WAYNE, Mich. -- Is consolidation or expansion the future of the car industry?

It's an interesting debate. One one hand, Saab is flirting between life and death at the moment.

On other other hand, in the last five years a proliferation of brands – Tesla, Fisker, Aptera, Coda – have emerged and some Chinese manufacturers are trying to go global with their low-cost cars. Moreover, customers seem excited: Think has 2,300 people on a waiting list for its electric town car. New brands are a definite possibility.

Bill Ford Jr., Chairrman of Ford (still confirming any family relationship), was asked that question at a briefing last week. He recalled a project he worked on 25 years ago at the...

WAYNE, Mich. -- Ford's CEO Alan Mulally spoke to reporters from the company's Wayne, Mich., factory Friday and offered an upbeat outlook on the economy: "We are banging around the bottom right now. All the data says the economy is beginning to improve."

A better economy is what any business in the auto industry would hope for, after enduring a depressing 2009 that saw layoffs, bankruptcies, idling factories and a host of unsuccessful attempts to execute business plans.

Just this morning, General Motors said it would shut down iSaab after repeated attempts to find a buyer before the end of the year failed.

Ford seems to fare better than some of its major rivals. The company didn't need...

Smart grid equipment CEOs have claimed:

• A $2.2 billion meter deployment would have a questionable ROI if most of the savings came from reduced truck rolls
• Smart meters currently being deployed are not smart enough
• Consumers don't want Big Brother controlling their thermostat, AC and appliances

We wrote about it in Smart Grid Backlash.

Jeff St. John blogged about it here.  According to St. John's reporting: Those complaints have focused attention on PG&E's $2.2 billion, 10 million smart meter deployment, with the California Public Utilities Commission demanding that PG&E find a third party to investigate the accuracy of the meters.

We've covered this topic repeatedly over the last...

As we begin the final day of the Conference of Parties (Cop15) climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, the grueling hours and stressful conditions are surely taking their toll on official delegates. It is, however, extremely impressive to see how tactful and diplomatic the country representatives are, even when speaking with observers and civil society participants.

After one particularly late night at the Bella Center, home of Cop15, I waited at the Metro station at 1:30 a.m. in the snow and freezing temperatures and happened to engage in conversation with a negotiator from Bolivia.

The position of Bolivia and others in the region is that the atmosphere is polluted with...

Joining the derogatory terms "Truthers"  and "Birthers" is now the term "Warmers" which refers to those who accept the science of anthropogenic global warming in spite of the recent data-massage climategate scandal. I saw this term in an article found on a nuclear power-oriented blog, Nuclear Street. Which worries me. 

Does accepting nuclear power as a necessary part of our energy mix mean that you're automatically a climate change denialist? Here's a long video from progressive, Stewart Brand on the necessity of nuclear power.

Here are some quotes from both sides of the climate change "debate."

Warmers

John Doerr, Partner at KPCB: "Put a price on carbon, put a price on carbon, put a...

EDF Energies Nouvelles said Thursday it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Investment Bank (EIB) to get €500 million ($716.2 million) to pay for building solar power plants in France and Italy.

The financing would be able to cover up to 50 percent of the cost for each of the projects EDF wants to build from 2010 to 2012. EDF didn't specify how many projects or their sizes will be covered by EIB's investments. EDF will have to raise money from other banks as well.

Paris-based EDF did say the money would help pay for the 2010 construction of a 36-megawatt solar farm in France and a 12.5-megawatt project in Italy.

Solar panel maker, First Solar, will benefit from...

I'm on a bit of a nuclear binge of late (and possibly at odds with the editors at Greentech Media regarding the topic). 

Questions that pop up around here are:

• Does nuclear even belong on a "greentech" site?
• Is nuclear power green power?
• Is nuclear a low carbon emission energy generation source?

Clearly a nuclear plant doesn't emit carbon during operation. But studies looking at the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of nuclear plants – examining the carbon footprint of uranium extraction and enrichment, plant construction, and spent fuel disposal make the carbon footprint picture a little murky. Here are a few links to nuclear power LCA studies.

Jeffrey Hamel and Tom Mulford of...