Photo: SolarReserveAt Rocketdyne's San Fernando Valley headquarters outside Los Angeles there's a whiff of the right stuff -- of crew-cut guys in short-sleeve white shirts and skinny black ties -- in a vast room that holds the massive rocket engines that propelled John Glenn and the Apollo 11 crew into space. In one corner of this corporate space museum stands something different, though. It's a scale model of a solar power tower, technology Rocketdyne developed a couple of decades ago as a spinoff of its work for NASA. Here's how it works: An array of mirrors called heliostats focuses sunlight …

The annual California Cleantech Open startup competition is always a fun event to attend, because you just might be present for the debut of the Google of green energy or the General Motors of electric cars. Beyond that, the competition serves as a leading indicator of emerging green tech trends. And given that the Silicon Valley establishment judges the event, it's an opportunity to gauge which way they see the wind blowing. This year the Open dropped California from its name as it expanded the competition to the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountain region. But at heart, it's still …

Climate Corps. Photo: Environmental Defense FundBack in May I wrote about the Environmental Defense Fund's (EDF) Climate Corps, a cadre of 26 MBA students who were then prepping for summer internships at Fortune 500 companies. Their mission was to green up corporate operations to save money and cut carbon emissions. With winter on the way and school back in session, I checked in to see how successful the Climate Corps was at combining the students' financial smarts, technological know-how -- half are engineers by training -- and environmental ethic. Pretty successful, it turns out. According to EDF, the interns identified …

Silicon Valley is by nature an optimistic place. After all, inventing the carbon-free future and making boatloads of money along the way is fun. And even though California is slouching toward apocalyptic collapse these days, there's always another innovation wave to ride. In Chu We Trust? It may take big bucks from the U.S. Dept. of Energy to fun some of the renewable energy projects that California entrepreneurs have on the drawing boards.Photo Illustration / Tonya RicksSo it's always interesting to get a more-or-less unvarnished assessment of the state of green tech, as happened last week when a group of …

A Tesla Roadster gets a boost from a SolarCity charging station in SalinasPhoto courtesy SolarCityYou can't get more California greenin' than this. Peter Rive can charge up his Tesla Roadster electric sports car in his San Francisco garage with carbon-free electricity supplied by a solar array on his roof. Then, if he's in the mood for a road trip, he can drive to Los Angeles, stopping at a solar-powered charging station along the way to top off the battery. The free charging stations on the "solar highway" -- aka the 101 -- were recently installed by SolarCity, the Silicon Valley …

Getting an audience with Silicon Valley's guru of green investing isn't always easy. Vinod KhoslaJames Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media, Inc. (via Wikimedia Commons)If Vinod Khosla is not speaking at one of the innumerable, and apparently recession-proof, green business conferences that seem to happen every other week, he's giving lectures at Google headquarters, writing white papers, or, of course, inking checks to green tech startups with the potential to disrupt multi trillion-dollar global industries like energy, automobiles and building materials. He's something of a Valley legend: Co-founder of Sun Microsystems, then a longtime tech investor with marquee venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins …

Wheego is an Atlanta-based startup that plans to enter the electric car market with its Whip.Photo: Todd WoodyA traffic jam is developing on the electric highway. A decade after General Motors killed the electric car, big automakers and startups are revving up to put battery-powered vehicles on the road over the next couple of years. One of the latest entrants is Wheego, an Atlanta company that is about to launch the Whip -- a tiny low-speed "neighborhood electric vehicle" that will be upgraded in 2010 to a full-speed, highway-ready car. Wheego chief executive Mike McQuary brought a Whip to San …

The Refract team recycled used billboards to create waterproof walls for the home.Courtesy Santa Clara University Adjacent to a three-story parking garage on the Silicon Valley campus of Santa Clara University, workers are busy building a contemporary wood-clad home that wouldn't look out of place in the pages of Dwell or another shelter magazine for the po-mo, Tesla-driving, little-square-eyeglasses-wearing set. Which is exactly the idea. The home is California's entry into the U.S. Department of Energy's biannual Solar Decathlon and is a collaboration between undergraduates at Santa Clara University and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Twenty …

Adam WerbachAdam Werbach’s career is something of a lodestar for the trajectory of the 21st century American environmental movement. A student activist tutored at the knee of the Archdruid himself, the legendary David Brower, Werbach was elected the youngest president of the Sierra Club in 1996 at age 23.  Then business beckoned and he launched a startup, Act Now Productions, to advise companies like Wal-Mart on going green. Global advertising and marketing goliath Saatchi & Saatchi acquired Act Now last year, rebranding it as Saatchi & Saatchi S (for sustainability) and installing Werbach as the CEO. Now he has written …

It may be tempting to view the Australian Senate's defeat Wednesday of climate change legislation as a portent of things to come as the U.S. Senate prepares to take up a cap-and-trade bill. Queensland is Australia's coal country. Its mines power the country and feed China's demand for energy.Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsBut the rejection of the Australian legislation reflects the peculiarities of Aussie politics rather than the viability of cap-and-trade. More importantly, it could trigger what might be the world's first national election fought over climate change -- an election that could give the ruling center-left Australian Labor Party a renewed …