Clean Technology, Recycling, Renewable Energy

Just when you thought all was quiet on the light bulb front, along comes another spoon of outrage to stir the pot. The latest trouble bubbled up last week with an article in the Washington Post under the rather overheated headline “Government-subsidized green light bulb carries costly price tag.” Things went quickly downhill from there [...]

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The Fisker Karma, a high performance luxury plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, broke down in the parking lot of Consumer Reports before they could conduct quality tests on it.

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Austin-based Green Mountain Energy Company has issued a challenge to SXSW attendees, speakers, fans and even those who were not able to attend, but wish they were there – spread the word and offset the conference’s carbon footprint.

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SJF Ventures and Citi Community Capital, Citigroup’s community lending and investment group, announced the closing of SJF Ventures III LP, the first nationally focused Impact Investment SBIC fund. Licensed by the US Small Business Investment Corp. (SBIC) under its new Impact Investment Initiative, the SFJ Ventures III fund will make equity investments in growth-stage cleantech and “positive impact” companies.

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Greenstart is a San Francisco-based startup accelerator focused on helping entrepreneurs build successful companies at the intersection of cleantech and IT. So far its offer to entrepreneurs included mentorship, assistance with product design, legal help, introduction to investors and $25,000 in seed funding. Earlier this week this offer has been upgraded with an additional $100,000 convertible note that will be available to entrepreneurs upon joining the program. This offer makes Greenstart one of most generous accelerators in the Bay area, which seems to have now not just a high number of entrepreneurs, but also a growing number of accelerators fighting over them.

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The Philadelphia Eagles football team has already established a leadership position in the field of sports sustainability, and it is just about to one-up itself.

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The U.S. military is the world’s largest fuel consumer. The DOD and DOE have set their performance goal to have 30 Net Zero Energy facilities by 2030.

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Contrary to popular belief, humans have failed to address the earth’s worsening emergencies of climate change, species’ extinction and resource overconsumption not because of a lack of information, but because of a lack of imagination, social scientists and artists say.

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Sen. John Bingaman and supporters are once again introducing federal legislation that would require power utilities to generate electricity from clean energy sources. Though the Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012 is once again likely to be shot down in Congress, the push for a long overdue overhaul of federal energy policy focused on clean energy looks certain to be a “hot button” issue right through the November elections.

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Water-Gen developed a technology that turns air into water, in order to ensure that military troops have available drinking water even in rough field conditions. The system can be installed on any vehicle and produce 40-80 liters of drinking water per day.

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The world’s most famous toy company, Lego, recently announced a massive investment in wind energy. Kirkbi A/S, the family holding company that owns Lego, will be buying wind turbines for almost $532 million for a 32 percent stake in DONG Energy‘s 277-megawatt Borkum Riffgrund 1 wind farm, which is scheduled to be fully operational in 2015. According [...]

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President Obama announces $30 million in new funding for natural gas vehicles and $14 million for new algae biofuel projects.

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The city of Glasgow is home to International Technology and Renewable Energy Zone (ITREZ) which is a research facility for renewable energy. Over the next 10 years, there is a planned investment of £100 billion in offshore wind energy.

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Dutch company Gaia-Wind, which manufactures small-scale wind turbines relocates to Glasgow and invests in a large scale project.

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“Waste not, want not,” Philadelphia resident Benjamin Franklin famously said, and the home of the Liberty Bell has taken his words to heart. Instead of flaring off waste gas from the city’s wastewater treatment plant, the Philadelphia Water Department has teamed up with the renewable energy company Ameresco to build a $47.5 million wastewater-to-biogas facility with a capacity of 5.6 megawatts.

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Food packaging is a major contributor to the waste stream, and emerging edible packaging pioneers Monosol and WikiCells aim to eliminate this. But there are concerns to overcome…

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“Is the emergence of shale gas a positive or negative development with respect to sustainability?” This was one of the most interesting questions discussed on one of the panels at KPMG’s Global Summit last week in New York. Given the growth of both interest and dispute around shale gas, the question was basically if shale gas is a bridge to a sustainable future or a bridge to nowhere.

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With few exceptions, water is necessary to generate and distribute energy. In turn, water can’t be collected, purified and transported without energy. A term has been coined to describe the relationship: the Energy-Water Nexus.

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Anheuser-Busch and Blue Marble Bio are partnering o launch a venture to convert brewery waste into a group of carboxylic acids and biogas.

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Back in 2010, in the months preceding the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day an ambitious campaign, called A Billion Acts of Green was launched to inspire individuals all around the world, to make a commitment to reduce their impact on the planet. Today, The Earthday Network, announced that they have reached the halfway [...]

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Instead of a land-based solar system, the company Solaris Synergy decided to develop a water-based technology. In other words: a floating solar power plant. According to the company, any fresh, salt or waste water surface can be turned into a solar energy platform.

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When it comes to details, Dubai is a global leader and the quality of life and business climate both have tremendous benefits. But when it comes to overall design, Dubai could use some CPR.

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The Obama administration is proposing a new rebate program for electric vehicles.

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Emerging markets for environmental financial investment and trading continue to attract significant global investment interest from untraditional investment sources. The clean energy market is large, growing and global with higher rates of market acceptance than anyone anticipated.

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According to Ecotricity, Searaser is the latest in harnessing wave energy and expects commercial application in the next 12 months.

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With the launch of a first-of-its-kind High Performance Sustainability Index for publicly listed US utilities, Target Rock Advisors has identified and ranked the top 5 and 15 US utilities across the three pillars of sustainable, Triple Bottom Line business practices and operations: environment, economy and society. Sure to spur interest among investors, Target Rock found that their shares, as a group, have outperformed the DJIA and S&P 500 over the past ten years.

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Solar energy is one of the most widely available forms of renewable energy, especially in the developing world where plenty of sunshine is available. Around the world, 1.5 billion people still live without access to power. This is where the Washington based, non-profit organization Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) comes in. SELF believes that energy [...]

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A U.S. biofuel company called Primus Green Energy has come up with a biofuel processing system that offers the gasoline version of the distributed energy trend. Rather than pushing for the construction of large, centrally located biofuel plants, the company is focusing on a relatively modest scale, in which its facilities would draw feedstock from [...]

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Ann Arbor-based Ecology Center released its fourth consumer guide to toxic chemicals in cars. Over 200 of the most popular models last year were tested for chemicals present in the dashboard, armrests, seats etc. These chemicals are responsible to the “new car smell” and are linked to many health concerns. Toxic chemicals inside vehicles are [...]

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many big changes [ in clean-tech] come in the second chapter we are now in, where software and IT will be critical; it’s now about the “energy internet.” This involves innovations around using energy more efficiently: How do you move it around? how do you push energy back to the grid? and how do you start making money? “IT has the ability to unlock the big changes.”

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