Matthew Phelan's Climate Chronicles

Raser Technologies’ financial history is not terribly flattering.

Last December, Motley Fool was singling the company out as a poster child for debt-ridden businesses with no discernible free cash flow, based on the firm’s $80 million in long-term debt and its paltry $284,000 in reported revenue.

The company had struggled unsuccessfully for years to profit from its Symetron AC motor technology, which it had been marketing as an improvement over both existing AC electric motor designs (in terms of torque) and high-torque, permanent-magnet electric motors (in terms of price).

Raser's pitch included eco-conscious overtures to hybrid electric vehicle manufacturers, which may be the only logical explanation for its curious new expansion — into geothermal energy.

What’s even more curious is that it seems to be working.

Scientists at the University of Michigan are beginning the first large-scale test of a new technology that takes a common problem for oil platforms and turns it into a method for reliably generating clean electricity from ocean and river currents. They are working with the U.S. Navy to build a prototype in the Detroit River this year with the capacity to power a 20,000-square-foot building.

When word first surfaced of the VIVACE Converter (short for Vortex-Induced Vibration for Aquatic Clean Energy Converter), it sparked a flurry of pop-sci articles struggling to explain the fluid dynamics with anything remotely accessible to the public.

The concept—absorbing energy from a phenomenon called vortex-induced vibration (VIV)—has been likened to Leonardo Da Vinci’s research into “Aeolian Tones,” the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, and the device’s own sexy aquatic biomimetics: It imitates fish. Like fish, whose muscular power alone could not propel them at the speeds they travel, the invention harnesses forces created by a disrupted current.

Previous methods for collecting energy from currents, like turbines and water mills, required an average flow of five or six knots, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots.

VIVACE promises to generate power from these much slower flows.

Like just about everything else in the collapsing real estate market, Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs, have taken a nosedive. No surprise: REITs are corporations that invest in real estate. Conventional wisdom has it that only those REITs holding rental housing, self-storage facilities and health-care properties will be left unscathed. A new deal just announced by Developers Diversified Realty Corp. (DDR), however, is turning that wisdom on its head and demonstrating how clean energy might be able to supply an unexpected economic jolt.