Green Tech

Nest Labs today fired back at Honeywell over its patent infringement case against Nest, claiming the thermostat giant is using its patent portfolio to stifle innovation.

The company also hired Apple's former chief patent counsel, Richard Lutton Jr., as it plans for a legal fight with Honeywell in the years ahead.

Founded by former successful Apple engineers, Nest Labs started selling its $250 Learning Thermostat last year and quickly sold out amid rave reviews over its design and ability to automatically set schedules.

Honeywell in February filed a suit claiming that Nest infringed on several of its seemingly broad … Read more

Intel announced its first Atom chip for microservers at a major company confab in Beijing today.

The new Atom, codenamed Centerton, is a system-on-a-chip, which makes it even more power efficient than less-integrated older Atom chips.

Centerton's power envelope -- what the industry sometimes calls TDP or thermal design power -- is six watts. While not as low as the power envelope for Intel's smartphone Atom, six watts is still a lot more power efficient than Intel's more mainstream chips. Those have power envelopes of 15 watts or higher. To date, Atom has been aimed at small … Read more

To a computer company like IBM, plug-in electric vehicles just look like more nodes on the network.

IBM tomorrow is expected to announce a demonstration project with Honda and California utility Pacific Gas & Electric to charge a fleet of Honda Fit EVs without disrupting the grid.

The smart-charging project will also test smartphone and Web-based apps for consumers, giving them an estimate of charge time and location of charging stations.

The power grid as a whole has the capacity to accommodate millions of plug-in vehicles, say experts. But if there's a concentration of electric cars charging at once, … Read more

As the Cleveland Indians play their home games, an experiment in industrial design will be spinning just overhead.

The ball park is hosting a wind turbine that uses a helix-shape tower to squeeze more power out of conventional wind turbines. The structure increases the wind speed, a technique companies have long pursued to lower the cost of wind energy.

The Progressive Field installation is a prototype designed by Majid Rashidi, a professor at Cleveland State University. The 40-foot-high, 18-foot-wide helix turbine will be installed for a year for testing and is expected to generate 40,000 kilowatt-hours a year, or … Read more

Micron Technology has updated its RealSSD C400 series of solid-state drives for small mSATA packages.

Basically, Micron is delivering the same performance of previous C400 products but in a 1.2 x 2.0 inch (3cm x 5cm) mSATA size -- the size typically used in thin laptops.

SSDs are faster than the standard spinning hard disk drives found in mainstream laptops (and often a lot faster).

The higher-capacity Micron models deliver the best performance. For example, the 256GB version has a read rate of 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speed of 260 MB/s. The smaller-capacity … Read more

Rather than try to reinvent the solar cell, startup Thermata has engineered a high-tech mirror to cut the cost of solar power.

The company, incubated at Idealabs, has completed initial testing on a system executives say can cut the cost of sun-tracking mirrors, or heliostats, in half using cameras and other digital technologies. Thermata plans to start beta testing the heliostats this year with potential customers, which are concentrating solar power technology companies, and with Sandia National Laboratories.

Thermata typifies a new breed of green-technology startup which is targeting a specific niche in energy using technologies from other fields. Its … Read more

The Chevy Volt will restart production "earlier than previously planned" due to an uptick in demand, General Motors announced earlier this week, but will this help to quiet critics?

The plug-in hybrid electric vehicle had been slated for a five-week production suspension, but that will be cut to four weeks, according to a report in the Detroit Free Press.

This is "due to increased Volt sales since January and the need to meet demand in our strong markets, including California," GM said in a statement, according to the Free Press.

The Volt came under withering criticism from some in the media … Read more

The gadgets in your smart home now come with software updates.

Nest Labs today released the equivalent of version 2.0 software for its smart thermostat on the Web, iOS or Android. The software tweaks for the $249 Learning Thermostat are designed to help people better understand how thermostat changes affect energy usage.

The update presents energy history data over 10 days, a longer period than before and indicates when heating and cooling systems turned on. It can also show what caused setting changes -- the weather, a manual adjustment, or an auto-away setting.

A new air conditioning feature, called … Read more

While Netgear and D-Link introduced their approaches to app-supporting and cloud-enabled networking products at CES 2012, Cisco, which didn't have anything to announce at CES, turns out to be the first to materialize the new concepts.

Cisco today unveiled a line of Linksys Smart Wi-Fi routers that promises to change the face, and the body, of home networking.

The Linksys EA4500, EA3500, and EA2700 -- the "A" designation being short for "app-enabled" -- look like models in the earlier E Series but have more-powerful hardware and support Cisco Connect Cloud, the next generation of Cisco … Read more