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“Effective implementation of the smart grid is paramount to our clean energy future, and Xtreme Power is working to provide equally smart storage technologies necessary to seamlessly deliver predictable, clean power on demand,” said Carlos Coe, president and CEO of Xtreme Power. “It is an honor to be recognized by VentureBeat as a company poised to bring the smart grid to life.”

A few weeks ago, President Obama announced more than $3 billion in stimulus grants to improve and “smarten” the national grid—pushing the concept of a modernized electricity network into the limelight. At the same time, the Innovation Competition invited organizations with products that promised to wield significant impact on the power grid’s ability to become smarter to pitch their ideas in front of a world-class group of industry influencers at GreenBeat 2009. Xtreme Power was selected from more than 50 applications as one of the top 10 innovations that will shape the future of the grid.

“Reflective of the growing public awareness for the smart grid, VentureBeat was impressed by the competitiveness of this year’s contest,” said Matt Marshall, founder and CEO of VentureBeat. “With Xtreme Power leading the way, we are confident that the technologies represented by these companies will drive the way to an efficient, carbon-reduced super grid with enormous potential to increase reliability of power delivery and reduce our carbon footprint worldwide.”

GreenBeat 2009 took place November 18-19, 2009, in San Mateo, California. More information on the GreenBeat 2009 Innovation Competition, along with this year’s winners, is available at http://events.venturebeat.com/greenbeat2009/.

About GreenBeat 2009

The seminal conference on the Smart Grid, GreenBeat 2009 will bring together leading entrepreneurs, investors, utilities, technology executives and policymakers to accelerate the development of a leaner, more efficient electrical grid. With a laser focus on new technology offerings, GreenBeat 2009 is the must-attend event in the space for discussion, debate and power networking. For more information about this event, hosted by VentureBeat, please visit http://events.venturebeat.com/greenbeat2009/.

About Xtreme Power

Xtreme Power is a developer and manufacturer of integrated power management and energy storage systems that offer compelling smart solutions to the many challenges and opportunities facing the electricity industry. Our integrated smart power management solutions range from 500 kW to 100 MW and opens new doors to the rapidly expanding potential of the electric industry for all stakeholders: utilities, independent power producers, alternative energy companies, and customers. With proprietary solid-state power management and integrated storage, we enable efficient and available power for an environmentally sound 21st century electricity industry.

About VentureBeat

VentureBeat, founded in 2006 to cover news and perspective about innovation for forward-thinking executives, has emerged to become one of the “best blogs on the Web.” according to the New York Times. It was recently called the most “influential business blog” by Text100, a public relations company that surveyed citations by mainstream news publications. VentureBeat runs several conferences, including GamesBeat, MobileBeat and GreenBeat. It also produces www.DEMO.com, the leading conference for emerging technology product launches.

In 2007, clean tech was responsible for 770,000 U.S. jobs. While that number is still relatively small, the trend is heading in the right direction — the number of clean tech jobs increased by 9.1 percent from 1998 to 2007, at a time when overall U.S. job growth was just 3.7 percent, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. And as federal recovery act funds are invested over the coming year, those numbers will continue to rise.

Across the country, multinational corporations like GE Energy, Sharp, BP and Siemens are investing in developing clean tech sectors, while manufacturing facilities that had closed are being repurposed for clean tech production.

Where Are These Clean Tech Jobs?

In its recently released Clean Tech Job Trends 2009 report, the clean tech research firm Clean Edge identifies the leading regions for clean tech development and jobs right now, particularly in the top five clean tech sectors: solar, biofuels, efficiency, smart grid and wind power.

The top 15 U.S. metro areas: San Francisco; Los Angeles; New York; Boston; Washington, D.C., and Baltimore; Denver, Boulder and Greeley, Colo.; Seattle, Tacoma and Bremerton, Wash.; Portland and Salem, Ore.; Chicago; Sacramento, Calif.; San Diego; Austin and San Marcos, Texas; Phoenix; Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Houston.

California is currently the No. 1 job-creating state for wind, solar PV and geothermal, but other states are well situated to take advantage of the growing market.

The states with the greatest potential for clean tech jobs development are Texas, Illinois, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina, according to a study of patterns of renewable energy demand, manufacturing capability and needed supply chains conducted for the Blue Green Alliance. That should be welcome news for a group of states that includes some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, and for the nation itself, which reached 10.2 percent unemployment in October.

In the Blue Green Alliance report, Building the Clean Energy Assembly Line, the Renewable Energy Policy Project estimates the renewable energy manufacturing job potential of all 50 states at over 850,000 jobs based on standards requiring 25 percent of power to come from renewable energy by 2025. All five of the leading clean tech sectors are showing strong signs of growth.

Solar

The five states with the most potential for solar PV potential manufacturing are California, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York, according to the Blue Green Alliance report.

SunPower in San Jose, Calif., is one of the top 10 clean tech employers in the country, with 5,400 employees.

In the Midwest's industrial belt, some retired plants are being reborn as clean tech operations. The Ford Motor Co. plant in Wixom, Mich., for example, laid off 1,500 employees when it closed in 2007; today the 320-acre facility is becoming a renewable energy business park where Xtreme Power will produce systems for wind and solar, and Clairvoyant Energy will manufacture solar panels.

Multinationals expanding into solar include BP, with 2,200 solar employees, and The Sharp Manufacturing Company of America in Memphis, Tenn., which employs 300 workers producing solar modules.

SCHOTT Solar, part of the German SCHOTT Group, established its Albuquerque, N.M., solar manufacturing plant in 2009 with an investment of over $1 million. It has 300 employees.

“If the market develops the way we hope it does, the facility will quadruple in size,” said James Stein, vice president for government affairs at SCHOTT Solar North America.

It will soon have even more competition: China’s largest solar panel manufacturer, Suntech Power, just announced plans to open its first American plant near Phoenix in 2010, hiring 75 people initially with plans to expand to 200.

Biofuels and Biomaterials

The top five states with potential for biomass manufacturing, according to the Blue Green Alliance study, are Texas, New York, California, Ohio and Oklahoma.

In Ohio, FirstEnergy initially planned to shut down the R.E. Burger Power Plant in Akron rather than spend $380 million to bring it into compliance with new air quality regulations. Instead, the company invested $200 million to convert the plant to burn biomass. The repurposed plant will come on-line in 2013, employing its original 105 workers and creating 200 new jobs.

Technology Review’s latest Top 10 Private Companies to Watch list includes three biofuel companies: Range Fuels, which will open the first U.S. commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia next year; Qteros, which is building a pilot plant in Chicopee, Mass.; and Mascoma, which will soon open a plant in Kinross, Mich.

Conservation and Efficiency

The recovery act’s $5 billion investment in the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) is projected to create over 100,000 new jobs in manufacturing, distribution and installation of insulation. (Building retrofits create eight times as many jobs per million dollars invested as coal production.)

In Ohio, where a $266.8 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Weatherization Program is retrofitting 32,000 homes, it’s estimated that the program will have created 590 new jobs and retained 487 by March 2012.

Serious Materials in Sunnyvale, Calif., which produces super-insulating windows, purchased two shuttered factories to meet demand for Illinois’ Weatherization Assistance Program.

“We’re small, but ... the opportunity now for things like low-income housing weatherization, is staggering. We will grow four times from last year to this year,” said Chuck Wetmore, who headed one of the factories, Kensington Windows in Vandergrift, Pa., and will now run the Serious Materials operation.

In addition, the green building industry will likely create or support 7.9 million jobs over the next four years, according to a report by the U.S. Green Building Council and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Smart Grid

The energy consulting firm KEMA estimates that smart grid development could create 280,000 U.S. jobs by 2012. Those jobs will involve grid monitoring, renewable energy integration, smart meter networking, consumer energy management and, most importantly, digital data management.

Clean Edge found that many high-level information technology executives are already making the move to smart grid companies.

Benefiting from the recovery act’s $3.3 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant Program, smart grid developer Silver Spring Network, based in Redwood City, Calif., is partnering with GE, Florida Power and Light, and Cisco Systems to develop a smart grid network for Miami businesses and residences that will enable the utility to manage power more efficiently. Already in contract with utilities serving 25 percent of the U.S. population, Google-backed Silver Spring currently has approximately 50 job openings listed in business development, customer operations, hardware and software engineering, IT, and other areas.

Another sign of the sector’s growth is the recent creation of the first smart grid and electric infrastructure exchange traded fund by NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc., Clean Edge, Inc. and First Trust Advisors L.P.

Wind

In 2008, the U.S. became the world leader in total wind power installed capacity with over 25,000 MW, creating 35,000 new jobs and bringing total employment in the sector to 85,000, according to the Environmental Defense Fund’s Manufacturing Climate Solutions report.

The North Carolina Wind Working Group found that every 100 MW of installed wind power capacity provides 310 full-time manufacturing jobs, 67 contracting and installation jobs, and 9.5 jobs in operation and maintenance. So if the U.S. achieves its 20 percent wind power by 2030 goal, the sector could support 500,000 jobs with three million additional jobs in construction and development.

Accordingly, the Department of Energy plans to invest approximately $118 million in wind energy with $93 million coming from recovery act funds.

The five states with the most potential for wind manufacturing, according to the Blue Green Alliance report are California, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin.

The Spanish company Gamesa, the second largest wind turbine manufacturer in the world, has four facilities in Pennsylvania providing jobs for over 900 employees.

The U.S. ”is where the growth is going to be," said Jim Buddelmeyer, vice president of purchasing for Gamesa. "That's why Gamesa has a big footprint here and we continue to invest money here."

Despite a lag in sales due to the economy, Danish Vestas Wind Systems is proceeding with a new factory in Brighton, Colo., that will employ 650 workers by 2010, a nacelle (wind turbine housing) factory for 700 workers, an R&D facility with 100 workers, and a wind tower facility in Pueblo, Colo., with 500 workers.

How Do the Salaries Compare?

According to Clean Edge, salaries for solar PV employees average $40,000 for an entry-level solar energy system installer, and $75,100 for a mid-level system integration engineer. In the biofuel sector, a recyclable material collector can earn $38,100 while a boiler operator makes $61,100.

Salaries for smart grid workers range from $46,400 for a network operations center technician to $87,700 for a mid-level hardware design engineer.

In the wind power sector, a mid-level sheet metal worker can make $50,300, and a field service engineer averages $62,400.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee report on green jobs maintains that green jobs pay relatively low wages, and Robert Pollin, professor of economics and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, acknowledges that green job salaries average about 20 percent less than similar jobs in the fossil fuels industry. Comparing salaries side by side is misleading, though, Pollin said: Green investments will create three times as many good jobs — at all salary levels — as the same spending in the fossil fuel industry, and by raising overall employment, green jobs also provide many new opportunities for both the unemployed and the underemployed.

Clean Tech Down the Road

While clean tech is on the ascent, the nation still has a way to go before it fulfills the promise of robust job creation.

“Clean tech job growth is small scale relative to the economy,” said Dean Baker, an economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“ARRA has helped percentage-wise — with green sectors up by 30 to 40 percent from the stimulus — but it’s starting from a very small base. The absolute numbers are low. We’re talking tens of thousands of jobs when millions are out of work.” The national unemployment rate as of October was 10.2 percent.

The recovery act also has yet to have its full impact on the clean tech sector because, while federal money has been committed, most funding has yet to be released.

Pollin explained that the Congressional Budget Office estimated only 2 percent of the investment in renewable energy would occur in 2009; the rest would be spread over the next five years.

That infusion of money will not just stimulate, “it will be transformative, so that after the stimulus runs out, we will have a new system that can last for years,” Pollin said. “Although it may not be the best stimulus for the short-term labor market, the green component of ARRA is a pioneering effort, going way beyond any other environmental investment in this country.”

The recovery act coupled with federal climate legislation could generate approximately $150 billion a year in U.S. clean tech investments over the next decade, resulting in 1.7 million new jobs, according to PERI.

Encouraged by ARRA’s backing, clean tech investment is the No. 1 venture investment sector, with investments in North America, after a slump earlier in the year, totaling $1.1 billion in the third quarter of 2009.

Source: http://solveclimate.com/blog/20091129/clean-tech-jobs-spring-investment-pours-and-factories-are-transformed

The Lyle, Texas-based startup is already making its batteries in three smaller-scale manufacturing facilities, Carlos Coe, CEO and founder, said in an interview last month. It's also testing them with Hawaii Electric Power, in a project meant to stabilize the intermittent power coming from wind turbines, and has had one 500-megawatt battery powering a remote observatory in Antarctica since 2006, he said.

Now it's seeking to raise up to $475 million to contribute to a factory at a closed Ford Motor Co. plant in Wixom, Mich. capable of turning out about 2,000 megawatts of batteries per year, Coe said see Green Light post).

That plant, meant to be built in partnership with Santa Barbara, Calif.-based solar panel maker Clairvoyant Energy, could also see the two companies integrate their solar power and battery systems, Coe said.

"We would represent the power electronics portion of the equipment they'll be producing in the future," he said. "The new approach would be integrating our approach with large-scale solar."

While he said it was too early to say if this meant solar-plus-battery systems rolling off the factory floor, "it's a fair thing to say we're working toward that direction," not just with Clairvoyant but also with other solar panel manufacturers he declined to name.

As for in-the-field proof of concept, Xtreme is testing its PowerCell batteries in applications from pickup truck-sized replacements for diesel generators to megawatt-sized units in the Hawaii wind power project, Tom Cain, partner with Xtreme investor Sail Ventures, said at the GreenBeat conference in San Mateo, Calif. last week.

Cain described PowerCell as a fiberglass battery designed back in the 1990s in an effort by Corning, British Aerospace and Ford Aerospace. The battery was spun out into a company planning to develop it for California's erstwhile zero-emission vehicle market – a plan that collapsed, along with General Motors plans for its EV1 electric car, when the state backed off its ZEV timeline, Cain said.

Xtreme Power, founded in 2004, bought the technology, and has since raised about $20 million from investors including Sail Ventures and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, the Austin Business Journal reported in June. That explains why the PowerCell technology hasn't gotten much attention before now, Cain said - but he's not afraid to attract attention now.

"This battery is unlike anything the world has ever seen," he said. That includes cost – about one-tenth the cost of comparable sized lithium-ion systems, he said.

If the technology can live up to its promises, "Xtreme Power has the potential to introduce a disruptive technology to the current energy storage landscape," Sam Jaffe, senior research analyst at IDC company Energy Insights, said in a Friday email.

Beyond the combination of high-power output, high-energy density, long cycle-life and high efficiency, "We've heard that they can sell their battery systems for $500/kWh [kilowatt-hour] and still make a profit," Jaffe wrote. That price would be well under the kilowatt hour prices that are typically quoted for other battery systems, which are meant for large-scale energy storage applications. And it could approach the price points for mass energy storage systems like pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage (see Top Ten Smart Grid: Energy Storage and Grid Energy Storage: Big Market, Tough to Tackle).

Xtreme Power itself hasn't given price figures for its PowerCell. It also says that its battery shouldn't be called a lead-acid battery.

Still, most observers, including Jaffe and Dan Rastler, energy storage program manager for the Electric Power Research Institute, place Xtreme Power in a class of so-called "advanced lead acid" battery systems seeking to make key improvements to age-old lead-acid chemistries (see Green Light post).

"This is one of several lead-acid battery technologies we've been following," Rastler said Friday. Lead-acid batteries can offer the advantages of working with cheap, safe and easy to recycle materials, he noted.

Beyond Xtreme Power, EPRI is interested in learning more about technology from Australia's Ecoult and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), advanced lead-acid batteries from Japan's Hitachi and GS Yuasa Group, and systems being developed by large-scale battery manufacturers East Penn and Exide, which are teaming up with startups providing new technologies, Rastler said (see Axion's Lead Carbon Batteries: Sweet Spot for Micro-Hybrid Vehicles?).

Source: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/xtreme-power-super-dry-battery/

“It's the ultimate irony; I love it,” he said.

The 50-year-old building will house manufacturing of Xtreme's large-scale power systems and Clairvoyant's solar panels.

Clairvoyant and Xtreme plan a total capital investment of $475.4 million and the creation of 2,500 direct jobs over the next five years, according to a briefing memo prepared by the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

Hardee expects the real estate deal to close in the second quarter of next year.

Clairvoyant plans to create up to four solar panel manufacturing lines at the energy park, with a capital investment of $857 million over four phases, and is expected to create 751 jobs over five years.

Once completed, Clairvoyant will have the capacity to produce more than 2.5 million solar panels a year at the Wixom site, potentially replacing the need for one large coal plant every year.

Xtreme will focus on large-scale systems to store power generated by windmills, solar panels and other technologies.

Redevelopment work is expected to start next year, with manufacturing to be under way by 2011. The companies are looking for tenants to fill the 2.4 million square feet of manufacturing space not being used by the joint venture. Hardee said leases will likely start being signed next year.

The deal was the result of a nine-month negotiation involving Clairvoyant, Xtreme and Ford Motor Co., facilitated by the MEDC.

Hardee said Michigan made sense based on both the involvement of the MEDC and the facility itself.

The Wixom Assembly Plant was one of Ford's largest and oldest manufacturing sites, producing 6.6 million vehicles during its 50 years of operation.

Production began in 1957 when Wixom became Lincoln Division's new national headquarters and the sole producer of all vehicles for the Lincoln Division. Over the years, Wixom Assembly produced the Lincoln Continental, Town Car, LS, Mark VI, VII and VIII, as well as the Ford Thunderbird and Ford GT.

At its height, more than 5,000 workers were employed at the plant. The Wixom plant employed approximately 1,000 workers when it closed in 2007.

“The facility has such good bones,” Hardee said. “It puts us one year closer to going to market because the heavy-duty infrastructure is already there.”

Source: http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20091115/SUB01/311159986/1002

• Ohio Module Manufacturing Co. taking over ArvinMeritor's Southwest Detroit plant, saving 200 jobs that manufacture complete chassis modules for the Jeep Wrangler. The Toledo-based company plans to invest $21.4 million into the facility.
• Detroit-based Strategic Staffing Solutions plans to spend $7.3 million to open a new IT center in the Motor City. That deal is expected to create 437 jobs.
• Williams International expects to invest $12 million to update its Commerce Township facility so it can build small gas turbine engines for military, industrial, and commercial aircraft applications.
• The transformation of the old Ford Wixom plant received a big boost with $137 million in tax credits over 20 years. Clairvoyant Energy Solar Panel Manufacturing and Xtreme Power plan to turn the facility into an alternative energy manufacturing base that will create 3,250 jobs as part of an $856 million project.

Source: http://www.metromodemedia.com/innovationnews/medcbrownfieldprojects0139.aspx