City Uses Sewage Gas for Renewable Energy, Peregrine Semiconductor Files for IPO, Cooley Q3 Venture Report, & More San Diego BizTech News

San Diego could be the first city in the country to use sewage gas in advanced fuel cells to generate electricity. We’ve got that and the rest of San Diego’s tech news roundup, which was abbreviated last week by the Thanksgiving holiday.

—The City of San Diego is set to begin construction next month on a biogas purification system from BioFuels Energy of Encinitas, CA, at its Point Loma Wastewater Treatment plant that is part of a $23.5 million renewable energy project. Methane gas from the sewage treatment plant will be injected into the natural gas distribution system, enabling the city and UC San Diego to withdraw gas elsewhere for use in power-producing fuel cells from FuelCell Energy of Danbury, CT.

—San Diego-based wireless chip designer Peregrine Semiconductor hopes to raise as much as $100 million in an initial public offering. The 20-year-old fabless chip design company said in a regulatory filing that it plans to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes, which includes financing its growth, developing new products, asserting and defending its intellectual property rights, and new capital spending.

—The Cooley law firm issued its Venture Financing Report for the third-quarter that ended Sept. 30. The report, which analyzes 92 deals nationwide with a total capital investment of approximately $988 million, characterizes deals during the three-month period as “a mixture of optimism and caution.”

—San Francisco Xconomist Lisa Suennen, who is a founding member of the Psilos Group in Corte Madera, CA, asked in an editorial she wrote for the Xconomist Forum whether anyone really cares about privacy and security when it comes to electronic healthcare records. Suennen was the moderator for our Xconomy panel discussion that focused on the consumer perspective in innovations in healthcare IT.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.