What is going on with AQT Solar? The silicon Valley CIGS startup announced on Thursday it has raised $18.7 million, but it doesn’t seem to have met some of the big goals it had set back in 2010. Read More »
Lithium-sulfur battery maker Sion Power said in a government filing near Christmas that it had raised $50 million from an unnamed investor. Now the mystery is over. The company on Thursday revealed that the equity came from chemical giant BASF. Read More »
The new year is a good time to look ahead and back. I’ve been doing a lot of deep thinking about how the smart grid is developing. Here’s what I expect we’ll see happen in 2012… Read More »
One of the difficulties with investing in cleantech startups is that investors sometimes need to take very long term views of the companies they back, despite that companies can be risky. Next-gen biofuel company KiOR is a prime example of this long term, high risk phenomenon. Read More »
If we’re going to add Koomey’s Law to the cannon, suggesting that power requirements of a unit of computing will decline by half every 18 months, we thought our readers should also know some of the other big laws out there governing technology today. Read More »
Scientists have been turning to nature for ideas to advance research. Solar can benefit from that, too. Researchers at MIT saw ingenuity in a sunflower’s petal arrangement and came up with a design for solar power plants that minimize land use and increase energy output. Read More »
2011 was a difficult year for solar manufacturers, and don’t expect 2012 to get much better. Lux Research’s Matt Feinstein pens a predictive article for PV Magazine looking at the top solar companies he thinks will struggle in the near term. Who made the list? Read More »
Automakers have cautiously been exploring car sharing. The inherent conflict is that if more people share cars, fewer people will buy cars. But at CES this week Daimler said it plans to expand its car-sharing service Car2Go to 12 more cities this year. Read More »
A conventional wisdom these days is that there is less venture capital or inclination by investors to do early-stage deals. But Flagship Ventures is proving it wrong with the closing of a $270 million fund. Read More »
Despite all the challenges, cleantech survived in 2011, says Adam Lesser, GigaOM Pro’s Green IT analyst. Or as Sheeraz Haji, the CEO of industry tracking research firm The Cleantech Group, informally titled his fourth-quarter-2011 presentation, “Cleantech Did Not Implode.” Read More »
Trotting out auto industry veteran and the former public face of Chevy Volt, Bob Lutz, as a spokesman, VIA Motors on Tuesday showed off its technology of converting conventional trucks, cargo vans and SUVs into hybrid electric vehicles and laid out production plans. Read More »
Electric car maker Fisker Automotive ended 2011 with a couple hiccups: including a recall and a slower ramp up in production of its Karma. Now kicking off 2012, Fisker has decided to quietly double its current fund raising round from $150 million to $300 million. Read More »
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