Shut down the air conditioners and earn millions. That's the message from NetApp, the services and storage giant. The company received a $1.4 million dollar rebate from Pacific Gas and Electric for retrofitting its data center in Sunnyvale, Calif. with an eye toward energy efficiency. The changes will save approximately $1.2 million in power bills a year. If you extrapolate that over three years, NetApp will save $3.6 million in power and still have that $1.4 million rebate. The new data center, as configured, has a power use effectiveness (PUE) of 1.3. PUE is a ratio comparing the total amount of power consumed by a data center divided by the amount actually used for...

Developing new solar technologies isn't that different from finding new drugs, say IBM and Harvard. The two are forming a new World Community Grid project to find new molecules for harvesting power from the sun. Under the project, IBM will offer up computing cycles on its cloud computer to researchers to test out the efficacy of various molecules. This, in a nutshell, is how drugs are developed. Researchers examine billions of different combinations of proteins to see how they interact. Running the mind-boggling number of combinations takes repetitive, brute-force computing power. The same is true when it comes to materials for organic solar. A lot of elements and materials can...

The distributed and micro nature of cleantech means that it has an important role to play in helping the world's poor, especially in the areas of energy and water. In fact, cleantech in the developing world is increasingly seen as an economic opportunity for local communities (for example, solar water heaters in China). Perhaps just as important, the introduction of clean energy into the developing world, if successful, could have a hugely ameliorating effect on global climate change as those economies expand, people are pulled out of poverty and consumption increases. Solutions for the poor are often lower tech, but higher inspiration. Take the group of six African students who...

A team of U.S. and Israeli geologists will publish a paper asserting that climate change could have contributed to the downfall of both halves of the Roman Empire. Based on chemical signatures in a piece of calcite from a cave near Jerusalem, they pieced together a detailed record of the area's climate from roughly 200 B.C. to 1100 A.D. The results found increasingly dry weather from 100 A.D. to 700 A.D. It was particularly dry from 100 A.D. to 400 A.D. The Roman Republic transformed into the Empire around 44 B.C. (see Caesar, Julius) and expanded across Europe, Africa and the Middle East until exhausting itself centuries later. "Whether this is what weakened the Byzantines...