Busy Day at the ARPA-E Show

I thought readers might be interested in my “notes to self” from the ARPA-E show the other day:

A representative from Électricité de France (logo pictured) says that the company is going full bore with EPRs (European pressurized water reactors). 

The director of the Algae Biomass Organization says that the concept of creating fuels from algae is a non-starter, especially while oil is so cheap.  He’s pushing for algae as the base for nutraceuticals.

The principle of Integral Consulting, which makes power control systems for hydrokinetics, is well aware of the various players in this space, and is bullish on concepts like my client Littoral Power Systems.

I ran into a true perpetual motion guy who’s going to use the ambient air pressure to create electricity. Actually, he’s not, but he thinks he is.

I came across several people who are investors or represent investors like venture capitalists. It’s refreshing to see how many people understand that clean energy is slated to become the defining industry of the 21st century.

I ran into a graduate student at the University of Florida whose project is to create extremely high temperature concentrated solar thermal. The secret sauce is using a graphite collector through which liquid tin flows as its working fluid. The system operates at 1350 degrees C, the merit of which is the theoretical efficiency that accrues to temperatures that high. It goes without saying that there are considerable engineering hurdles to be crossed, including components (like pumps) that don’t fall apart. Terrific young man; I was very proud to meet him.

I spoke with a woman at the Department of Energy Advanced Fuels Campaign who specializes in nuclear. The thing that I found most interesting about her entire organization is that it’s focused on the integration of renewables with nuclear. That is, it’s not nuclear or renewables it’s nuclear and renewables, integrated in a very thoughtful and innovative way.

I ran into the director of CalCharge, a consortium of energy storage organizations. The purpose is to bring lots of different types of companies together to understand the state of the art of storage, and where it’s going, such that all can generate the maximum levels of synergy with one another.

I shook hands with a senior player in Constellation, a subsidiary of Exelon, the energy giant. His group invests in commercially ready startups that may be pre-revenues, but that are posed for rapid growth. His organization is most comfortable investing somewhere between one and five million dollars into each project.

I met a senior analyst of the AES Corporation. His position, and I think it’s an interesting one, is that the world is too focused on the next new thing, as opposed to maximizing the utility of existing technologies. He is personally in charge of understanding how coal plants can be modernized to deal with the obvious problems associated with toxicity.