Environmental Engineering Reference
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Silicon Valley was swept by energy fever; for a time, it seemed as if
every investor and entrepreneur who had made it big in information
technology was get ing into the game. Kapadia caught the bug too,
and he joined the board of Envia a couple months at er its founding,
kicking in $250,000, the company's i rst investment. h e next October,
Bay Partners bought into the company, and early the following year it
invested in Enphase Energy, a company that made microinverters for
solar power . 36 In August 2010, Kapadia let to run Envia full-time.
“Two things were the core drivers of the founding,” Kapadia explains.
“We were convinced that oil prices are not going to go back down to
twenty dollars a barrel, as it was i t een years ago, and we were con-
vinced that A123”—then the hot est bat ery company on the planet—
“was not going to succeed.” A123, in his view, had misunderstood the
challenge, focusing its ef orts on driving down the costs of manufac-
turing. To Kapadia, though, the challenge remained technology: “We
needed to increase the amount of energy we encapsulate in a bat ery
because each ounce of energy determines how many miles you can
drive that car.” Envia and a handful of other companies focused squarely
on the goal. “We have done exactly that,” Kapadia claims, “which is
to focus on the innovation required to double or triple the amount
of energy per unit weight.” He is certainly right about A123. Within a
week of going public in September 2009, the company stock topped
twenty-i ve dollars a share, but by July 2012 a share could be bought
for less than i t y cents.
“h e only risk now is the demand,” says Kapadia, a sentiment that
is widely shared but understates the challenge. “Can we bring the cost
down fast enough?” Any progress will be evolutionary: “You start out
with the smallest bat ery possible. And then gradually, as the cost comes
down, you increase the size of the bat ery. As you increase the size of
the bat ery, the amount of miles goes up.” Whether this will happen
rapidly, delivering the 250-mile range at a modest cost, which Kapadia
seeks by 2020, or far more slowly, as many more skeptical analysts
believe, will be revealed only in time.
Layden is also optimistic that technological progress will be faster
than many naysayers project. He rel ects on an engine that he worked
on back in 1986: “We were happy to get ten miles a gallon.” Layden
 
 
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