cleantech
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Seven ways to fight dirty (energy)
In case you missed it, dirty energy is back to dirty tricks. This time with the help of DC lobbyists, Bonner & Associates, who forged letters to Congressman Tom Perriello of Virgina’s 5th District. The letters, written on “official” letterhead from the local NAACP chapter and a Hispanic group, Creciendo Juntos, asked Perriello to vote […]
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EEStor CEO says game-changing energy storage device coming by 2010
If the Texas company EEStor is running a scam, it’s a frakking brilliant one. For years the otherwise tight-lipped outfit has been promising a capacitor that can quickly charge, quickly discharge, and hold enormous amounts of energy — on all accounts, performance far beyond any battery on the market, or even contemplated. If it performs […]
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Silicon Valley VC sees bright future for green tech — and a need to engage policy makers
A BrightSource Energy solar thermal project.Photo: BrightSource EnergyDrive around the San Francisco Bay Area and you can see the emerging corporate infrastructure of the new green economy. In a downtown Oakland office tower, you’ll find the headquarters of BrightSource Energy, a solar thermal power-plant developer that has scored contacts to build more than 2,600 megawatts’ […]
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Why I’m not freaked out about the Waxman-Markey climate bill
Feeling ambivalent?Will the Waxman-Markey bill spark a full-scale energy revolution? No. Not on its own, not in the next 10-15 years. The short-term targets for reducing greenhouse gases are too low, the renewable electricity standard is too weak, too many offsets are allowed, and there’s too little investment in clean energy. To boot, there’s every […]
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Lots of great green stuff in the latest issue of The Atlantic
I haven’t read The Atlantic much lately, but I picked up the latest issue at the airport and it is superb. Three pieces are worth particular note. First, Joshua Green has a piece on “The Coming Green Economy” that is as good as anything I’ve ever read in popular media about the contours of the […]
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Hot new clean-tech startups are plug-and-play
You gotta be crazy to start a green-tech company these days, right? Venture funding has fallen off the proverbial cliff since the economy imploded last September, and even established renewable energy companies are struggling to stay afloat until the Obama stimulus cash begins to flow. But it seemed more 1999 than 2009 this week at […]
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Clean technology innovation: reaping the rewards
Business Week has a provocative article this week by Michael Mandel on innovation — or the collapse of it — in America. According to Mandel, many of our current woes stem from a failure to innovate over the last decade since the glory years of the late 1990s. While most Americans still take pride in our innovation, […]
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First quarter cleantech VC funding hits $1 billion — green stimulus funds soar to $400 billion
Clean tech venture capital funding in the first quarter of 2009 hit $1 billion, according to “findings released today by the Cleantech Group in cooperation with Deloitte.” For the authors of the findings, the headline news was global cleantech VC funding “dropped 41 percent during 1Q09, compared to the previous quarter.” But that $1 billion […]