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 [...]

  Ztek to Bloom Energy, Stop Infringing: Fuel-cell company Ztek has accused competitor Bloom Energy of patent infringement, according to a Calif. government document reported by Greentech Media.Branson’s BioJetFuel: Richard Branson said Virgin Group wants to make biofuels at the beginning of the next decade and will test a jet plane on biofuel early next year [...]

  When Bill Joy was hired by venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Paul Kedrosky wondered if Joy would be a Bob Metcalfe (a high-profile person that moved to VC late and fits the job) or a Stewart Alsop (a high-profile person that moved to VC late and doesn’t fit the job). We’re not ready [...]

  Corn-based ethanol just can’t win. Even Biotown USA — a town renamed for biofuels a couple years ago — couldn’t make the economics of an ethanol plant built by VeraSun (VSE) work in this current market. Now another ethanol producer, BioFuel Energy Corp. (BIOF), has said it’s halting work on its third planned plant due [...]

  Despite all the new efforts in clean technology, our world still bears the scars of many years of dirty technologies. One particularly nasty leftover is an industrial degreaser called trichloroethylene (TCE), which is found in more than 60 percent of U.S. Superfund toxic waste cleanup sites. Now, a new genetically-engineered poplar tree could provide a [...]

  EnerDel To Power Think: EnerDel says it has signed a deal with Think Global to supply the of choice for lithium-ion batteries — release.Governator Signs Bill for $125M Per Year For Green Cars: The California governor signed a bill to spend $125M annually on alternative fuels and clean car technology — GreentechMedia.Time On the [...]

  Here’s betting you’ve never heard of one of the world’s top ten killers: indoor air pollution. Every day roughly 3 billion people around the world cook and heat their homes by burning biomass such as wood, crop waste, and dung without proper ventilation, and, according to the World Health Organization, the resulting toxic air accounts [...]

  Steve Jobs is probably as tired of Greenpeace watching Apple’s (AAPL) eco moves as we’re sick of hearing about Nicole Richie’s pregnancy — as in, a lot. Greenpeace released a report this morning that says Apple’s mobile game changer — the iPhone — contains toxic brominated compounds (which the report says indicates the presence of [...]