Professor Tom Murphy dives into ocean power and looks at how abundant it is, yet potentially useless in the short term. Read More »
Next-gen biofuel company KiOR has long planned to raise more money to get its first commercial-scale biofuel facilities off the ground. On Friday morning the company revealed that it has raised a new $75 million loan from existing investors Alberta Investment Management and Khosla Ventures. Read More »
One of the year’s largest smart grid conferences — DistribuTECH — closes today in San Antonio, Texas. It’s like the CES for utilities, power companies and the vendors that are trying to sell them stuff. Here are the top 10 trends I took away. Read More »
The long-promised but perpetually fledging biofuel industry still remains a big focus of government support. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Thursday that it has made a conditional commitment for a $232.5 million loan guarantee to biofuel maker ZeaChem. Read More »
Some good news and bad news for the beleaguered battery maker Ener1. On Thursday, the company announced it’s filing for Chapter 11 in New York, but has done so under a pre-arranged restructuring plan that includes commitments for up to $81 million from investors. Read More »
A tough legal showdown between the city of Boulder and utility Xcel Energy is brewing as the city prepares to force Xcel to sell its distribution network. Read More »
The questions all founders must ask themselves
By Marcus Tallhamn, CEO of Otelic.com
Jan. 26, 2012, 12:00am PT
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Having learned from past mistakes, the CEO of Otelic, Marcus Tallhamn, created a set of “Value Alignment Questions” before starting his current company and decided to share them in the hopes that it’ll eliminate a lot of “WTF?!” moments. Read More »
As I’ve been walking the floor at DistribuTECH in San Antonio, Texas — one of the largest smart grid focused conferences of the year — I’ve been snapping pics of the grid connected devices that will deliver a more efficient system and create the Energy Internet. Read More »
Warren Buffett and the true value of solar
By Adam Lesser
Jan. 25, 2012, 10:02am PT
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Did the Warren Buffett investment machine see some seriously undervalued assets in solar, even as most investors have recently viewed the solar industry as a train wreck? Read More »
One day it could be common to have a home battery to store energy from a solar panel, and some battery makers and startups showed off their home batteries at DistribuTECH this week. Read More »
GM’s communications service OnStar could some day enable owners of GM’s electric car the Volt to charge their cars primarily with any available clean power. Read More »
On one hand, Obama said he won’t walk away from clean power, despite acknowledging that some companies will fail, in the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. On the other hand, Obama pledged to open up 75% of the U.S.’s offshore oil drilling resources. Read More »
More Must Reads
There’s a perception in Silicon Valley that smart thermostat startup Nest created the world’s first connected thermostat. While the Nest thermostat is gorgeous and potentially a game-changing, there’s dozens of companies that are making smart thermostats and software, and here’s a dozen of them in photos: Read More »
Choosing a home automation network standard can be a hassle. It’s too bad there isn’t a ubiquitous network standard to use in plug-and-play modules. Oh wait: what about Wi-Fi? Belkin’s new WeMo products use Wi-Fi, which may help move home automation from geeks to the mainstream. Read More »
Energy software company Opower says it will send its 25 millionth energy data report to a utility customer by the end of January and will likely hit the 75 million mark sometime in 2012. Read More »
Energy software company EnergyHub and weather and sensor network company Earth Networks have teamed up to offer a smart thermostat and demand response program for utilities and consumers. Read More »
After a variety of strategies and around $100 million in funding, startup Tendril is now largely a software company, and on Tuesday at the DistribuTECH conference in San Antonio, Tendril announced a big partner in its play to provide the software layer for electric vehicles: BMW. … Read More »
Thin Film, a company that prints memory and logic circuits onto plastic films, has signed partnerships with three companies to create a cheap, disposable temperature sensor. The resulting product could be the start of the stupid web and an initial step to the Internet of Things. Read More »
Asia, with its rapidly growing number of car owners and large pollution problems, could very well be the biggest market for biofuels and green chemicals one day. LanzaTech, which announced Monday it has raised $55.8 million, is certainly finding more willing customers and partners Asia. Read More »
The often-ignored and hardly ever programmed, humble thermostat is morphing into a unique and undercover gateway into the smart home. Check out my report for our premium research subscription service GigaOM Pro. Read More »
Four years after Better Place CEO Shai Agassi announced the startup would build out its first electric vehicle charging network in Israel, this past weekend, Better Place delivered its first 10 cars in Israel to employees at businesses. Read More »
A couple of years ago some of the fiercest debates within the smart grid industry were around what wireless technology would power the future of the power grid. Today the networking companies seem to be embracing a wide range of wireless technologies, now offering utilities choice. Read More »
This weekend in New York City, dozens of developers gathered for the second Cleanweb Hackathon, where programmers spent the weekend building mobile and web apps around new ways to manage energy. The event is the latest sign the ecosystem around clean technology is changing. Read More »
In the telecom and Internet worlds, it’s standard to re-route data over different lines when one path is overloaded. But not so much, when it comes to the power grid. However, a newly-emerged startup called Varentec, backed by Khosla Ventures, is looking to change all that. Read More »
With DistribuTECH on the calendar next week, you can expect a slew of product announcements from smart grid companies camping out in San Antonio. So we thought we’d get a jump on it with some recent new product releases that caught our attention. Read More »
Professor Tom Murphy does the math for the potential of tapping into the sun’s rays as heat. What do you think he found? Read More »
Despite Coda just going into production of its inaugural electric sedan, the startup will announce on Friday it’s launching a division that plans to sell its batteries and battery management system to act as energy storage for the power grid. Read More »
Updated. Electric car maker Fisker Automotive issued its second recall of its inaugural car the Karma, this time due to a software malfunction that affected its entertainment and navigation systems, reports Hybridcars. Fisker will also temporarily halt sales of the Karma until the problem is fixed. Read More »
Nanosolar, which has struggled for years to fulfill its promise as the next major thin-film solar manufacturer, announced Thursday it has a new CEO. Eugenia Corrales, who has been the startup’s head of engineering and operations, is taking over the chief executive post effective immediately. Read More »
Not all cellular network traffic comes from our cell phones and gadgets; a growing amount will come from machines using these networks to communicate, including the utilities that provide you with power and water. Spring announced a host of new smart grid partnerships on Thursday. Read More »
Energy software startup EnergyHub is powering around 100,000 connected thermostats in the U.S. with its management software, and those thernostats are producing around 5 billion data points each month. What kind of trends will that big data reveal about Americans and energy consumption? Read More »
If you follow solar news, chances are you’ve heard of Dow’s solar shingles — a more aesthetic way to put panels on rooftops. Well, according to the founder and CEO of thin film solar startup NuvoSun, Dave Pearce, NuvoSun is the latest producer of Dow’s solar … Read More »
We’ll once again be live streaming the second Cleanweb Hackathon that will be held in New York City, this weekend! The “Cleanweb” is the trend of using information technology — software, the web, social media, mobile — to address resource constraints around energy, food and water. Read More »
On Wednesday U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and half a dozen utilities plan to announce the official launch of the Green Button initiative, which will enable utility customers to easily download their energy consumption data with one click. Read More »
On our Green Overdrive show, we’ve driven a lot of the electric cars that are out there on the market. But what about technology that can make the traditional internal combustion engine car far more efficient? Enter Valley startup Pinnacle Engines and its innovative engine architecture. Read More »
While so many startups in the U.S. and Germany have been trying to build commercial-scale businesses off of making solar panels made of copper-indium-gallium-selenide (CIGS), really only one is making strides at any kind of scale: Japan’s Solar Frontier. Read More »
Analysts at IDC have projected that the dollar per gigabyte price barrier for solid state drives should fall by the second half of this year. What does that mean for data centers, where many operators want to bring down energy usage while speeding up web serving? Read More »
Networking giant Cisco held a press event on Tuesday morning showing off a couple of new products for its smart grid initiative, but mostly emphasizing an overall design and architecture for how Cisco sees the entire smart grid network for its potential utility customers. Read More »
First Solar has broken its own record. The company announced Tuesday that it’s able to produce a thin-film solar panel that can convert 14.4 percent of the sunlight that hits it into electricity. The new record exceeds the 13.4 percent it achieved last year. Read More »
Looks like investors are still willing to fund pre-commercial next-gen biofuel startups. Joule — the startup behind the unusual hybrid solar-biofuel technology that launched back in 2009 — announced it has raised a third round of funding of $70 million, bringing its total funding to $110 … Read More »
Using text messages or iPhone apps to manage physical devices isn’t all that uncommon — think Zipcar’s door unlocking app or Verizon’s new apps to remotely manage thermostats and lighting. But what about using a missed call to manage crucial resources? Read More »
Startups looking to disrupt the traditional energy industries — oil, coal, gas-burning cars — need to have more than just innovative technology. They need a team and a plan in place that can scale their technologies to compete on the massive scale needed. Read More »
By Adam Lesser
Jan. 16, 2012, 1:26pm PT
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The usual Intel-ARM potshots continued at CES with ARM’s CEO responding to Intel’s new Medfield chip running on smartphones. The CEO conceded that Intel would get some design wins but added, “Are they ever going to be the leaders in power efficiency? No, of course not.” … Read More »
Solar service provider Sungevity under went some serious expansion in 2011 as it began to target the East Coast and overseas, and lined up Lowe’s as an investor and partner. Now following that growth, the startup has started raising a new funding round of $40.8 million. Read More »
By Chris King, eMeter
Jan. 16, 2012, 10:00am PT
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Last week eMeter’s Chris King shared his smart grid predictions for 2012. But also, as the new year turns, he says he’s pondering these important questions, too: Read More »
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