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 [...]

  Amid heated debates over clean power sources, how to build out the smart grid, and the future of advanced transportation, one thing’s clear: Energy storage technology will play a key role in all of these transformations. Energy storage — from batteries to ultracapacitors to pumped hydro to compressed air — will be crucial for the [...]

  Why Open Source for the Smart Grid Needs a Kick-Start: Berkeley Labs has been working on an open source version of a system for demand response services for the power grid for more than five years. But only one company in that time has commercialized a version of the open source platform — a sign [...]

  Data center managers aren’t the only ones suddenly charmed by solid-state drives (SSDs) for computing storage needs. A growing number of VCs are also warming to the green, high-performance potential of the storage technology (GigaOM Pro Research, subscription required).With no moving parts to speak of, a solid-state drive is far and away more energy [...]

  Want to transform urban transit? Take a cue from Google, and invent a better algorithm. Service-based transportation networks offer a key for cities to address urban traffic congestion, encourage adoption of alternative transit and slash greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector, says Ryan Chin, a PhD candidate in the Smart Cities research group at [...]

  At this point, the number of creative ways that companies have developed to help home owners monitor and manage their energy consumption, seems to far surpass the volume of consumer interest. That’s OK, though, because the home energy management market is so new, and it’s still unclear which services and technologies will be the most [...]

  The Departments of Agriculture and Energy late yesterday announced they will be doling out a dozen grants — ranging from $1 million to $4 million each — to private sector and university research projects focused on alternative fuels and bio-based products. In total, the departments will give out $24.4 million in funding, part of their standard [...]