The march of the chipmakers into solar continues. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. — a heavyweight in contract chipmaking — announced Wednesday that it has signed a licensing agreement and has invested $50 million in Silicon Valley thin-film solar startup Stion. Read more »
Silent Power says it can link solar panels to batteries to make solar light up the night — and it has a pilot project in Sacramento to test out its proposition. Read more »
Consumer electronics bigwig Belkin has just launched a $30 device that can measure household power use by watts, dollars and carbon footprint from any appliance or device that plugs into a wall socket. But will consumers pay for DIY home energy management? That’s still unclear. Read more »
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HomePlug is linking smart meters with homes over electrical wires, and has a few big smart grid vendors — including General Electric and Grid Net — on board. How will powerline technologies compete with wireless in the smart grid to come? Read more »
What can Kevin Costner do for the oil-soaked Gulf Coast? His company Ocean Therapy Solutions, which he’s backed to the tune of $24 million, can clean water to 99.9 percent purity, and BP has ordered 32 of the company’s centrifuges so far. Read more »
Nobody likes high-voltage transmission lines running through their backyards, not even in the energy-loving heart of Texas. Recently a group of landowners (the Heart of Texas Landowners Coalition) persuaded the state’s regulators to force utility Oncor to reroute a $100 million transmission line around their property. Read more »
The market for carbon accounting software in the U.S. last year was as small as an average venture capital funding round — about $10 million — but researchers are predicting that the market will boom to $250 million by 2012. Who will grab that cash? Read more »
Cisco sees a $20 billion opportunity in the smart grid, and while it may have gotten off a bit late to the party, it’s crashed it in a big way. The networking giant wants to deliver products and services that span the grid. Read more »
Clean technology investment has kept up its recession-beating pace so far this year. Will the front-running startups in the field find an exit? The cleantech sector shows continuing momentum — and that’s just what longtime VC investors need. Read more »
Allan Schurr, Vice President of Strategy and Development for Energy & Utilities at IBM, has his finger on the pulse of IBM’s efforts to tie together the various chaos of systems that will make up the smart grid. Read more »
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Despite the build out of smart grid infrastructure, there’s still a variety questions that remain unanswered when it comes to just what will a next-generation smart grid network look like? Here’s 5 points of debate that we’ll be addressing at our Green:Net conference on April 29: Read more »
California will have a new governor come November, and while the race is still open, it’s looking like it’ll be a contest between Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman. How important will a green platform be to securing the gubernatorial race? Read more »
Is a negawatt worth the same amount of money as a megawatt? The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has said yes, at least tentatively, and this could spell big new opportunities in the demand response industry. At the same time, it could give technologies that enable turning down energy use new and interesting ways to pay for themselves. Read more »
Distributech, the once-sleepy power grid trade show, has been transformed into a high-profile smart grid showcase over the past couple of years — this year’s show in Tampa, Fla. is no exception. Here’s 10 things you should pay attention to coming outta Distributech this year. Read more »
When it comes to smart grid data, how much is enough — and how much is too much? That question could pit the IT industry’s hopes to use smart grid data to help people save energy — and make money — against customer privacy and data […] Read more »
OpenADR — the Berkeley Labs open source system for automating the way utilities do demand response — is already being used to control some 70 megawatts of capacity for big industrial and commercial customers of California’s biggest utilities. Could it expand its reach into homes and […] Read more »
Updated with comments from Google: There’s a battle looming in California over smart meters and energy prices. Google says the state should require its big utilities to give near real-time pricing information to every smart meter-enabled customer by the end of next year. California’s big three […] Read more »
In the world of smart grid, there tends to be two kinds of networks — short range local area networks (LANs) that connect neighborhoods of smart meters together, and bigger-pipe “backhaul” wide-area networks (WANs) to carry that collected data back to the utility. But wait — there’s […] Read more »
Utilities don’t have to worry anymore about whether or not they will have to pay taxes on their Department of Energy smart grid grants. The IRS will provide a “safe harbor” for utilities that are in line for a piece of the $3.4 billion in stimulus […] Read more »
EnerNOC is a big name in the world of demand response — that is, turning down buildings’ energy use to help utilities shave peak power demands. But it’s also been making its way — and buying its way — into energy efficiency, carbon management and energy […] Read more »
Echelon makes smart meter networks and building automation systems. Could it bring the two businesses together? On Wednesday, Echelon shipped its 2 millionth smart meter, adding recent contracts with a host of Danish utilities and partners to its big list of European clients — and, on […] Read more »
Xtreme Power has been pulling the veil away from its decades-old energy storage technology over the past six months or so, getting attention for claims of a “chemical capacitor” that can beat lithium ion batteries in terms of energy storage, efficiency, cycle life and cost. Now […] Read more »
There are ways to make greener plastic besides making it from corn. On Tuesday, IBM’s Almaden Research Center and Stanford University announced a new line of organic catalysts that they say could revolutionize the green plastics industry by giving it a set of tools to build […] Read more »
Bloom Energy’s gala unveiling last month has given the fuel cell industry more attention than it’s gotten since former President George W. Bush named it as the technology to replace the internal combustion engine for American cars . . . back in 2003. The way those […] Read more »
Energy storage — if you’re going to have intermittent wind and solar powering even a fraction of the country’s energy needs, you’re going to need it as backup, the experts agree. But right now grid-scale energy storage is a challenge, without clear regulatory and market mechanisms […] Read more »
When Forbes reported in November that IBM was launching a major utility and energy research lab in China and planned up to nine big smart grid projects in the country, it came as little surprise to many. After all, China is going to be spending much […] Read more »
Utilities, tech vendors and trade groups like the Grid Wise Alliance have openly been complaining that it’s taking too long for the billions of dollars in smart grid grants, which the Department of Energy promised back in October, to reach the projects, and ultimately create jobs. […] Read more »
John Bryson, former CEO of Edison International and co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has a yen for startups that can take solar PV, smart meter communications, and battery technologies farther. At least those were some of the startups he plugged in his opening speech […] Read more »
The launch of Bloom Energy’s fuel cells has refocused the energy industry on just how to get this decades-old technology to compete on a cost basis with traditional forms of energy generation. For most fuel cell makers, that means finding niche markets — data centers, perhaps, […] Read more »
Talk of a smart grid enabled by the nascent wireless standard WiMAX has been growing in recent months, and today brings the latest development: Arcadian Networks, a startup that owns licensed 700-megahertz spectrum across a swath of the American heartland and is selling smart grid services […] Read more »
The bloom on Bloom Energy has begun to fade, and questions are rising about the fuel cell startup’s competitiveness against existing forms of power. At $7 to $8 dollars per watt, Bloom’s fuel cell capital costs have trouble matching those from some distributed generation systems such […] Read more »
That looming March 1 deadline for V-Vehicle to raise $350 million — the amount that the T. Boone Pickens and Kleiner Perkins-backed startup needed in order to release the bulk of an incentive package put together by state and local authorities in Monroe, La., (or else […] Read more »
We’ve been tracking plenty of stories that underscore China’s growing might in cleantech, and here’s another one. Prudent Energy, the subsidiary of China’s JD Holdings, said Tuesday that it has raised a $22 million Series C round to build out its Beijing manufacturing capacity for vanadium […] Read more »
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff wants his agency to have a lot more authority over planning cross-state transmission lines, as well as getting states and utilities to share the costs of building them. But on Monday, the utility industry pushed back. The Coalition for […] Read more »
Metrus Energy, a startup seeking to popularize a power purchase agreement-like model for investing in building energy efficiency projects, has landed its first contract. The “efficiency services agreement” announced Friday calls for military contractor BAE Systems to upgrade its Merrimack, N.H. manufacturing facility’s energy efficiency with […] Read more »
The rumors of an impending IPO for smart grid networking darling Silver Spring Networks are now…more detailed rumors. The latest comes from Dow Jones Clean Technology Insight, which reported Friday that Silver Spring has picked a banker for an IPO scheduled for mid-2010, and is aiming […] Read more »
Bloom Energy says its fuel cells can be 100-percent carbon free — but that’s only if you run them on biogas. What’s biogas, and where does it come from? And how can Bloom’s customers get ahold of some to make their fuel cells something more than […] Read more »
Military bases have been some of the pioneers for so-called microgrids — systems of self-generated electricity and intelligent controls that can be disconnected from the grid at large to keep the lights on when the utility can’t provide power. The idea is that a tree falling on […] Read more »
Cellulosic ethanol startup Enerkem needs trash and money. Massive trash company Waste Management has lots of both. The two said Wednesday that they’ve gotten together, with Waste Management making a strategic investment in the Montreal-based company as part of a 53.8 million Canadian dollars ($51.5 million) […] Read more »
Microgrids — office parks, college campuses or communities that can generate their own power and disconnect and reconnect from the grid at large at a moment’s notice — could be integral building blocks of the smart grid. That’s why Dave Pacyna, senior vice president of Siemens […] Read more »
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