Top 10 Green Tech Ideas in 2010

1. Clean Technology

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It is pre-determined that, 2010 could be seen a disaster for the clean technology industry. But, there was a biggest disappointment after December's U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen, where the nations of the world failed to produce a comprehensive treaty to cut carbon emissions — that should have bring the long-term confidence to invest in clean tech industry. In United states of America, the green tech seems to have gone backwards. But that's a myopic view. In Europe, investment in clean energy including solar and wind are reasonable high, where carbon market is bit high. China has become major player in clean tech, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in renewable energy and energy efficiency. By the way they will position themselves to lead the world in the future cleantech industry. And now even the U.S., the Department of Energy, headed by Steven Chu, physicist (Nobel prize winner), has began to support innovative clean tech companies and investing more money into R&D. They are focussing on Silicon valley companies where most of them might be the world's most innovative entrepreneurs in clean tech.

2. Recycling e-Waste
Today the electronic waste recycling business is in all areas of the developed world a large and rapidly consolidating business. Part of this evolution has involved greater diversion of electronic waste from energy-intensive downcycling processes (e.g., conventional recycling), where equipment is reverted to a raw material form. And that's what really happening, the poor take apart your phone with little protection, exposing themselves to mercury, lead, cadmium and other dangerous metals so that they can get to the gold, copper and other valuable materials within. So-called e-waste is the fastest growing part of the solid waste stream, and some 20 to 50 million metric tons of it are thrown out every year.
But there are ways to recycle e-waste, CloudBlue, helps tech companies take care of their e-waste, arranging for direct pickup and processing, ensuring that valuable metals can be reused and recycled for future electronics thus we can reduce the need to mine more high-tech and harmful metals. They can also process the waste onsite, thus customers like banks that dont have to worry about sensitive data that might be encoded on old computers.

3. Algae Biofuel
The biggest renewable energy business in the U.S. is old corn ethanol. But now they have ended up with statement like high levels of corn ethanol production simply aren't sustainable. But that doesn't mean biofuels can't play a major role in a greener U.S. energy policy — they just have to be the right kind. One of the best options on the horizon is biofuel made from algae, which counters a lot of the problems with corn ethanol. (The right strains of algae secrete oils that can be used to make fuel.) Algae do not need farmland to grow: tanks will do the job just fine anywhere there is spare land and a decent amount of sunshine. Algae also grow much faster than traditional crops, and the micro-organisms may be able to use to use wastewater or even saline water during their development, rather than fresh water. Startups like Sapphire Energy and Algenol in California and Florida are passing the pilot phase and nearing commercial development. Here, 10 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy for 2009-10. Oilgae, the new brand has started termed as oil from algae became oilgae plays major role in spreading knowledge about algae biofuel production, (www.oilgae.com).

4. Algae food
"Algae has been eaten by man for centuries, but scientists have only recently focused on its nutritional potential. Blue- green algae grows in Upper Klamath Lake in southern Oregon, far from urban pollution, under the most natural Conditions possible. Also known as Aphanizomenon flos-aquae, blue-green algae contains no heavy metals or harmful bacteria, and supplies the most complete range of amino acids, vitamins and minerals available in any single food. It is a virtual powerhouse of nutrition. With the addition of a few basic nutrients, algae gather most of their energy from the sun. The result is a protein and carbohydrate-rich slime that can be converted to a variety of products. First, the protein is extracted and processed into animal feed or blended into human food products. For something that looks like pond scum — actually, it pretty much is pond scum — algae are extremely useful- it might have high market as long as you can convince consumers to eat pond scum.

5. Thin-film Solar
Two factors will make solar power more competitive on the energy market. One is efficiency — the percentage of the sun's energy that a solar panel can convert into electricity. The other is price: how cheap are the panels to produce? Many solar panels in use today — the crystalline silicon arrays you'll see on rooftops — focus on efficiency while costing more. But there's another way to make solar panels: thin-film. The technology uses much less silicon, which means that the average efficiency of those panels is less than arrays using crystalline silicon. But the very fact that thin-film panels use less silicon makes them much cheaper and faster to produce. That combination has helped thin-film companies like first Solar of Tempe, Arizona, and Nanosolar of San Jose emerge as early clean tech titans. Publicly traded First Solar is one of the most successful renewable energy firms in the world today. The future of solar looks thin.

6. Molten Salt Storage
Renewable energy has many advantages, as environmentalists won't hesitate to tell you. There's no need to pay for fuel since the wind and the sun are free, and that saves utilities from the price spikes seen in coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear. But wind and solar face one major problem: intermittency. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, turbines and silicon panels aren't producing electricity, and there's no way to store the electricity they do produce during peak times if it's not being used. That's a serious obstacles since utilities, often by law, need to provide enough electricity to meet demand at all times. But utility-scale solar companies are working on ways to store the energy they produce during the brightest days. One option: molten salt. It can be used in solar thermal, which employs powerful mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create steam, driving an electric turbine. The surplus heat produced during the day can be used to warm up massive amounts of salt, which can absorb significant amounts of heat. When the sun goes down — or when it's simply cloudy — that heat can be used to generate steam and run an electric turbine. It's not perfect, but it's the best battery that's been developed yet for utility-scale solar.

7. Solar Tower
There are two ways to harness energy from the sun. One is through photovoltaic panels, which transform sunlight directly to electricity. But — news flash — the sunlight also produces heat, which can be concentrated using mirrors to produce steam, which then drives electric turbines. It's this second form — called solar thermal or concentrated solar power — that has the most potential for utility-scale power generation. In fact, there are already solar thermal plants operating in the deserts of Nevada and California, using low rows of curved mirrors to concentrate sunlight. But Bill Gross at eSolar thinks that he can improve on that fairly basic technology. Instead of rows of mirrors, eSolar uses vertical mirrored towers of that perfectly concentrate sunlight on a ground target. Using sophisticated software that Gross helped write himself — he was an Internet entrepreneur before breaking into alternative power — the mirrors perfectly track the sun as it crosses the sky, maximizing the amount of electricity that can be produced. The result is a relatively compact but power utility-scale plant that gets the most out of that free source of energy called the sun.

8. Custom Biofuels
Before alternative energy, biotech was the next big thing in California's Silicon Valley, with PhD-stocked startups racing to decode the genome and create new and better drugs. But innovators are discovering that the two fields have a lot in common — especially when it comes to biofuels. First-generation biofuels are limited: corn ethanol packs less energy per gallon than petroleum, and new fuels like biodiesel often can't be used in car engines without expensive technical conversions. That's a hidden obstacle to wider adoption; there is a trillion-dollar infrastructure already in place around petroleum, and changing it won't be easy or cheap. But what if you could adapt biofuels to use our current infrastructure, not the other way around? That's what a handful of biotech companies are doing right now. Startups like Amyris and LS9 are using the tools of biotechnology to produce new biofuels that are sustainable and ready for use in our cars and trucks right now. The companies create custom microbes in the lab that can produce biofuels to order — even "green crude" that has most of the benefits of petroleum without the drawbacks. The technology is still a long way from commercial scale, but it provides some of the best hopes for a biofuelled future.

9. Electric Cars
It's an article of faith among many environmentalists: the future will be electric. But how long is it going to take? Electric cars have been around since the dawn of the automobile — in fact, the technology hasn't changed all that much since Henry Ford's own electric Model-Ts. But the electric car lost out to gasoline-powered ones for good reasons: gasoline carries a lot of power per gallon, while batteries never had the capacity to move cars very far. Even in the 1990s, with the introduction of improved electrics like GM's lamentedly discontinued EV1, battery-powered cars remained a fetish for those who value their carbon footprint over convenience. Times really have changed, though — and 2010 could finally mark the tipping point for electric cars. GM's long-awaited Volt — not a pure electric but a plug-in hybrid — is finally set to go on sale at the end of this year. The Japanese car company Nissan is going one better with its all-electric Leaf — the one with the polar bear ads — and Ford and Toyota have electrics in the works as well. Smaller startups are experimenting with ultra-efficient electric cars, while the innovative company Better Place is installing networks of battery-charging stations in Israel for its own electric transportation system, with a subscription payment system modeled on the wireless industry. Electric cars still have a number of obstacles to overcome, and they won't make a huge dent in carbon emissions unless the grid itself is steadily cleaned up, but they are closing in on the mainstream.

10. Smart Meters
Our electrical devices may be 21st century, but the electrical grid we plug them into is strictly 20th. The grid is inefficient and prone to breakdowns — as anyone who remembers the great East Coast blackout of 2003 would know. Improving the grid is going to be a vital part of helping clean energy scale up: better transmission lines are needed to carry wind-generated electricity from the middle of the U.S. to the more heavily populated coasts, for example, while a more flexible grid can better handle the intermittency of renewable power sources. But the first installment on a smarter gird will be smarter meters. Right now the electric meter in your home tells you — and the electric company — only the most basic information. The majority of utilities won't even know that homes have lost power in a blackout until enough annoyed customers call them. But smart meters connected to a network can relay that sort of information instantly, giving utilities and customers alike a real-time picture of how much power is being used at any given moment. And as new appliances are networked into smart meters, we'll be able to use them much more efficiently — programming our washing machines to run only during times of low power demand, say. By smoothing out the electricity demand curves, smart meters can help utilities get more out of the power plants they already have — and avoid building more.
Thanks to TIME