Oregon: StartupWeekend Near LockDown; Man Threatened Explosions And Guys

It’s unclear if the man removed from this weekend’s startup weekend event in Portand Oregon was a contestant or not. Oregonlive.com is reporting that a man who was removed from the event started tweeting threats of explosions, guns and violence.

The threatening tweets have been removed however as a precaution the rest of the event is near lockdown with only one guarded entrance being used for the remainder of the event.

According to the report, police responded to Portand’s first StartupWeekend event at 10:39am this morning. The man had gotten loud with event organizers and eventually left on his own. Later in the afternoon he started tweeting things that had event organizers concerned.

One of the organizers told oregonlive.com “They were very strange posts that were interpreted as maybe threatening to the people at the meeting,”

Portland State University beefed up security at the event and the StartupWeekend organizers offered refunds to anyone who didn’t want to  stay after the disruption. From what we can tell the event has continued.

Portland Police spokesperson Sgt. Pete Simpson said “There’s no criminal act based on what the officer learned from talking to the people, but certainly concerning enough that calling the police was the right thing to do,”. Police apparently contacted the man again who said he has no intention on returning to the event location.

source: OregonLive

Seattle: Google Backed CleanTech Startup AltaRock To Start Drilling In Oregon

In 2008 Google invested in a new CleanTech startup called AltaRock. AltaRock plans on building engineered geothermal systems in places where natural resources aren’t already available for such systems. AltaRock will create geothermal reservoirs in areas without natural flowing streams.

AltaRock had embarked on a demonstration project of this technology in California in 2007 however the project ran into technical difficulties and ended in 2009. AltaRock applied to work on a similar project in Oregon in May of 2010 which was just recently approved.  Oregon’s Bureau of Land Management said they find no big environmental impact to the project.

For this project to work AltaRock needs to use special tools to drill wells that are a few miles deep. They will then inject cold water to fracture hot rocks. Electricity is produced by pumping water into the well where it will “flow along fissures of hot rocks and extend them” reports GigaOm. AltraRock needs to predict the paths of the expanded fissures to insure the production wells will intercept them. Each well typically costs a few million dollars. For the Oregon site AltaRock needs to build two new wells which they will use in conjunction with a well that’s 10,060 feet deep and already in place. The existing well will be used for injecting the water while the two new wells will be used to pump out the hot water.

AltaRock raised $26 million dollars earlier on in a round led by Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Vulcan Capital. They have also received a $21.4 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

An MIT study has said that the enhanced geothermal system could create 100gw of electricity by 2050.

Source: GigaOM