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Cleantech

First Solar sets record for thin-film solar tech

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 »

GE’s smart grid services highlight a move to the cloud

Two recent wins for GE signal not just where GE is headed, but also two important trends for 2012. First, the move to “cloud-based” hosted services is under way in earnest. Second, many of the sector’s biggest players are targeting coops and municipals. Read More »

 
 

Behind the scenes of GE’s India energy lab

Entrance to GE's research center in India

This weekend in the final leg of my trip to India with Geeks on a Plane, we stopped by GE’s research center in Bangalore. While GE works on a variety of technology at the center, I focused on the energy research that GE is conducting there. Read More »

You might remember the name Current, because at one point Google and other investors pumped over $200 million into the company to focus on broadband-over-powerlines. Jump forward six years and Current is now a smart grid company with new investors and focus on Europe and Asia. … Read More »

128 cabinets of high- density, high-efficiency servers

Achieving the ultimate in green building badges — the LEED platinum certification — is pretty rare and is particularly unusual for data centers. But on Thursday GE showed off its new LEED platinum-certified data center in Louisville, Ky. Here are some photos from the green facility. Read More »

Fusing solar technology with buildings is an area that tends to invite creative ideas. An intriguing design caught our attention at Intersolar in San Francisco this week: It’s a solar panel with a honeycomb structure that replaces the glass facades of a building. Read More »

U.S. startup Nuvve is setting its sights on the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) market with a 30-car project in Denmark that it says will sell plug-in car battery power to help stabilize the grid. Can the model scale? Read More »

Sensus is the only one of the big five smart meter giants using a licensed star network, rather than an unlicensed mesh network, to connect smart meters. Now it has $675 million in debt financing to expand that technology. Read More »

Landis+Gyr at Any Price? Smart Meters’ Second Act

Landis+Gyr is on the auction block, and big smart grid suitors like General Electric, Toshiba and Honeywell ABB are rumored to be interested in paying $2 billlion-plus for the smart meter giant. Strategic buyers could find value by integrating into their own lines of business. Read More »

Mixed Signals for Q1 Greentech Investment

Greentech investment trends in the first quarter of 2011 either signal a record-setting expansion for the industry in 2011, or retrenchment in the face of economic and political headwinds — depending on how you look at the numbers. Read More »

Industry Efficiency: GE Buys Converteam for $3.2B

GE’s plan to buy a 90-percent stake in big French electrification and automation player Converteam for $3.2 billion could open up new opportunities to use electricity to replace fossil-fueled power. Read More »

Honeywell and State Grid Corp. of China plan a big demand response pilot project using OpenADR, marking the first step into the potentially huge Chinese market for the emerging standard for automating demand response. Read More »

More Must Reads

A study has found that Southern utilities could be able to pay back the costs of smart meters a lot faster and more easily than East and West coast utilities. How do regional grid differences play out in real life? Read More »

The cloud can make home energy management both cheap and powerful. But what if it turns out to run afoul of real — or imagined — privacy concerns? Read More »

Schneider Electric launched a bare bones, utility-centric line of home energy management gear on Tuesday, staking its claim to the residential energy market on the premise that homeowners will choose elegant simplicity over flashy high-tech. Read More »

Southwest Airlines is rolling out new fuel-efficient flight-path technology that could save the company up to $60 million a year — and help the global airline industry shave its carbon footprint as well. Read More »

General Electric research shows that ZigBee uses less than half the power of Wi-Fi for home energy networking — a fact that cements its likely role as a key enabler of GE’s home energy management devices to come. Read More »

General Electric has launched a new business around energy-smart household appliances and products. But utilities are its first target customers, not consumers. Read More »

China plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decade on a nationwide smart grid, but where are the opportunities for outside investors and innovators? Read More »

Home energy efficiency startup OPOWER has raised $50 million as it seeks to quadruple its customer base and add new features to its age-old, paper report-based customer outreach. Read More »

Smart appliances are still years away from mass adoption, but they’re going to have a bigger influence on how the smart grid and the energy-smart home get connected, according to Pike Research. Read More »

Trilliant has hopped the pond in a big way. The smart grid networking provider announced late Wednesday that British Gas has picked it for its smart meter deployment, starting with 1 million meters to be deployed by 2012. Read More »

General Electric and some high-flying venture capital partners have named 12 winners of the first $55 million of a $200 million “ecomagination challenge” they launched this summer. The list is full of some already well-funded companies, including several that GE is already investing in. Read More »

What makes a smart grid pilot a success — even when it’s a failure? General Electric and Accenture spent an hour Wednesday with some energy industry big shots at the World Economic Forum in Atlanta and explained it all to us. Read More »

Lockheed Martin has turned to the smart grid with a vengeance. The gigantic defense contractor has been helping utilities design, manage and secure smart meter networks, distribution grid sensor systems and microgrids for years, but in the past year has ramped up its efforts. Read More »

Schneider Electric likes to say that 70 percent of the world’s electrons flow through its equipment. What’s it doing to make those electrons flow more intelligently? Read More »

GE is gunning for First Solar’s turf with a new line of thin-film solar panels, saying it hopes to grow its solar business to match its $6 billion-a-year wind power dominance. Read More »

A state court has ruled that the IC was wrong to allow utility Commonwealth Edison to pass on certain costs to its customers, including the $5 million passed on to customers in 2008 for a smart grid pilot project now getting underway. Read More »

Smart meters get all the attention, but smart distribution grid and substation projects are actually taking the lead in smart grid spending across the nation, and corporate giants are reaping the benefit. That’s the gist of a Cleantech Group report released by the DOE Thursday. Read More »

Look out, smart meter startups with IPO dreams — the granddaddy of power metering is plugging into the public markets. Elster Group, the German electric, gas and water metering giant founded in 1848, announced this week that it was filing to go public. Read More »

Echelon has launched a new software-hardware combo to control the distribution portion of the grid. The product has two notable aspects: it’s open to third-party developers, and its first customer will be utility Duke Energy. Read More »

The official verdict is out — Pacific Gas & Electric’s smart meter technology has been working properly, but its customer service hasn’t. That’s the conclusion of a state-ordered report released Thursday from independent analysts at the Structure Group. Read More »

There are many tech-paved roads that lead to reduced energy use in data centers, from software-centric solutions to those that put sensors on every server and fan. But the paths to commercializing those technologies are, by comparison, relatively few. Read More »

Startups might not be able to convince the FAA to try out a new, fuel-saving way to guide planes to their landings at airports around the country, but what about GE?. On Thursday, AA flight 1916 used technology based on the work of startup Naverus. Read More »

After weeks of testimony, Baltimore Gas & Electric has gotten itself back into the good graces of Maryland state regulators. The utility announced Monday that the Maryland PUC approved the redrawn project on Friday, meaning BG&E won’t have to return a $200 million DOE stimulus grant. Read More »

Last month, General Electric announced that it would be taking submissions from inventors and entrepreneurs seeking a piece of a $200 million smart grid investment fund. Now GE says it has received 950 submissions from around the world. Read More »

Looks like bad news for First Solar. The Washington Post reported Thursday that the thin film solar PV leader may not have actually secured that 2-gigawatt solar farm planned for China’s desert, which it announced back in September of 2009. Read More »

ECOtality CEO Jonathan Read described the company’s new Blink smart charging stations for electric vehicles as a “Swiss army knife of telecommunication,” designed to connect with local area networks, Wi-Fi, Zigbee and cell phone networks. Can Read build a business with these stations? Read More »

Despite the build out of smart grid infrastructure, there’s still a variety questions that remain unanswered when it comes to just what will a next-generation smart grid network look like? Here’s 5 points of debate that we’ll be addressing at our Green:Net conference on April 29: Read More »

Distributech, the once-sleepy power grid trade show, has been transformed into a high-profile smart grid showcase over the past couple of years — this year’s show in Tampa, Fla. is no exception. Here’s 10 things you should pay attention to coming outta Distributech this year. Read More »

When Forbes reported in November that IBM was launching a major utility and energy research lab in China and planned up to nine big smart grid projects in the country, it came as little surprise to many. After all, China is going to be spending … Read More »

Talk of a smart grid enabled by the nascent wireless standard WiMAX has been growing in recent months, and today brings the latest development: Arcadian Networks, a startup that owns licensed 700-megahertz spectrum across a swath of the American heartland and is selling smart … Read More »

Military bases have been some of the pioneers for so-called microgrids — systems of self-generated electricity and intelligent controls that can be disconnected from the grid at large to keep the lights on when the utility can’t provide power. The idea is that a tree falling … Read More »

UPDATED: General Electric plans to get into smart charging for electric vehicles in a big way this year, and it’s partnering with 2-year-old Juice Technologies to do it. This morning the companies announced a joint development agreement to create charging devices that will integrate with GE’s … Read More »

Just over six months have passed since Samsung unveiled a multibillion-dollar push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its factories and slash the amount of emissions resulting from its consumer products. Now the company is diversifying its efforts. Read More »

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