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  • The economics of the Bloom Box

    Bloom Energy at the eBay headquaters. Photo courtesy BloomEnergy via Flickr Cross-posted from WattHead. With all the hype today around the release of the “breakthrough” Bloom Energy fuel cell (which has become known as the “Bloom box” and is referred to by Bloom as an “Energy Server“), it’s good to find a couple of posts […]

  • What the heck is a Bloom Box and will it solve the world’s energy problems?

    The internet loves mysterious product unveilings, especially those promising to revolutionize the world and how we live in it. (Think Apple’s iPhone.) But few (except for maybe the iPhone) actually live up to the hype. (Or so I hear. Anyone wanna get me an iPhone?) CEO K.R. Sridhar is starting to peel back the layers […]

  • San Francisco commits $150 million to green homes

    Monday night I was having drinks in downtown San Francisco with some seriously smart people — top-level IBM scientists and strategists involved in Big Blue’s Smarter Planet initiative.  Given the room’s collective interest in creating smart electrical grids, smart water systems, advanced electric car batteries and other green technologies, the talk naturally turned to how […]

  • Four stories that should have changed the media narrative … but didn’t

    One of the most frustrating things about covering national energy politics is that conventional wisdom in D.C. never seems to change. The incestuous circle of journalists, pundits, lobbyists, and lawmakers known as The Village has its own set of narratives about climate/energy policy. Those narratives are a) completely at odds with the rest of the […]

  • Cleantech execs learn to lobby

    Dirty energy lobbyists long ago mastered the art of lobbying on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by their copious government subsidies. Now clean energy companies are playing catch-up. Jim Snyder at The Hill reports on executives flying in to Washington to learn about the happy ways of our capital: The executives mostly represent clean-energy companies and […]

  • Why senators don’t see the clean energy boom

    You might not have heard, because almost nobody reported it, but new clean-energy projects attracted more global funding in 2008 than fossil-fuel projects did. For the first time ever, investors put more money in solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower than in fuels that must be burned, according to a U.N. report. And when venture-capital funding […]

  • Winning the clean energy race: a new strategy for American leadership

    By Teryn Norris & Devon Swezey You know the world is changing when the president’s first trip to Asia is defined by a new U.S. foreign policy dubbed “strategic reassurance” – convincing China that the United States has no intention of containing its growing power or endangering its foreign investments. As the New York Times […]

  • SolarReserve’s 24/7 solar power plant

    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 […]

  • Is John Broder embarrassed to have a baseless hit job on Gore under his byline?

    Al Gore’s back in the public eye, promoting his new book, which naturally raises the question: which mainstream press outlet will be the first to do a vapid hit piece? Today we have our answer: The New York Times, which has run a truly absurd and embarrassing piece from John Broder. It casts about desperately […]