Green IT

Electric carmaker Tesla Motors said on Wednesday it does not expect the contentious divorce of its chief executive, Elon Musk, to affect its plans to list its shares and does not rely on him to provide further funding.

The California start-up, in a filing with U.S. securities regulators, sought to distance itself from a divorce dispute between Musk and his estranged wife that has cast a shadow over what had been one of the most anticipated IPOs of the year.

"We do not believe that Mr. Musk's personal financial situation has any impact on us," the … Read more

ENXSuite, formerly known as Carbonetworks, is one of many software companies betting that businesses need to actively manage energy spending.

The start-up announced Thursday that it has changed its name and has hired former Oracle and Aspect Communications executive Beatriz Infante as CEO. It's also in the process of raising additional capital to expand, it said.

When it first launched in 2007 from Vancouver, ENXSuite developed software for businesses to manage carbon-reduction programs and comply with regulations. Since then, it's expanded its hosted software to track greenhouse gas emissions as well as energy, water, and waste.

"We … Read more

Greenpeace activists on Wednesday cloaked Dell headquarters in Texas with a banner directed at founder Michael Dell that read, "Michael, What the Dell? Design Out Toxics! - Greenpeace."

The publicity stunt was timed with the Wednesday release of Greenpeace's 15th quarterly "Guide to Greener Electronics" (PDF).

The environmental activist group gave a low score to computer manufacturing giant Dell for its failure to make good on a promise to eliminate toxins like PVC plastics and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from its products.

Greenpeace gave the company low points in its July 2009 guide for missing … Read more

Though he helped start Sun Microsystems, Bill Joy has been spent the last five years thinking a lot more about solar energy than about that other Sun.

"It's early days," Joy said of the green-technology industry he now focuses on as a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins. "It's like the Internet before the Netscape IPO."

But, he said, there are needs in his new field that are quite different from those encountered by most Internet ventures.

"Most Internet companies don't make anything other than software or a Web site," Joy said. &… Read more

What do 10,000 cows and diesel generators have in common?

Both have the ability to power a 1-megawatt data center. Diesel generators are already used for this purpose at some data center sites, though the energy source is not very environmentally friendly. On the other hand, 10,000 cows grazing a dairy farm produce 20,000 metric tons of manure each year that can be turned into methane gas and eventually electrical power.

That's according to researchers from HP Labs, who are presenting a paper on these findings at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Phoenix … Read more

Virgin chief Richard Branson has seen the enemy and it is carbon.

Branson is touting the Carbon War Room, a group of entrepreneurs, public sector officials, and industry leaders as a way to "remove gigatons of carbon out of industry." Branson, speaking at the SAP Sapphire conference, a coordinated Orlando-Frankfurt powwow with customers, Branson said:

When asked where information technology fits into this war on carbon, Branson noted that the industry plays a big role. Information technology companies and industry leaders need to … Read more

Researchers at MIT say they have come up with designs for a new generation of commercial aircraft that could use as much as 70 percent less fuel than today's airliners.

As part of a $2.1 million NASA grant, the MIT-led team said that its designs for a so-called "N+3" airplane--meaning three generations beyond today's airplanes--could leverage new technologies like advanced airframe configurations and propulsion systems and could deliver the 70 percent fuel savings by around 2035.

In a release, Ed Greitzer, an aeronautics and astronautics professor at MIT, said that meeting NASA's criteria for new, highly-efficient aircraft designs would require a "radical change" from the current aviation paradigm. That's mainly because airplanes largely have the same design today as they've had for the last 50 years--an "easily recognizable 'tube and wing' structure of an aircraft's wings and fuselage."

But Greitzer's team crafted two designs that could upend the traditional airplane paradigm. One is a 180-passenger D "double bubble" series, which could eventually replace the Boeing 737 that is used for so much domestic travel; and the 350-passenger H "hybrid wing body" series, which could take the place of the popular Boeing 777 used for many international flights. … Read more

An IBM supercomputer is doubling as a space heater via a technique that reduces energy use by 40 percent and dramatically lowers the overall carbon footprint.

Based at Swiss university ETH Zurich and dubbed Aquasar, the liquid-cooled supercomputer went live on Thursday and started analyzing fluid dynamics while simultaneously providing heat for the building. In a typical data center, about half of the energy is used for cooling.

Researchers at IBM and ETH Zurich will monitor the system, which consists of two IBM BladeCenter servers in one rack, able to compute six teraflops. They will be gathering data on energy … Read more

BOSTON--Doubling the performance of clean-energy technologies every 18 months, as the semiconductor industry has seen with Moore's Law, is a tough goal to hit. But the same technical and business concepts that underpin Moore's Law can play out in green tech, say executives from General Electric and Intel.

More businesses are seeking to make money around energy technology and environmental sustainability. But the scale and speed of innovation needs to ramp up in order to tackle environmental problems and conserve natural resources, according to a panel at the annual Ceres conference here on Thursday. Ceres is a network … Read more