Danfoss IXA of Denmark has a simple idea for changing the way greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants are managed in industrial environments: measure them at the source. The startup, a spinoff of the Danfoss Group, is working on sensor technology packaged in a hermetically sealed box with a nano-coated sight glass that can withstand super-harsh [...]

  For the entrepreneurs competing to win the $250,000 grand prize package in the Cleantech Open business plan competition — and join the ranks of past winners like Adura Technologies — the wait is over. Tonight in San Francisco, the organization announced finalists from each region (listed below the break). But the big kahuna goes to [...]

  Having logged a quarter of a million miles on the road in pre-production models, built more than 300 prototype battery packs and completed tests for more than 50,000 lithium-ion battery cells, GM says its Chevy Volt is on track to meet its remaining production milestones less than a year from launch. But the U.S. car [...]

  Duke Energy, a utility that has 4 million customers across the Midwest and the Carolinas, doesn’t want to be in the business of selling and making consumer electronics. The utility is not interested in helping sell iPhones, selecting the devices that consumers want to use for energy management, or rolling out trucks to neighborhoods to [...]

  General Electric started churning out plans earlier this year for cleaner heavy-haul locomotive technology, announcing its intention in May to produce batteries for hybrid trains in upstate New York and unveiling a new, more fuel-efficient locomotive model. This morning, the conglomerate has announced a set of agreements with various companies and the government of China [...]

  Number eight on our list of 10 Things to Know About Smart Grid Security was this: Utilities need much better privacy safeguards. While the massive amount of data that will be unleashed by adding digital intelligence to the power grid needs to be kept out of the hands of cyber-hackers who would use it to [...]

  If diplomats headed to Copenhagen this December are able to negotiate a new global climate treaty, how will the world know these countries are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as much as they claim? Michael Woelk, the chief executive of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Picarro, believes he has an answer: build a network of monitoring sites equipped [...]

  Carbon capture and water desalination couldn’t seem further apart. One seeks to grab large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and sequester them away from the planet’s atmosphere, and the other is a process for separating salt from seawater. Where’s the connection? It lies in the labs of Hayward, Calif.-based startup Porifera, a spinoff from the [...]

  While we put conglomerate General Electric on our list of “Tech Vendors That Will Cash in On the Smart Grid Stimulus Funds,” we didn’t get the full impact the funds could have on GE in the days after the awards were announced. But the Wall Street Journal’s got that this morning, and says that around [...]

  General Motors trotted out preliminary financial results for the first time this morning since it sloughed off bad assets to the government and emerged from bankruptcy this summer: GM saw a net loss of $1.15 billion between July 10 and September 30 of this year, but ended the quarter with $42.6 billion in cash on [...]

  Dutch to Try Road Tax Alternative: The Dutch government has approved a plan to replace the annual road tax on cars with mileage fees in an effort to reduce traffic congestion and vehicle emissions. Starting in 2012, GPS devices will be used to monitor vehicles, tracking the time, hour and place each car moves and [...]

  The co-founders of Aptera Motors, Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony, did not leave the three-wheeled electric car startup by choice, according to a report this morning over at Wired’s Autopia. Rather, unnamed sources tell the blog that Fambro and Anthony were pushed out in “a boardroom confrontation between the original founders and the auto industry [...]

  When news breaks that a company is in talks to be acquired, pundits are often quick to point to it as a positive sign. But in reality, it all depends on the valuation and the price of the deal. Over the past couple of days the Financial Times and Reuters have reported that Ausra, the [...]

  Top executives from 13 companies including California utility Pacific Gas & Electric, Japanese automaker Nissan, smart grid startup GridPoint, battery maker A123Systems, battery giant Johnson Controls-Saft, and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, are joining forces this morning as the founding members of a new alliance called the Electrification Coalition with a shared vision for how [...]