The Winners and Losers in the Smart Grid Stimulus Funds: The $3.4 billion in smart grid stimulus fund awards were announced this week and close to 100 recipients woke up today to the equivalent of Christmas morning — here’s a chart showing 13 of the biggest winners.What the ARPA-E Bets Mean for the Future of [...]

  As utilities start to build large solar projects and solar power makes up an increasingly larger portion of the electricity mix, integrating this energy into the grid will be a challenge. Solar, like wind, is intermittent — power from the sun fluctuates when clouds pass overhead and wind doesn’t blow consistently. Now General Electric, which [...]

  Well, that didn’t last long. Less than a year after Ford Motor and Smith Electric Vehicles announced plans to collaborate on an electric version of the Detroit automaker’s Transit Connect commercial van for the U.S. market, the two companies have called it quits on the deal.Ford and Smith, which have both received multimillion-dollar awards from [...]

  Climate change, corporate carbon footprints and policies in the works to address them present real risk for businesses and their investors. But can shareholders demand disclosure of that risk? As of this week, thanks to a new ruling from the Securities and Exchange Commission, now they can.Prior to this decision, handed down on Tuesday, the [...]

  Think of rooftop solar and you likely envision photovoltaic panels. But a group of solar startups are working to put concentrating solar-thermal systems – more commonly seen in large solar projects in the desert – on roofs too. One such startup, San Jose, Calif.-based Chromasun, unveiled its first collector at the Solar Power International conference [...]

  The Department of Energy this week announced the first round of grants under its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, which was created to back risky but potentially breakthrough technologies. Out of the 37 projects awarded grants, three are focused on improving building energy efficiency and could help spur what Secretary of Energy Steven Chu [...]

  Companies like Applied Materials and Oerlikon are building businesses out of selling so-called “turnkey” (ready to use) thin-film solar manufacturing equipment to would-be solar developers. The idea is that instead of developing the technology itself, a solar maker can just buy the gear and start churning out panels with relative ease. But the reality is, [...]

  Business Models in the Electric Motorcycle Revolution: What electric motorcycle startups are “trying to do with the motorized two-wheeler is more revolutionary than evolutionary and so their approach to the market must be distinct, perhaps diametric to that of the companies that currently occupy the landscape.” — Asphalt and Rubber via Autoblog GreenHow to Cultivate [...]

  Want to slap some solar panels on your house, or retrofit an office building to make it more energy-efficient? Those can be expensive projects, out of reach for many families and businesses. So the president of a company called Renewable Funding developed a scheme to help finance property owners’ solar power and energy-efficiency projects through [...]

  Tesla Motors just snagged a hefty tax break in California. The state’s Alternative Energy and Advanced Transportation Financing Authority, part of the Treasurer’s office, yesterday approved a request from the startup to avoid paying sales tax on up to $320 million worth of manufacturing equipment — a deal expected to save Tesla $28.8 million, according [...]

  Energy-harvesting devices, which draw tiny amounts of power from sources like the sun and vibration, have slowly started to appear in industrial and commercial applications, like wireless sensor networks. But battery-free consumer electronics have mostly remained out of reach (see what happened to M2EPower). However, two-and-a-half-year-old Netherlands-based startup GreenPeak is looking to change that, and [...]

  Envia Systems, a battery materials startup based in Hayward, Calif., has just entered an elite group: the 1 percent of applicants awarded a first-round grant under the Department of Energy’s high-risk energy tech fund, ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy). Given that Envia, founded in 2007, had previously announced only $3.2 million in venture capital financing, [...]

  Its looking like the solar industry may be heading back into a not-so-sunny period, at least as far as corporate earnings are concerned.First, SunPower indicated last week that its 2009 revenue would be weaker than many investors had expected, sparking a selloff that has since stripped 24 percent from the stock’s market value. Then Germany, [...]

  In a couple months the $3.4 billion in stimulus funds for smart grid projects will be doled out to about 100 utilities and cities. But the tech vendors — smart meter makers, network software developers, wireless sensor gear companies — will see those funds flow down in the form of contracts. While the ecosystem as [...]