Cleantech Update

From the Interatinal Statesman WHAT was the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century? The motor car, perhaps, or the computer? In 2000 America’s National Academy of Engineering gave a different answer: “the vast networks of electrification”. These, the academy concluded, made most of the century’s other advances possible. But whereas cars, computers and so forth have become ever more sophisticated, power grids have remained, in essence, sets of dumb wires. Thomas Edison, a pioneer of electrification in the 1880s, would be able to run them. Power is fed into the grid from power stations in the hope that it will arrive in factories, offices and homes. To this day most utilities rely on consumers to tell them that the power is out—and may then have to put in a lot of detective work to discover the cause. This may be changing at last. A global movement is afoot to make grids “smart”. This means adding all kinds of information technology, such as sensors, digital meters an...

Augsut 5th The Energy Information Agency (EIA), has issued a draft analysis which makes the case for chartering a Green Bank/Clean Energy Deployment Administration. A Green Bank would, according to John Podesta of the Center for American Progress, “enable clean-energy technologies—in such areas as wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biomass, and energy efficiency—to be deployed on a large scale and become commercially viable at current electricity costs.” The establishment of a Green Bank and the Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA) has already been included in the House energy bill and the Senate Energy Committee bill. Reed Hundt, co-chair of the Coalition for the Green Bank said, “CEDA’s low-cost financing can protect consumers state by state from any electricity price increases as well as create millions of new jobs converting our nation from carbon to clean as the basis of our economy.” Podesta pointed out that “China is investing $220 billion of its economic stim...

"Silicon Valley Six" companies are ripe for M&A or IPO * Top four are Solyndra, LinkedIn, Silver Spring, Zynga * Companies have $100 million revenue, proven record By David Lawsky SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Investors, encouraged by a growing number of acquisitions and public floats in the past few months, are keeping a close eye on a coterie of promising startups in Silicon Valley. An informal poll of venture capitalists and others pointed to six privately held companies as the ripest for acquisition or readiness to go public, out of 34 cited in industries ranging from alternative energy to social networking. For now, the Silicon Valley Six say they intend to keep growing rather than agreeing to be acquired or go public during the recession. The top four are business social network LinkedIn, solar panel maker Solyndra, smart grid company Silver Spring, Zynga, a casual games company whose products run on social networks like Facebook. Two others ...