Once upon a time, in a land called Maine, a girl (of a certain age) couldn’t help but wonder, “if you want to reward homeowners for saving energy in their homes, doesn’t it make sense to look at actual energy usage, something that accounts for behavior, as well as structures?” Soon, there were others, too, [...]
Last week, many of the leading minds of the cleantech world congregated in suburban Washington DC for the 2012 Energy Innovation Summit. The Summit is mainly oriented as a showcase of some of the most interesting and promising technologies that have surfaced directly or indirectly as a result of ARPA-E: the Advanced Research Project Agency [...]
The space where energy meets IT is a geek’s dream. Four years ago, about when I took an extended hiatus from blogging for cleantechblog, the available software and hardware options that supported residential energy efficiency were slim, and the solutions, clunky. Home performance and energy rating professionals had paper data collection sheets and time-consuming modeling [...]
from original post at Clean Fleet Report Iran stopped shipping oil to the United Kingdom and to France. Global oil prices shot-up and we pay more at the pump. With the threat of oil shipment disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, prices are likely to stay high. In the USA, over 96 percent of our [...]
Innovation in the cleantech arena often entails combining inarguable facts in strange ways. Consider these apparently-unrelated truths: Much of the developing world lacks access to electricity. Fertility rates in the developing world are typically much higher than in the developed world. There are few things with more untapped energy than a young child. Children around the world [...]
from original article by John Addison at Clean Fleet Report “The electric car doesn’t do any good because it’s just powered by coal” gets repeated by the oil industry, by news pundits who ignore fact checking, and even by some environmentalists. In the past three years of writing about electric cars, I have yet to [...]
On January 18, BP (NYSE: BP) released Energy Outlook 2030, its official corporate view of the future of energy. Every year, BP releases its Statistical Review of World Energy that serves as an excellent compendium of historical and current data on a host of energy-related issues, but rarely does BP present its projections of trends [...]
from original article at Clean Fleet Report San Francisco has about 1,500 taxis, double its fleet of 15 years ago. The total gasoline used each year by those 1,500 taxis is about half the total used by the 750, in years past. San Francisco taxi operators are saving millions by with a fleet that is [...]
In most of the discussions about anthropogenic (i.e., human-influenced) climate change, the concept of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is usually short-handed to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In fact, humans are responsible for emissions of many other pollutants that contribute to climate change, and while these emissions are sometimes converted into “CO2-equivalents” to make discussions simpler, it’s [...]
By Neal Dikeman A quote in a recent Wired article claiming cleantech is getting pounded epitomizes the zero sum mentality prevalent in the renewable energy and cleantech discussion. ‘Even solar’s biggest allies on Capitol Hill — people such as Edward J Markey, a top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee — fear the [...]
from original post at Clean Fleet Report I’m sitting behind the wheel of this new Tesla Model S wishing that I could drive it away. I can’t. This prototype does not have a drive system. It is on display at the Clean-Tech Investor Summit, getting serious interest from attending CEOs and venture capitalists that can [...]
The USA Today recently ran an uncommonly in-depth article about the massive efforts to clean-up the decommissioned and horribly contaminated Hanford nuclear site in rural Washington state. A relic of the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, Hanford was the primary site for the production and refinement of plutonium (atomic symbol Pu) for the U.S. arsenal of [...]
from original post at Clean Fleet Report Gartner, the largest technology market research firm, is forecasting 100,000 electric car sales in 2012 in the United States. Yesterday, I took in the presentation at the SV Forum and then talked with Thilo Koslowski, Vice President of Gartner’s Automotive and Vehicle Practice. He acknowledged that 100,000 is [...]
The Water Innovations Alliance (WIA) recently completed an assessment of the state of the U.S. water infrastructure, which was given an overall grade of D- by the American Society of Civil Engineers in its most recent infrastructure report card. Underlying that nearly failing grade, the WIA produced some startling statistics in a recent newsletter (not yet posted to [...]
On September 21st, 2011, sodium-sulfur (NAS) batteries installed at Mitsubishi Materials Corp’s Tsukuba Plant, Japan, caught on fire. It took firefighters more than 8 hours to control the blaze, and two weeks to extinguish the fire. NGK Insulators Ltd., the company that manufactured the energy storage system, said the fire authorities are still investigating the cause of the fire. NGK has suspended production of its NAS cells, and advised customers around the world refrain from using their batteries until it tracks down the cause of the fire and finds a solution.
I don’t know exactly when “green” became the de facto official color of environmentalism, but it dates back at least to the 1970s, when European political parties rooted in ardent environmental positions took the name “Green”. But, as Paul Markille noted in The Economist‘s excellent annual round-up of speculations for the new year — “The World [...]
