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SYN Feature Enterprise

Hug Energy, which had developed an application for computer energy management, is shutting down. CEO Marcus Tallhamn made the announcement in a blog post and an email to users, citing weak investor interest. It’s a sign of how crowded the energy management space has gotten. Read More »

Feds Promise $571 Million in Biofuel Loan Guarantees

Biofuel production nationwide has been woefully behind schedule as would-be producers struggle to just get their first commercial plants rolling. The U.S. government wants to help and on Thursday announced loan guarantee commitments totaling $571 million for Coskata, Enerkem, and a JV from Valero. Read More »

 
 

The DOE has offered a $967 million loan guarantee for the Agua Caliente Solar project, a 290 MW photovoltaic facility that will be built in Yuma County, Arizona, will be developed by NRG Energy and will use First Solar panels. Read More »

The most talked about company in cleantech in 2010, fuel cell company Bloom Energy, announced Thursday morning that it’s launching an offer for 10-year electricity contracts with no upfront payment for the Bloom Box fuel cell itself, which costs between $700,000 to $800,000. Read More »

Gevo Lowers IPO Target to $100M

Biofuel startup Gevo has lowered its upcoming IPO to $13 to $15 per share. That’s about $100 million, or $89 million after fees, less than the $150 million it targeted in August, but close to what analysts have predicted. Read More »

Amazon Web Services, which built and popularized cloud computing with its Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service has moved up the stack from infrastructure to providing Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, its brand new Platform-as-a-Service play. With Beanstalk, Amazon hopes to outgrow the competition. Read More »

Bandwidth.com and Verizon Communications today signed an agreement that could make it easier from companies such as Skype and Twilio to build out cool VoIP applications and service as well as set precedent ahead of any regulatory policy on how phone companies charge for VoIP calls. Read More »

OpenStack-based Storage Cloud Launches; IaaS Next

The first non-Rackspace OpenStack-based cloud-storage service is in beta, but it’s just the first in what should be many products based on the open source cloud project. Internap’s XIPCloud Storage platform provides a self-service, web-based offering to complement the hosting providers existing dedicated storage offerings. … Read More »

Electric vehicle drive train system maker KLD Energy is looking to raise $10 million in debt and securities, and has closed on a little over $2 million of that round. The startup has planned to build its business via electric scooters in Asia. Read More »

EMC launched a slew of new products and a new product line that it hopes will keep it relevant in a changing IT world where cloud computing and products with a more consumer feel are changing the dynamic at both ends of the spectrum. Read More »

The argument against electric cars is that if the grid is powered by mostly coal, then so are our cars. But the long term goal is to move the grid over to clean power. However, here’s the bumpy road ahead for these transitions. Read More »

Anant Agarwal of Tilera (far left) at Structure 2010

Tilera, a chip design firm that’s building a 100-core processor for hugely parallel compute problems, has raised $45 million in funding from investors that include Artis Capital Management, WestSummit Capital Management and Comerica Bank. The company has raised a total of $109 million. Read More »

More Must Reads

Database startup Clustrix revealed the identities of four customers today, strong evidence that there’s something to its webscale SQL database beyond the $30 million investment that Clustrix has raised thus far. The customers announced are AOL, Photobox, Box.net and iOffer. Read More »

GridPoint — the smart grid startup that’s raised lots of money and has a lot to prove — has now raised yet even more funding: a $23.6 million round according to a filing. That brings 8-year-old GridPoint’s total financing to over $240 million since its founding. Read More »

Google blogged this morning about a new no-planned-downtime for Google Apps, a promise it’s able to make because of its globally distributed infrastructure estimated at more than 1 million servers. Google’s expansive infrastructure gives it multiple options for migrating workloads during planned downtime. Read More »

More bad news about cellulosic biofuel maker Range Fuels. The financially-strapped company reportedly plans to shut down its plant in Georgia after making just one batch of ethanol. It needs to more raise more money and tackle technical problems at its first commercial plant. Read More »

Investors loved the wind energy sector, and they showed it by blowing the most investment dollars that way in 2010. They also were most busy with energy efficiency deals, the number of which surpassed other cleantech categories last year, according to a U.S. market report by … Read More »

According to a recently-released independent report from the California Council on Science and Technology, which compiled a lot of the already available research done on the subject, there are no known health risks associated with living with a smart meter. Read More »

For next-generation biofuels to make any type of dent in the fossil fuel industry, oil companies will have to get on board, and here comes one to the rescue for the struggling cellulosic ethanol sector. Oil giant Valero is backing cellulosic ethanol startup Mascoma. Read More »

General Electric is grabbing a piece of the booming data center energy business, with a $520 million offer for Lineage Power Holdings, a provider of gear for the $20 billion-per-year data center and telecom power conversion industry. Read More »

Most web workers have probably heard that “the Internet is running out of addresses.” In response, The Internet Society, together with such major players as Facebook, has announced World IPv6 Day. What will this mean for web workers, businesses and individuals? Read More »

The company behind the sometimes-annoying WeatherBug app has emerged with a new plan to build what it says will be the world’s largest global sensor network that will track green house gas emissions. AWS Convergence Technologies, now Earth Networks, will invest $25 million into the network. Read More »

Rackspace and Akamai have entered into a relationship through which Rackspace will resell a wide range of Akamai’s CDN services across Rackspace’s business lines. The partnership appears to be another indicator that Rackspace is doing everything it can to put pressure on Amazon Web Services. Read More »

Here’s the bad news from next-gen biofuel producer Range Fuels: The company has let some workers go. But the good news the company wants you to know is that Range Fuels is still planning to produce enough cellulosic ethanol to meet a government estimate for 2011. Read More »

PHP Fog has raised $1.8 million for its PaaS cloud targeting PHP developers. Just as Heroku attracted large numbers of Ruby developers, a PHP PaaS offering certainly should attract users, even if PHP Fog isn’t the only one at that dance. Read More »

Electric vehicle makers are trying to tackle that EV battery safety issue with design, technology and rhetoric. You can see some good examples at the Detroit Auto Show this week, like Volvo, and Tesla. Read More »

Globally, mobile broadband subscriptions are set to double in 2011, up to 1 billion from 500 million last year. This growth rate is increasing and it corresponds very highly to another growth rate: that of smartphone sales, which recently jumped 93 percent per year. Read More »

Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft. More accurately, he’s “retiring” this summer because CEO Steve Ballmer decided that the Server and Tools Business, which Muglia leads, needs new leadership. One has to ask what’s going on at Microsoft and what Steve Ballmer has in mind. Read More »

Intel Capital and Braemar Energy have invested an undisclosed amount of funding into Viridity Energy, a startup which makes software that dynamically manages power loads on the grid in terms of energy pricing, renewable energy generation and energy storage. Read More »

Swiss grid giant ABB has put $10 million into car charging company ECOtality and linked a North American manufacturing agreement. Looks like ABB is picking its preferred winner for the U.S. car charging network to come. Read More »

Holy solar. Southern California Edison announced this morning that it has signed contracts with solar developers SunPower and Fotowatio Renewable Ventures to buy solar electricity for a total of 831 MW of solar projects. Read More »

It’s that time again, when automakers haul their wares out to Detroit for the North American International Auto Show. The event, which kicks off on Monday, will include an array of concepts for more efficient and less polluting cars, including hybrids, plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles. … Read More »

Last summer, GE and a group of VCs launched a $200 million fund for a smart grid challenge that plans to allocate financing to entrepreneurs and startups innovating around the power grid. This morning at CES, GE announced another phase: the eco-home. Read More »

MeghaWare, when it officially launches in the spring, will give users a single portal to view and manage the entirety of their web identities — from Google Apps to Netflix to, interestingly, Amazon S3. It’s a strange combination of services, until you consider the business model. Read More »

First Solar’s own power generation projects have always been mounted on racks that don’t tilt throughout the day to follow the sun, but the company is exploring the use of trackers. First Solar announced Friday it has bought RayTracker for an undisclosed sum. Read More »

For the first time, power company NRG Energy and its utility Reliant Energy are making a showing at the massive gadget love-fest CES. Why? As Reliant Energy President Jason Few told me, this is the beginning of the “digitization of the power grid.” Read More »

GM and LG Chem are licensing a broad suite of patents from Argonne National Laboratory to develop lithium-ion battery cells and packs for next-generation electric cars. LG Chem will use the IP to make cells in Michigan starting next year. Read More »

T-Mobile started slow with mobile broadband but is chugging down the tracks: today the carrier detailed plans to double HSPA+ speeds to 42 Mbps in 2011 as it races against the growing demand for data. A live speed test at CES today impressed at 28 Mbps. Read More »

Amazon Web Services has made available two additional support options for customers of its cloud computing services. Customers can now choose from the Bronze level, which costs $49 a month, or the Platinum level, which costs at least $15,000 a month. Read More »

The Volt plus wireless charging is an early adopter power match made in heaven. At CES, GM said it will offer wireless charging in some cars — including the Volt — via startup Powermat. GM has also backed Powermat with $5 million. Read More »

Nvidia, the graphics chipmaker, today announced Project Denver, a plan to use the same chip architecture found in cell phones in servers. The move broadens Nvidia’s relationship with ARM, expands its market and puts Nvidia in even more competition with Intel. Read More »

Apple has recently been awarded a patent for “administering and maintaining a network-booted operating system.” This could point to the development of a cloud-based Mac OS X. If it comes to pass, what would a cloud-based OS X actually look like and how will it work? Read More »

In the case of the following companies (and one open-source project) — ranging from Cisco to Twitter — I think that although they made lots of headlines in the past year, the true effects of their actions won’t be realized until later this year. Read More »

First Solar’s big plan to eventually build 2 gigawatts of power plants in China’s Inner Mongolia has moved ahead. The company signed a memorandum of understanding with China Guangdong Nuclear Solar Energy Development Co. on Wednesday to develop the first phase, 30-megawatt project. Read More »

MetroPCS’s discounted 4G LTE mobile broadband plans, announced yesterday, weren’t just the beginning of a possible price war. It represented a long-talked about tactic of ISPs charging for content at different rates and potentially favoring their own services while charging more for access to rivals. Read More »

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