The wheels of a $500 million academic and industry collaboration to fight carbon emissions with bio-energy, are starting to turn. On the 1st of December Christopher Somerville will officially start his work as the Director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, (EBI), a first of its kind, half a billion dollar partnership between energy giant BP, [...]

  Boise, Idaho-based biomechanics startup M2E Power announced today that they have raised $8 million in Series A funding. The 22 month-old company’s investment was led by OVP Venture Partners with particiaption by @Ventures and Highway 12 Ventures. M2E has created a microgenerator and a battery storage system that can capture energy from the daily motions [...]

  Cleantech Fringe Photo Spread: CNET has an eye-candy photo essay of cutting edge photogenic clean energy tech. Purdy — CNETYum, Fat in a Box: Pacific Natural Energy (PNE) has developed FatBox which can transform fat into fuel. I’m sure it’s very useful but it sounds like a horror movie — Renewable Energy Access.Exxon, Partners to [...]

  It’s starting to feel like a mad dash to the legislative finish line. With just days to go before the Thanksgiving holiday, my estimation earlier this week that Congress might wholesale the environmental integrity of the Energy Bill remains a possibility, but overall, as discussions continue behind closed doors, the fate of the bill is [...]

  Enter your zip code into the newly launched Carbon Monitoring for Action web site and you’re likely to uncover some information that will surprise you — there’s really a power plant that close to me spewing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of carbon emissions into the atmosphere? Good to know. When it comes to [...]

  Enzymes are fragile — they don’t like things such as chemicals or heat. And as enzymes are increasingly being put to work in the cleantech world, stabilizing enzymes that can be used in renewable energy applications is becoming a valuable technology. St. Louis, Miss.-based Akermin, which is working on developing this enzyme-stabilizing technology, said this [...]

  Venture Vehicles Bruce in NYT: We got a ride with Venture Vehicle’s Ian Bruce a few weeks ago, so we can tell you the NYT’s description of “an Italian-made alligator-skin boot”-wearing Bruce driving his “three-wheel thrill machine” is spot on. Though, still cheesy as heck — NYT.Formula 1 Biofuel: The Brazilian oil company, Petrobras, announced [...]

  Looks like the $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute — a partnership between BP, and the research labs of UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to work on bioenergy technology — is finally up and running. The group said Wednesday that the contract has been finalized and work is [...]

  Former VP Al Gore has gone all cleantech VC, so why can’t a presidential candidate use a cleantech venture fund as a platform for election? Illinois Senator Barack Obama said on Wednesday that, if elected, he would create a ‘Clean Technologies Deployment Venture Capital Fund’ backed by an annual $10 billion investment over five years. [...]

  J. Craig Venter says he expects biology to largely replace what has been created by the oil industry. If anyone can comfortably make a statement like that to a room full of venture capitalists, it’s Venter. The genomics guru, who has had his own genome sequenced and has a new memoir out he’s looking to [...]