David Willetts
Stable policy and massive infrastructure needs will limit the impacts of a looming double-dip recession in one of the world’s leading advanced economies, a government minister told Breaking Energy last week. Keep reading →
Venture Capital
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States should abandon the “venture capital” approach to supporting renewable energy and focus on a fuel and technology-agnostic portfolio approach, Connecticut’s energy and environment commissioner says.
Connecticut is abandoning technology-specific renewable energy credits and instead funding a “green bank” that tightens the focus on creating scale in the deployment of both renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies, Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Daniel Esty said at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum – Wall Street in New York City today. Keep reading →
California Energy Storage Startup Community Gets State Bridge Across ‘Valley of Death’
By Felicity Carus
Energy storage technologies – notorious for falling into the infamous financing “valley of death” – are set to get a stronger bridge across the abyss from lab to market in California.
CalCharge, a consortium based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, launched May 29. Keep reading →
Startup Battlefield Finalists pose onstage at Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 held at the San Francisco Design Center Concourse on September 14, 2011 in San Francisco, California.
Low natural gas prices in the US have slowed momentum in the development of grid-level energy storage solutions, an expert panel gathered from venture capital, power generation and utility companies said last week. Keep reading →
Consumer electronics could be the winners in the quest for energy storage – cleantech’s holy grail – rather than electric vehicles or the integration of renewables.
Dan Adler, president of the influential California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF), told last week’s Cleantech Forum in San Francisco: “It is the holy grail and that’s why we continue to focus on this notion that there’s some piece missing.” Keep reading →
IT is poised to revolutionize the energy industry by ceding control of consumption and generation to consumers and lead to an “age of empowerment”, an influential figure in the wholesale power sector said yesterday.
David Crane, the outspoken CEO of NRG Energy, told the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco: “We’ve come a long way from the days of the legendary Henry Ford and his comment that the American consumer can have any color of model T as long as it’s black. Keep reading →
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory biofuels lab.
Corn-based ethanol production is set to peak this year as the Environmental Protection Agency’s advanced biofuels mandate has capped production of conventional ethanol at 15 billion gallons, or about 357 million barrels. Keep reading →
Developers of new advanced biofuels technologies are evaluating the entire energy production, service and delivery chains for commercial opportunities.
OriginOil’s ambitions are much larger than its small IPO from last year’s registration suggests, and the company claims it has pioneered technology that will revolutionize the service industry for advanced biofuels as Halliburton and Schlumberger had done in the petroleum and petrochemical industries. Keep reading →
Government Energy Innovation Summit Seeks Lower Cost, Higher Performance Technology
By Margaret Ryan
We’re from the government and we’re here to listen.
That was the opening message from top Department of Energy officials at the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, DC. The conference, being headlined Feb. 28-29 by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and former president Bill Clinton, is drawing more than 2,400 participants from the worlds of science, engineering, energy and venture capital. Keep reading →
Nuclear Fusion: ‘This is the Adventure Part of Venture Capital’
By Jared AndersonWhile eating lunch at a recent energy conference with the usual random selection of delegates and speakers, I asked the co-founder of a leading energy venture capital firm what technology he finds most exciting right now. Without hesitation, he began telling me about his company’s ambitious, longer-term bet on a small nuclear fusion company. He then put me in contact with his partner and co-founder, who helped fill in the details for this story. Keep reading →