We often cover semiconductors that require less energy, but we rarely talk to the companies behind those chips to find out what else they might be doing to reduce their power consumption. However, Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer for Qualcomm, recently shared a few tidbits about what the cellphone chip maker is doing to keep corporate consumption down–and it all starts with information technology (not everyone is jumping ship to build “cleantech” firms).
If corn-based biofuels are the Britney Spears of the cleantech world (a fallen star but still all over the place), fuel made from algae is the next great “American Idol” winner (major potential in the pipeline). And despite the fact that algae-to-biofuel start-ups have been taking their sweet time bringing a pond-scum fuel product to market, some inroads have been made recently–GreenFuel is building its first plant, PetroSun starts producing at their farm on April 1, and big-oil Chevron and Shell have made some early bets as well.
Now that Shai Agassi’s electric-vehicle network start-up Project Better Place has started to charge ahead in its first market, Israel, the company has begun to put the pieces in place to actually build the 500,000 electric-vehicle charging stations.
What do Russian rocket scientists know about wind power? A lot, at least according to entrepreneur Rick Halstead, who is creating a wind-turbine design company with a group of Russian engineers that previously built submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles. Not exactly the most common resume bullet point, that one.
Israel’s growing solar industry, early moves on electric vehicles (the home to Shai Agassi’s first electric-vehicle infrastructure project) and recently funded water start-ups are making the state one of the front-runners of the cleantech revolution. And Israel keeps churning out new solar start-ups; on Monday a solar photovoltaic company called Pythagoras Solar said it had raised a Series A round of $10 million.
British Telecom made a major bet on renewable energy last October, saying it planned to invest close to half a billion dollars in wind farms to meet 25% of the company’s U.K. power needs by 2016. Now BT’s clean energy goals are crossing the pond, to its U.S. headquarters. The company said today at a press conference in El Segundo, Calif., where company executives, Prince Andrew Duke of York and the mayor of El Segundo spoke, that it’s building a 500-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system for its North American HQ.
With battery technology the biggest barrier to the proliferation of electric vehicles, companies like electric sports-car maker Tesla are constantly surveying their battery options. At the Clean Tech Investor Summit in Palm Springs, Calif., Tesla Chairman Elon Musk said the company is moving its battery-pack production from Thailand to California, and wants to one day buy battery cells produced domestically as well–potentially even getting into the battery cell business themselves.
You can thank this blog post for even more carbon emissions in the atmosphere. That’s because Web hosting is largely powered by fossil fuel power plants and computers run on electricity. To help bring a little carbon transparency to Web sites, including those in our good ol’ blogosphere, two student entrepreneurs–Alex Wissner-Gross at Harvard and Tim Sullivan at Yale–have developed the CO2 Stats Project, a widget that tracks visitors to Web sites, calculates the sites’ carbon emissions and offsets the lot. Wissner-Gross and Sullivan tell us that their widget, launched at the end of October, has grown to more than one million unique visitors viewing it each month across about 700 sites.
As the end of the year creeps closer, another well-known clean-tech start-up has parted ways with its CEO. The Friday before Christmas, biodiesel producer Imperium Renewables said its CEO Martin Tobias is being transitioned from his roles as CEO and chairman of its board of directors. Over recent weeks the CEOs of electric sports-car start-up Tesla and thin-film solar company Miasole have jumped ship (or walked the plank).
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