Last week, the White House released a new video highlighting the installation of solar panels on the roof of the residence. “Solar panels on the White House, I think, are a really important message that solar is here,” said Secretary Moniz, who was featured in the video along with Minh Le, Director of the Energy… Keep reading →
A Boston startup has turned into a leading building performance analytics provider in recent years as it has helped property owners save significant sums by monitoring their utility data. The company, called WegoWise, now says it has the “largest database of utility in multifamily buildings,” and is extending its platform to cover commercial property as well.
One of their first commercial property customers is Liberty Property Trust, a $7 billion REIT currently using WegoWise to track utility usage over 2.9 million square feet of its portfolio, and is rolling out usage across its 81 million square feet of property. Keep reading →
What if the future of lighting looked surprisingly like the past? Cree, a lighting company with its roots in selling LEDs to the 80% of the lighting market that is commercial, has hit the consumer market with a new bulb it says could eventually save more than $40 billion in energy costs if adoption of the new technology hits 100%
The logic in appealing to the consumer market is similar to the IT strategies proliferating across the industrial sector, and more specifically energy: technology decisions are made by consumers based on their comfort with it, even when the applications aren’t for their personal lives. “This is a very important step to accelerate the adoption [of LED lighting]; getting the consumer on board will change the inflection point,” Cree Vice President, Corporate Marketing Mike Watson told Breaking Energy in a recent interview. Keep reading →
Plants and trees have been making clean energy for billions of years using water and sunlight, so why can’t humans do the same? People have been asking this question for over 100 years and Giacomo Ciamician, an Italian scientist, has been dubbed the father of artificial photosynthesis for his research into what he called “the guarded secret of plants.”
Today, chemist and Harvard professor Daniel G. Nocera has taken up the mantle along with fellow scientists, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. His work and grand vision has been captured in this brief video by filmmaking team Jared Scott and Kelly Nyks (PF Pictures), which recently won a $50,000 FOCUS FORWARD prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Keep reading →
As 2012 came to a close, Tendril emerged from a restructuring as a smaller startup that was seeking partnerships with other companies serious about home energy management, and not those just looking to try it out.
Tendril’s latest partner, Hitachi, certainly fits the bill. Tendril announced this week that its firmware will be integrated into Hitachi’s SuperJ Applications Ecosystem, which operates on the OSGi framework, allowing for multiple types of firmware to run on the same device. Keep reading →
James Hughes, CEO of First Solar, recently gave a hugely interesting interview to Australia’s Renew Economy in which he discussed his company’s future, the state of the global solar market.
Hughes’ views on utility scale v. rooftop solar are intriguing and worth reading, as First Solar is one of the largest solar manufacturers in the world and a major player in the U.S. utility-scale solar market. The company has paid considerably less attention to small-scale commercial and residential solar, and this focus is reflected in Hughes’ comments about the future of distributed renewable energy generation: Keep reading →
There are many things you can do to lower your electric bill, but going the extra mile to make your home energy efficient can save you hundreds per month. Here, homeowner Gerald Singleton explains how he was able to reduce his monthly bills, and drastically cut the cost of installing solar paneling to do so. “My heating bill was getting to be $600 a month, because I was running a space heater in my mother’s room 24 hours a day,” says the Flushing, N.Y. resident. “It just was becoming prohibitive to heat the house in the winter.” Keep reading →
When people think about applications for natural gas in the US some of the most iconic images are kitchen stove burner tips and large power plants. However, natural gas liquids are widely used in manufacturing thousands of everyday products, as well as fertilizers and other applications that people may not be as familiar with. Keep reading →
We are currently living in a way that is indisputably unsustainable. The ecological resources on which modern housing depend are becoming increasingly scarce, and the excessive carbon footprint left behind by “McMansions” and sprawling suburban developments are leading more and more people to seek radically greener housing alternatives.
This is the second of a five-part series called “Off the Grid,” in which we explore environmentally-sustainable, self-sufficient communities across the globe. We’ll attempt to answer the question: Is green, off-grid living our future? This week, we take a look at an Earthship community in the deserts of New Mexico in the United States. Keep reading →
Every day we walk past energy vampires, sucking away on our power supply, and most of us don’t even know it.
Cars left running or huge buildings with their lights glowing all night are obvious wasteful consumers of energy, but many times it is actually smaller and less noticeable power consumers that are – when aggregated across hundreds of millions of homes and offices – adding significant strain onto the US power production and transmission system at a time when blackouts are creating real concerns for companies relying on constant power supply. Keep reading →
