Clean Tech News & Views: Solar Energy News. Wind Energy News. EV News. & More.
Taiwan’s Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world from 2004-2007. Now, it is looking to become the world’s tallest GREEN building. The building’s owner, Taipei Financial Center Corp (TFC), is putting in $1.9 million to give this 101-story building a green makeover.
The new green economy is putting more robots to work in green jobs, especially in environmental research and related fields. In a sustainability twofer, many of the new machines are powered by solar energy and other green alternatives. Click through the show to see what’s up with some of our circuit-centric friends. 1. Robolobster Northeastern [...]
Mix salt water with fresh water and there you have it: instant carbon-neutral energy. The process is called osmotic power, and a company called Statkraft has just opened the world’s first osmotic power plant in Norway. For now the plant has a limited production capacity and will focus mainly on testing and developing the technology [...]
Mad scientists don’t usually hang around in Switzerland, tinkering around with their crazy ideas and running after them down the asphalt. Thankfully Bertrand Piccard, who flew the Breitling Orbiter hot air balloon around the world in 1999, isn’t mad. In fact, this idea may just fly. In 2003 he and the Solar Impulse Foundation announced [...]
Daniel Nocera’s Sun Catalytix was one of the 37 ARPA-E awardees last month with a $4.1 million vote of confidence from the Nobel prizewinner-driven Department of Energy. Now Polaris Venture Partners has just added $1 million to its earlier $2 million investment in the MIT spin-off to bring their total investment to $3 million. Nocera’s [...]
Puff (a car exhaust monitoring device) is attached near the exhaust pipe of your vehicle. Its color changes dynamically, visualizing the amount of pollution your car is producing. Green indicates the lowest rate of pollution, red the highest. Karolina Sobecka, the artist/designer of Puff, explains: In this project, design is used as a strategy to explore the overlap between the material and immaterial worlds and spur discussion on the hidden social and psychological mechanisms behind the cultural use of accessories as ‘objects to think with’…Amateur Human (the design project’s official name) focuses on the environmental issues since we all are inadvertently becoming more eco-conscious whether we want to or not, and these issues seem both overwhelming and ambiguous.
Through its Texas subsidiary Horizon Wind Energy, the giant Portuguese company EDP Renewables; the second largest wind company in the world, intends to almost triple its US projects to $4 billion worth of new wind energy projects in the United States through 2012. This year alone Horizon Wind Energy installed $1.5 billion worth of wind [...]
Transit use boomed from 2006-2008, but not in traditionally transit-friendly areas. This shows hope for more transit use in traditionally car-oriented places in the US in the future. An analysis of the most recent transit use data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that transit use grew by up to 47% in major metropolitan areas [...]
