Think of clean energy technology and what comes to mind? Wind turbines on our mountain tops? Millions of roofs covered with solar cells? Futuristic cars from a sci-fi movie? Well, try again.
Think of something the size of a matchhead that you will probably never see, or even know it's there. Think super-efficient power conversion chips inside your mobile phone charger, laptop power supply, lighting systems and other mains-powered devices. The chips may be minute and out of sight, but the new energy-saving technologies they contain, developed by Cambridge-based CamSemi, could be transformational. The company's power management controllers promise to set off a quiet revolution in the electronics industry - and save hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
"Your old cordless phone is probably wasting a third of the electricity it consumes - and that's in a product that is left plugged in all the time," says CamSemi's chief executive officer, David Baillie. "Your mobile phone charger is probably throwing away half the energy while it's actually charging, and all the time it's left plugged in on the wall it's burning a watt, day in day out. It doesn't sound like much but multiply that watt by a billion chargers around the world and it's a gigawatt, or a big coal fired power station. And many people have more than one mobile phone, they have mp3 players, digital cameras, bluetooth headsets, portable games machines ... so it's not just mobile phones but the whole consumer electronics sector."
The world consumer market for chargers and power supplies is about 2 billion units a year - and CamSemi is aiming to take a "leadership position" in the sector, getting its chips into at least 20% of them. "We believe our technology is the best around for manufacturers of chargers or adapters for mobile phones, and for consumer networking technologies like modems and routers and WiFi access points," says Baillie. "So we have every hope of achieving that ambition."
Paradoxically, CamSemi is supporting efforts to reduce the size of its market by developing a "universal charger solution" so that a wide range of mobile phones and other devices can share chargers via a PC-type USB interface. Apart from the convenience to consumers, this would have a huge "green" payoff by reducing waste and electronics landfill. "There are multiple green aspects in what we do," says Baillie. "Not having to make holes in the ground, smelt metals and dump electronic waste is definitely part of our mission."
Moreover, CamSemi is eyeing up even bigger markets. "Power conversion is everywhere - it is ubiquitous," says Baillie. "Hardly anything that plugs into the mains does not contain a power conversion and electronic control somewhere. Energy efficiency legislation will drive everything to have intelligent power conversion and the sky is the limit. There are so many places where we could play."
The lighting market is an example. Incandescent or filament bulbs are one of the few products to run directly from the mains - but they throw away 95% of their energy as heat, turning only 5% into light. Thanks to efficiency regulations, this 10 billion-unit-a-year market is disappearing, to be taken over by compact fluorescent bulbs and LEDs - both of which need power converters.
The company is thinking big but remains small for now: it turned over $2m last year and has yet to make a profit. Hence the importance of clean-tech investors who have been financing CamSemi since 2002, most recently culminating in a third investment round in April 2008 in which the Carbon Trust and BankInvest joined existing investors to subscribe $34m. "Having the Carbon Trust on board adds a lot of value through its industry connections but it also validates our green credentials and adds reassurance," says Baillie. "Our job now is to deliver a great return - for our investors and for the environment."