Daimler’s car2go, a car-sharing pilot project with 200 Smart Fortwo vehicles first announced in March, officially kicked off Wednesday in Austin, Tex. Now city employees will be able to pick up networked vehicles at stations and designated parking spaces around Austin, and drop them off anywhere within the service area.The Austin network, modeled after a [...]
Rupert Murdoch’s got a new partner with a Silicon Valley pedigree to help his company News Corp go carbon neutral by 2010: Hara. The media giant plans to announce on Thursday that’s it’s using Hara’s software to track and reduce energy and carbon emissions.While we all know News Corp — with its vast network of [...]
For plug-in vehicle makers, “a radical new form of market segmentation” holds the key to reaching beyond wealthy, green-minded early adopters, according to a new report from McKinsey & Co. The common approach of trying to build a vehicle that can satisfy virtually all the driving needs for a large swath of consumers may hinder [...]
It’s official: New TVs sold in California will be more energy efficient in coming years. The hotly debated state energy efficiency standards for televisions — the first of their kind in the nation — have just been approved by the California Energy Commission (hat tip our friends at sister site NewTeeVee). The standards say that [...]
Selling the Smart Grid to Average Joe: Smart grid analyst Jesse Berst examines how the Electrification Roadmap released this week by a coalition of heavyweight CEOs could be an inflection point for the smart grid. “Electric transportation is something the public wants; it will take a significant infrastructure upgrade to make it happen; and it [...]
Updated with comment from Ener1: Norway-based electric vehicle developer Think has narrowed the “short list” of locations for its first North American manufacturing facility to at least three states, including Indiana, Michigan and Oregon. A Reuters article published late Tuesday reported that Indiana has a lock on the facility, citing an interview with the CEO [...]
Step aside “Cash for Clunkers,” and make way for “Cash for Caulkers.” The White House is reportedly considering rolling out a two-year, $23 billion program to encourage homeowners to undertake weatherization projects such as adding air sealing, insulation and energy-saving light bulbs. The program would be called Home Star -– playing off the name Energy [...]
While the debate over how — or if — consumers will want to manage their home energy consumption makes a lot of headlines, commercial buildings suck up 18 percent of the total energy consumption in the U.S. and represent one of the biggest opportunities for energy efficiency improvements and carbon reduction. According to Pike Research, [...]
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 [...]
