August has been a busy month at SBS starting off with a very successful Southeast Biofuels and Renewable Energy Conference where we released the 2012 Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency report for Mississippi. It is currently open for public comment and I encourage all of our readers to provide us your feedback on how we may improve it. We also conducted our fifth full-day Renewable Energy Venture Development Academy (REVDA) session this month and got great feedback from it. I appreciate Rich Sun, one of Mississippi Technology Alliance's board members, for coming by in person to share with the attendees his criteria for selecting and investing in biomass projects. Rich has been involved with almost $11 billion in private equity and debt deals, 60 percent of which were in the energy sector. An introductory REVDA session will be conducted in Biloxi, Mississippi, September 14 (see below) and the next full session will be held in Washington, DC, October 15, 2012, as a pre-conference workshop for RETECH 2012.  

Our goal for developing the REVDA content has always been to draw from real life examples and experiences of companies and investors we work with on a regular basis while leveraging the appropriate public resources.   For more on that topic, please read the interview in this newsletter with Susan Seagren who handles New Markets Tax Credits (NMTC) for AMCREF Community Capital LLC in New Orleans. I serve as an advisory board member for AMCREF and another NMTC firm, MuniStrategies LLC, and would love to hear from you if you have projects that may benefit from this program. I will also be serving as a panelist at the upcoming MegaWatt Ventures competition's final event at Florida's Cleantech to Spacetech Event in Orlando, Florida, on September 21, 2012. This is a unique competition for startup companies in the cleantech sector.  

August is drawing to a close with the anxiety of Hurricane Isaac. While we got some high winds and intermittent downpours in the Jackson, Mississippi, area, our thoughts are with those on the Gulf Coast region in Louisiana and Mississippi who were just pounded by Isaac. According to Entergy, which provides electricity to large parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, Hurricane Isaac is the fourth largest storm after hurricanes Katrina (2005), Gustav (2008) and Rita (2005) in terms of customer outages, which peaked at 769,000.

I received an automated phone call from Entergy Mississippi that they were working hard to restore power everywhere, which got me thinking about the vast support infrastructure that is needed to operate a large utility. Reliability in electricity generation, transmission and distribution are critical components of the backbone of our economy and one that renewable energy generators also have to contend with. Underdeveloped energy storage technologies and lack of transmission capabilities are some of the big challenges that are preventing greater deployment of renewable energy systems. On the other hand, this also opens the field up for innovation and new technologies to emerge that can expand the reach of the electrical grid while making it less susceptible to outages.

While I was glad to see that Isaac passed through relatively quickly, I am saddened to announce Natalie Boudreaux is no longer working with us.  Natalie served as a business analyst for the Strategic Biomass Solutions and came upon a great opportunity with Shell Oil in Houston, Texas. We are proud of Natalie's accomplishments and wish her all the success in her future endeavors. I hope you find these newsletters useful and interesting and welcome your comments via email (sarora@mta.ms) or phone (601-960-3659). Thank you and enjoy the rest of the newsletter.

 

Sumesh Arora, Ph.D.

Director, Strategic Biomass Solutions  

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Strategic Biomass Solutions is dedicated to connecting entrepreneurs, investors and economic developers in order to drive renewable energy technologies to market.  SBS is funded in part by the United States Department of Energy.