CleanTechnica

At a cleantech panel about business opportunities running up to the 2012 Olympics in London, Dallas Kachan, managing director for the Cleantech Group, said that the second quarter “looks a lot like the first quarter” for cleantech investing so far.

In other words, it’s still down from last year, but deals are still happening and money is still available, he said. “The amount of investment is not continuing to plummet; it’s stable,” Kachan said. “Some might say we’ve reached bottom.” Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to environmental news, doom and gloom often rules the day. And it’s easy to get discouraged. But scientists from Yale University say most polluted ecosystems can recover in as little as 5 or 10 years.

The study means it’s not too late to turn things around if societies commit to cleanup, restoration and sustainability, according to Yale’s analysis of 240 independent studies. The findings appear in this month’s issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.
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LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, has become the alpha acronym when referring to green, or eco-friendly, buildings. The standard, from the U.S. Green Building Council, recently went 3.0.

Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, is taking the green diploma to an even higher degree. University officials are betting a new Living Learning Center will meet the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most stringent green building rating system from the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of the USGBC and its Canadian counterpart.

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There were many viewpoints this weekend at TIE’s annual ‘pow-wow’ TIEcon 2009 when it came to cleantech, but if I were to boil them down (in a electric stove running on renewable energy) I would say the essence can be summarized as this: the mundane matters.

I say this not because there was a lack of enthusiasm in the air-absolutely the opposite-rather I say it because a more zoomed-out perspective on cleantech has begun to crystallize, and with that everyone from VC’s to the entrepreneurs bootstrapping their way through the battlefields of innovation has recognized the value of niches within the ‘ecosystem’ of cleantech.

This, of course, is a fitting metaphor for the area of innovation hoping to save us from ourselves. The area of innovation slated to reinvigorate our intuitions about what it means to work alongside nature as opposed to taking it for granted. At the same time, the principles of business and innovation surrounding growth of capital via monetization requires these innovations to return deep profits for those invested. Here’s how that duality played out in real-time:

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Experts call energy efficiency the low-hanging fruit, because it’s cheaper to cut power use than create new energy from fossil fuels like coal.

But our creature comforts — like iPods, cell phones, PCs and plasma TVs — are sucking the life out of advances in energy efficiency around the world, the International Energy Agency says.

In other words, too much fruit is rotting on the vine.

The IEA says in a new “Gigawatts and Gadgets” report that electricity consumption from power-hungry electronics could cause household energy use to triple by 2030. That means increased greenhouse gases from electric generation, and increased electric bills for creating that power. Read the rest of this entry »

A new way to treat wood has trees back in the limelight: a hardwood’s reliability that even a rain forest mahogany tree can love.

The above picture is of the world’s first heavy traffic road bridge made from Accoya® wood. The bridge, located in Sneek in the Netherlands, is “the first wooden bridge in the world that can support the heaviest load class of 60 tons”.  At this week’s Wall Street Green Trading Summit, a panel on forestation introduced a new way of thinking about how to deal with destruction of the rain forest.

>> More from the recent Wall Street Green Trading Summit:   Opening, Carbon Markets, Weird Investments and Solar Panels for All.

I think we can all agree that planting trees is a good way to go environmentally green (they capture carbon like crazy), but lets take a look at that other green for a moment: the green of cash.  Forestation can turn a profit quickly, given that it is one of the few industries in the United States that we know for sure will be cross marketable as a carbon offset industry.  Read the rest of this entry »

Wilmington, Mass.-based fuel-cell company Lilliputian Systems, which announced it raised $28 million this week, wants to set the record straight.

In October, The Wall Street Journal wrote that the company would be shipping its matchbook-sized fuel cells late this year. But now, the company — which is developing the cells for a range of consumer electronics, including cell phones and laptops — isn’t saying when its products will be commercially available, only that it plans to announce the timing this summer. Does that mean we can expect a delay?

Mouli Ramani, vice president for business development, tells me that’s not the case. When he spoke with the Journal, he was referring to a test-market launch with its partners, not a commercial launch that would make the fuel cells available to the general public, he says. In other words, don’t expect to be able to buy Lilliputian fuel cells at Best Buy this year.

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A team of researchers at Rice University have discovered a way to improve the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries: use carbon-nanotube/metal-oxide arrays as electrode material. Rice’s nanotubes are grown to look and act like coaxial conducting lines used in cables.
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It may not look like much, but Serbian scientist and inventor Veljko Milkovic will tell you that under ideal conditions his two-stage mechanical oscillator will produce twelve times more energy at the business end of the machine than what is required at the input side of it.

[After spending several days reading the documents and opinions, watching the videos, and making myself comfortable with the material I link to below, I was sufficiently convinced that the 2-stage oscillator was—at the very least—something CleanTechnica's readers would find interesting. I welcome your comments and critique, because that is how science progresses -TBH]

Simply put, the two-stage oscillator consists of a lever and a pendulum: two machines that perform work individually. Milkovic and others claim that when these two machines are combined, assembled with the proper weight distribution, and properly synchronized, Centrifugal and Gravitational forces operate in concert to produce energy gains bordering on the astonishing. Read the rest of this entry »