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Roundup: Coda Goes to Hawaii, Ford Adopts Liquid-Cooled Batteries, and More

Fleets and consumers in the Aloha State can get Coda all-electrics in 3Q 2011.

Coda Automotive, the Sino-American car company coming out with an all-electric sedan later this year, said it will bring its cars to Hawaii in the third quarter of next year.

The company is already slated to bring out a limited number of cars to California later this year. Hawaii is an interesting choice. The state is seen as a growth market for PV panels, wind, solar air conditioning and oceanic air conditioning. The weather is amenable and… Read More ›

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In California, Large and Small Generators Tussle Over Grid Rules

The need for the California ISO to bring renewables on-line is creating tension between small and large providers.

To help California reach its renewable portfolio standard goals, The California Independent System Operator (the ISO) may be aggravating a rivalry between large- and small-scale renewable energy producers.

The Small Generator Interconnection Procedure (SGIP), the ISO's proposed rules governing grid connection for five megawatt to twenty megawatt projects, is now at the formal proposal stage. It has stirred up a controversy because the ISO wants… Read More ›

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Independent Test Exonerates PGE Meters, Blames Customer Service

Smart meters don’t make customers mad, people do, concludes the Structure Group.

The Structure Group, an independent organization retained by the California Public Utilities Commission to examine the smart meters installed by Pacific Gas & Electric in Northern California, issued its report today.

The meters worked. Increases in bills were largely due to a 2009 heat wave, which caused air conditioning use to spike. Structure also did not detect manufacturing problems. Structure tested 750 meters and 147 electromechanical… Read More ›

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With Arch Rock Purchase, Cisco Takes Aim at Silver Spring Networks

Cisco is rolling out the wallet to transform its smart grid strategy into tangible product offerings.

The brewing competition between Cisco and Silver Spring Networks just lost its subtlety.

The networking giant today bought Arch Rock, a privately held company that specializes in standards-based mesh networking technology for monitoring data centers and, more importantly, for connecting different assets on the grid (namely, AMI networking solutions). Yesterday, Cisco cut an alliance with Itron, the smart meter maker, that will lead to Cisco… Read More ›

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JDSU, an Optical Giant, Enters the CPV Market

CPV going to where the sun is rather than where the subsidies are?

The concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) market has been long on promise and short on results.  But there have been a few hopeful signs of late.

Kleiner Perkins saw fit to invest $130 million into CPV systems vendor Amonix.  And shortly after that fund raise, Cogentrix announced a 30-megawatt project with Amonix.  That's easily the largest CPV project in the history of CPV.

SolFocus recently said that it would have 10 megawatts in the ground by the end… Read More ›

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The Biggest Green Market? Seven Reasons Why It’s Green IT

Solar, wind and biofuels are all fantastic technologies, but to make money, stick to IOPS.

Over the past few weeks, I've had a number of meetings with engineers, executives and investors and such, and I keep coming away with the same conclusion.

The fastest-growing and arguably most attractive segment in alternative energy and energy efficiency lies in hardware, software and networking equipment. Yep, green IT. Part of the conclusion is a historical and personal bias: I wrote about semiconductors and PCs for eleven years. But I still… Read More ›

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The Problem With Ethanol, California’s New EE Standard, and More

Ethanol’s a bargain—until you do the math.

Beware the sticker price.

Propel Fuels, which wants to build 75 alternative fuel gas stations in California, unveiled one in Oakland yesterday, according to several news reports. The company already operates stations in Oakland and Seattle.

One of the big problems with ethanol has been the availability of pumps dispensing E85, the 85 percent ethanol/15 percent gas blend. While General Motors and others have sold thousands of flex fuel cars, the… Read More ›

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Recurve Gets New CEO, Hones Its Strategy

Andy Leventhal is the new boss. And the focus shifts completely to software.

Recurve, the energy efficiency retrofitter and software developer, is getting a retrofit itself.

The company has hired Andy Leventhal as its new CEO, replacing Pratap Mukherjee. Leventhal co-founded Planet Metrics, a carbon accounting company, in 2007, and sold it off to Parametric Technology in February.  

The change in CEO will also usher in some organizational changes. The most important is that Recurve will spin off its operational group --… Read More ›

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The Future of Sustainable Paint Manufacturing

When it comes to sustainability in the auto industry, there’s a great future in plastics.

"You can have a Model T in any color, as long as it's black."  The automotive world has come a long way since Henry Ford made this statement while introducing the revolutionary Model T Ford in 1908.  Today, paint color and quality both play major roles in car-buying decisions.

However, automotive paint is not just about looks. It is also the vehicle's first line of defense against scratches, abrasions and parking-lot dings.  Over the years,… Read More ›

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Cisco, Itron Team Up for Grid Communications

The router king and a smart meter giant hold a kum-bay-yah on IPv6.

Cisco and Itron are joining forces to go after the smart grid together.

The companies announced a somewhat far-reaching agreement under which the two will work to develop IP-based communication standards for the smart grid. Itron will then bundle and resell Cisco's technology. In short, what you have is an alliance between a company (Cisco) with experience, heft, deep wallets and lots of technology in networking and communications and another… Read More ›

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Realities of VC Investment in Water Tech

Will this be the year that investment in water broke?

Water is an enormous issue around the globe -- for drinking, farming and industry.  

There is a looming water crisis facing everyone on Earth as populations rise, pollution increases and climate and weather patterns change.  There is already a water crisis in many developing nations and in some not-so-developing regions, like Australia and California.  The stats for "embedded" or "virtual" water are sobering -- for example, the production of 1… Read More ›

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California Fails to Pass 33 Percent Renewable Standard, But Arnold May Intervene

At midnight, one of the most ambitious plans for renewable energy turned into a pumpkin.

Debate was still going on when midnight rolled around.

The California Legislature last night failed to pass SB 722, a bill that would have required California public utilities to obtain 33 percent of their power from "new renewables," i.e., solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass, but not large-scale hydroelectric dams. Debate was proceeding on a companion bill when August 31 turned into September 1 and the session ended.

The failure is a blow to… Read More ›

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Undermining the Critics of Wind Power

Controversial energy commentator Robert Bryce gets fact-checked.

"A slew of recent studies," energy writer Robert Bryce wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal essay, "show that wind-generated electricity likely won't result in any reduction in carbon emissions -- or that they'll be so small as to be almost meaningless."

Bryce acknowledged in an interview that this claim is "counterintuitive." It is also, on closer examination, dubious.

For his "slew" of studies, Bryce offered three, all from the United States… Read More ›

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Reduce IT Power Consumption by 20 Percent? Fujitsu Says Yes

Toyota Australia cut its IT power consumption by 43 percent.

How much power do computers use?

Data centers, desktops, printers and other IT equipment now accounts for around 40 percent of the power bill of large corporations, according to Kartik Ravel, practice director of Green IT at Fujitsu America. At hedge funds and financial services firms, where complex transactional software churns constantly, it can be 70 percent to 80 percent of the bill.

To that end, Fujitsu is taking an energy efficiency… Read More ›

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Solexant’s CdTe Solar Ramping to 100MW

“Semiconducting nanoparticles” on a “scale never done before”

If you're a photovoltaic module startup that has received venture capital funding in the last few years -- it's time to start showing results.

The solar market is no longer the domain of scientists and hobbyists -- the industry will ship more than ten gigawatts this year.  It's about scaling big, scaling fast and driving down costs.  Suntech, Yingli, Trina Solar, First Solar, SunPower and others are all going to exceed one- or… Read More ›

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Harry Reid Touts Green Jobs From Coast to Coast

State energy efficiency policies will attract private funding and create jobs in cleantech.

In advance of the Clean Energy Summit 3.0: Investing in American Jobs next week, Senator Harry Reid brought together Pacific Gas & Electric Chief Executive Officer Peter Darbee, the Center for American Progress, and Energy Resource Management for a press conference today.

Reid emphasized Nevada’s focus on building out clean energy infrastructure as an investment geared to create more jobs.

“The Recovery Act planted the seeds, but what we need to… Read More ›

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EV Batteries Plummet in Price: Down to $400 a kwH

Better Place talks finance; IBM shoots for Lithium Air prototypes in two years.

San Francisco -- Lithium-ion batteries might not decline in price as fast as computer processors or memory, but an unusual combination of circumstances is nonetheless allowing for massive discounts at the moment.

Better Place, the company currently building car-charging and battery-swapping networks in Israel and Denmark, is purchasing batteries for cars at $400 per kilowatt hour for delivery in early 2012, according to company executives.… Read More ›

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Advanced Wind Measurement Technologies Take Hold in the Industry

For the most accurate readings, you need to get high.

Just-emerging Light Detecting and Ranging (LIDAR) and Sound Detecting and Ranging (SODAR) systems are more cost-effective ways than anemometer-equipped meteorological towers to measure the power a site can really be expected to produce at the loftier heights at which wind is now being harvested.

In the five-stage wind information life cycle, a wind resource is first discovered via prospecting. A good site justifies more careful assessment. If… Read More ›

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The Sunset of Solar Venture Capital

Solar game over, VCs. Move along. The days of opportunity are gone.  Find another greentech bubble.

I ran into a venture capitalist colleague coming out of Palo Alto's Whole Foods yesterday evening.  I mentioned a VC-funded solar startup CEO I had just interviewed, and this VC, let's call him Sanjay, just rolled his eyes and said, "Solar is done."

Sanjay pointed out, in-between bites of raw fawn hearts, the logic that now made solar investing, at least in solar panels, a lost cause for venture capital investors.  He explained, "Let's say your… Read More ›