Charismatic speakers, from DOE Chief Steven Chu, to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger kicked off the first official morning of the ARPA-E Summit — the Department of Energy’s high-risk, early stage grant program. But amidst all of the inspiring words budget cuts loomed large. Read more »
Every week now. it seems like the DOE has offered up a new loan guarantee for clean power. On Thursday, the lucky winner was thin-film solar panel maker SoloPower, with a $197 million conditional loan guarantee to expand its thin-film solar panel plant in Oregon. Read more »
President Obama unveiled his proposed budget Monday that calls for boosting funding to the Department of Energy by nearly 12 percent. The spending plan would focus on research and deployment of technologies he’s championed repeatedly: renewable energy, electric cars, biofuel, energy efficiency and nuclear. Read more »
The DOE’s program to fund high-risk, early-stage, greentech projects is working, the DOE says this week. The indicator, says the DOE, is that private investors have invested a combined $100 million into at least 6 ARPA-E awardees. Here are the six ARPA-E graduates: Read more »
President Obama, who laid out an ambitious clean energy agenda in his State of the Union speech, is spending Thursday in Pennsylvania touting a new energy efficiency plan: “Better Buildings Initiative” to save building owners $40 billion in energy costs by 2020. 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 »
Venture capital investors continue their big love for solar, and despite a collective vow to be less irrationally exuberant about the sector, investors still are willing to hand out hefty amounts for buzzy startups. 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 »
Do not pass go, do not collect $24 million: That’s the card played by auto supplier Tenneco, which withdrew from a Department of Energy loan program in March 2010, less than six months after securing a coveted conditional loan commitment from the agency. Read more »
Following on the heels of the Obama administration’s plan to streamline the DOE’s loan guarantee program, the DOE has given final approval to its largest clean power loan guarantee to date: a $1.45 billion guarantee for a solar thermal project in Arizona built by Abengoa Solar. Read more »
While Uncle Sam has tapped a select few companies as winners for its green car loan program, it has left a much longer list of loan applicants disappointed or stuck in limbo. Here’s the state of the ATVM awards at the end of 2010: Read more »
We’re all going to need to become a lot more energy literate if we’re going to fight climate change. Now the DOE has started working on a collaborative Energy Literacy document that will help guide energy education in schools, as well as federal policy and funding. Read more »
Everyone’s favorite DOE Chief Steven Chu was mighty busy today — he ushered in a report that establishes “solar energy zones” on public lands, as well as an announcement that the DOE will give out $184 million in grants for efficient vehicle technology project. Read more »
Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu shows off the DOE’s new cool roof and explains the benefits of ditching a dark roof and opting for a cooler (lighter one). Read more »
Just about one year into his role heading up the DOE’s loan program office, former VC Jonathan Silver tells us he believes the agency has come a long way from it’s first few years of neglect and delays. Read more »
All hail the open-source scientist. Open collaboration in energy innovation will be a key part of fighting climate change, said Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu in Cancun, Mexico, at a side event to the U.N. negotiations. Read more »
Could 1.7 billion processor hours put a dent in the fight against climate change? That’s what the DOE is hoping, and this week unveiled a program to donate computing power from two super computers for dozens of projects working on energy innovation. Read more »
A public official with a sense of humor is seriously refreshing. The DOE’s Chief Steven Chu sings praise for a particularly funny article in The Onion entitled, “Report: Global Warming Issue From 2 or 3 Years Ago May Still Be Problem,” on his official Facebook page. Read more »
It’s no secret that some energy retrofits can save consumers significant money, but how to conduct those retrofits and how much should they cost are two big questions. The government’s answer: standardize the process of getting home energy audits and loans. Read more »
The Obama administration is working on streamlining the DOE’s loan guarantee program, a spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) tells me this morning. The program will not be abandoned, but will be changed to run more smoothly, and take less time. Read more »
Both Google and the government have taught us one important lesson: data rules. On Friday, U.S. officials said they will develop what they called the “first-ever, comprehensive and up-to-date database” of satellite images that will show land-use changes around the world. Read more »
With Solyndra’s announcement this morning that it will lay off dozens of workers and close its first factory, the question over whether or not the DOE’s flagship loan guarantee to Solyndra was a mistake has been answered. And yep, it’s a disaster. Read more »
As part of a record-setting environmental settlement package, the bankruptcy estate of General Motors will set aside more than $11.7 million for the cleanup of an old factory site in Delaware where plug-in hybrid car startup Fisker Automotive plans to manufacture its Fisker Nina sedan. Read more »
It’s a new day for V-Vehicle, an auto startup with ambitions to produce low-cost efficient cars. The company has just taken two steps common among startups whose investors are unhappy and pushing for a restart: a new name — Next Autoworks Co. — and a new CEO. Read more »
Microsoft has backed off demands for content owners to use its proprietary streaming format for live video, enabling publishers like ESPN to stream video in HTML5 instead. That could lower the cost of video delivery and open the door for more content on the game console. Read more »
BrightSource Energy is close to securing approval from the California Energy Commission for its first commercial project to build a solar thermal power plant, and it’s lined up a hefty federal loan guarantee. Is it time for it to go public? Read more »
After posting Kevin Tofel’s demo of the struggles he had with Flash-based video on his Nexus One mobile handset, we’ve received a ton of comments, including response videos from readers who showed their own experiences with Flash on Android mobile handsets. Here are just a few. Read more »
Execs at green car startups like to give the impression that hundreds of millions of dollars in DOE green car loans are just about to fill up their corporate bank accounts. For some, it could be true. For others, not so much. Read more »
Utilities know they have to figure out how to store energy produced intermittently, such as wind and solar, or store energy from fossil-fuel power plants to keep the grid loaded when wind turbines and solar energy equipment aren’t doing their best. Read more »
Can the stimulus money really help to drive down the price of solar electricity by half in the next five years? Yes, according to a White House report on Tuesday touting the impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But think again. Read more »
Smith Electric Vehicles U.S., an electric truck and van maker based in Kansas City, Mo. and backed by $32 million in stimulus grants, has become the great green hope for its loss-making parent company, the United Kingdom’s Tanfield Group. Read more »
General Motors’ long-awaited S-1 filing spotlights work on the Chevy Volt, OnStar communication system and Google partnership as evidence of GM’s commitment to next-generation technologies. Here’s 12 things to know from the S-1 related to greener vehicles and Car 2.0:. Read more »
Private Media Group CEO Berth Milton doesn’t think it’s worth fighting piracy. The porn veteran wants to instead give the content of his adult entertainment company away and use it as a free promotional tool to build a new business based on actual real-life sex. Read more »
This afternoon the DOE announced that power company Ameren has stepped up to drive a new version of FutureGen that the DOE has dubbed FutureGen 2.0. Thus the DOE says it will still award the project $1 billion out of the stimulus package. Read more »
And the DOE loan guarantee train keeps on chugging. This morning the DOE says it has offered its 14th loan guarantee — a $17.1 million conditional commitment to AES to build a 20 MW energy storage system using A123System’s lithium ion batteries. Read more »
One of the first disappointments a brand new iPad owner often faces is the fact they simply can’t use their magic new toy right out of the box. To setup an iOS device, you need a computer running a compatible version of iTunes. But why? Read more »
Molycorp, a company that controls one of the largest deposits outside China of a group of metals used in many green technologies, is off to a rocky start on the public markets after raising $393.8 million in its IPO today. Read more »
The UFC is looking to crack down on illegal live streams of its pay-per-view events, subpoenaing live streaming sites Justin.tv and Ustream to get the IP addresses needed to identify and shut down users that have made videos of those events available for free online. Read more »
“Revolutionary.” That’s how the Department of Energy describes the methods for generating fuels directly from sunlight that the agency hopes will emerge from a new project in California. An energy research “hub” just been awarded $122 million to work on the tech. Read more »
Many of the initiatives detailed at this week’s Clean Energy Minsterial seem more like pledges to figure out how to reach green energy goals and gain access to necessary data than a definite road map with all the answers in place. Read more »
