Over the weekend, ABB (NYSE: ABB) announced the $1 billion acquisition of Power-One (NASDAQ: PWER), which makes a wide spectrum of power conversion electronics equipment. Notably, Power-One is a major player in the market for inverters, which convert DC power into AC power. In turn, inverters are important for synchronizing DC-based technologies such as batteries, [...]
Glass has been made for thousands of years, and innovators have always been tinkering to improve the basic product. Over the years, these improvements have mainly been in terms of color, strength, weight, quality. The cleantech imperative of the past few decades is now pushing glass innovations on two more dimensions, energy efficiency and power [...]
With the Solyndra debacle and other bankruptcies (e.g., Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt), and a 65% decline in the MAC Global Solar Energy Index (SUNIDX), 2011 was a bad year for the solar industry. Now into 2012, the hits just keep on coming. Last week, the long-time solar energy poster-child First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) announced it was closing its [...]
It’s that time again: sifting through the detritus of a calendar year to sum up what’s happened over the past 12 months. Everybody’s doing it — for news, sports, movies, books, notable deaths…and now even for cleantech: here’s the scoop from MIT’s Technology Review, and here’s a post on GigaOM. So, my turn [drum roll, please], here’s [...]
For the uninitiated, “nanotechnology” refers to the science of the very small, engineering particles and their corresponding materials at the nanometer scale. For a sense of perspective, at one-billionth of a meter, a nanometer is about 1/60,000 of the width of a human hair, so we’re talking engineering not just at the microscopic scale, but the [...]
By Neal Dikeman I had a chance to chat today with Dr. Charlie Gay, the President of Applied Material’s solar division. You may recall, we broke the story in the blogosphere 5 years ago about Applied’s entry into solar, which was anchored with a highly touted and very aggressive strategy for turnkey large format amorphous [...]
by Richard T. Stuebi One of the biggest challenges facing cleantech, relative to other forms of technological innovation, is that the basic markets being served are widely viewed as commodities. In high-tech, many people are willing to pay very high (and profitable) prices for new gadgets with cool functionality. Witness just about everything that Apple makes, along [...]
