TechConnect Blog Posts
REfficient: Sustainable Model for a Sustainable Marketplace
I usually coach high tech companies with patented (or at least patent pending) technologies. Patents make for such a nice, clean way of protecting sustainable value in a company. But they're not appropriate in every situation, particularly among online businesses. So how do you stay ahead of the competition when you've got no legal - and relatively few financial - barriers to entry? Espeecially if you're an online-based service business doing something that it seems like a ton of people are doing already?
Nothing Succeeds Like Success
Stephanie McLarty runs REfficient, one of the 14 Canadian companies I'm coaching for the TechConnect World Expo next week. REfficient is "The World's Sustainable Marketplace", a service that helps corporations dispose of "surplus assets" such as obsolete servers, switches and the like that are otherwise gathering dust and storage fees (or just valuable space at the company). As the push to be green grows and waste disposal regulations tighten up, it gets more complicated and expensive to deal wtih those assets, which is why they end up in a storage closet somewhere. But still, dozens of companies have offered green solutions to surplus asset disposal, none of which to my knowledge has taken the world by storm. Why is this one different?
In fact, Stephanie herself started one of those dozens of companies before launching REfficient... but wasn't satisfied with the limited success she achieved. But there's a reason she has been recognized by Ernst & Young, IEC and WEConnect International, as well as Profit magazine, as an entrepreneur to watch: she learned from the experiences at the first company, applied them to the current one and is already, in one year, operating at a 28% gross margin, debt-free, having dealt with 252 metric tons of surplus assets.
There are other things that REfficient's done well: They started with niche customers with a lot of market pain in a sector where they have well-established networks and understand the equipment they are repurposing. And my favorite, they are continually innovating to make themselves more valuable to their clientele. And that's how they've already reached $500K in revenue. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? That's why you'll always hear about how companies fail due to a lack of execution more often than to a failure of technology. Stephanie and her team are executing really well and I'm sure will continue to do so.
If you'd like to learn more, I encourage you to attend their pitch by registering for TechConnect World Expo and attending the Consulate General of Canada Boston's all day Canada Innovates clean energy conference, including pitches by 14 Canadian companies with a broad range of technologies.
Conover + Company Communications is presenting this information to you on behalf of the Government of Canada. Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia.
CarbonCure: Killing Two Birds with One Concrete Block
Concrete contributes fully 5% of annual carbon dioxide emissions globally when one of its primary constituents, cement, is produced. It's a problem that won't go away any time soon: cement and concrete are affordable, strong and practical building materials. The good news is that they represent a great opportunity for reducing CO2 emissions through innovation.
Sequestering Carbon Dioxide and Making Better Concrete
CarbonCure Technologies, one of 14 Canadian companies that I have coached on their pitches for June 15 at the TechConnect World Expo, has developed just such an innovation: they're making better concrete blocks by infusing the blocks during manufacture with CO2.
What do they mean by "better"?
- Better use of feedstock: ~10% less cement
- Better use of energy: ~30% less energy to process
- Better productivity: ~20% fewer defects
And at the same time:
- Better quality product: ~15% stronger than standard blocks
"But wait, there's more!" Not only is it a better process that produces a better block, it's a process that sequesters carbon dioxide resulting in a net 17% reduction in the production of CO2. And the precast concrete producer that adopts the technology will get to breakeven in just one year.
It certainly doesn't hurt that they have been able to attract high profile partners. CarbonCure is doing a pilot project this year with the Shaw Group, a company that has been producing concrete for over 150 years. Furthermore, Air Liquide provides their CO2 delivery system. This 100-year old gas products company is well-respected for its focus on sustainability and efficiency.
To me, the most surprising aspect of this company is that it arose from parent company CarbonSense Solutions. Not that there's anything particularly unusual about a spin out, but CarbonSense is a "specialized carbon management firm... offer[ing] a range of technical and advisory services... measuring and managing your carbon inventory..." - not the kind of company that I would have necessarily expected to be starting a high tech subsidiary. Clearly, they've paid close attention to their customers' problems and addressed them using their own areas of expertise to foster the development of an exciting new technology. This is a cleantech technology with a real market pull.
If you'd like to learn more, I encourage you to attend their pitch by registering for TechConnect World Expo and attending the Consulate General of Canada Boston's all day Canada Innovates clean energy conference, including pitches by 14 Canadian companies with a broad range of technologies.
Conover + Company Communications is presenting this information to you on behalf of the Government of Canada. Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia.
BDR Technologies: Beating the Biodiesel Catch-22
The idea that you could grow your own gasoline (sort of) is just so appealing - freedom from foreign oil, freedom from releasing long-buried carbon into the atmosphere, maybe even remediating or reclaiming some damaged land. What could be greener?
Reality is not so easy of course: between competition with food, the energy costs associated with growing, harvesting, transporting and processing the feedstock, and the equipment and operations costs for making biofuels, it's still (mostly) gasoline-from-drilled-oil that we buy at the pump. But that doesn't mean that there aren't lots of smart people working on a lot of innovative solutions to help us move toward biofuels.
In the case of biodiesel, the Catch-22 has always been the tradeoff between economics and quality. If you want to keep costs down, you need to use an inexpensive feedstock material. But inexpensive feedstock generates a lot of impurities and particulates that cause operational problems during production and performance problems during use. In addition, industry quality standards are increasingly more stringent. So right now your choice is either paying far more than most people are willing to pay for biodiesel to get the good stuff or dealing with the increased processing expense, poor quality and performance issues associated with the lower cost feedstock.
Ceramic Membranes Provide Better Biodiesel at a Lower Cost
Enter BDR Technologies, with a patented processing technology that makes very pure products no matter which feedstock you use, and does it at a lower cost than many of its competitors. In a BDR system, the feedstock, methanol and a catalyst are combined and passed through their special membrane filters. The filters are formed into tubes that provide a lot of surface area for the liquids to pass through, separating the biodiesel (and its glycerin co-product) from unreacted materials and contaminants from the biodiesel. You can see some of their membrane tube designs in the photo at left and their microstructure in cross-section in the micrograph just below it (hey, I'm a materials scientist by training - I get to put in micrographs once in a while!). The result: nice, clean biodiesel and very pure glycerin (for soap, cosmetics, pharmaceutials and other applications).
CEO Ken Lawless told me during our coaching session that they designed from the beginning for retrofit into existing biodiesel processing systems. The bonus for their customers is that the reactors can essentially double the capacity of an existing plant on the same footprint with very short payback periods. I love this approach because he doesn't have to build plants - which could run into the tens of millions. He just needs $250K to insert his reactors into an existing plant to improve its quality and increase capacity, making this technology a much more affordable option. He's planning to commission the demo plant in September 2012, so it's a very exciting time for him and his team.
If you'd like to learn more, I encourage you to attend their pitch by registering for TechConnect World Expo and attending the Consulate General of Canada Boston's all day Canada Innovates clean energy conference, including pitches by 14 Canadian companies with a broad range of technologies.
Conover + Company Communications is presenting this information to you on behalf of the Government of Canada. Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia.
Hydrostor: Grid Scale Energy Storage
Almost no aspect of energy use is untouched by the issue of energy storage. We're most accustomed to dealing with it in our daily lives: at what inconvenient moment is our cell phone or laptop battery going to fail us? But far more important from a clean energy perspective is grid scale storage. Wind and solar farms need cost effective storage to smooth out the inherent ups and downs of energy production from the weather. Utilities can put off building new power plants longer if low cost, convenient storage is available to allow them to manage supply and demand more effectively.
The diagram to the right (from the Electric Power Research Institute; click to enlarge) illustrates an important gap in storage solutions: the ability to store energy to be delivered over a period of hours to days at hundreds of kilowatts to hundreds of megawatts, the kind of energy supply that can keep substantial communities powered over time when the generated supply isn't adequate.
Novel Approach to Compressed Air Energy Storage
Hydrostor, a Canadian startup, will be pitching their solution for that gap at the Canada Pavilion at the TechConnect World Expo Boston on June 15. Hydrostor has an intriguing twist on Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) and I really like the way they think: they've taken the very practical approach of applying existing technology in a novel way. The air is stored in very large surplus military bags under water. These bags have been used in marine environments for decades without significant environmental impact and they're inexpensive.
But wait, you may be thinking, how many people live close enough to water deep enough to use these bags for it to be worthwhile? I asked the same question when I was coaching CEO Curt VanWalleghem and was surprised to learn that close to 50% of the world's population actually lives in a geography that is well-suited to Hydrostor's technology. In fact, they're building their pilot project with Toronto Hydro. They've further tuned their business model to target off-grid, remote populations such as island nations.
If you'd like to learn more, I encourage you to attend their pitch by registering for TechConnect World Expo and attending the Consulate General of Canada Boston's all day Canada Innovates clean energy conference, including pitches by 14 Canadian companies with a broad range of technologies.
Conover + Company Communications is presenting this information to you on behalf of the Government of Canada. Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia.