One sixth of the world’s servers — computers that run web services — are not being used at all, wasting $24.7 billion in total costs per year, including $3.8 billion in energy-related costs, according to a new report published Thursday. Researchers at  the Alliance to Save Energy, Kelton Research and 1E, a software IT company, [...]

  The technology behind the first “Green Revolution” in agriculture, during the 1960s and ’70s, focused on boosting crop yields, to help feed growing populations and spur economic growth in Latin America and Asia. But that revolution wasn’t all that green in the 2009 sense of the term, relying heavily on chemical fertilizers and increased irrigation. [...]

  When it comes to the smart grid, utility executives seem willing to embrace the dumb pipe status that their cousins in the telecommunications world are so leery of. That’s because the history of heavy regulation — and near-monopoly — has created an environment where competition and innovation aren’t commonly baked into the utility business model. [...]

  Even though the “smart grid” industry is a hot topic these days — with $4 billion in federal stimulus funds set to be doled out in weeks and a potential $210 billion in revenues between 2010 to 2015 — the term can still be a dirty word for some utilities. That’s because some in the [...]

  Climate-Security Connection: National security fears loom large for politicians who might otherwise oppose carbon legislation. That’s why John Kerry, rather than Barbara Boxer, has become the face of the Senate climate bill and why environmentalists are hitching up with veterans groups. — TNR’s The VineRedox Flow Batteries for EVs: “Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for [...]

  Solar thermal power company Solel Solar Systems has found an exit. Less than a year after Solel raised a gigantic $105 million investment from London-based firm Ecofin to help finance a plant in California’s Mojave Desert, Siemens has announced today that it is buying the Israeli company from Ecofin (and another unnamed major shareholder) for [...]

  Waiting for the cellulosic ethanol industry to move into commercial production is like watching grass grow. This morning cellulosic ethanol developer Coskata unveiled that it’s demonstration plant in Madison, Penn., is now up and running and ready to produce 50,000 gallons of the biofuel per year. It’s a big milestone for the company in terms [...]

  While utilities and companies are eagerly awaiting the upcoming announcement about which of the hundreds of applicants managed to grab a piece of the $4 billion from the federal stimulus package for smart grid projects, it looks like states could offer smaller runner-up prizes. Smart meter tech maker SmartSynch says that it’s been awarded a [...]

  Green building geeks now have a more powerful tool for developing next-gen building designs with minimal environmental impact. Software engineers at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory launched this week an update of their plug-in for SketchUp, Google’s open-source 3D building modeling tool. With a growing list of features, the latest version of [...]

  State law requires the California Energy Commission (CEC) to assemble a report every other year with recommendations for policies to “conserve resources; protect the environment; ensure reliable, secure, and diverse energy supplies; enhance the state’s economy; and protect public health and safety.”That’s a massive task, particularly during a time of flux for how we generate, [...]

  Green jobs have become a sort of mantra of late among the political left, with supporters looking to clean-energy sectors to produce companies hungry for new hires and help ease the pain of the economic downturn. Today research firm Clean Edge, known among other things for its annual Clean Energy Trends reports, weighed into the [...]

  GE is upping its stake in technologies designed to make and use electricity more efficiently. The company’s investment arm, GE Energy Financial Services, today announced it has invested in three startups: SolarEdge, which has developed electronics to monitor solar panels and maximize their production, Tendril, which has developed energy-management technology for utilities and consumers, and [...]

  For an international auto show organized around the theme “Fun Driving for Us, Eco Driving for Earth,” it’s only fitting for some cool green designs to be in the works. But while most automakers will have some kind of lower-emission offering on display when the Tokyo Motor Show kicks off next week, a few models [...]

  Microsoft revealed today the latest part of its plan to carve out a fatter slice of the smart grid pie: a software architecture for utilities called Smart Energy Reference Architecture, or SERA. Described by Microsoft as its “first comprehensive reference architecture that addresses technology integration throughout the full scope of the smart energy ecosystem,” SERA [...]