Trying to bring the production of biofuels closer to their consumption destination — be it the feedstock or the pumping station — isn’t a new idea. Several of Vinod Khosla’s biofuel investments are focused on cutting down the energy, and thus the cost, expended in transportation. This morning a similarly distributed, mobile biofuel investment bet [...]

  Vinod Khosla gave a speech down at Sand Hill Road yesterday in which he offered the most detailed description of his portfolio companies that we’ve heard. Breaking it down into four categories — the war on oil, the war on coal, efficiency and materials — he discussed at least 32 portfolio companies that he hopes [...]

  Given Tesla’s first electric car model won’t reach customers until next year, the hundreds of its eco-conscious sports car-loving (occasional celebrity) customers that have actually made it onto the waiting list are likely getting a bit antsy. And they probably wouldn’t like to watch the six or seven crash tests that have cost up to [...]

  Paul Dickerson, the COO of the federal government’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), says he has two goals: One, show industry and the venture capital worlds that his department is a friend to business – not isolated and bureaucratic, like government divisions tend to be. And two, educate the world that Americans [...]

  There’s a lot of talk about how many jobs the cleantech revolution is going to create. If you think about all the various sectors — solar, biofuels, water, to name a few — one would think the number of jobs created would be in the millions. And if you’re an American, it’s important that [...]

  Solar Thermal Trend: Ausra’s John O’Donnell leads us through the trend in utility-scale solar thermal plants — BusinessWeek.Grid Gear: Utilities are checking out battery options to beef up the power grid — MIT Tech Review.Power grid watchdog, we need power lines: The group that oversees North America’s power grid, the North American Electric Reliability Corp, [...]

  There’s a lot of obvious costs of climate change — you know, like making the Earth uninhabitable. Some of the lesser known costs to industry can be quantified and the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Environmental Research put out a report recently looking into some of these economic effects. Here’s 5 economic losses to [...]

  One day, the old-skool electricity grid will have the smart network capabilities of the Internet — distributed, self-healing, maybe even peer-to-peer. It’s a huge future business opportunity that’s prompting investors to put money into startups like GridPoint, which this morning said it closed a $48.5 million Series D round that was led by Goldman Sachs [...]

  A Princeton professor is proposing that coal be combined with biomass to create what’s called synfuels — high-performance, low-emission jet fuel. Combined with a carbon capture and sequestration system, the process could produce “near-zero greenhouse gas emissions.” The announcement came as Richard Branson told a conference that Virgin would be test-flying jets with biofuels in [...]

  Climate change means we’ll be facing more unpredictable weather — and if you’re in a weather-sensitive business like farming or owning a ski resort, unexpected weather can mean a significant loss of sales. San Francisco startup WeatherBill, founded by former Google (GOOG) exec David Friedberg, offers businesses financial protection against unexpected weather — basically weather [...]