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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Skyline Innovations, Metrus Energy and others have come up with ways to take the sting—and cost—out of energy retrofits.
You really don’t need to own your light bulbs. You don’t even need to lease them.
You just need the light that emanates from them.
That is the premise underlying a new crop of startups such as Skyline Innovations and Metrus Energy that hope to transform energy efficiency and building management through creative financing, service contracts and software.
These companies essentially retrofit commercial and industrial buildings. But rather than… Read More ›
Here’s hoping that the next batch of Greentech IPOs look better than the current pageant.
(This is an excerpt from our larger recent review of the Greentech IPO Landscape: Past, Present and Future.)
These companies to follow actually have real products, serious revenue and the prospect of profits in high-growth markets.
Here's a list of ten potential greentech IPOs coming in late 2010 through 2012:
Bloom Energy has a great story, revenue from the sales of its Bloom Boxes and marquee customers including Cypress, Google, FedEx and San… Read More ›
The small island community switches over from incandescent light bulbs to more efficient bulbs through the power of suggestion.
The 7,400 people living on the island of Molokai share a special bond. That was the sense Francois Rogers got during his many visits to the small island.
As special project director of The Blue Planet Foundation, Rogers depended on the fact that these people talk to each other and influence each other through word-of-mouth recommendations.
That's why Blue Planet's program, Go Green & Carbon Clean, was successful. On the most fundamental level,… Read More ›
Is networking every home appliance the way to get consumers to save energy? Or can consumer behavior be modified in less ‘gadgety’ ways? Plus, an update on People Power.
There are a few paths to the consumer-facing smart grid. You can go device-crazy and try to arm every appliance in the house and building with a sensor and radio to go along with a controller, an in-home display (IHD) and an internet gateway (that in some cases connects to your smart meter in cooperation with your utility). This will allow you to monitor and shut off your appliances remotely.
Tendril, Energy Hub, and apparently, People Power… Read More ›
The titans of industrial agriculture could be the future leaders of sustainable food production.
I walked along the mud-caked fringe of farmland and tried in vain to make out the profiles of a quarter of a million baby tomato plants. It was hard to believe that in just a few months this perfect rectangle of endless muck would burst into three million pounds of ripe red fruit, and even stranger to think that this vast monoculture just might be leading the world toward agricultural sustainability -- particularly considering that not one of… Read More ›
An innovative cooling technology helps position LEDs to take over the lighting industry.
Alan Salzman of VantagePoint Venture Partners has remarked that solid-state lighting is causing "a $100 billion industry to flip," and in his view, the mammoth lighting incumbents like Philips, GE and Osram "might catch up -- or might not."
We're in the midst of the great lighting transformation -- with solid-state LEDs on the cusp of transforming the lighting industry. The Edison bulb will soon be a relic and CFLs an interim step.
This… Read More ›
A year-long test in Minnesota yields California-like results. Score one for the behavioralists. Added bonus: Google trash talk.
It turns out that people really are the same everywhere.
OPower, which has created a software service that encourages consumers to reduce power consumption, managed to reduce power consumption by around 2.1 percent for customers participating in an energy efficiency program in Minnesota sponsored by Connexus Energy. The cumulative savings from the project came to almost $1 million.
The results are similar to what OPower has seen in tests with… Read More ›
Solar, wind and biofuels are all fantastic technologies, but to make money, stick to IOPS.
Read More ›
Energy Efficiency
Michael Kanellos
08 30 10
Green IT
Michael Kanellos
08 23 10
Finance & VC
Eric Wesoff
08 16 10
-
I think it's interesting to see these new types of PV come out.…
-
Michael, Mark's comment can be included in the EWPC article "A…
-
I rewrote the chapter in the 1999 ASHRAE Systems and Applications…
-
And what is great about VM Ware is that energy conservation is…
-
Thank you Michael, You have given me a great opportunity. I was…
-
I agree with Jim - VM Ware is a Green IT champion.
-
Ah. I may have confused you. Quick death refers to the unusually…
-
The most effective Green IT play was VM-Ware where entire 75%…
-
truth is, it's hard to make any solution work for residential…
-
The conventional wisdom that “Everything Dies a Quick Death”…
Need an avatar? Get one here: Gravatar