Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur who, at one time, was expected to take over the CEO role at SAP, said today that he has formed “Project Better Place,” a venture focusing on electric vehicles, and is raising an initial $200 million to fund the project. When Agassi announced his resignation from software company SAP (SAP) last [...]
A major political selling point of ethanol production is the possible salvation it offers small towns in the center of the United States. But does “the biofuel revolution” actually benefit these communities or just Vinod Khosla? That’s the topic that Kansas State researchers will tackle with the $696,000 grant they received last week from the [...]
Creating more energy-efficient consumer electronics starts at the chip level. CamSemi, a fabless semiconductor startup based in the UK, is designing energy-saving integrated circuits for the power supply consumer electronics market. The five-year-old company this week raised a Series C round of $26 million from 3i Group, Scottish Equity Partners and Carbon Trust Investments.More energy-efficient [...]
You can’t turn on an incandescent light, you can only generate one shoe box of trash a month, and you have to live out of a car for a year. Those are the rules of Your Environmental Road Trip’s (YERT) great American green voyage, an exploration of the nation’s environmental movement by a three-person crew [...]
The bad news for BP rolled in from all over this week. The company agreed to pay a $50 million fine to settle a refinery blast criminal case. Four of its former traders are facing indictments for their role in a 2004 attempt at cornering the propane market. It settled a civil case stemming from [...]
Carbon Under the Lone Star: Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin will undertake a 10-year, $38 million project to study injecting and storing carbon dioxide underground — GreenCarCongress.GreatPoint’s Biomass Plant: The cleaner coal company backed with $100 million in venture funding is building a biomass demonstration plant in Somerset, Mass. — release.Green Policy [...]
Listen up, cleantech crew: according to one scientist, you may want to relocate your labs to the slopes of Mount St. Helens. Yesterday’s NY Times features a provocative op-ed piece by Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Global Ecology, in which he asserted that seeding the stratosphere (above where jets fly) with [...]
Not a week can go by without a declaration of the growth of cleantech investing. Here’s the latest from today: The Cleantech Network says venture capitalists in North America invested close to $1.3 billion in cleantech startups in the third quarter, a 50 percent increase over the second quarter and a 36 percent rise over [...]
The world will need to add the equivalent of two more Saudi Arabia’s to meet even the most conservative fuel consumption estimates over the next two decades, according to Donald Paul, CTO of Chevron (CVX). And that kind of scale is what startups need to keep in mind when thinking about how they can work [...]
When it comes to finding a successful exit for your cleantech startup, good luck finding a buyer willing to pay the price you want. That was the consensus of investors at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Conference this week. The cleantech industry is too young for its M&A market to have matured, and the IPO [...]
