We just watched the winners of this year’s California Cleantech Open accept their awards. Perhaps the best indicator of the importance of this competition is the success of last year’s recipients — solar startup GreenVolts, for example, said this evening that it’s raised $10 million in […] Read more »
What better way to find up-and-coming cleantech startups than to follow a business plan competition for just-out-of-the-lab companies with little funding. Tonight, the California Cleantech Open announced six winners in the categories of “Air,Water and Waste,” “Energy Efficiency,” “Green Building,” “Renewables,” “Smart Power,” and “Transportation.” We […] Read more »
EnerNOC (ENOC), which sells demand response and energy management services to commercial and industrial customers, was one of the rare successful exits in the cleantech world — the Boston-based company went public earlier this year, netting nearly $100 million. Today, the company filed to offer 4 […] Read more »
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Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur who, at one time, was expected to take over the CEO role at SAP, said today that he has formed “Project Better Place,” a venture focusing on electric vehicles, and is raising an initial $200 million to fund the project. When Agassi […] Read more »
A major political selling point of ethanol production is the possible salvation it offers small towns in the center of the United States. But does “the biofuel revolution” actually benefit these communities or just Vinod Khosla? That’s the topic that Kansas State researchers will tackle with […] Read more »
Creating more energy-efficient consumer electronics starts at the chip level. CamSemi, a fabless semiconductor startup based in the UK, is designing energy-saving integrated circuits for the power supply consumer electronics market. The five-year-old company this week raised a Series C round of $26 million from 3i […] Read more »
You can’t turn on an incandescent light, you can only generate one shoe box of trash a month, and you have to live out of a car for a year. Those are the rules of Your Environmental Road Trip’s (YERT) great American green voyage, an exploration […] Read more »
The bad news for BP rolled in from all over this week. The company agreed to pay a $50 million fine to settle a refinery blast criminal case. Four of its former traders are facing indictments for their role in a 2004 attempt at cornering the […] Read more »
Carbon Under the Lone Star: Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin will undertake a 10-year, $38 million project to study injecting and storing carbon dioxide underground — GreenCarCongress. GreatPoint’s Biomass Plant: The cleaner coal company backed with $100 million in venture funding is building […] Read more »
Listen up, cleantech crew: according to one scientist, you may want to relocate your labs to the slopes of Mount St. Helens. Yesterday’s NY Times features a provocative op-ed piece by Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Global Ecology, in which he asserted […] Read more »
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Not a week can go by without a declaration of the growth of cleantech investing. Here’s the latest from today: The Cleantech Network says venture capitalists in North America invested close to $1.3 billion in cleantech startups in the third quarter, a 50 percent increase over […] Read more »
The world will need to add the equivalent of two more Saudi Arabia’s to meet even the most conservative fuel consumption estimates over the next two decades, according to Donald Paul, CTO of Chevron (CVX). And that kind of scale is what startups need to keep […] Read more »
When it comes to finding a successful exit for your cleantech startup, good luck finding a buyer willing to pay the price you want. That was the consensus of investors at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Conference this week. The cleantech industry is too young for […] Read more »
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Yesterday it was precious landfill-generated methane, today it’s our consumptive society’s discarded electronics, or e-waste. The EPA reports that in 2005 approximately 2 million tons of e-waste were generated in the United States, of which around a mere 350,000 […] Read more »
How to Invest in Renewables: Alt Energy Stocks brings us the how-to’s of investing in clean energy, for funds or individual stocks — Alt Energy Stocks. Eco-Heroes: Time Magazine picks the top environmental do-gooders, including a list of scientists and innovators — Time. Plastic Separates Carbon […] Read more »
The Dow Jones Alternative Energy conference was full of cleantech companies looking for funding on Wednesday. Which ones? The conference organizers were kind enough to hand out a nifty booklet categorized by “financing plans.” Here’s the goods: Raising Money Now: Antig Technology, Ardica Technologies, Atmocean, Avalence, […] Read more »
With oil trading at over $87 a barrel, the 40th Annual Tokyo Motor Show is set to open in an environment of record-high gas prices. Hybrids, fuel cells, biofuels, and electric vehicles will all make appearances as manufacturers hedge their bets on which technologies will take […] Read more »
While new fuel sources are being sought out amid the amber waves of grain, a less-glamorous but equally lucrative search is taking place — in decomposing landfills. Landfills are carbon-rich methane factories, and waste-to-energy systems have, for years, been used to capture that carbon. Energy Investors […] Read more »
The Entrepreneur-In-Residence (EIR) role is one of our favorite classic venture jobs: Get on a venture firm’s payroll and struggle for a good nine months to try to build a startup in which your firm can invest. The Department of Energy wants to mine the EIR […] Read more »
Chinese solar cell maker Suntech Power Holdings (STP) officially opened its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco this week — we like that because the office is not too far from Earth2Tech, GigaOM headquarters. SF Mayor Gavin Newsom, never one to shy away from green-themed media attention, […] Read more »
Google Funds Algae In Space: Google has committed $3 million to support 15 researchers at NASA/Ames who are working on capturing methane emitted by algae to use as energy source — San Jose Mercury News. Plug-In Prius On It’s Way?: Popular Mechanics takes a ride in […] Read more »
While BP is renewing its focus on non-renewable resources, the company has posted a 29 percent drop in third-quarter net income, to $4.4 billion from $6.23 billion in the same period last year. Citing problems in its U.S. refineries, oil and gas production in the latest […] Read more »
The surge of venture investments in cleantech has been surprising some industry watchers — the total figure climbed 80 percent in the third quarter to $844 million, according to a recent MoneyTree report. But one look at GE’s investments in clean technology R&D, and suddenly those […] Read more »
Want to be friends with Academy Award-winning movie star Tom Hanks? You could just friend him on MySpace. Or you could buy one of the electric retrofitted cars he’s touting on his profile. Hanks, in a low-budget video series distributed through MySpace (NWS), is promoting the […] Read more »
Cleantech is all about top scientists making breakthroughs, high-up execs greening business strategies, and venture capitalist funding the next greatest greenest thing. But a huge amount of economic growth lies at the other end of the socio-economic spectrum as well. With the creation of a clean […] Read more »
Organized by the Council of Science Editors, 235 scientific journals from 37 countries around the world published articles on poverty and human development yesterday. We thought we’d do our part here at Earth2Tech and talk about five companies working on projects that could form part of […] Read more »
When a company is developing battery technology for eco-chic plug-in hybrid vehicles (including work on converted plug-in Priuses), it’s not hard to become a well-known name in the cleantech industry. And being high-profile is helpful when it comes to raising funding — this afternoon the six-year-old […] Read more »
Niche video just got even more specialized with the addition of a “green” video-sharing network. emPivot, which has been in public beta since August, offers a combination of video hosting for green organizations as well as a green-tailored search engine to deliver environmentally relevant media. Founded […] Read more »
Fuel cells powered by bacteria that produce electrons as they eat are quietly making waves in labs around the world. Traditional fuel cell technology is powered by chemicals like methanol or hydrogen; the bacteria-based kind are known as microbial fuel cells (MFCs). While MFC’s aren’t generating […] Read more »
What do thin-film solar, traffic-management technology and power storage all have in common? They’re all innovations that can help fight climate change, and they’re all getting investments from Battelle Ventures and its affiliate fund, Innovation Valley Partners (IVP). The firms said this morning that they will […] Read more »
It was only mid-August when we heard that HelioVolt had raised a whopper of a $77 million Series B round. But given it’s taking many thin film solar startups a lot of capital to get to the production stage, we’re not surprised that this morning the […] Read more »
In our increasingly digital world, power is one of the main “cost centers” and most large Internet and telecom companies are grappling with this problem in unique sort of ways. Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) are putting their data centers right next to hydroelectric power generation […] Read more »
Trying to bring the production of biofuels closer to their consumption destination — be it the feedstock or the pumping station — isn’t a new idea. Several of Vinod Khosla’s biofuel investments are focused on cutting down the energy, and thus the cost, expended in transportation. […] Read more »
Vinod Khosla gave a speech down at Sand Hill Road yesterday in which he offered the most detailed description of his portfolio companies that we’ve heard. Breaking it down into four categories — the war on oil, the war on coal, efficiency and materials — he […] Read more »
Given Tesla’s first electric car model won’t reach customers until next year, the hundreds of its eco-conscious sports car-loving (occasional celebrity) customers that have actually made it onto the waiting list are likely getting a bit antsy. And they probably wouldn’t like to watch the six […] Read more »
Paul Dickerson, the COO of the federal government’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), says he has two goals: One, show industry and the venture capital worlds that his department is a friend to business – not isolated and bureaucratic, like government divisions tend […] Read more »
There’s a lot of talk about how many jobs the cleantech revolution is going to create. If you think about all the various sectors — solar, biofuels, water, to name a few — one would think the number of jobs created would be in the millions. […] Read more »
Solar Thermal Trend: Ausra’s John O’Donnell leads us through the trend in utility-scale solar thermal plants — BusinessWeek. Grid Gear: Utilities are checking out battery options to beef up the power grid — MIT Tech Review. Power grid watchdog, we need power lines: The group that […] Read more »
There’s a lot of obvious costs of climate change — you know, like making the Earth uninhabitable. Some of the lesser known costs to industry can be quantified and the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Environmental Research put out a report recently looking into some […] Read more »
One day, the old-skool electricity grid will have the smart network capabilities of the Internet — distributed, self-healing, maybe even peer-to-peer. It’s a huge future business opportunity that’s prompting investors to put money into startups like GridPoint, which this morning said it closed a $48.5 million […] Read more »
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