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 [...]

  Now that large, established players — Silver Spring Networks and Cisco (CSCO) — are building out the smart grid network, the next area for innovation will be the applications, software and services designed to run on top of the network. That’s a trend we’ve covered, and it has been heavily discussed at this week’s GreenBeat [...]

  In a long speech on a variety of greentech subjects — ranging from renewable energy technology to prospects for the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen to the U.S. Senate’s slow pace on the climate bill  — former Vice President and current Kleiner Perkins partner Al Gore singled out the smart grid as a key initiative [...]

  Cisco has made a ton of noise in the smart grid space — CEO John Chambers told the Wall Street Journal this year that the company had an unlimited budget for smart grid initiatives — but it’s been unclear what exactly Cisco would be selling to utilities. As Laura Ipsen, Senior Vice President of the [...]

  President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintaothis week launched a joint effort to “reduce oil dependency, cut greenhouse gas emissions and promote economic growth” through accelerated deployment of electric vehicles — an effort that needn’t exist in opposition to “green mobility efforts.” Nor should it overplay the role of personal vehicles as a solution [...]

  We’ve yet to delve too deeply into all of the fisticuffs surrounding the suit filed by a Bakersfield, Calif. resident against utility PG&E for a smart meter that he says tripled his electricity bill. Other residents in the area have complained to the media and PG&E about billing discrepancies. In response, PG&E has slowed down [...]

  “Aptera’s production and delivery will be tied directly to funding,” said Aptera Motors CEO Paul Wilbur in a release from the ultra high-efficiency vehicle startup late yesterday. That very mild assessment belies the reality that Aptera is peering across the Valley of Death, where many ventures die for lack of funding at the critical commercial [...]

  At VentureBeat’s GreenBeat conference last night, Kleiner Perkins leader John Doerr touched on a lot of the themes he usually does: the necessity of putting a price on carbon, greentech as “the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century,” and the smart grid being a massive opportunity. But Doerr did make one very interesting statement [...]

  Daimler’s car2go, a car-sharing pilot project with 200 Smart Fortwo vehicles first announced in March, officially kicked off Wednesday in Austin, Texas. Now city employees will be able to pick up networked vehicles at stations and designated parking spaces around Austin, and drop them off anywhere within the service area.The Austin network, modeled after a [...]

  Rupert Murdoch’s got a new partner with a Silicon Valley pedigree to help his company News Corp go carbon neutral by 2010: Hara. The media giant plans to announce on Thursday that’s it’s using Hara’s software to track and reduce energy and carbon emissions.While we all know News Corp — with its vast network of [...]

  For plug-in vehicle makers, “a radical new form of market segmentation” holds the key to reaching beyond wealthy, green-minded early adopters, according to a new report from McKinsey & Co. The common approach of trying to build a vehicle that can satisfy virtually all the driving needs for a large swath of consumers may hinder [...]

  It’s official: New TVs sold in California will be more energy efficient in coming years. The hotly debated state energy efficiency standards for televisions — the first of their kind in the nation — have just been approved by the California Energy Commission (hat tip our friends at sister site NewTeeVee). The standards say that [...]

  Selling the Smart Grid to Average Joe: Smart grid analyst Jesse Berst examines how the Electrification Roadmap released this week by a coalition of heavyweight CEOs could be an inflection point for the smart grid. “Electric transportation is something the public wants; it will take a significant infrastructure upgrade to make it happen; and it [...]

  Updated with comment from Ener1: Norway-based electric vehicle developer Think has narrowed the “short list” of locations for its first North American manufacturing facility to at least three states, including Indiana, Michigan and Oregon. A Reuters article published late Tuesday reported that Indiana has a lock on the facility, citing an interview with the CEO [...]