5 Award-Winning Green Technologies from the Clean Tech Open 2008

The envelope, please—the California Clean Tech Open, the Oscars of the green business world, took place at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts last week. Standout clean-tech startups in six categories received $100,000 “startup in a box” packages to help bring their sustainable visions closer to fruition. Here’s a glimpse at some of this year’s luminaries.
By Elizabeth Svoboda

Green Building Award: BottleStone
For years, Paul Burns liked to futz around with adding recycled materials to the clay tiles his San Jose shop produced. Those just-for-fun experiments yielded BottleStone, a combination of clay, cement, and old glass that looks uncannily like real granite, but takes much less energy to produce. BottleStone’s ersatz stone—which consists mainly of glass sourced from Bay Area recycling programs—will initially appear in countertops and bathroom vanities, but Burns’ ultimate ambition is to sheathe the facades of skyscrapers in it. The material has three times the flexure strength of cast concrete, meaning it might prove ideal for building in earthquake-prone areas (quake testing, however, has yet to be conducted).

Transportation Award: ElectraDrive
Converting gas-powered cars to electric vehicles (EV) has chiefly been a one-off industry thus far: You take your jalopy to a mechanic skilled at making the switch and pay him through the nose to work his magic. ElectraDrive aims to make electric conversion more accessible to the masses with its one-size-fits-all conversion kit. The kit’s designed to turn just about any car into an EV, whether it’s a sleek convertible or a hulking truck—you just take your car’s gas drivetrain out and put the company’s ElectraMount module in. CEO Fraser Smith estimates that once the company begins high-volume construction of the kits, they will be available for approximately $10,000, about half of what it currently costs to get a custom electric-car conversion done.

Energy Efficiency Award: Viridis Earth
Americans may be more eco-conscious these days, but they still love their air conditioners—so much so that they spend $53 billion a year running them. Viridis Earth manufactures $350 retrofit devices that can make your old a/c unit an energy-efficient wunderkind. One device cuts an air conditioner’s energy consumption by 20 to 30 percent, a reduction so substantial that the retrofit typically pays for itself in less than a year. “You get a big energy savings—you can compare it to replacing all your bulbs with compact fluorescents,” says Viridis president Greg Nugent. The device also reduces the typical user’s carbon footprint by more than two metric tons per year.

Renewables Award: Focal Point Energy
Lots of companies that use hot water or steam for manufacturing rely on gas or electricity to generate their heat. But it’s much more efficient to gather sunlight and use it to heat the water directly—a principle Focal Point Energy has seized on. “To collect the heat, we use a reflective membrane made out of a Mylar-like material,” says Howard Harrenstien, the company’s chief architect, who came out of retirement to join the team. “When we stretch the membrane, it becomes a parabolic reflector.” The reflector focuses incoming sunlight into a concentrated beam, which can then be aimed at water-filled containers to make the contents boil.

Green Building Award runner-up: Solar Red
Having your own roof solar-power system might sound like a great idea, but it can be an uphill battle if you’re not loaded or you’re not a hard-core do-it-yourselfer. By devising a system that can be put up by the same guys who nail on your roof tiles (no professional solar installer required), Solar Red has succeeded in cutting the cost of home solar by 25 to 50 percent. To lay the groundwork for the system, workers simply tack a series of photovoltaic-friendly mounting brackets on during roof installation. “It only costs $500 to put in the brackets while you’re building a new roof,” says Solar Red founder Darrell Park. “After that, when you’re ready to install your solar, it takes about 30 seconds to snap on each of the solar panels.” Presto: Solar that’s as easy to assemble as Lego.

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