Twenty. That's the number of major utilities that are experimenting with the TREE (Tendril Residential Energy Ecosystem) from smart metering start-up Tendril. Fifteen of the utilities are engaged in lab tests with the Boulder-based company, four are preparing field pilots and another will kick off a commercial rollout to consumers in the next few weeks. Collectively, these these utilities serve 56 million customers, according to CEO Adrian Tuck. It's a notable achievement and, in the increasingly crowded field of smart metering and automated energy management, it is the sort of metric that will underscore who is winning and who is falling behind. Why? Utilities will be the...

Intel makes its third solar investment in the last month. Intel Capital continued its surge in the solar market with this morning’s announcement of a $12.5 million investment in precursor chemical company, Voltaix.  Founded in 1986, Voltaix makes electronic chemicals and gases used in semiconductor manufacturing and CVD precursors such as germane, used in the production of advanced PV cells. Voltaix’ materials are intended for in thin film PV cells using amorphous silicon, CdTe and CIGS (as opposed to wafered silicon).  The market share for thin film solar is only about 10% today but that share is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.   XsunX is one of...

British Energy, the UK's nuclear power monopoly, will likely be sold to Electricité de France this week in a deal valuing the company at close to $25 billion. Though negotiations are ongoing and the parties are still apart on the precise value per share of British Energy (EdF thinks the 750p per share valuation a bit too rich), both sides are expecting to end the week with the largest transfer of wealth from Britain to France since Jane Birkin married Serge Gainsbourg. For some, the sale has aroused feelings of economic nationalism. Unlike in the U.S., where we prefer to keep our state-owned enterprises at least nominally private, the Europeans have no problem taking an active...

A lot of cell phones end up in the toilet, but not on purpose. While precise numbers are tough to come by, it happens enough so that if you waterproofed cell phones, you could extend the average life of many of them by a year, according to Captain John Konrad, who runs the gCaptain blog and is one of the people helping to promote Golden Shellback, a waterproof coating for electronics devised by the Northeast Martime Institute. Apply the coating to a cell phone or a notebook and you can submerge them without harm. The NMI is now trying to commercialize the coating. It actually evolved from a splash proof coating for a man overboard system. It's somewhat expensive now, but could...

The new home of Other World Computing, a large computer dealer in Woodstock Illinois, is about as green as you can get. The building, which will ultimately aim for LEED platinum certification, sports a geothermal heating and cooling system, a reflective roof and a system from Sunlight Direct that pumps sunlight from a reflector dish into the building with fiber optic tubes. The sunlight system, which becomes operational by October, will provide about 1/3 of the light for the outfit, with about 2/3s coming from high-end florescent bulbs, said CEO Lawrence O'Connor. "In the warehouse, reuse of materials occurs where practical," he wrote in an email after we spoke. "We invested in...

Following up on my previous post, here are a few more things from the California Clean Tech Open presented at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Here’s a list of the 44 finalists vying for the “$100,000 Startup in a Box" prize package. It’s worth taking a scan of these firms to get a flavor of the range of clean-tech technology and entrepreneurs – everything from desalination to diapers, from solar concentrators to plug-in hybrid chargers. Some quotes from the hallways:

• Power Assure’s Donnie Foster said that his firm’s pending software “can cut Data Center electricity bills by 50 per cent. According to Gartner, Data Centers need to go from...

Ausra has a proprietary Thermal Energy Storage method and the company is not talking about it. However, insiders tell me that storage material is being mined and shipped for Ausra on a huge scale. Thermal Energy Storage (TES) can allow parabolic trough power plants to store solar thermal energy at peak solar hours and to dispatch the power when it's needed. According to NREL, TES can allow parabolic trough power plants to reach annual capacity factors of up to 70 percent (versus 25 percent without thermal storage.) Josef Eichhammer of Solar Millenium spoke about molten salt thermal storage at a panel I moderated at Intersolar and I blogged about it here. The company is building...