Green Tech

Demand in China and a host of other factors are pumping coal prices to new levels, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As a result, coal prices could begin to push up the price of electricity, food, imports and other products that directly or indirectly rely on coal-burning power plants. (Coal supplies 40 percent of the world's electricity and roughly 50 percent of the U.S.'s electricity.) Demand is growing so fast that China in fact imported more than it exported in the first half of 2007 last year. Oil has already contributed to rising prices.

Thermal coal … Read more

There is a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which was created by the Hoover Dam and the Colorado River, will go dry by 2021 because of escalating human demand and climate change, according to a study by Tim Barnett and David Pierce of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego.

Lake Mead straddles the Arizona-Nevada border, and Lake Powell is on the Arizona-Utah border. Aqueducts carry water from the system to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the Southwest.

By 2017, there is a 50 percent chance that the … Read more

Blu-ray is finally getting some momentum in the market, and two secretive start-ups are already looking at ways to replace the standard, or at least retrofit it.

Kaai and Soraa are trying to develop lasers and LEDs that could, conceivably, replace conventional LEDs in the lighting market and serve as a standard for optical data storage, Ford Tamer, the newest partner at Khosla Ventures, said in an interview. The firm has invested in both companies.

Tamer didn't provide many details on the companies, but that's par for the Khosla Ventures course. The company is placing many investments in companies that are still in the exploratory and scientific discovery phase and thus wants to keep a lid on details. Tamer did, however, say that Kaai and Soraa are both interested in the lighting and data storage markets. (And if anyone can ferret clues out of the "aa" in both company names, send it along.) … Read more

Last week, three financial titans--Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley--announced "The Carbon Principles" to provide guidance to energy companies in managing carbon risks. The upshot of The Carbon Principles is that these big banks are stating explicitly that going forward, they will only provide debt financing to new power projects if proponents can prove that the proposed plants will remain economically viable under future climate change policies.

Put another way, Wall Street sees federal carbon legislation as imminent, and doesn't want power sector executives to try to "sneak in" any last coal plants … Read more

It's become a staple of conventional wisdom that increased ethanol production has caused food prices worldwide to skyrocket.

Unfortunately, many experts and crop data say that's not a complete answer. Granted, production of corn ethanol has surged in the U.S. and has boosted pricing pressure. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute noted in a recent column on Cleantech.com that demand for grain by ethanol distillers jumped from 54 million tons in 2006 to 81 million tons in 2007. That jump of 27 million tons effectively doubled the annual growth rate. Brown said that ethanol creates … Read more

If you've got a fancy job in the Bay Area, you're probably going to get the sales call from Sass Somekh.

Somekh, the former president of equipment maker Novellus and an alum of Applied Materials, has started OurPower.org as a way to promote plug-in hybrid conversions. Converting a regular Prius to a plug-in isn't cheap. The price runs about $10,000. Even if gas rises to $4 a gallon, it would still take nearly 100,000 miles of driving before you broke even. (OurPower.org is working with A123 Systems, the lithium-ion battery maker, to perform … Read more

Infinia on Monday said that it raised $50 million to commercialize a large mirrored dish that turns out three kilowatts of solar power.

With the money, Infinia will be able to bring its Infinia Solar System to market late in 2008.

The company is negotiating with project developers who intend to use hundreds of the dishes in solar power plants in Spain and the southwestern United States, according to Infinia president J.D. Sitton.

The series B round was led by hedge fund GLG Partners and private equity firm Wexford Capital, and included prior investors Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, EQUUS … Read more

Rommel Noufi, one of the primary experts in copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cells, is joining SoloPower as vice president of research.

Noufi has been a fixture in CIGS for several years as a scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He also holds the record for efficiency for CIGS cells: one of his cells can convert 19.9 percent of the sun's energy into electricity while another can convert 16.5 percent. When reporters or analysts have CIGS questions, the path in the past several years has often led to Noufi.

Efficiency has been a major headache … Read more

Type "green+tech+bubble" into Google search and you get 228,000 results--quite a bit considering the terms "green tech" and "clean tech" are relatively new.

Discussion of an over-investment in energy-related start-ups is hard to avoid when the amount of venture capital dollars--which financed the Internet bubble--going into the field just goes up and up.

All digital ink spilled over the bubble is justified, but for reasons that may seem counter-intuitive, according to Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight, a consulting firm founded by business guru Clayton Christensen.

Anthony contends that many business … Read more