The problems with burning coal as fuel are numerous, ranging from nasty mining practices like mountain top removal to mercury and CO2 emissions. it should come as no surprise, then, that more and more utility and energy companies are either being forced to, or voluntarily moving away from building new coal power plants.

The question now is what will take coal’s place. The early front-runner is probably natural gas, which has an already established distribution system and fits right in with what the oil companies already like to do. Gas has problems too, though. It’s fairly expensive, and methane released into the atmosphere is twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The smart money seems to be increasingly looking to solar power as a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternative to coal.

1366 Technologies, a new MIT start-up aiming to make silicon solar cells competitive with coal, today announced it has secured $12,4 million in a first round of financing co-led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners.
MIT Professor, 1366 founder and CTO, Ely Sachs, noted that 1366 Technologies will be combining innovations in silicon cell architecture with manufacturing process improvements to bring multi-crystalline silicon solar cells to cost parity with coal-based electricity.

The big point that Sachs goes on to make is that the technology is already there. What’s needed is to reduce manufacturing costs and bring production up to a level that is cost-effective versus the price of coal. It’s evident now that the race is on to achieve this, and the goal is close enough in sight that professor thinks it’s worth his time to take a leave of absence from his job at M.I.T. in order to start up a solar cell manufacturing business. They don’t seem to be having any trouble finding investors.

Smart money, indeed.

In Arizona, Frito-Lay has a potato chip factory the size of two football fields which, in a typical year uses enough natural gas to heat 13,000 homes.

Not anymore. The factory is being re-fitted in order to almost totally take it off the energy grid. Through a combination of solar collectors, waste water collectors and better efficiency, the plant will produce enoiugh energy to run itself. or, as the company puts it, the factory will have a net zero energy cost.

Obviously, by not burning gas or using energy from other generators, the plant wilol also cut down on its green house gas emissions. At the TerraPass blog, Adam Stein is most impressed that the methods being used are entirely existing, off-the-shelf technologies:

The project stands out to me mostly for what it is not:

Net zero is not a demonstration project for showy or questionable new technologies. In fact, the plans rely for the most part on defiantly unsexy technologies: solar concentrators, which are sort of the Jan Brady of the solar energy world; methane digesters, a technology that predates World War II; waste heat collection, an efficiency measure that Bill McKibben lamented the obscurity of just as Sean Casten was raising half a billion dollars to fund such projects.

What I find most interesting here is that Frito-Lay executives are thinking long-term:

Since 1999, Frito-Lay company wide has reduced its water use by 38 percent, natural gas by 27 percent and electricity by 21 percent, cutting $55 million a year in utility costs.

But finding new ways to save energy and water is getting harder each year. So Frito-Lay officials started exploring more ambitious — and expensive — methods.

At a strategy meeting last year with (Indra K. Nooyi, PepsiCo’s chairman and chief executive), Frito-Lay managers proposed creating a plant with a combination of technologies that would cut water and energy use as much as possible.

“We said, ‘This might not make a hell of a lot of sense initially, but long term this is where we need to go,’” said David Haft, Frito-Lay’s group vice president for sustainability and productivity.

Evidently Mr. Hafy wasn’t paying attention in business school when they taught that corporate executives aren’t supposed to think about anything beyond next quarter’s profit/loss statement.