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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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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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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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Hot Water, Lights and AC as a Service

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 ›

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How a Word-of-Mouth Light Bulb Program Saved Molokai $6.5 Million

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 ›

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Megafarms: The Future of Sustainability?

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 ›

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Nuventix Helping to Flip the Lighting Industry to LEDs

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 ›

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OPower Shifts Regions, But Gets Similar Results in Energy Efficiency

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 ›