Power players

Area companies show the way toward renewable energy sources

Greg Cipriano, a vice president at Southborough-based Protonex Corp., with the company’s M250 fuel cell for RVs that use biofuel. (Globe Staff Photo / Bill Polo)

Roaring with the constant din of traffic and enveloped in fossil-fuel exhaust, the Massachusetts Turnpike corridor seems an unlikely path to a future of clean, renewable energy.

Yet Boston's western suburbs have quietly become home to companies that are national and even world leaders in developing clean, renewable power sources.

Although they specialize in different areas - wind energy, solar power, fuel cells, batteries - top executives at four of the companies say they share an appreciation of the deep well of brainpower and technical talent in the region and a commitment to a sustainable energy future.

"The biggest advantage is access to the talent pool here," UPC Wind's chief executive officer, Paul Gaynor, said last week. "There are a lot of folks with great energy backgrounds, and the current state administration is being very proactive in terms of helping us out."

Here we profile the four companies - A123 Systems in Watertown, Evergreen Solar Inc. in Marlborough, Protonex Corp. in Southborough, and the Newton-based UPC Wind - as examples of how the use of cutting-edge technology has positioned them at the forefront in the search for alternative sources of energy.

A123 SYSTEMS Watertown

The development of consumer-acceptable electric vehicles has been held back mostly by limited battery power and range. When built large enough for vehicular use, the advanced lithium-ion batteries that power cellphones and iPods are dangerously prone to overheating and catching fire.

Using a nanotechnology breakthrough developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, A123 Systems has developed a battery that, in theory, will have greater range than the nickel-metal hydride batteries in use in today's hybrid cars and be just as stable.

How big is the buzz around A123 System's proprietary "nanophosphates" products? The firm recently made Business 2.0 magazine's list of "15 Companies That Will Change the World" and scored a major marketing coup in its partnership with one of the world's largest automakers.

In a recent advertising campaign, General Motors began rebranding its venerable Chevrolet mark as a green brand under the slogan, "Gas-friendly to gas-free." The Detroit automaker has cast its new electric car, the Volt, as the centerpiece of the campaign, even though the vehicle is not projected to become commercially available until 2010, and is based on a battery pack that A123 Systems is still developing.

"The Volt project is really our top priority. It represents a tremendous change in the way vehicles are going to be made," A123 Systems CEO David Vieau said. "There is a huge change going on" from the old energy supply chain, he said. "It is a multitrillion-dollar swing that we're a part of."

Vieau said that the company's Watertown location just made sense. There was ample space in the Arsenal on the Charles office park for the company's needs, and it offers easy access to both MIT, where the company has its intellectual roots, and Hopkinton, where it has a manufacturing facility. The company also has manufacturing plants in Asia as well as research labs in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Toronto.

EVERGREEN SOLAR INC. Marlborough

Ever since the first Earth Day in 1970, solar power has been the great tease of the renewable energy world - a clean, inexhaustible source of power that would finally be made affordable by a technological breakthrough that always seemed to be just around the corner.

The problem: Conventional solar cells simply use too much expensive silicon to be cost-effective.

But nearly four decades later, Marlborough-based Evergreen Solar Inc. finally may have come up with that breakthrough, or at least one version of it. Another business based on an MIT-bred technology, Evergreen has developed a revolutionary, efficient, and green process for manufacturing solar panels that uses less silicon than other methods.

Evergreen's "string ribbon" wafer process runs two sets of wires through a stream of liquid silicon, with surface tension (the same force that is behind soap bubbles) creating an ultrathin layer of silicon to form between the wires. The result, according to the company's vice president for marketing, Terry Bailey, is a solar panel that produces twice the electricity for the same amount of silicon, making it an energy source that is economically competitive with other sources of power on the national grid.

The only public company of the four, Evergreen reported nearly $15 million in revenue during the third quarter of this year. Founded in Waltham, the 350-employee company moved its headquarters to a larger facility in Marlborough a few years ago, and is building a new manufacturing plant in Devens that will double its workforce.

PROTONEX CORP. Southborough

Protonex Corp. CEO Scott Pearson said the company, which has about 65 employees at its Southborough headquarters, has been able to grow by developing a diversified line of fuel-cell products for military and commercial markets.

Protonex has received major funding from both the Air Force and the Army to develop small, hydrogen fuel-cell power packs that weigh less and last twice as long as the batteries the military currently is using.

The company also has developed fuel cells that can operate on conventional fuels, such as biodiesel and methanol. The product's flexibility addresses one of the biggest impediments to the wider use of fuel cells - the creation of a commercial hydrogen-distribution infrastructure.

Because they use a chemical process rather than internal combustion to make electricity, small fuel-cell generators are much cleaner and quieter than conventional generators, even when using conventional fuels, Pearson said. Protonex also focuses on building small fuel-cell products because they require smaller amounts of precious metals like platinum to make and so are more economically viable, he said.

Pearson calls fuel cells the missing link in the renewable-energy supply chain.

"If the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, fuel cells can fill the gap either by using hydrogen or . . . biofuels to make energy," he said.

Easy access to technical talent out of MIT and the region's other elite universities made Southborough an easy choice for the company's headquarters, Pearson said.

"Besides," the Hopkinton resident said, "we live here."

UPC WIND Newton

UPC Wind has become one of the country's largest independent developers of wind-power systems, even though the closest viable location to Newton for a land-based, wind-energy farm probably is much farther out Interstate 90, well into the western part of the state.

While the Cape Wind project, which would place 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound off Cape Cod, has been mired in controversy and local opposition, UPC Wind has been quietly finding sites, planning, and building major projects from Maine to Maui. While wind is perhaps the cleanest source of renewable energy available, building a wind-power project requires a complex set of technological, political, public relations, and business skills, CEO Gaynor said.

The company's founder, Brian Caffyn, has lived in the area and the company has been able to find employees with all the necessary skills in the area around its Newton headquarters, where about 45 people work, Gaynor said.

"Cookie cutters don't exist in our business," he said. "We operate a 20-megawatt wind farm outside of Buffalo and a 200-megawatt wind farm in Utah, and they were completely different deals. The wind business . . . is a case-by-case world. The projects are not very repeatable."

With oil nearing $100 a barrel and with recent technological advances that will allow for wind turbines three times the size of those currently in wide use, wind power is increasingly competitive with conventional sources of fuel - in most places, Gaynor said.

"The fact of the matter is that Massachusetts does not have a lot of massively commercial sites for wind power," he said. "For the kind of wind speeds that you need, most of those sites are out in the Berkshires, and those projects would be pretty small, maybe about 20 megawatts. The biggest advantage is access to the talent pool here."