EU nation will determine how close to or far off it is from its Kyoto goals in 2008.

We also discussed the culture of innovation in the Silicon Valley that allows companies to experiment and fail, an approach that would never be attempted in more conservative Europe. Providing an underhanded compliment on our city rankings, he said "such rankings would never be published in Europe unless they were perfect," though he did say they were "the best such rankings of cities that exists."

Jauregui is now off to Oklahoma City, which finished second-to-last in the city rankings, mainly because of its 2 percent public transit use and pervasive sprawl. The word "sprawl" forced a translation from the note-scribbling State Department official, which I heard as "disembodied." I would have added "major export of the United States" but held my tongue.