Cool Cleantech Stories (1 Not Cool One)

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Some more good cleantech stories of the pastw week or so:

1. The City 2.0 Wins 2012 TED Prize. For the first time, the TED prize didn’t go to a person but to an idea. Of course, City 2.0 includes a lot of cleantech and other green-friendly features.

ted prize 2012 city 2.0

2. Electric Vehicle & Smart Energy System Teaming Up. Electric transportation and storage technology company ECOtality, Inc. is teaming up with Silver Spring Networks to mesh ECOtality’s Blink electric vehicle (EV) charging stations with the Silver Spring Smart Energy Platform. The integrated product will be for sale on the global market. “The companies demonstrated product interoperability at Grid-Interop 2011 [last] week,” ECOtality reports. “The joint development agreement will provide another option, in which the Blink station leverages Silver Spring’s Direct-to-Grid communications to securely connect to a utility’s Silver Spring smart grid network. Silver Spring utility clients can also deploy Silver Spring’s UtilityIQ Demand Response Manager, a robust demand response management system that includes smart EV charging. The application enables utilities to offer their customers EV charging options, schedule charging for off-peak times to reduce customer bills and control load for grid reliably, and collect EV-specific consumption data for billing.”

3. Australia & Sweden Ordering More Wind Turbines. “Vestas has received a firm and unconditional order for 56 units of the V90-3.0 MW wind turbine for Australia,” the company noted last week. The project they’ll be going to is the Musselroe Wind Farm in Tasmania, Australia, which will total 168 MW of power capacity. “Delivery of the wind turbines will begin during the fourth quarter of 2012 and the project is expected completed by June 2013.”

Sweden also ordered a heap of turbines from Vestas recently, 96 MW worth of them for its Lemnhult project

4. Industrial Distributed Energy Generation Expected to Increase 46-85% by 2016. “The industrial distributed generation (IDG) market landscape is evolving to include new technologies, systems, business models, and service providers that are altering how traditional transmission and distribution systems are controlled and operated,” a news release from last week notes. “As a result, according to a recent report from Pike Research, the IDG market is poised for significant growth over the next five years. Under a “low growth” forecast scenario, the market intelligence firm forecasts that total IDG capacity in the United States will increase by 46% between 2011 and 2016, rising from 91 gigawatts (GW) to 133 GW during that period. A more optimistic forecast scenario, which assumes a more favorable regulatory environment for IDG and more robust U.S. economic growth, foresees the market expanding to as high as 168 GW of capacity during that period, an 85% increase over 2011 levels.”

5. 76% of Religious Americans Want Global Warming Pact. “A new University of Maryland poll finds that 76 percent of Catholics and evangelicals support a global pact reducing the pollution that causes global warming, much like the one on the table in Durban, South Africa,” Think Progress reports.

6. Rick Perry Calls Solyndra a Country (and Calls It ‘Solynda’). Oh my. Think Progress notes, “the Solyndra story is a manufactured scandal Republicans have kept alive to try to smear the Obama administration.” Apparently, they’ve even gone as far as turning the company into a country and changing its name (ok, accidentally).

7. Solar Greenhouses in Ladakh, India. “These people have the timerity to produce energy and food – without BP, without a grid, without giant power plants, without giant corporations,  without coal, without oil. And they didn’t have to kill anyone,” Peter Sinclair notes. “That would never win you the Iowa GOP primary.” Probably not. Here’s more on these solar greenhouses in Ladakh, India:


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Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

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