Energy efficiency

With so many "green" options appearing on everyday products, navigating the marketplace can be tricky if you're attempting to green your life.

Home Depot stamps efficient lightbulbs, low-toxic paints, and other goods as "Eco Options." SC Johnson sells Windex certified by Greenlist, the company's internal effort to reduce toxicants in its product line. Canon labels printers as "Generation Green."

Environmentalists may applaud corporate efforts to sell fewer polluting and poisonous goods and services. But some consumer watchdogs warn that the proliferation of green claims will confuse or mislead shoppers, and prefer that … Read more

China is the Saudi Arabia of waste heat, according to Roger Ballentine, president of Green Strategies.

The country's power plants aren't very efficient and, unlike Denmark or Japan, China hasn't invested a lot in technologies that can capture the heat and harness it to produce electricity. That means there's a vast amount of potential energy being squandered--or waiting to be tapped by an entrepreneur or two.

China isn't alone. Over half of the electricity produced in the U.S., for instance, never actually gets used for a productive purpose. A lot of it gets converted … Read more

Want to green your life in honor of Earth Day on Tuesday? Good luck. There's seemingly no limit to the potential catch-22s of trying to do the right thing by the environment.

For example, could so-called green fuel destroy rainforests and drive up food prices? Are organic vegetables shipped from South America really better than those grown conventionally yet closer to home? What if the making of solar panels would pollute a city in China?

Consumers are far removed from the design, mining, manufacture, packaging, and transportation involved in making goods available for daily life, while a complex global … Read more

Danny Kennedy may have come up with a way to make solar panels an impulse buy.

Sungevity, Kennedy's company, has come up with a Web-based system for evaluating the solar potential for a given home through satellite data. Customers log onto Sungevity's site and provide an address and some information about their monthly electrical bill.

Within 24 hours, the company sends customers a quote for installing a solar system, an estimate of how much the system will save them over 25 years, the prospective increase in the value of their home, and simulated imagery of what their home … Read more

It looks good on paper. Combine the managerial expertise of the computer world's start-ups with the growing market for green energy.

But, as Larry Gross as discovered, it doesn't always work. Gross, brother of Bill Gross and a former entrepreneur at Idealabs, is no longer the CEO of AltraBiofuels, according to Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech. The 4-year-old AltraBiofuels has pulled in millions in venture funds.

So far, there's no explanation for the departure.

Gross, though, isn't the only former IT exec to also be a former energy exec. Late last year, Martin Tobias, a software VC … Read more

Here's a measurement you probably haven't thought of before: it takes between 3,000 gallons and 6,000 gallons of water to power a 60-watt incandescent bulb for 12 hours a day over the course of a year.

That statistic was published on Thursday by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, who have studied how demand for a dwindling natural resource--fresh water--plays into energy.

The most water-efficient energy sources are natural gas and synthetic fuels produced by coal gasification. The least efficient are ethanol and biodiesel--two fuels booming in production because of supportive government … Read more

Correction, 2:50 PM PDT: Due to incorrect information provided by the company, this post misstated the name of one of the fuels used in the Eco-marathon. The entry from Schurr High School ran off liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

The team from Mater Dei High School might be only months (or less) removed from driver's ed, but it pulled off a nifty feat of driving over the weekend. One of its entries in the Shell Eco-marathon Americas won the grand prize for motoring to a record 2,843.4 miles per gallon.

Its other entry proved none too shabby … Read more

Smart-grid company Silver Spring Networks has raised $17.4 million, the latest in a string of investments in the sector.

Foundation Capital and Edison Electric Institute were the investors, according to VentureWire, which reported the news.

Silver Spring Networks does software and devices aimed at utilities that are looking to upgrade to smart-grid infrastructure.

The company makes devices on utility poles that can broker information over IP (Internet Protocol) from people's home smart meters and grid operation centers.

Utilities are starting to invest in advanced meters and networking to make power distribution more efficient and cut down on service … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The chief executive of Duke Energy, James Rogers, is an unlikely advocate for policies to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. But the man who is building two new coal power plants is just that.

Rogers delivered a keynote speech at the MIT Energy Conference here on Saturday where he called for policies and technologies to bridge the fossil fuel-based energy industry of today with low-carbon alternatives.

Rogers heads a company that generates 90 percent of its electricity from burning coal or nuclear power to serve its 4 million customers. So it's not surprising that he says that "… Read more