A new rule in California meant to help keep vehicles cool in the sun (and thus cut the need for fuel-chugging air conditioners) could interfere slightly with signal reception for GPS devices, but probably won’t block most mobile phone signals. Those are some of the findings in a report released this month by the California [...]

  If and when Tesla goes public, it could become the biggest and possibly the first public offering for a U.S. car company since Ford Motor's IPO more than 50 years ago. It will also offer a glimpse at the role IPOs will play in the green car market.

  Time for Contingent Climate Commitments: Should the Obama administration get out ahead of Congress, pledging to set greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that 67 senators may not be willing to ratify? — GristGM Marketing Volt to…Middle Schoolers?: “On November 30th, hundreds of middle school students and teachers will assemble at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los [...]

  Thin-film solar PV maker First Solar has been aggressively buying solar projects, hoping to drive down project costs while spurring demand for its solar modules during the economic downturn. But First Solar isn’t in the business of holding onto these projects over the long term. In the latest indication of its strategy to develop and [...]

  So you think you’ve come up with the next game-changing greentech idea and now you just need to score some funding to get your new firm off the ground? Well, if you were eying the greentech bigwigs at Kleiner Perkins to back your fledgling startup, maybe you should rethink your strategy. In a presentation from [...]

  The cost of solar equipment has been steadily dropping over the last decade, but as the economy hit the skids over the past year, the cost to finance solar projects actually increased. In other words it became more expensive for a utility or company to raise capital to build solar projects this year than in [...]

  Sure, buying stuff isn’t exactly good for the environment — all products take energy to make and ship and, thus, contribute to carbon emissions — but Black Friday is upon us, and we’ve decided to put together an Earth2Tech slant on the annual holiday gift guide. These gifts range from gadgets that are super energy-efficient [...]

  Cali to TV-Makers: Cut Energy Consumption in Half by 2013: The California Energy Commission this week approved a first-in-the-nation efficiency standard for televisions, requiring new TVs sold in the state need to to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent by 2011 and 49 percent by 2013.“Cash for Caulkers” Could Deliver $23B for [...]

  Aptera co-founder Chris Anthony has bowed out of day-to-day business activities at the three-wheeled vehicle developer as it seeks to put the brakes on its cash burn. But one of his other startups, Flux Power, has just hit the gas, with the launch of its first product last week.Based in Vista, Calif., Flux plans to [...]

  Electric car startup Tesla Motors plans to file for a public offering very soon, two anonymous sources tell Reuters — “any day,” according to one source. When we contacted Tesla for confirmation, the company supplied a statement from spokesperson Ricardo Reyes saying, “We do not comment on rumors or speculation.”But Tesla CEO and Chairman Elon [...]

  The award of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and loans for electric vehicles, batteries and charging infrastructure in the last few months has provided a major boost for companies working in the space. That’s true for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based ECOtality, whose subsidiary eTec (with several partners, including Nissan) won a nearly $100 million grant [...]

  Back when I was a broadband reporter for Red Herring magazine, I took a trip to Seoul and did the classic story on how South Korea kick-started its economy with government investment into blazing-fast broadband pipes that created its world-leading mobile and web industries. South Korea’s broadband buildout may hold some interesting lessons for the [...]

  “Oil is finite, but information is infinite,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said a year ago in a talk for the New America Foundation. Fortunately, we have online tools to organize and manage that information, sometimes in the interest of reducing oil consumption, as well as emissions and fuel expenses for drivers. The California Air Resources [...]

  Electronics and liquids don’t mix, unless you’re Iceotope. At this week’s Supercomputing 2009 conference in Portland, Ore., the 3-year-old startup from Sheffield, UK is demonstrating a liquid-cooled server setup that has the potential to cut data center cooling costs by up to 93 percent. The firm just came out of stealth mode, 18 months after [...]