Author: Zachary Shahan

Net-Zero Solar Homes with $0 Electric Bills (& You Can Win One)

14 years ago Zachary Shahan 7 Comments

Well, this is outside the realm of what I normally cover, but this is pretty cool. A commercial home builder, Meritage Homes, has started offering net-zero, super-green homes. With a starting price of $140,000 and incomparable electric bills, these are affordable and green. With solar panels as part of the package, you don’t even have to go through the simple trouble of finding an installer and getting solar added — probably the biggest obstacle to people going solar.

Green Futuristic Airships Coming to a Sky Near You?

14 years ago Zachary Shahan 2 Comments

“The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt.”

That’s the intro to a piece on The Daily Climate on these promising, Super Cool airships of the 21st century. These low-carbon options for air cargo transport are currently being targeted at China, Africa, northern Canada, and other developing markets where there currently isn’t much (or any) transportation infrastructure

Jobs and the Cleantech VC Boom

14 years ago Zachary Shahan 3 Comments

The recently released data reporting a substantial increase in overall Venture Capital Investment and, in particular, a near record increase for the cleantech sector, should come as encouraging news on the employment front. What is more significant than overall invested capital ($2.57 billion for Cleantech, up 52% from the previous quarter) is that the number of deals remained nearly flat, which means of course that the deal-size is up significantly. A closer look reveals that the majority of the dollars committed went to later-stage deals, many to fund scale up and commercialization phase activities, therefore driving job creation across a number of functions.

Google’s Clean Energy Projects (7 Big Ones)

14 years ago Zachary Shahan 16 Comments

Google is one of the largest clean energy corporate leaders in the U.S. If we had more Googles (and fewer Facebooks or Apples), it looks like we’d have a much brighter future. Hopefully others will follow Google’s lead sooner than later on this front, or even try to one-up it. With a number of recent clean energy project announcements, I thought it might be nice to run down a list of Google’s major projects of the last year or so.