http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=a9wBJqPgMUT8&refer=homeJune 29 (Bloomberg) -- Up and down Sand Hill Road, the venture capital hub south of San Francisco, the financiers who bankrolled the technology boom of the 1990s are chasing their next big thing: alternative forms of energy.
As oil and natural gas prices climb, venture capitalists are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in young, often money-losing companies that hope to harness the power of the sun or the heat inside the Earth. They're pouring millions more into companies that cook up gasoline and diesel substitutes from corn, sugar and soybeans. In all, U.S. VC funds invested a record $739 million in renewable energy in 2005, up 36 percent from 2004, according to Cleantech Venture Network LLC, a research group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
VCs haven't buzzed like this since the Internet captured investors' imaginations in the 1990s. Alternative energy stocks have surged the way dot-com shares did in 1999 -- before the bottom fell out of the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Investors Rush In
The 40-stock WilderHill Clean Energy Index has rocketed since its August 2004 debut, rising 90 percent to a record 251.17 on May 5. Since then, the index has fallen 23 percent to trade at 194.21 on June 28.
As they did in the late 1990s, stock investors are baying after companies that have yet to turn a profit. Pacific Ethanol Inc., based in Fresno, California, for example, lost $611,763 in 2005 on sales of $38 million. Its stock? Up 129 percent in the 12 months ended on June 28.
The frenzy troubles Silicon Valley pioneer Vinod Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems Inc. in 1982 and, then, as a partner at Menlo Park, California-based VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, helped finance Amazon.com Inc. and Netscape Communications Corp.
``We need to be cautious that this doesn't become like the dot-com bubble,'' says Khosla, 51, a champion of ethanol. ``We don't want to get ahead of ourselves.''
A New Era
For now, the alternative-energy bulls are charging. They say a collision of powerful forces -- from the soaring price of OPEC crude to the booming economy of China, to growing concern that global warming threatens our planet -- is about to usher in a new era of green power.
Oil prices have tripled during the past three years, and the first energy crunch of the 21st century has begun to rip through the world's fossil fuel-based economy. In the U.S., the largest energy consumer, $70-a-barrel oil has sapped consumers' confidence and raised the threat of stagflation, a toxic combination of accelerating inflation and slackening economic growth last seen in the 1970s.
President George W. Bush has urged the nation to break its ``addiction'' to foreign oil and find new, cheaper sources of power. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, has a geo-thermal system.
Today, the world is straining to feed its seemingly insatiable appetite for energy with oil, natural gas and coal. Tomorrow looks even worse. China, now the No. 2 energy consumer, devours 6.5 million barrels of oil a day. By 2025, it will gulp 14.2 million a day, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Emerging economies such as India's will swallow still more.
Global Warming
Global warming, meanwhile, has vaulted from scientific journals to front pages worldwide. The news is everywhere: Glaciers are melting, polar bears are drowning and each year sets new heat records.
In April, Vanity Fair magazine, chronicler of the Hollywood A-list, confronted the issue by declaring ``Green is the new black.'' Julia Roberts, who won an Oscar playing environmental crusader Erin Brockovich, graced the cover, with Al Gore, George Clooney and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at her feet. Country singer Willie Nelson, the long-haired Texas rebel who twangs ``On the Road Again,'' has started a company that sells biodiesel at truck stops in Middle America.
As President Bush, a Republican, touts alternative fuels, Gore, his Democratic opponent in 2000, warns of the catastrophes that lie ahead if we keep spewing greenhouse gases into the air.
`An Inconvenient Truth'
Gore's environmental documentary, ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' opened in U.S. theaters on May 26. The film raked in $17,292 per screen, besting ``The Break-Up,'' a comedy starring Jennifer Aniston. Kleiner Perkins and Menlo Park-based VC firm Foundation Capital have held private screenings of Gore's film for partners and clients.
Climate change is no longer the bugaboo of a few scientists. About 85 percent of people in the U.S. believe it's probably happening now, according to a March ABC News/Time magazine/Stanford University poll.
Goaded by $3-a-gallon gasoline, thawing icecaps or both, some consumers are changing old habits, and entrepreneurs and companies are responding. General Motors Corp. has discontinued the Hummer H1, its hulking gas guzzler. At Toyota Motor Corp., U.S. sales of the hybrid Prius coupe doubled in 2005.
The Green in Green
So where will VCs find the green in green? That depends on whom you ask. Khosla, who withdrew from Kleiner Perkins as a full-time partner in 2004 to start his own firm, Khosla Ventures, a few doors away, is betting on ethanol. He says the fuel may help the U.S. break its dependence on overseas oil, which he calls a threat to national security.
Erik Straser, 36, a partner at nearby Mohr Davidow Ventures who once worked at the top-secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, says the cure to our energy ills is right over our heads. New solar-power cells may one day reshape the global electricity industry, he says.
Lee Bailey, chief operating officer of Santa Monica, California-based US Renewables Group LLC, says he's not counting on big, new ideas. Instead, Bailey, 54, has spent $38 million for a stake in a mothballed geothermal power plant in the pine- covered hills of northern California. Workers there are drilling new steam wells and restoring a 70-ton turbine.
Then there's Nancy Floyd, who has seen promise -- and profit -- in green power since she went to work for the Public Utilities Commission in Vermont in 1977. Co-founder of San Francisco-based Nth Power LLC, Floyd, 51, is wagering on biodiesel, a fuel made from soybean and canola oils, among other bets.
Nasdaq Bust
``A lot of VCs have woken up to the sheer magnitude of opportunity in the energy markets,'' says Ira Ehrenpreis, a partner at Technology Partners, a Palo Alto-based VC firm.
Venture capitalists could use a winner. Many of them are still nursing losses from the Nasdaq bust. After that rout, institutional investors pulled back, and VCs' money dried up.
Investment flows into venture funds plunged to $4 billion in 2002 from a record $106 billion in 2000, according to the Washington-based National Venture Capital Association. VC funds posted a negative return of 6.8 percent from 1999 to 2005.
And so the deals keep coming. In April, five venture capital firms, among them Kleiner Perkins, clinched the biggest clean-power deal the VC industry has ever seen. They invested a combined $50 million in Altra Inc., a Malibu, California-based ethanol company. In May, venture capitalists from Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group met with executives at SolFocus as the startup raised $15 million.
Expensive Alternative
People have dreamed of finding cheap, clean sources of energy since the oil-price shock of the 1970s. So far, the hopes for alternative energy have far outstripped the reality.
Green power is expensive. Even now, after oil and natural gas prices have surged to record highs, it's still usually cheaper to generate electricity by burning fossil fuels than it is by using solar panels, wind turbines or underground steam.
In May, Rosemead, California-based Southern California Edison agreed to pay 6.15 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity from renewable sources, plus an additional, undisclosed rate to ensure energy would be available during peak hours.
Power produced by natural gas-fired plants costs 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar power costs U.S. homeowners as much as 30 cents per kilowatt-hour -- double or even triple the price of gas- or coal-generated electricity, according to Jefferies & Co., a Los Angeles-based investment bank.
Subsidies
Strip out state and federal incentives designed to promote renewable power -- subsidies that might disappear when the political winds shift -- and the economics of green look even worse.
Take biodiesel. In late May, the fuel cost $2.99 a gallon in Washington state. Regular diesel cost $3.15 to $3.30. A biobargain? Not quite. U.S. biodiesel actually costs closer to $4 a gallon. The federal government pays distributors as much as $1 for every gallon of biodiesel they sell.
Because it's relatively expensive, green power has never really caught on. In 2005, wind turbines, solar panels and other alternatives to fossil fuels generated about 357 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, or 9.4 percent of the juice used in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That's down from 11 percent in 1989.
Oil, coal and natural gas generated 72 percent. The rest came from nuclear power, a proven alternative to fossil fuels that doesn't contribute to global warming but carries its own environmental hazards.
`Just Around the Corner'
``Alternative energy has been just around the corner for 20 years,'' says J. Stephan Dolezalek, a partner at San Bruno, California-based VantagePoint Venture Partners. Once a green- power doubter, Dolezalek is now backing clean-energy startups.
Institutional investors that invest in VC funds are warming to clean energy, too. The $130 billion California State Teachers' Retirement System, for example, is investing $250 million in alternative energy through VC and private equity funds.
``We're not head over heels in love with this sector, but we're moving prudently to invest in it,'' says Margot Wirth, a money manager at the teachers' pension fund.
To green-energy skeptics, VCs have a familiar reply: This time, things are different. The economic, environmental and cultural stars have finally aligned for a new era of alternative power, they say.
`Birkenstock Set'
``Something has really changed,'' says Floyd of Nth Power, which has invested solely in alternative energy since 1997. ``This industry isn't just for the Birkenstock set anymore; it's got serious capital behind it now.''
That includes corporate cash. General Electric Co. has made wind turbines since 2002 and solar systems since 2004. Now, its GE Energy Financial Services arm plans to triple its renewable energy fund to $3 billion by 2008.
``The growth opportunity is so apparent, so we're going after it,'' says Kevin Walsh, managing director of GE Financial's renewable energy unit.
Khosla, the former Kleiner Perkins VC, has become a leading ethanol evangelist. A Republican, he says U.S. dependence on Middle Eastern oil threatens the nation's security. Ethanol is not only cleaner than gasoline; it's ultimately safer for the country, too, he says. His firm has invested an undisclosed sum in Altra and other ethanol startups.
``Oil is a fundamental component of our economy and, arguably, nothing but trouble,'' Khosla says in a 12-page white paper he distributes to U.S. lawmakers and investors.
Khosla's Allies
Khosla has allied himself with national security hawks such as R. James Woolsey, 65, director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1993 to 1995.
``We are so locked into oil that we're unprepared to substitute another fuel,'' says Woolsey, 65, who advises VantagePoint Partners on alternative energy investments. ``What if a terror attack or a regime change in Saudi Arabia takes 6 or 7 million barrels off line for a year? Would the price of oil go to $100 or $200 a barrel?''
Khosla, a native of Pune, India, with close-cropped gray hair and deep-set eyes, made his name developing network computing companies such as Cerent Corp. and Juniper Networks Inc. Kleiner Perkins turned an $8 million investment in Cerent into $2 billion.
That record has won Khosla entree to Washington power brokers. He's delivered his pitch on ethanol to Democratic Congressional leaders, such as Nancy Pelosi of California, as well as Republicans such as senators Richard Lugar of Indiana and John McCain of Arizona.
Ethanol Push
The U.S. government is already pushing ethanol, whether consumers want to pay for it or not. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires that oil refiners -- which blend ethanol with gasoline as an additive -- double biofuel consumption by 2012. For now, at least, consumers are paying the freight: For the past eight years, corn-based ethanol has cost them an average of 49 cents a gallon more than gasoline.
With about 6 million flex-fuel ethanol vehicles already on U.S. roads, Khosla says his plan isn't grandiose.
``When we started with the Internet, every telecom carrier said, `No way. We have a 100-year-old infrastructure, and it will never change,' and in less than 10 years, it did,'' he says. ``I think the same thing can happen in energy. I have no doubt that we could replace most, if not all, of our fuel needs with ethanol in 25 years.''
Geothermal Power
Bailey of US Renewables isn't waiting for Khosla's ethanol revolution. Instead, he's dusting off another decades-old idea: geothermal power.
The Bottle Rock geothermal power plant sits atop the largest subterranean steam field in the world, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Napa County wine country. When Bailey first saw Bottle Rock in 2005, it had been idle for 15 years and was overgrown with weeds and littered with stacks of rusting metal pipes. He had to sidestep bear droppings as he surveyed the derelict plant.
``It was a complete mess,'' he says. Nonetheless, US Renewables, which is investing a $100 million fund in alternative energy projects, bought about 88 percent of the plant last October and is financing its rebirth.
Back in the 1980s, Bailey, a lanky, 6-foot-5-inch lawyer from upstate New York, served as general counsel of Rochester Hills, Michigan-based Energy Conversion Devices Inc. The company developed the batteries for GM's short-lived EV1 electric car.
Rustic Canyon
After directing a Clinton Administration program that promoted sales of state companies in Russia and South Africa, Bailey joined Santa Monica, California-based Rustic Canyon Partners. Rustic Canyon was founded by Thomas Unterman, former chief financial officer of newspaper company Times Mirror Co., now part of Tribune Co.
Rustic Canyon, with $800 million under management, invests part of the fortune of the Chandler family that built the Los Angeles Times. Bailey formed US Renewables in 2004 with Rustic Canyon as lead investor.
Making the drive to Bottle Rock through the rice-growing fields north of Sacramento, Bailey says he doesn't have the patience to finance new solar or hydrogen technology. Bottle Rock plans to go on line by December, a little more than a year after he invested in it, he says.
``Going into the lab for years and then developing a technology into a commercially viable product takes a long time,'' he says. ``It could be 10 years before you can exit.''
Volcanic Steam
Bottle Rock draws volcanic steam from reservoirs 10,000 feet underground and pumps it through almost two miles of pipe to a turbine and generator. Housed in concrete walls almost 2 feet thick to withstand earthquakes, the $60 million facility was state of the art when it opened in 1985.
``It was the Cadillac of plants,'' says Louis Capuano, chief executive officer of ThermaSource Inc., an oil and steam well driller in Santa Rosa, California, and a minority stakeholder in Bottle Rock.
Five years after going on line, the steam wells clogged. With natural gas then at $1.46 per million British thermal units -- four times less than it cost on June 5 -- California shut the plant rather than fix it. Bottle Rock no longer made economic sense, Capuano says.
Now it does, Bailey says. Twenty states have passed laws requiring utilities to buy a portion of their electricity from alternative sources. California has required its utilities to buy 20 percent of their power from non-fossil-fuel plants by 2017.
Carlyle Invests
On May 16, Bottle Rock landed a 10-year contract from San Francisco-based Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Bailey says Bottle Rock will generate 25 megawatts of electricity an hour by December, enough power for 25,000 homes, and is capable of putting out more than twice that much.
On June 8, a $685 million fund run jointly by buyout firms Carlyle Group and Riverstone Holdings acquired 50 percent of Bottle Rock for an undisclosed sum.
At Mohr Davidow, a Sand Hill Road mainstay founded in 1983, Straser says he sees a bright future for solar power. A native of Manhattan Beach, near Los Angeles, Straser got a Ph.D in engineering from Stanford in 1988. As a student, he patented a system that uses wireless sensors to monitor satellites and power plants.
After working at the Los Alamos lab and Interval Research Corp., a technology incubator funded by Microsoft Corp. co- founder Paul Allen, Straser joined Mohr Davidow in 1998, at the age of 28.
`Move the Cost Needle Down'
At a restaurant near his office, Straser pushes aside his stir-fry and grabs a pencil to diagram how rising energy costs are pressing companies to seek alternatives like solar power.
``Solar is all about cost performance now, and those companies that can move the cost needle down, that's the only goal that matters,'' Straser says, scribbling on the butcher paper covering the tabletop.
In early 2005, Straser met with Martin Roscheisen, 37, a fellow Stanford-trained engineer, who'd assembled a team of 30 Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers in an office park in Palo Alto. They were developing a new type of solar technology that cost less to produce than typical silicon panels. Google co- founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were early investors in the company, called Nanosolar Inc.
A few months later, Mohr Davidow led a $10.5 million round of financing for Nanosolar, which included Benchmark Capital, the Sand Hill Road VC firm that funded EBay Inc.
Nanotechnology
``Given that we invested in the company before the product was developed, there was a technical risk,'' Straser says of Nanosolar. ``But we dove in deep on the technology, and we could see how a breakthrough manufacturing process could unlock a huge economic advantage.''
For 30 years, solar cells have been fashioned from silicon wafers similar to the ones that semiconductor manufacturers like Intel Corp. use to manufacture computer chips. The rigid, delicate panels are expensive to make, costing customers about $5.40 per watt, and must be mounted in modules on rooftops or other exposed surfaces.
Using nanotechnology, the science of building microscopic materials from single atoms and molecules, Nanosolar's scientists created a ``photovoltaic ink'' that converts sunlight into electricity. The ink is coated onto flexible, foil-like strips that wind through roll presses similar to those that print newspapers.
The thin film of ink, which is 1/100th the thickness of a silicon-based solar cell, can be attached to walls or any other flat surface or integrated into roofing material. Roscheisen says this process will enable Nanosolar to make solar cells for as little as a 10th of the cost of silicon panels.
Bay Area Factory
Roscheisen says he doesn't aspire to replace existing electricity sources with his PowerSheet-brand solar cells.
Rather, he plans to market the product as a source of relief when electricity is most expensive -- during the afternoon, especially in the summer, when air conditioners tax the power grid. In California, electricity prices jump to 30 cents in the afternoon from 6 cents per kilowatt-hour at night. By drawing electricity from solar cells, customers can save money.
``Solar is fundamentally about peak power availability and value,'' Roscheisen says. Nanosolar plans to build a factory in the Bay Area that can make enough solar cells to generate 120 megawatts of power by the end of 2007 and 430 megawatts by 2009. On June 21, Nansolar announced a $75 million investment from a group including hedge funds SAC Capital Advisers LLC and GLG Partners LP.
Growing Pains
Right now, many solar companies are feeling growing pains. Worldwide sales of solar panels more than doubled to $11.2 billion in 2005 from $4.7 billion in 2003, according to Clean Edge Inc., a Portland, Oregon-based research firm. Solar cell makers that can't buy the silicon they need face backlogs of as long as two years, says Jeffrey Bencik, an analyst at Jefferies in New York.
Nanosolar confronts commodity risks of its own. The company uses copper and indium, both of which have undergone volatile price swings during the past year. Indium, a metal as scarce as silver, swung from $950 a kilogram in June 2005 to $1,035 in September, to $797.50 on June 5.
An even bigger challenge is that Nanosolar's ``thin-film cells'' are less efficient than conventional solar panels. They convert 14 percent of the sunlight that strikes them into electricity, whereas silicon cells convert about 20 percent.
`Glitches'
Michael McGehee, a materials science professor at Stanford's School of Engineering, says Nanosolar's cells show promise. ``I'm excited about this technology, but it's going to take a while,'' he says. ``There are always glitches you can't predict.''
Floyd of Nth Power has been confronting the uncertain future of alternative energy since her days at the Vermont Public Utilities Commission. Back then, she was fresh out of Rutgers University in New Jersey, with a master's degree in political science, and says she didn't know a watt from a volt. (Watts measure electric power, and volts are the unit of force that carries electricity.)
Then President Jimmy Carter jump-started the renewable power industry with tax credits. Floyd was hooked.
``There were a lot of new technologies coming on line, and there weren't many entrepreneurs, so it was a market where you could really make a mark,'' she says.
In 1982, Floyd founded NFC Energy Corp., a wind power company in San Francisco that raised $30 million and erected 130 wind turbines in the Altamont Pass that connects the Bay Area to the Central Valley.
Nth Power
Floyd, who used to hike into the pass and use a device called an anemometer to measure the force of the wind, struck gold: In 1985, she sold NFC for 25 times its initial investment capital.
After a two-year stint at Pacific Telesis Group, the telecommunications company now owned by AT&T Corp., Floyd co- founded Nth Power in 1993 with Maurice Gunderson, a thermodynamics engineer. It took them four years to raise their first fund.
``Finding investors was a challenge,'' Floyd says.
It's less challenging now: In June, Nth Power closed its fourth fund at $200 million. Chevron Corp. and Electricite de France SA, the state-owned power provider, are among Nth Power's investors.
Floyd says alternative energy is still the wide-open industry she remembers, where an individual with little capital and a big idea can make a splash. Last November, she backed just such a person, a former airline pilot named John Plaza.
Northwest Pilot
In 2004, Plaza, 40, quit his job at Northwest Airlines Corp., withdrew half of the savings in his 401(k) plan, took out a second mortgage on his Seattle home and sold his beloved Ducati Supersport motorcycle. With the $300,000 he raised, he started Seattle Biodiesel LLC.
Plaza picked biodiesel because it's a tested, clean alternative to petroleum. Like cooking oil, the fuel, which is more yellow-colored than gasoline, can burn in any diesel engine with little modification. Unblended biodiesel emits up to 50 percent less carbon monoxide and 78 percent less carbon dioxide than petroleum diesel, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
By July 2005, Plaza had raised $2 million from individual investors. Martin Tobias, a partner at Seattle-based VC Ignition Partners LLC, had come aboard as CEO.
Brewery Tanks
Plaza's startup built a plant in a 10,000-square-foot (929- square-meter) warehouse on Seattle's south side. It looks like an oversized chemistry set, with pipes snaking across the ceiling and connecting various tanks wrapped in silver-colored insulation. Plaza salvaged a dozen 7,000-gallon (26,500-liter) tanks from a brewery that was closing to hold vegetable oil and finished biodiesel.
The plant receives soybean oil from Cargill Inc. and other growers by rail, heats it up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit (93 degrees Celsius), uses a proprietary process to remove glycerin and then purifies the fuel. Plaza fills his Chevy diesel pickup directly from a tank at the plant, which makes 5 million gallons a year.
Floyd visited the plant in the fall of 2005 and concluded that the company could prosper by catering to truckers and other fleet customers. Even better, biodiesel might eventually be used by power plants or refined into heating oil. Last November, Nth Power took part in a $7.5 million funding round led by Technology Partners, a Palo Alto venture firm.
Biodiesel Plant
``We don't need a massive shift by U.S. consumers to get a venture return,'' Floyd says.
Plaza and Tobias are now rounding up $40 million to build the largest biodiesel plant in the U.S. at an old lumber mill port on the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle. It will be capable of producing 100 million gallons of biodiesel a year by mid-2007.
By the time the plant is pumping out biofuel, the young company will be facing formidable competition: On May 11, Chevron's venture arm acquired 22 percent of Galveston Bay Biodiesel LP, a Houston-based company that's building a 100 million-gallon biodiesel refinery. With Chevron's distribution network, Galveston could capture many of the customers Plaza is aiming for.
Plaza shrugs at the challenge. ``If the oil companies do that, and we're on 100 percent renewable fuel as a country, and I'm dead broke, well, then I'll feel like a success,'' he says.
Green Future?
For green-power fans, the biggest risk of all is oil. Venture capitalists and stock market investors are all betting that high-priced crude is here to stay.
``If oil suddenly drops to $50 a barrel on decreasing demand, then this whole thing could drop like a rock,'' says Robert Wilder, CEO of Encinitas, California-based WilderShares Inc., which tracks the WilderHill Clean Energy Index.
An oil slump might bring an end to today's green rush. Given the spiraling demand for power worldwide, however, cheaper oil alone won't cure our energy ills for long.
Ernest Moniz, co-chairman of the Energy Research Council at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is researching noncarbon-based energy sources, says the world must come to grips with its appetite for energy and the environmental havoc being wrought by fossil fuels. There's no time to waste, he says.
``These are huge issues that have to be grappled with,'' he says. ``We're talking about a transformation of the global energy infrastructure over the next few decades.''
Time moves fast in Silicon Valley. In 1999, VCs were the heroes of the New Economy. By 2002, many of them looked like goats. What many investors seemed to forget during those dark, post-bubble years is that, sometimes, the dreamers are right.
In less than a decade, a seemingly quixotic startup with a goofy name -- Google -- has become one of the most valuable companies in the world. VCs who can find a Google or Amazon or EBay of green power will make a fortune. And if they happen to save the world along the way, well, that's fine, too.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Edward Robinson in San Francisco
edrobinson@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: June 29, 2006 00:43 EDT
