Green buildings

Flor, the green carpet manufacturer, announced Thursday that it's opened a fifth brick-and-mortar store, this one in Dallas.

Like its other retail stores in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and Santa Monica, the Dallas Flor store will offer a recycling drop-off for customers to return worn Flor items.

Flor sells carpets that are made from either wool or mostly renewable and recycled content, with an end goal of eventually making all its carpets entirely from sustainable materials.

In an age when most carpeting comes with a high amount of unhealthy VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), FLOR carpets also either meet or … Read more

Bloom Energy and telecom giant AT&T said today that the clean-tech start-up would install its fuel cell-powered Energy Servers--known colloquially as "Bloom boxes"--at 11 facilities in California.

The AT&T facilities include sites in Corona, Fontana, Hayward, Pasadena, Redwood City, Rialto, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Jose, and San Ramon.

The units are expected to provide 7.5 megawatts of energy for AT&T, reducing its carbon emissions footprint for the facilities involved by half, or about 250 million pounds of CO2 per year.

For AT&T, it's a chance to use a buzzworthy clean-tech company in its overall corporate sustainability initiative to use more renewable energy as part of its portfolio. (The company also has 19 solar deployments slated for 2011.)

For Bloom, it's the latest in a series of high-profile partners, including software maker Adobe.

The key to Bloom's success lies in its business model, in which it pays for installation and hardware upfront in exchange for profits from a fixed rate on power produced.

(If you're interested, our sister site SmartPlanet did a deeper dive last year into the tech that's inside the Bloom box; our corporate siblings at 60 Minutes also profiled the company in February 2010.)

For the AT&T deal, the Bloom boxes are expected to produce more than 62 million kilowatt-hours of electricity each year, enough to power some 5,600 homes.

Installation of the boxes is scheduled to begin later this year; the plan is to have them fully operational by mid-2012.

This story originally appeared on SmartPlanet.com… Read more

Chicago-based Clean Urban Energy has raised $7 million in Series A funding, the company announced today.

The company has developed a software platform, and the monitoring and analytic services to go with it, that take advantage of a building's thermal mass and thermal-energy storage (TES) to make it run more efficiently and save on energy costs.

Clean Urban Energy says its software analytics platform can reduce the expense of a building's heating, ventilation, and air conditioning energy use by 15 percent to 30 percent.

"By aggregating and optimizing the thermal storage properties of multiple buildings, CUE unlocks … Read more

The Department of Energy has issued a $1.4 billion conditional loan guarantee to fund a massive project that would install solar panels on unused industrial roof space across the U.S.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced yesterday that support for Project Amp would come from American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 funds.

The project's aim is ambitious, with a goal of installing 733 megawatts' worth of photovoltaic solar panels across 28 states within the next four years. Once complete, the Project Amp solar panels are expected to generate enough electricity to power over 88,000 U.S. … Read more

Steel giant Tata Steel has partnered with Australian solar developer Dyesol to produce a steel girder coated with solar panels, both companies announced this week.

The prototype girder was made as one continuous length of coated steel 10 feet long that can capture both direct and diffuse light. The solar cells were "printed" directly onto the steel as opposed to being a composite of multiple cells added to an existing steel girder. The new process will enable Tata Steel to integrate photovoltaics in building materials in volume for a moderate cost.

It's the world's largest dye-sensitized … Read more

Zeta Communities broke ground yesterday on a net-zero housing development in Stockton, Calif., the company announced.

The housing community, which will consist of 22 units, is being developed by the nonprofit group Visionary Home Builders of California.

Zeta Communities is known for its affordable, green prefab homes that are constructed using sustainable or recyclable materials at its factory in Sacramento, Calif. Building 90 percent of a home in the factory will cut construction time by 70 percent, according to Zeta.

In the case of the so-called Tierra del Sol community planned for Stockton, the Zeta prefab homes will be 1,… Read more

Homes using EcoFactor for controlling their heating and cooling have seen on average a 17 percent reduction in energy use, the company announced Thursday.

In conjunction with local utilities and home service providers, Silicon Valley-based EcoFactor collected data from homes in both pilot and commercial programs using two-way thermostats connected to the company's software platform.

EcoFactor's software collects over 24,000 pieces of data daily to profile a home's thermal characteristics. It monitors things like weather forecasts, and the home's temperature and its HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system, then mathematically analyzes the most opportune … Read more

To IBM, buildings are just another source of data its computers can crunch and make sense of.

The computing giant today at an event in New York is unveiling its Intelligent Building Management software, which collects and analyzes information to improve energy efficiency and maintenance. It's part of IBM's smarter planet initiative to use technology and its business consulting group to tackle big social problems.

Many commercial buildings are already have building management systems that use sensors to communicate information with a central computer. For example, heating and cooling equipment and offices can monitor temperature, humidity, light levels, … Read more

Fujitsu will cut its power usage by 15 percent this summer in parts of Japan suffering from power shortages caused by the massive March earthquake, the company said today.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) has been struggling to deal with nuclear power reactors severely damaged by the quake and resulting tsunami, leading to efforts in Japan to encourage lower electrical power use. Fujitsu said it will cut its own power usage in areas serviced by Tepco and Tohoku Electric Power through a variety of programs, and it's an interesting list for any company worried about power cost and supply … Read more