(Reuters) – U.S. home prices rose for a sixth straight month in July in the latest sign of a sustainable housing market recovery, while a jump in consumer confidence this month offered a harbinger that Americans are ready to loosen their spending.

Six years after its collapse, economists believe the housing market has turned a corner.

Two separate reports on Tuesday showed that home prices rose in July, though the gains were not as strong as the previous month. That follows recent data that home resales and groundbreaking on new properties rose in August, while business sentiment among homebuilders hit a more than six-year high this month.

The S&P/Case Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas rose 0.4 percent in July on a seasonally adjusted basis. Economists had expected a gain of 0.9 percent, which would have matched June’s advance. Case Shiller is one of the most closely watched barometers of the U.S. housing market.

On a non-adjusted basis, prices were up 1.6 percent.

The gain in house prices supports the view that “even with the broader economic recovery struggling to gain traction, the housing recovery is sustainable,” wrote Paul Diggle, property economist at Capital Economics.

Housing has regained its footing at the same time as the broader economic recovery has lost traction. The economy grew at a 1.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter, and economists say it is not likely to fare much better in the current quarter.

Larry Kantor, head of research at Barclays Capital, said housing has the potential to give a stronger boost to the U.S. economy in 2013 as steadily rising prices reassure Americans that the housing crash is past.

“We’d not previously had a decline in house prices since the 1940s so we don’t know for sure, but six months of price rises may deter people from renting,” he said.

Earlier this month the Federal Reserve unleashed an aggressive stimulus program in which it will buy $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities a month until the job market sees sustained improvement.

The Fed’s announcement pushed mortgage interest rates to new record lows last week, according to data from mortgage finance provider Freddie Mac.

Still, housing faces a number of hurdles, including tight lending standards for mortgages, a large number of underwater homeowners, and a large number of foreclosures still in the pipeline.

OUT OF THE WOODS

U.S. stocks were modestly higher in the early afternoon, with housing shares up 0.4 percent. The housing index is up more than 14 percent for September so far.

The day’s data helped drive down prices of Treasuries, a traditional haven from risk, as it reduced worries about slowing global growth.

Also on Tuesday, consumer confidence climbed in September to the highest level in seven months as Americans were more optimistic about the job market and income prospects.

The Conference Board, an industry group, said its index of consumer attitudes rose to a reading of 70.3 from an upwardly revised 61.3 in August. It was the highest level since February and topped economists’ expectations for a reading of 63, according to a Reuters poll.

With consumer spending accounting for two-thirds of economic activity, analysts are keen to see the upbeat attitudes translate into more buying.

“It does bode well for spending down the road,” said Omer Esiner, chief market analyst at Commonwealth Foreign Exchange in Washington.

Cheerier consumers, combined with the recent rise in equities markets, could help President Barack Obama’s reelection chances, with campaigning on both sides focusing on the health of the economy.

The housing market is considered a key sector of the economy.

“Housing is out of the woods and it should be making a contribution to the overall economy going forward,” David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at Standard & Poor’s, told Reuters Insider.

Compared with a year ago, prices in the 20 cities were up 1.2 percent, the biggest gain since August 2010, according to the S&P/Case Shiller index.

Prices were lower than a year ago in only four cities, with Atlanta faring the worst, down nearly 10 percent. Hard-hit Phoenix continued to rebound, with a gain of 16.6 percent.

Separately, the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency home price index showed prices rose 0.2 percent in July compared with a 0.6 percent rise in June.

Analysts cautioned that home prices could decelerate somewhat through the rest of the year as the traditional summertime buying boost wears off.

Economists expect prices will rise 1 percent this year and 2.5 percent next year, according to a Reuters poll done at the beginning of September before the Fed announced its latest quantitative easing program.

In the consumer confidence data, the Conference Board’s expectations index climbed to 83.7 from 71.1, while the present situation index gained to 50.2 from 46.5.

Consumers were more optimistic on both the current and short-term outlook for the labor market and had a more favorable view on their income prospects in the next six months.

Consumers also felt better about price increases with expectations for inflation in the coming 12 months down to 5.8 percent from 6 percent.

(Additional reporting by Ryan Vlastelica and Atossa Abrahamian; Editing by Leslie Adler)

If the U.S. economy looks a little merrier this December, its Santa Claus will be the iPhone 5.

U.S. sales of Apple’s latest must-have gadget could pump more than $3 billion into the economy by year’s end, say some economists and technology analysts.

All told, the iPhone 5 could add a quarter-percentage point to the U.S. economy’s growth in the next three months, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

The phones went on sale Friday, Sept. 21. Many stores were sold out Sunday and were awaiting new shipments.

Apple reported Monday that it sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s since the launch.

That could mean pre-sale estimates of the iPhone 5’s economic impact were too conservative. JPMorgan Chase analysts had estimated earlier this month that about 8 million iPhone 5s would be sold in the U.S. through Dec. 31, enough to add a third of a percentage point to the economy’s annual growth rate in the fourth quarter.

Wherever sales end up this year, it doesn’t mean the iPhone 5 alone will revive the sluggish economy. “Some of the increased spending on iPhones will be offset by less spending on other things,” Zandi says.

Even with the iPhone’s contribution, the U.S. economy is only expected to grow at a weak annual rate of 2% to 2.5% in the October-December period, Zandi says. JPMorgan Chase estimates a 2% growth rate. But it should counter the negative effects of this summer’s drought on consumer spending growth.

JPMorgan analyst Michael Feroli says his estimate for the iPhone 5’s economic impact appears reasonable based on previous iPhone introductions.

When the iPhone 4s went on sale last October, online sales and computer and software sales had their largest monthly increase on record, he points out in his iPhone 5 report.

Feroli calculates last year’s iPhone added 0.1 to 0.2 of a percentage point to the economy’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter. And the iPhone 5’s launch is expected to be much larger.

In addition to iPhone sales, the new product’s arrival will also spur demand for new phone cases, chargers and other accessories.

One place the iPhone’s impact is clear is in the stock market.

Apple’s shares are up 74% this year, after rising $1.40 on Friday to close at $700.10. Its $278 billion gain in stock market value this year exceeds rival Microsoft’s total market value of $261 billion.

Apple’s gain represents 12% of this year’s boost in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P/Dow Jones Indices. Its surge also accounts for 44% of the gains by the 71 technology companies in the index.

Contributing: Adam Shell

(Reuters) – Researchers have created a new material that could solve some of the problems holding back projects to combat global warming by capturing and burying carbon emitted from power stations.

The material, made from aluminum nitrate salt, cheap organic materials and water, is non-toxic and requires less energy to strip out the carbon when it becomes saturated, the scientists said.

Carbon capture has not yet been proven on a commercial scale and pilot projects have been hindered by concerns that the ammonia-based materials, or amines, used to absorb carbon can themselves produce toxic emissions.

They are also expensive and need large amounts of heat to boil out the carbon so it can be taken away and stored.

The researchers say their new absorber, dubbed NOTT-300, could overcome all these problems.

“I feel this can been viewed as a revolution to a certain degree,” Sihai Yang from Nottingham University, who worked on the project, told Reuters.

“It is non-toxic, and zero heating input is required for the regeneration. There is promising potential to overcome the traditional amine material on both environmental and economic grounds.”

Timmy Ramirez-Cuesta, who worked on the project at the ISIS research center at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, said the new material could simplify carbon capture by using interchangeable filters.

“When the material is saturated, the exhaust gases are diverted to the second container where the process continues,” he said.”The full container is disconnected from the system and the CO2 is removed using a vacuum and collected. The regenerated container can then be reconnected and used repeatedly.”

The team, which also included scientists from the University of Oxford and Peking University inChina, say the new material captured close to 100 percent of the carbon dioxide in experiments using a cocktail of gases.

Although the rate could be lower in the “dynamic conditions” of a real power station, it should still be over 90 percent, which is a key test for the viability of an absorber.

The material can pick up harmful gases, including sulphur dioxide, in a mixture, allowing others like hydrogen, methane, nitrogen and oxygen to pass through.

It does, however, absorb water vapor and the researchers are doing further work to overcome the problem, which could reduce its performance with CO2.

Martin Schroeder at Nottingham, who led the research, said NOTT-300 could also be put to use in gas purification. Natural gas often contains 10 percent of carbon dioxide impurity which needs to be removed before it can be used.

The scientists said they are working with companies in the carbon capture business on commercializing the new material.

The research was published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

(Editing by David Cowell)

Joule Unlimited will demonstrate its novel production process within the next few weeks.

KEVIN BULLIS

Monday, September 17, 2012

Joule Unlimited, a startup whose engineered microörganisms produce ethanol from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, announced the commissioning of a new demonstration plant last week that will start producing ethanol within the next few weeks. Today, the company announced a partnership with Audi that will help Joule develop and test its fuels. The financial details of the partnership weren’t released, but not including the Audi partnership, Joule has raised $110 million.

In small-scale outdoor tests, Joule has shown that its approach, which involves engineered microörganisms housed in special transparent reactors, could produce 8,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, a few times more than other advanced biofuels companies (see “TR10: Solar Fuel” and “A Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil Fuels“). As Joule moves its technology to market, it has abandoned its original elaborate reactors in favor of simple plastic tubes—a move that Joule says makes the process more economical.

Most biofuels companies take some form of biomass, such as corn, grass, or algae, and process it to make biofuel, often with the aid of microörganisms. Joule’s approach is to take out as many of the intermediate steps as possible. Joule has taken a microörganism (the company won’t name the organism) and introduced combinations of genes known to produce ethanol from carbon dioxide and water and sunlight. To increase the productivity of the microbe, it has removed as many of the microörganism’s original genes as possible—without killing it—to ensure that its metabolism is geared toward making ethanol rather than growing the microörganism. Joule calculates that it could produce 25,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year this way, and has demonstrated a rate of 15,000 gallons in the lab. It’s also developing organisms that produce diesel.

Joule’s solution was to do away with the concrete foundations, metal frames, and solar-panel-like structures and use plastic tubes instead. The tubes are a couple of meters wide and up to 50 meters long. “The new design is much larger, and you can lay it directly on the ground. That leads to a huge reduction in cost,” says William Sims, Joule’s CEO.

In the new design, the organisms, nutrients, and water are circulated to optimize their growth. The ethanol they produce vaporizes inside the tubes in the sun, rising to the top, where it’s relatively easy to remove. (The ethanol still needs to be further purified in a central facility.) To deal with heat, the company uses a transparent resin for the tubes that redirects the infrared portion of sunlight away from the tube, while allowing the light the microörganisms need to pass through to them.

Joule plans to work out the final design for the system at its new four-acre demonstration plant in Hobbs, New Mexico. One of the challenges other biofuels companies face is that the economics of the process won’t work until it’s demonstrated in a full-scale commercial facility, with large vats for producing biofuel. Sims says the economics of Joule’s approach can be demonstrated with just a few of its plastic solar converters, reducing the amount of financing needed. “It’s pure replication. What works for four acres will also work for 5,000 acres,” Sims says.

Joule has calculated that its organisms could, in theory, produce 25,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, which would allow the company to produce ethanol at $1.28 per gallon. But Sims says the process could be economical at lower rates of about 11,000 to 12,000 gallons. He says construction on the first commercial plants could begin as early as the end of 2013.

Crystal Solar’s approach simplifies the manufacturing of silicon wafers and eliminates some expensive equipment.

KEVIN BULLIS

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Korean company Hanwha SolarOne has shown the first commercial-sized solar panel to use a novel technology for producing silicon wafers, which are the most expensive part of a solar cell. Developed by the Santa Clara, California-based startup Crystal Solar, the technology makes wafers that are less than a third the thickness of conventional wafers. It wastes less silicon during processing than conventional approaches and greatly reduces the amount of equipment needed to make the wafers, potentially cutting wafer costs in half. Wafers account for a third to a half of the cost of making a solar panel. Hanwha has taken a $15 million stake in Crystal and is helping to bring the technology to market.

The new technology and the partnership between Hanwha and Crystal Solar could be a model for how to continue to cut the cost of conventional silicon solar cells. A few years ago, the prospect of solar panels that cost less than $1 per watt to make seemed far-fetched, a view that led investors to pour money into alternatives to silicon solar panels, such as thin-film solar panels.

But now solar panels do cost under $1 per watt to make, which has driven many thin-film startups out of business. Instead of developing a technology to challenge silicon solar panels, Crystal is developing a technology that can easily be incorporated into existing silicon panel manufacturing. And rather than manufacturing solar panels itself, it’s working with a company in Hanwha that already has manufacturing experience. Startups typically lack manufacturing experience, and many fail because they can’t bring manufacturing costs down.

An early stage of conventional processing derives pure silicon from a gas that contains silicon and other elements. Crystal Solar developed a way to create thin crystalline silicon wafers directly from that gas, eliminating the need to first make polysilicon, melt it down, crystallize it, and saw it. It’s a version of a process used in the chip industry, but it’s far more efficient and faster (see “Silicon Solar Cells Ditch the Wafers“).

The approach reduces costs, not only by reducing silicon waste, but also by eliminating much of the expensive equipment needed to make wafers, says Chris Eberspacher, the chief technology officer of Hanwha SolarOne. Eberspacher says that for Hanwha to develop similar technology itself would be risky and take years of development. It decided instead to look to startups for innovation. “This way, we don’t have to pick one technology,” he says. “We can survey the range of what startups are doing and pick the best. It allows us to move much faster.”

Eberspacher says that Crystal Solar is still working to bring down costs, such as by reducing the cost of its machines for making the wafers and increasing the number of wafers they can produce. He says if Crystal Solar continues to hit its milestones, Hanwha could offer a commercial product that uses the technology in 2014.

(Reuters) – Scientists have grown a drug to treat a rare genetic disease inside corn plants, potentially offering a cheaper way to manufacture a treatment that currently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for each patient.

The move marks an advance for the emerging field of molecular farming, which could one day see complex biotech medicines being mass-produced in plants rather than factories.

Researchers from Canada and Australia reported on Tuesday that they had created transgenic corn that could synthesize alpha-L-iduronidase, an enzyme used for a debilitating condition called mucopolysaccharidosis I (MPS I).

The disease causes progressive damage to the heart, brain, and other organs.

The research is still at an early stage and the new plant-grown medicine has not been tested in clinical trials, so any eventual treatment is still many years from reaching the market.

But the work, led by scientists at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, is a significant step forward because it shows a way of producing molecules that should be accepted by the human immune system without causing dangerous side effects.

George Lomonossoff of Britain’s John Innes Centre, who was not involved in the research, said the ability to control the way sugars bound to proteins in the corn was “an important addition to the toolkit for producing pharmaceuticals in plants”.

“This is GM technology which offers a means for the production of a better quality pharmaceutical. However, the clinical efficacy and safety of the drug will need to be proven,” he said.

MPS I is one of dozens of lysosomal storage disorders, including Fabry and Gaucher disease, many of which can be treated with enzyme replacement therapies, made by companies like Sanofi’s Genzyme unit and Shire.

But the current process of making them in mammalian cell cultures inside stainless steel tanks is very expensive.

In the case of MPS I, treatment with the enzyme replacement drug Aldurazyme, from Genzyme and Biomarin, costs over $300,000 a year for children and more for adults.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers said transgenic plants could be a cost-effective and safe alternative.

Some large companies have been looking at ways to make complex protein drugs in plants but molecular farming has yet to deliver its first commercial product.

The closest is a Gaucher disease drug from Israel’s Protalix BioTherapeutics and Pfizer, which is produced in a culture of carrot cells – rather than in whole plants – and was approved for sale in the United States in May.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Louise Heavens)

KEVIN BULLIS

Monday, September 17, 2012

Joule Unlimited, a startup whose engineered microörganisms produce ethanol from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, announced the commissioning of a new demonstration plant last week that will start producing ethanol within the next few weeks. Today, the company announced a partnership with Audi that will help Joule develop and test its fuels. The financial details of the partnership weren’t released, but not including the Audi partnership, Joule has raised $110 million.

In small-scale outdoor tests, Joule has shown that its approach, which involves engineered microörganisms housed in special transparent reactors, could produce 8,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, a few times more than other advanced biofuels companies (see “TR10: Solar Fuel” and “A Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil Fuels“). As Joule moves its technology to market, it has abandoned its original elaborate reactors in favor of simple plastic tubes—a move that Joule says makes the process more economical.

Most biofuels companies take some form of biomass, such as corn, grass, or algae, and process it to make biofuel, often with the aid of microörganisms. Joule’s approach is to take out as many of the intermediate steps as possible. Joule has taken a microörganism (the company won’t name the organism) and introduced combinations of genes known to produce ethanol from carbon dioxide and water and sunlight. To increase the productivity of the microbe, it has removed as many of the microörganism’s original genes as possible—without killing it—to ensure that its metabolism is geared toward making ethanol rather than growing the microörganism. Joule calculates that it could produce 25,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year this way, and has demonstrated a rate of 15,000 gallons in the lab. It’s also developing organisms that produce diesel.

Joule’s solution was to do away with the concrete foundations, metal frames, and solar-panel-like structures and use plastic tubes instead. The tubes are a couple of meters wide and up to 50 meters long. “The new design is much larger, and you can lay it directly on the ground. That leads to a huge reduction in cost,” says William Sims, Joule’s CEO.

In the new design, the organisms, nutrients, and water are circulated to optimize their growth. The ethanol they produce vaporizes inside the tubes in the sun, rising to the top, where it’s relatively easy to remove. (The ethanol still needs to be further purified in a central facility.) To deal with heat, the company uses a transparent resin for the tubes that redirects the infrared portion of sunlight away from the tube, while allowing the light the microörganisms need to pass through to them.

Joule plans to work out the final design for the system at its new four-acre demonstration plant in Hobbs, New Mexico. One of the challenges other biofuels companies face is that the economics of the process won’t work until it’s demonstrated in a full-scale commercial facility, with large vats for producing biofuel. Sims says the economics of Joule’s approach can be demonstrated with just a few of its plastic solar converters, reducing the amount of financing needed. “It’s pure replication. What works for four acres will also work for 5,000 acres,” Sims says.

Joule has calculated that its organisms could, in theory, produce 25,000 gallons of ethanol per acre per year, which would allow the company to produce ethanol at $1.28 per gallon. But Sims says the process could be economical at lower rates of about 11,000 to 12,000 gallons. He says construction on the first commercial plants could begin as early as the end of 2013.

(Reuters) – Perched on a hilltop outside Washington, the U.S. government’s net-zero energy laboratory looks a lot like the luxury houses nearby, with two significant differences: it will make as much energy as it uses, and only sensors, not people, live in it.

Designed to fit in a typical residential neighborhood, the 4,000 square foot (372 square metre) net-zero lab on the suburban campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology is so energy-efficient that over the course of a year it is expected to produce as much energy as it needs.

Its total energy consumption should be “net zero.”

To measure energy use, researchers at NIST have created a virtual family of four – two imaginary working parents, a 14-year-old and an 8-year-old – and scripted their every meal, move and shower. The energy use of this typical family will be monitored.

Sensors and computer programs will simulate virtual people entering the living area or moving from room to room, taking a bath, cooking a meal, turning on a computer, a television or a toaster. The appliances and plumbing do exist and are controlled from a command center of sorts, located in the detached garage.

Small devices will simulate the heat and humidity that actual humans produce in the two-story, four-bedroom structure.

“This family is very cooperative, they do exactly what we want them to do, every minute of the day,” Hunter Fanney, chief of NIST’s Building Environment Lab, said at the project’s official launch last week.

To gauge water use, the master bedroom’s shower is fitted with a scale. Step into the shower stall and onto the scale, and a weight read-out appears outside. When the lab is in use, the system will figure out by weight whether the virtual parents or children are taking a shower, and how much hot water they use.

The simulations assume that the 14-year-old will take the longest showers, Fanney said.

TESTING ENERGY-SIPPING TECHNOLOGY

Solar panels on the roof generate electricity and heat water. There are no roof gutters, partly as an aesthetic statement, but also because the lab-house is surrounded by a deep layer of gravel through which rainwater can percolate.

The garage is built across a breezeway from the main house so all the heat from the monitoring equipment doesn’t add to the lab’s energy load. There’s an electrical outlet for an electric car and a wheelchair lift that allows no-stair access to the main floor of the building.

This is not the only net-zero house in the United States, but it is the first created to look and feel like an amenity-filled suburban home, according to NIST. Most net-zero homes make it to net-zero by cutting down on size and amenities.

A house similar to the lab was built in Concord, Massachusetts, for about $600,000, exclusive of the cost of the land, said Betsy Pettit of Building Science Corporation.

A lower-cost not-quite-net-zero home was built for Habitat for Humanity for about $150,000, Pettit said, but that one was about 1,200 square feet (111 square metres), less than one-third the size of the NIST lab.

NIST’s lab cost $2.5 million, because it will do more than monitor energy use, and the monitoring equipment is costly; after the first year, it will be a test bed for new technology.

Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which made environmentally friendly construction a priority, almost every component of the structure was made in the United States.

The one exception was an air exchanger made in Canada. The project got a waiver to buy it when this item could not be found in the United States, a NIST spokeswoman said.

(Reporting By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent; Editing by Fred Barbash and Todd Eastham)