EnerG2 Inc., an ultracapacitor startup that has kept quiet until now, is launching today with the official announcement that it has raised $8.5 million in its first round of financing. Founded in 2003, it has spent five years developing electrode materials that it claims can boost the performance of ultracapacitors, devices that are useful in electric cars and smaller electronic devices.

Unlike batteries, which store electricity chemically, ultracapacitors store energy as electrical fields and physically separate the positive and negative charges with an insulator. Some describe ultracapacitors as “mechanical batteries“, attractive for their ability to deliver large bursts of power, charge and discharge quickly and efficiently and last through many more cycles than batteries, as well as tolerate changes in temperature, shocks and vibration. And where a traditional battery lasts about 1,000 cycles (one charge and discharge), an ultracapacitor could last 1 million cycles or more, according to Rick Luebbe, EnerG2’s chief executive.

But low energy density, or the energy stored per kilogram, has long been a shortcoming of ultracapacitors compared to batteries. So a power tool that might run for 30 minutes on a lithium-ion battery and take two hours to charge –- and need replacing every few years – might run for only five or 10 minutes on a similarly-sized ultracapacitor, but would charge in 60 or 80 seconds and last the life of the tool, Luebbe said.

EnerG2 thinks it can help make ultracapacitors more attractive by boosting their performance and making them cheaper, both on a dollars-per-kilowatt and dollars-per-watt-hour basis, he said. The company didn’t say how much it expects to cut costs, but Luebbe said the electrode materials, the company’s specialty, are one of the largest cost components.

Working with technology initially developed at the University of Washingon, EnerG2 has taken the pure activated carbon typically used in today’s ultracapacitor electrodes, the plates that hold the electrical fields, and restructured it at the nano level, increasing its surface area and making it more porous so that ions can flow more easily, he said.

That material can already give electrodes up to five times the power density, or double the energy density of current electrode materials, Luebbe claims. And even when the material is optimized for one attribute, like power density, it can maintain the energy density of conventional materials –- the energy density doesn’t drop off precipitously when power density increases, he said.

Despite the improvements, EnerG2 isn’t targeting ultracapacitor applications that compete head-on with batteries, at least at first. Even with its new materials, ultracapacitors won’t approach the energy densities of batteries, so the company has set its sights on applications where other attributes, such as power density, cycle life or fast charging, are more important.

Instead, there are many applications to go after where ultracapacitors already have a place, such as electric rail systems that capture the energy released when a train brakes coming into a station and uses the energy to help start the train up again. That requires an energy-storage device to charge and discharge so many times that no battery can handle it, Luebbe said.

Industrial applications involving kinetic energy are another natural fit, he said. For example, systems that turn the motion of cranes, forklifts or elevators into electricity could take advantage of a storage device like ultracapacitors, again because of their ability to charge and discharge rapidly over and over again.

Still, ultracapacitors’ low energy density limits their market, said Brian Barnett, vice president of technology for TIAX LLC, a technology development and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

“Capacitors have difficulty [reaching more than] 5 watt-hours a kilogram, and lithium-ions today can reach 20 or maybe 30 times that or more,” he said, speaking roughly. “There’s a big gap here, and as lithium-ions are able to do higher and higher power, it will be difficult for capacitors to find their appropriate niche.”

Aside from the industrial and electric-rail applications, EnerG2 plans to sell materials for ultracapacitors in hybrid-electric vehicles, consumer electronics, power tools and backup power in data centers, telco switching stations and even the grid, he said.

It should have plenty of potential customers. Big companies making ultracpacitors now include Panasonic Corp. and Okamura Laboratory Inc. in Japan and NessCap Co. in South Korea. The United States’ Maxwell Technologies is also going after the transportation market, along with Apowercap Technologies and Eestor.

EnerG2’s next step is to get the materials accepted into its ultracapacitor customers’ manufacturing systems, Luebbe said, adding that he hopes to see the first shipments in the second quarter of 2009; he says the company already has the ability to make “fairly good amounts” of electrode material. Later, it also plans to develop new materials for other energy-storage devices, including lithium-ion batteries, as well as natural-gas, methane and hydrogen storage.

OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital Management led EnerG2’s round. Washington Research Foundation’s WRF Capital, the Sustainability Investment Fund and members of the Northwest Energy Angels also invested in the Seattle-based company.

EnerG2 Inc., an ultracapacitor startup that has kept quiet until now, is launching today with the official announcement that it has raised $8.5 million in its first round of financing. Founded in 2003, it has spent five years developing electrode materials that it claims can boost the performance of ultracapacitors, devices that are useful in electric cars and smaller electronic devices.

Unlike batteries, which store electricity chemically, ultracapacitors store energy as electrical fields and physically separate the positive and negative charges with an insulator. Some describe ultracapacitors as “mechanical batteries“, attractive for their ability to deliver large bursts of power, charge and discharge quickly and efficiently and last through many more cycles than batteries, as well as tolerate changes in temperature, shocks and vibration. And where a traditional battery lasts about 1,000 cycles (one charge and discharge), an ultracapacitor could last 1 million cycles or more, according to Rick Luebbe, EnerG2’s chief executive.

But low energy density, or the energy stored per kilogram, has long been a shortcoming of ultracapacitors compared to batteries. So a power tool that might run for 30 minutes on a lithium-ion battery and take two hours to charge –- and need replacing every few years – might run for only five or 10 minutes on a similarly-sized ultracapacitor, but would charge in 60 or 80 seconds and last the life of the tool, Luebbe said.

EnerG2 thinks it can help make ultracapacitors more attractive by boosting their performance and making them cheaper, both on a dollars-per-kilowatt and dollars-per-watt-hour basis, he said. The company didn’t say how much it expects to cut costs, but Luebbe said the electrode materials, the company’s specialty, are one of the largest cost components.

Working with technology initially developed at the University of Washingon, EnerG2 has taken the pure activated carbon typically used in today’s ultracapacitor electrodes, the plates that hold the electrical fields, and restructured it at the nano level, increasing its surface area and making it more porous so that ions can flow more easily, he said.

That material can already give electrodes up to five times the power density, or double the energy density of current electrode materials, Luebbe claims. And even when the material is optimized for one attribute, like power density, it can maintain the energy density of conventional materials –- the energy density doesn’t drop off precipitously when power density increases, he said.

Despite the improvements, EnerG2 isn’t targeting ultracapacitor applications that compete head-on with batteries, at least at first. Even with its new materials, ultracapacitors won’t approach the energy densities of batteries, so the company has set its sights on applications where other attributes, such as power density, cycle life or fast charging, are more important.

Instead, there are many applications to go after where ultracapacitors already have a place, such as electric rail systems that capture the energy released when a train brakes coming into a station and uses the energy to help start the train up again. That requires an energy-storage device to charge and discharge so many times that no battery can handle it, Luebbe said.

Industrial applications involving kinetic energy are another natural fit, he said. For example, systems that turn the motion of cranes, forklifts or elevators into electricity could take advantage of a storage device like ultracapacitors, again because of their ability to charge and discharge rapidly over and over again.

Still, ultracapacitors’ low energy density limits their market, said Brian Barnett, vice president of technology for TIAX LLC, a technology development and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass.

“Capacitors have difficulty [reaching more than] 5 watt-hours a kilogram, and lithium-ions today can reach 20 or maybe 30 times that or more,” he said, speaking roughly. “There’s a big gap here, and as lithium-ions are able to do higher and higher power, it will be difficult for capacitors to find their appropriate niche.”

Aside from the industrial and electric-rail applications, EnerG2 plans to sell materials for ultracapacitors in hybrid-electric vehicles, consumer electronics, power tools and backup power in data centers, telco switching stations and even the grid, he said.

It should have plenty of potential customers. Big companies making ultracpacitors now include Panasonic Corp. and Okamura Laboratory Inc. in Japan and NessCap Co. in South Korea. The United States’ Maxwell Technologies is also going after the transportation market, along with Apowercap Technologies and Eestor.

EnerG2’s next step is to get the materials accepted into its ultracapacitor customers’ manufacturing systems, Luebbe said, adding that he hopes to see the first shipments in the second quarter of 2009; he says the company already has the ability to make “fairly good amounts” of electrode material. Later, it also plans to develop new materials for other energy-storage devices, including lithium-ion batteries, as well as natural-gas, methane and hydrogen storage.

OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital Management led EnerG2’s round. Washington Research Foundation’s WRF Capital, the Sustainability Investment Fund and members of the Northwest Energy Angels also invested in the Seattle-based company.

If you’re anything like the average Silicon Valley entrepreneur, right now you’ve got an iPhone in your pocket and a pile of old Blackberries in a drawer somewhere. But hopefully, with the help of recycling and resale companies like Flipswap, we’ll no longer keep old phones hanging around or worse, throw them in the trash.

Flipswap just raised $14 million for its business plan of letting you trade in or recycle your old phone as you’re buying a new one. The startup says it has taken over 700,000 handsets back to date, and partnered with several larger companies, including Amazon and Newegg.

Its website tries to make simplify the trade-in process for consumers. You can choose to either take store credit at a nearby location (sadly, the closest to me is 60 miles away) or trade online. The price for a trade-in is prominently displayed although, as you might imagine, quite a few older phones are worth little to nothing.

Because mobile phone use is still growing at a torrid pace worldwide, Flipswap can turn a decent buck from the model. And that’s why it also has plenty of competition. ReCellular, which just picked up a $15 million investment, also concentrates on mobile phones, and looks like the larger of the two companies. Accepting a wider array of electronics are TechForward, which is raising a round, Turtle Wings and Gazelle, whose parent company Second Rotation just scored $6 million.

The investors backing Flipswap are NGEN Partners and RRE Ventures. The company is based in Los Angeles, Calif.

Environmentalists like to point out that a person’s carbon footprint is about more than just the CO2 they emit through daily activities like driving or surfing the Internet, extending to the goods they own, even the food they eat. The same holds for most companies, Planet Metrics’ core user group for a new carbon information platform.

The hidden CO2 emissions of companies tend to come from their supply chains, long tails of vendors and manufacturers that modern multinationals tap into for everything from each individual part in a complete device — Apple’s iPhone being one famous example — to outsourced labor and customer support. Most companies can’t even begin to estimate the amount of CO2 they’re indirectly responsible for.

Planet Metrics rounds all those data points up to give companies a view into how much carbon their business really generates. The startup has collated thousands of studies by governments, universities and private researchers that show the life cycle inventory (LCI) of pretty much everything, from raw materials to finished goods, as well as regional data like how electricity is generated in a given area.

Nobody else has yet gone that far to track CO2, according to the company’s CEO, Andy Leventhal. Of course, one might wonder why, if it’s so difficult to get carbon information, companies would bother at all. After all, why would a corporation go out of its way to learn about how it’s detrimental to the environment, if there aren’t yet regulation forcing them to?

Often, the answer is that companies want to be ahead of the curve. Most big corporations are convinced that carbon regulation is coming, and they want to have a good handle on how to react when it does. Leventhal also points to CO2 remediation as a “business driver”, as eliminating wasteful processes can often help streamline a company.

And, as the saying goes, information is power. Although that’s not strictly true in the case of CO2 emissions; just knowing that someone in your supply chain is spewing carbon into the atmosphere isn’t necessarily helpful. Often, the steps required to reduce emissions take years to enact — another reason for companies to get in on the game early.

Along with announcing its product, Planet Metrics has also disclosed a $2.3 million first investment from angel investors and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company is based in San Francisco, Calif.

Environmentalists like to point out that a person’s carbon footprint is about more than just the CO2 they emit through daily activities like driving or surfing the Internet, extending to the goods they own, even the food they eat. The same holds for most companies, Planet Metrics’ core user group for a new carbon information platform.

The hidden CO2 emissions of companies tend to come from their supply chains, long tails of vendors and manufacturers that modern multinationals tap into for everything from each individual part in a complete device — Apple’s iPhone being one famous example — to outsourced labor and customer support. Most companies can’t even begin to estimate the amount of CO2 they’re indirectly responsible for.

Planet Metrics rounds all those data points up to give companies a view into how much carbon their business really generates. The startup has collated thousands of studies by governments, universities and private researchers that show the life cycle inventory (LCI) of pretty much everything, from raw materials to finished goods, as well as regional data like how electricity is generated in a given area.

Nobody else has yet gone that far to track CO2, according to the company’s CEO, Andy Leventhal. Of course, one might wonder why, if it’s so difficult to get carbon information, companies would bother at all. After all, why would a corporation go out of its way to learn about how it’s detrimental to the environment, if there aren’t yet regulation forcing them to?

Often, the answer is that companies want to be ahead of the curve. Most big corporations are convinced that carbon regulation is coming, and they want to have a good handle on how to react when it does. Leventhal also points to CO2 remediation as a “business driver”, as eliminating wasteful processes can often help streamline a company.

And, as the saying goes, information is power. Although that’s not strictly true in the case of CO2 emissions; just knowing that someone in your supply chain is spewing carbon into the atmosphere isn’t necessarily helpful. Often, the steps required to reduce emissions take years to enact — another reason for companies to get in on the game early.

Along with announcing its product, Planet Metrics has also disclosed a $2.3 million first investment from angel investors and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The company is based in San Francisco, Calif.