Sierra Energy’s Mike Hart was featured in the Sacramento Business Journal today. Here are the highlights:

Green Business Newsmaker | Mike Hart
Premium content from Sacramento Business Journal by Bob Schmidt , Correspondent
Date: Friday, February 10, 2012, 3:00am PST

Throwing waste into a hole in the ground in a landfill and covering it with dirt is wasteful, Mike Hart says. Converting waste into energy is smarter.

Hart, president of Sierra Energy Corp., has a machine that will do that.

Sierra Energy’s FastOx Gasifier is a derivative of the blast furnace. It uses heat, steam and oxygen to turn trash into a gas that can be refined into transportation fuel.

“That’s a pretty exciting proposition,” Hart said, “because you can get rid of landfills, which are a toxic nightmare because of the stuff that leaches into our water tables and the greenhouse gasses that go up. Every ton of trash thrown into a landfill creates one ton of greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere. You can get rid of that with this technology.

“Landfill operators are using valuable land for garbage. What happens if the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) starts charging a carbon tax for those greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere? The landfill business is going to start looking not so attractive.

“What we’re suggesting is that an operator could get one of our gasifiers and not only turn every ton of waste that comes in into clean fuel and clean electricity, but they can take the trash already in the ground, dig it up and turn it into clean energy.

“Sierra Energy is a local company, and our gasifier, capable of converting five tons of trash a day into energy, is currently being demonstrated at the Department of Defense-funded Renewable Energy Testing Center at McClellan Park.”

Where did the idea for the Sierra Energy gasifier come from?
I’ve been a judge at the annual Big Bang Competition that’s run at UC Davis, and the gasifier was one of the projects that came through the competition. One of the people involved with the plan came out of UC Davis, and I ended up acquiring the technology. The Big Bang Competition is part of the UC Davis Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We built our first gasifier in 2009, built a bigger one in 2010, and will begin shipping our first commercial products to market this year and raising funds to build a new facility to be based in Sacramento.

What prompted your interest in the gasifier?
I was interested in alternative energy even when I was growing up. I wrote a term paper my senior year in high school about solving the energy crisis. I had all these great ideas, including gasification. It took me 30 years to get around to doing something about it. I always hated waste. When I saw something left over, I always wanted to figure out what to do with it.

That summarizes my business life. I love finding junk and finding a use for it, stuff that somebody else doesn’t see value in. Trash is the ultimate commodity. There used to be a big landfill my friends and I used to go to, and we’d find all kinds of great stuff. I would wonder how much people would pay for the stuff we’d find, and I found out that people were paying to get rid of it.

Eventually I figured out that there was a real opportunity there.

Who is He?
President, Sierra Energy Corp.

The essentials
• Age: 49
• Born in Cupertino. He can trace his ancestry to pioneers who traveled with the Donner Party. Lives in Davis with wife, Angie, and their five children, one each in college, high school, junior high school, elementary school and kindergarten.
• Education: B.A., political science, University of California Davis, and Stanford Advanced Management Program.

His favorite things
• Book: “The Goal,” by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt
• Restaurant: The Grad, in Davis
• Vacation spot: Lake Tahoe, and driving around the country in our RV
• Music: Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly
• Hobbies: Hiking, skiing. I plan to learn to fly an ultra light this year.
• Hero: The man in the arena, the entrepreneur who makes things happen.

EnlargeLisa Tanner/Courtesy Women Innovate Mobil: The founders of startup accelerator Women Innovate Mobile (clockwise from top right: Deborah Jackson, Kelly Hoey and Veronika Sonsev) aim to boost the profile of tech companies founded by women.      Lisa Tanner/Courtesy Women Innovate Mobile

More often than not, when we hear about hot tech companies, all the founders are male (see: Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga). But in an effort to change that profile, a new funding source is targeting companies founded by women.

Kelly Hoey thinks a lot of investors may be missing some good business opportunities because they aren’t coming from someone who looks like the next Mark Zuckerberg.

“You’re looking for a white guy in a hoodie, and that next visionary is … going to be wearing a skirt and a great pair of shoes,” she says. “They’re going to look different.”

Hoey is one of the three women behind Women Innovate Mobile, a startup accelerator. The group invests small sums of money in startups, gives them an office for three months, and helps them refine their business plan. Hoey says it’s like a greenhouse for startups.

“They get mentoring, they are given access to the networks of resources — that may be funding, that may be expertise,” she says.

Accelerators are not a new idea. Among the most well-known is Y Combinator, based in Silicon Valley, which has nurtured new stars like Dropbox and Reddit. But only 4 percent of Y Combinator’s grants went to startups with a female founder.

View a slideshow of women throughout the history of computing.

Addressing The Shortage Of Women In Silicon Valley

Missing In The Mobile Market

Veronika Sonsev, another of the founders of Women Innovate Mobile, says Silicon Valley may be missing some great opportunities, especially in the mobile space, where the perspective on, say, how to design a phone might be a little different coming from a woman.

“They use phones to plan every aspect of their life, to manage their kids’ schedules,” she says. “Given the nature of how women use telephones and all of the things that they do in their household, I can only imagine some of the ideas that they may come up with.”

The question is, of course, why aren’t women already out there turning their ideas into companies? The answer is complex, says Sharon Vosmek, the CEO of a nonprofit called Astia that helps women develop their business ideas. Vosmek says a lot of research indicates that women lack confidence. When a woman gets a C in calculus, for instance, she may figure she’s bad at math, but that’s not necessarily so for a guy.

“A young man with the same grade will perceive that he’s a math whiz,” Vosmek says. “He’ll use it in the furtherance of his career, to negotiate a higher salary and actually to have higher aspirations.”

And starting your own company often requires a big dose of confidence, Vosmek says.

‘A Great Problem For You To Solve’

Bill Reichert, a partner in Garage Technology Ventures, says another reason is that a lot of the female entrepreneurs he sees don’t have the computer science background.

“We tend to invest in companies that have very strong core technical teams, and … that population is disproportionately male,” Reichert says.

But starting an Internet company isn’t as technically difficult as it used to be. A female founder can bring an idea or marketing experience.

Women Innovate Mobile’s Sonsev, a former executive at AOL who now has her own startup, says women have to stop being shy about their ideas. Sonsev says women can turn their daily challenges into business opportunity that a man might not see, whether it’s seeing their child’s calendar online, or finding relevant health information.

“How many times have you been in a situation [where] you’re like, ‘You know, if only someone would start a company to solve that problem, I would be a customer.’ Well, that’s a great problem for you to solve,” she says. “Why don’t you start that company and help find other customers who are similar?”

Women Innovate Mobile is taking its first round of applications through Feb. 1. Sonsev notes that the group has already gotten inquiries from women as far away as Ireland and India.

Biomass Power and Thermal As I drove through blowing snow and over a small but growing snow bank in the spot where I parked my car this morning, I happily reminded myself that I’ll be in sunny San Francisco, Calif., next week.

The Pacific West Biomass Conference & Trade Show, a Biomass Power & Thermal and Biorefining Magazine event, kicks of Monday with biomass industry tours and the California Biodiesel and Renewable Diesel Conference. The Pacific West event continues with panel discussions and networking opportunities until Wednesday at noon.

True, this winter has been surprisingly mild for North Dakota, but I still don’t mind escaping during the few cold days we have had to endure so far. But besides the weather improvement, I’m excited to attend the conference and greet familiar and new faces in our industry.

The biomass tours at BBI International events are always educational and next week will feature a dairy digester and an aquatic biomass project. Tour attendees will even get to take part in a cheese tasting that will also feature local wine and beer. The event’s keynote, Mike Hart, is the president and CEO of Davis, Calif.-based Sierra Energy, a company specializing in waste gasification.

The entire event is packed with knowledgeable speakers and intriguing topics that are relevant in the industry today, including financing, feedstock procurement and handling, conversion technology advancements and more.

I hope to see you there.

PRESS RELEASE — Sierra Energy, a waste gasification and renewable energy company, today announced CEO Mike Hart will kick off BBI International’s Pacific West Biomass Conference & Trade Show, delivering the opening keynote address on January 17 at 8:00 a.m. PT. The 2012 Pacific West Biomass Conference will be held January 16-18 at the San  [Read More …]

Bill Davis, founder and former CEO of Ze-Gen, joins the Sierra Energy Advisory Board. “Mr. Davis’ strong renewable energy startup track record and financing experience will provide invaluable strategic insight to Sierra Energy as we move to the next phase of our growth,” said Mike Hart, president and CEO of Sierra Energy.