Edie Lush

Clean and cool mission

I’m travelling with the Clean and Cool Mission – 19 of the hottest UK cleantech (i.e. green) companies who have the potential to revolutionise the way we live our lives.

Some of them are easy for the layman (me) to understand. Some of them require a bit more thought. The other night trip co-leader Oli Barrett and Richard Miller of the Technology Strategy Board and I tried to fit all of these companies together. We ended up in Scotland. We also decided we needed an artist to illustrate our picture – but I’ll do the best I can to show you what we came up with

Picture if you will a gorgeous windswept field along the Scottish coastline. First of all we’ll need a house. For this we’ll turn to Modcell – who design the ‘Balehaus’ – i.e. a house made out of straw bales. Modcell take traditional straw bale construction – the oldest straw bale house is 130 years old and is in Nebraska – and make it available to a modern commercial construction market. These guys make extremely thick panels (“fat and proud,” says CEO Craig White) of prefabricated straw bale cladding panels, triple glazing and airtight construction to create homes that reduce heating demand by 80%.

Gorgeous house made even more green by (Breathing Buildings) ventilation systems – they make air vents that radically reduce energy costs by half. Shaun Fitzgerald waxes poetic when he describes “e-stack system” which his company installed into a school in Cambridgeshire. “Over two weeks in the winter of 2008, we turned the e-stack system off on Tuesdays and Thursdays and observed considerably higher CO2 levels and the radiators were on full blast. When the ventilation was back on, the Reception kids needed only their school jumpers to stay comfortably warm.”

Our house was designed to use as little energy as possible with the help of Integrated Environmental Solutions. IES’s performance analysis software and consulting team helped us navigate “the maze of sustainable design strategies, technologies, industry standards and regulations.” We’re in good company – other clients include Wal-Mart, the Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and the Scottish Parliament.

Scotland gets a bit dark in the winter, and when we flip on the lights we’ll be using Juice Technology’s LED lights. Juice’s system uses motion detectors, daylight equalisation (they know what time of day it is), dimmers and – by virtue of being LED – reduce energy useage by 90% compared with incandescent lighting. Forget to turn your lights out? No problem, whip out your mobile phone and do it wirelessly.

In fact, not only can you turn off your lights, but your water heating and hot water as well thanks to Colin Calder’s Passivsystems clever kit – it wirelessly connects to sensors around your home to manage your home. It knows that when the north wind is blowing hard to turn up the heat a bit, and takes the TV off of stand-by and turns it completely off, while leaving the DVR on to record The Wire for you.

While you’re saving all the energy you can, it’s clear you need some electricity. Looking out your window onto the Scottish Coastline you can just see the edge of the Oyster hydro-electric wave power machine built by Martin McAdam’s Aquamarine Power. It is a flap connecting to the seabed at around 10m depth – not too far off shore. Sceptical of wave power? There’s already an Oyster at the European Marine Energy Centre down the road in Orkney, Scotland which has survived the winter and producing sustainable zero-emission electricity – each passing wave moves the flap, driving hydraulic pistons to deliver high pressure water via a pipeline to an onshore electrical turbine.

And since we’ve got wave energy, why not a wind turbine too. After all, it’s Scotland – hardly short of a breeze or too. Our Wind turbine is powered by the latest in hydraulic technology thanks to Artemis Intelligent Power. Their hydraulic “gearbox” is much lighter and cheaper than a conventional one. Since Artemis also provides fuel-saving hydraulics for the off-road industry, so when we’re using our tractor we’re also using Artemis’s fine products.

Unbeknownst to many, the sun does shine in Scotland – and for those sunny days we look to the solar panels, made with the low cost, efficient lenses of Microsharp Solar

We’re producing more than enough energy for ourselves and store the excess energy produced by the abundant waves in our Isentropic containers. Isentropic’s technology stores electricity in two large containers of gravel, one hot (500C) and one cold (-150C). Through some clever science, Isentropic stores the energy and gives it back to you when you need it. If it sounds too simple – investigate further – one Venture Capitalist told Isentropic’s Jonathan Howes that a winning storage technology is the “ the zero to trillion dollar” cleantech application.

And the energy we’re not storing we’re selling back to the electrical grid with the help of Evince Technology’s transistors made with Diamonds. Dr. Gareth Taylor (who’s favorite quote these days is ‘Diamonds are a [smart] grid’s best friend’) always has a handful of the diamonds on hand. These diamonds “are very much the ‘horseshoe nail’ technology that will get watts from A to B much more efficiently and much more cheaply than they are at the moment.”

Want to know how much money we’re making off of the energy we’re selling back to the electrical grid? Glance down at the “Wattson” made by those nice people at DIY Kyoto. The handy little portable and wireless (and super cute) device shows you how much money each appliance you use is costing you – and when you’re selling energy back to the grid – as we are – how much you’re earning.

And if we want to know even more about our carbon footprint (though clearly it is pretty small) we only have to glance down at our laptop to check ourselves out on AMEE whose mission according to founder Gavin Starks is to “measure the carbon footprint of everything.” Weirdly, he seems completely confident that he can do this. Besides us, the UK Government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change and business intelligence vendor SAS have signed up for AMEE’s clever carbon accounting. AMEE is also set to help the thousands of UK companies that are going to have start carbon reporting over the next year.

In the garage of our house is a nifty little Lotus which runs on EVO Electric’s high torque motors – there’s one on each wheel. It goes zero to 60 mph in under four seconds, which is handy for getting round those Scottish cows when they lumbar into the road.

Alongside the Lotus sits the Suzuki – Crosscage fuel cell motorcycle, the world’s first purpose built hydrogen fuel cell motorbike. This motorbike – which wouldn’t look astray underneath James Bond’s thighs – was built by Suzuki with Intelligent Energy’s advanced air cooled fuel cell power system. And it doesn’t just look cool in Scotland. According to Mark Lawson-Stratham, “motorcycles are often used in developing economies, but worryingly can produce hydrocarbon pollutants in amounts many times greater than cars.”

When we need to wash our clothes we use our Xeros Washing Machine which uses 90% less water than conventional washers and a lot less detergent, depending more on small polymer beads which – when they get wet – become sticky and pull the dirt off of the clothes. Ok, to be clear, Xeros is currently targeting the commercial laundry market, but who’s to say we don’t run a laundry service for the Scottish coast!

The little water we use from the washing machine is cleaned with the aid of Hydroventuri. As Hydroventuri’s Harvey West likes to say, “it’s all about bubbles”. It is a low cost, highly efficient way to clean water so that we can recycle it and use it to water the plants (on those days it doesn’t rain).

I already mentioned the cows. When they aren’t getting in the way of our hybrid motorcycle and Lotus, they’re producing fuel. Otherwise known as “cow flatulance”, or to the scientifically minded, methane gas. Some clever catalyst and microchannel reactor technology developed by Oxford Catalysts even turn this gas into a liquid fuel to power a sexy motorcycle or car. And it can also produce liquid biofuels from other types of waste agricultural waste — or even from municipal rubbish that would otherwise go to landfill.

Our laptop computer, MP3 player, digital camera, DVD player and mobile phone are run on the most efficient of batteries – namely Lithium Ion batteries which use silicon anodes made by Nexeon They run longer and provide more power between charges than anything else on the market. Not only that, Nexeon batteries power our Lotus EV, meaning we can drive twice as far between charges, and should our domestic power supply falter, we have our off-grid energy storage system which incorporates these latest Lithium Ion batteries.

How on earth do we get mobile phone reception out here? It’s back to farmers again. Our off-grid mobile phone mast has its power provided by Diverse Energy runs on ammonia – used by farmers for fertilizer – and stored in Diverse’s PowerCube® which reduces CO2 emissions as well as costs. Commercial Director Dr. Alastair Livesey says his technology has the potential to transform mobile phone coverage across the developing world where most off grid masts are powered by noisy diesel generators. “Mobile phone operators can extend their mobile coverage in rural areas of emerging markets, This increases their customer base, reduces costs, cuts their carbon footprint and our sole by-products – water and fertilizer are a welcome donation to local communities”.