Cali to TV-Makers: Cut Energy Consumption in Half by 2013: The California Energy Commission this week approved a first-in-the-nation efficiency standard for televisions, requiring new TVs sold in the state need to to reduce energy consumption by an average of 33 percent by 2011 and 49 percent by 2013.“Cash for Caulkers” Could Deliver $23B for [...]

  Aptera co-founder Chris Anthony has bowed out of day-to-day business activities at the three-wheeled vehicle developer as it seeks to put the brakes on its cash burn. But one of his other startups, Flux Power, has just hit the gas, with the launch of its first product last week.Based in Vista, Calif., Flux plans to [...]

  Electric car startup Tesla Motors plans to file for a public offering very soon, two anonymous sources tell Reuters — “any day,” according to one source. When we contacted Tesla for confirmation, the company supplied a statement from spokesperson Ricardo Reyes saying, “We do not comment on rumors or speculation.”But Tesla CEO and Chairman Elon [...]

  The award of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and loans for electric vehicles, batteries and charging infrastructure in the last few months has provided a major boost for companies working in the space. That’s true for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based ECOtality, whose subsidiary eTec (with several partners, including Nissan) won a nearly $100 million grant [...]

  Back when I was a broadband reporter for Red Herring magazine, I took a trip to Seoul and did the classic story on how South Korea kick-started its economy with government investment into blazing-fast broadband pipes that created its world-leading mobile and web industries. South Korea’s broadband buildout may hold some interesting lessons for the [...]

  “Oil is finite, but information is infinite,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said a year ago in a talk for the New America Foundation. Fortunately, we have online tools to organize and manage that information, sometimes in the interest of reducing oil consumption, as well as emissions and fuel expenses for drivers. The California Air Resources [...]

  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 Jintao this 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 [...]