No-one could accuse AMEE of having modest goals.
Since 2007, the East London-based clean-technology company has been accumulating energy and environmental information from governments, companies and non-governmental organizations around the world with the goal of becoming the leading global source of data that can be used to calculate corporate carbon footprints or supply-chain energy consumption. Keep reading →
The traffic circle at the intersection of Old Street and City Road in East London’s Shoreditch neighborhood would be just another ugly piece of urban infrastructure if it hadn’t become identified with the city’s booming technology industry.
The circle – or roundabout, as the Brits call the familiar road features – is at the heart of a cluster of high-tech firms ranging from Google and Intel to hundreds of startups that have opened their doors in the last four years, generating a creative cluster that has invited comparisons with California’s Silicon Valley. Keep reading →
Tough week for Apple on the green front. It ran into a buzz saw of ridicule for its decision to withdraw from the EPEAT product registry, and now Greenpeace is saying the company’s ballyhooed ultra-green North Carolina data center amounts to “mostly talk and not enough walk.”
Greenpeace on Thursday did boost Apple’s “How Green Is Your Cloud?” score, moving it to 22.6 percent from the 15.3 percent the company received in April. That puts Apple well ahead of Amazon (13.5 percent) but a long way behind Dell (56.3 percent), Google (39.4 percent) and Facebook (36.4 percent), among others. Keep reading →
Could data centers someday stand alongside drilling rigs in the Marcellus Shale gas fields? It is an increasing possibility, says an energy expert at an international buildings efficiency firm.
Data centers are sometimes built for the exclusive use of such giants as Google and Facebook, but most of them are intended for hosting companies, which process data for multiple tenants. Keep reading →
An 11th hour withdrawal from a long-anticipated initial public offering could be a potentially damaging blow for a cleantech startup trying to raise additional capital from the public markets.
But BrightSource, the concentrating solar power startup with 9 GW of projects in the pipeline, has not ruled out another attempt at a public launch. Keep reading →
An environmental activist and two business executives walk into a bar…and they start a solar power company. While this may not make your favorite jokes list, it serves as an interesting background story for an innovative residential solar startup.
“The solar power industry is at an inflection point,” and with low cost cells produced in China and elsewhere, companies like Sungevity are on the cusp of putting solar everywhere – “it’s becoming ubiquitous,” the company’s President and founder Danny Kennedy recently told Breaking Energy. Keep reading →
Plans to build the first US undersea transmission system for offshore wind farms advanced on Monday when the federal government said there was no competition for the proposed project, which can now be subject to an environmental review without being delayed by an auction.
The US Department of the Interior issued a finding of no competitive interest on the plan by Atlantic Grid Holdings to build the $5 billion Atlantic Wind Connection, a 300-mile transmission line off five mid-Atlantic states to take as much as 7,000 megawatts of wind-turbine capacity from yet-to-be-built offshore wind farms. Keep reading →
Nancy Floyd is the founder and managing director at Nth Power, a venture capital firm established specifically to invest in clean energy startups.
Solar, energy efficiency, smart grid and advanced transportation all feature in Nth Power’s portfolio. Keep reading →
It is the best of times and the worst of times for the solar energy business.
Using the language of the oil patch, Recurrent Energy CEO Arno Harris says that while the “upstream” part of solar – manufacturing solar panels – is suffering amid the cost compression and reduced appetite for technology risk represented by the failure of Solyndra and other solar firms in 2011; at the same time, the “downstream” part of solar – installations to generate power – are thriving. Keep reading →
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says he expects the leasing process for wind projects off the Atlantic coast, including a “pioneering” backbone transmission project, to go forward early in 2012.
Salazar also announced Tuesday approval of wind and solar projects in the Southwest, and Deputy Secretary David Hayes said Interior is on track to meet Congress’ 2015 target, of 10,000 MW of renewables on federal lands, three years early. Keep reading →
