A new startup from the founder of The Climate Corporation is looking to use driving data to remake the stodgy car insurance sector and is launching in Oregon on Wednesday. Read more »
Apple has decided to more than double the size of its fuel cell project at its data center in North Carolina, making it — once again — the largest out there that isn’t owned by a utility. For awhile eBay was holding that title. Read more »
LEDs for our homes are starting to come down and price and look – gasp — like actually normal light bulbs. Philips has a newly designed LED 60-watt incandescent replacement that looks, well, just like a regular light bulb. And that’s a good thing. Read more »
A startup called Alveo Energy, with technology developed at Stanford University, is building an ultra low cost and long lasting battery that could help deliver breakthrough energy storage technology for the power grid. Read more »
What will be the fate of electric car startup Fisker Automotive after a very difficult year? My speculation: something’s gotta give in 2013. Read more »
Selling solar panels and projects into China is notoriously tricky for American solar makers — the market is already flooded with low cost Chinese solar panels, and domestic suppliers seem to carry favor. What’s the answer? Baby steps: joint ventures and pilots seem like the way to go. Read more »
Are you cheating on your quantified self? Even if our quantified selves are a little better, fitter and more hardworking than our actual selves, they’re still part of a new kind of virtual, fluid and filtered identity that’s becoming more common place on the internet. Read more »
A Serbian startup called Strawberry Energy has a new design for its solar powered public chargers and recently installed its eighth “Strawberry Tree” in Serbia. In the wake of the Sandy-induced power crunch, I’d love to see some of these in a public areas in cities in the U.S. Read more »
A website that claims to be from Amazon about launching a clean-powered pilot project for its AWS services, alas, isn’t true. It’s a stunt by the environmentalist at Greenpeace to get Amazon to add more clean power to its cloud. Read more »
To stay relevant and to continue GE’s move beyond hardware into software, GE is looking to make relationships, investments and even acquisitions of Valley software analytics startups. The conglomerate is holding a splashy event, and launched a competition, in San Francisco to get that point across. Read more »
Tesla Motors plans to raise the price of its second electric car, the sedan the Model S, by just $2,500. The price boost goes into effect on January 1, 2013. Read more »
The Department of Energy’s grant program ARPA-E has chosen 66 more projects to fund, from printed batteries, to smart grid analytics to a Valley battery startup. Here’s some I think are particularly interesting. Read more »
Silver Lake’s energy fund and venture firm Kleiner Perkins are backing a German recycled plastics processor called Friedola Tech. The company will use the funds partly to open up a new factory in South Carolina. Read more »
Did investor love for designers just jump the shark? Nah, but it’s a long-brewing trend that continues to get even bigger. Read more »
Solar installer and financier SolarCity has set the terms for its planned IPO, and plans to sell 10.1 million shares at between $13 and $15 per share. At the midpoint the company would raise $141 million. Read more »
GE’s lighting division has acquired an LED startup based in Boulder, Colorado: Albeo. The move shows how LED technology is dropping in price and improving in performance — at least for the commercial and industrial sectors. Read more »
GE is spearheading a rebranding of green. In a new report out this week, the conglomerate pushes the “Industrial Internet,” which is really mostly about using information technology for energy efficiency gains for industry — across transportation and power generation and distribution. Read more »
Will solar rooftop installer, and financier, SolarCity hold its IPO before the end of the year? If so, the company could break the dry spell for venture-backed solar and next-gen energy startups, and also deliver Tesla CEO Elon Musk another win. Read more »
Despite the difficult year in cleantech, there’s quite a few things that excited me this year. Here’s 10 things to be thankful for in cleantech. Read more »
The latest in cleantech from GigaOM Pro this week: advanced battery technologies, the fate of clean energy post election, and should the U.S. aggressively export natural gas? Read more »
So what if it’s geeky power grid gear. Entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators are working hard on developing the next-generation of compressed air energy storage technology. Like an air battery. And Bill Gates is a fan. Read more »
Opower has quietly been amassing serious reach with utilities, including crunching energy data from 50 million households and plans to be able to save its customers 2 terawatt hours by the end of 2012. Read more »
Microsoft will soon start construction on an experimental micro data center at a waste water treatment plant in Wyoming. The concept could help Microsoft scale up clean power for its data centers. Read more »
Indian tech firm Wipro takes the lead for the first time — beating out U.S. companies like Apple, HP and Dell — to become the highest ranking gadget maker in Greenpeace’s latest green guide to electronics. Read more »
Check out an hour long discussion between myself and three cleantech investors about the state of cleantech, the future of cleantech — and importantly for them — where the money is for cleantech. Read more »
Google is on the brink of crossing the billion dollar mark for its investments in clean power projects. The search engine giant is arguably the most aggressive Internet company in the world to embrace clean power for its data centers. Read more »
According to Bloom Energy’s third quarter earnings, uncovered by Fortune, Bloom is still losing money every quarter, but hopes to become profitable in 2013. Read more »
A startup selling a service that controls consumers’ smart thermostats for utilities has scored a deal for its service to be mass deployed throughout Las Vegas. Read more »
For seemingly the first time in history, an algae fuel blend will be sold to regular consumers in select cities in Northern California through a month-long pilot program for gas station owner Propel Fuels and algae fuel maker Solazyme. Read more »
Advanced Equities, a controversial investment group in Chicago, is closing up its broker-dealer operations, reports Fortune. The firm had raised hundreds of millions of dollars for cleantech startups in recent years, but recently settled charges with the SEC, hurting its reputation and costing it $1 million. Read more »
Next-gen biofuel company KiOR has started up production of its biocrude at its plant in Columbus, Mississippi. It’s an important advancement for an industry that’s had major delays and setbacks. Read more »
Soladigm is emerging from stealth after five years as View, and is now commercially selling its dynamic windows that can be tinted on demand by an iPhone app. Read more »
Solar thermal company BrightSource is actually looking to raise $130 million, which is another $50 million over the amount it announced last month. The company makes solar thermal power plants which use mirrors and a boiler to produce electricity. Read more »
A startup backed by Khosla Ventures called Transonic Combustion has raised another round of $32 million to deliver a more efficient internal combustion engine. How far away is a more efficient internal combustion 2.0? Read more »
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) sided with U.S. solar manufacturers in a dispute that Chinese solar cell makers have been benefiting from illegal subsidies. As a result Chinese solar makers will face tariffs. Read more »
An outlier appeared this week that seemed more consistent with 2006, rather than 2012. A group of high-profile venture capitalists put a large round into a potentially capital intensive next-gen energy technology, showing there’s still room for some of these big energy ideas to be funded. Read more »
As Obama is projected to have won the Presidential election, clean energy and cleantech supporters cheer and hope for four more years of support for the development of next-gen energy technologies. Read more »
Following its successful cleanup of contaminated water at the Fukushima reactors in Japan, venture-backed startup Kurion, which makes nuclear waste cleanup technology, is hoping to cleanup Hanford, a former nuclear weapons production site in Washington state. Read more »
Peter Thiel is leading a large investment into an air energy storage startup called LightSail Energy. Thiel joins Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures as investors. Compressed air energy storage tech pumps air into tanks and releases it on demand to create a sort of air battery. Read more »
How do you design for smaller screens that we manipulate with our fingers? You use data. Lots of it, parsed with sophistication and nuance. Read more »
