While utilities and companies are eagerly awaiting the upcoming announcement about which of the hundreds of applicants managed to grab a piece of the $4 billion from the federal stimulus package for smart grid projects, it looks like states could offer smaller runner-up prizes. Smart meter tech maker SmartSynch says that it’s been awarded a [...]

  Green building geeks now have a more powerful tool for developing next-gen building designs with minimal environmental impact. Software engineers at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory launched this week an update of their plug-in for SketchUp, Google’s open-source 3D building modeling tool. With a growing list of features, the latest version of [...]

  State law requires the California Energy Commission (CEC) to assemble a report every other year with recommendations for policies to “conserve resources; protect the environment; ensure reliable, secure, and diverse energy supplies; enhance the state’s economy; and protect public health and safety.”That’s a massive task, particularly during a time of flux for how we generate, [...]

  Green jobs have become a sort of mantra of late among the political left, with supporters looking to clean-energy sectors to produce companies hungry for new hires and help ease the pain of the economic downturn. Today research firm Clean Edge, known among other things for its annual Clean Energy Trends reports, weighed into the [...]

  GE is upping its stake in technologies designed to make and use electricity more efficiently. The company’s investment arm, GE Energy Financial Services, today announced it has invested in three startups: SolarEdge, which has developed electronics to monitor solar panels and maximize their production, Tendril, which has developed energy-management technology for utilities and consumers, and [...]

  For an international auto show organized around the theme “Fun Driving for Us, Eco Driving for Earth,” it’s only fitting for some cool green designs to be in the works. But while most automakers will have some kind of lower-emission offering on display when the Tokyo Motor Show kicks off next week, a few models [...]

  Microsoft revealed today the latest part of its plan to carve out a fatter slice of the smart grid pie: a software architecture for utilities called Smart Energy Reference Architecture, or SERA. Described by Microsoft as its “first comprehensive reference architecture that addresses technology integration throughout the full scope of the smart energy ecosystem,” SERA [...]

  No fewer than 100 large-scale carbon capture and storage projects within about a decade, at a cost of some $56 billion — that’s what International Energy Agency chief Nobuo Tanaka said the world needs in order to help address climate change, Reuters reports. And it’s only the beginning of his vision for a massive carbon [...]

  Storage — it’s the unsexy work horse behind social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter that require hundreds of thousands of servers to handle the data of millions of users. Traditionally taking the form of spinning disks, data storage also sucks a whole lot of power. But companies, like Fusion-io, are innovating on more [...]

  Entrepreneurs are using cutting-edge tech and innovative business models to launch startups in energy sectors like solar, biofuels and batteries. So why not bring that entrepreneurial spirit, advanced technology and innovative thinking to one of the biggest hurdles for clean power, transmission lines? A company called Tres Amigas, based in Santa Fe, N.M., is gaining [...]

  The burden loaded onto General Motors’ extended-range electric Chevy Volt has been heavy since before the “New GM” — the company that emerged this summer after the federally managed bailout and bankruptcy process — was even born. In the financial viability plans that GM submitted to Congress in pursuit of federal aid, the company used [...]

  The buildout of smart grid infrastructure is about to drown utilities in a sea of information. So points out Jack Danahy in an interesting article in Smart Grid News recently, in which he presents data that shows how much information a typical smart meter will produce. If 140 million smart meters are installed over the [...]

  Utilities, Startups Weigh in on Cali Car Charging Rules: As the California Public Utilities Commission drafts rules related to the integration of battery-powered cars into the state’s electrical grid, one of the biggest questions is whether the commission should regulate Better Place, Coulomb Technologies and other third-party providers of electricity for EVs. — NYT’s Green [...]

  Hundreds of bills escaped California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto power last night ahead of a midnight deadline to act on a mountain of legislation — but not a pair of long-debated clean energy bills. As expected, the governor killed two items, which would have required utilities in California to get at least a third of [...]