What’s cleantech? It’s often dismissed as a playground for solar panel and wind turbine makers.
But in fact, green technology startups and researchers and have transformed the field into a hotbed of innovation. From Facebook’s renewables-powered data center, to Nest’s iPod-inspired smart thermostat, cleantech pioneers are bringing their energy-saving techie passions home. And don’t worry, and those solar and wind are making big strides too.
Now’s the perfect time to catch up on what’s happening on the cleantech front. Click below for some highlights or can always follow ecoINSITE on Twitter for the latest updates.
Wondering how to lower your office’s carbon footprint during the hot summer months? Why not try some Green Curtains? Each spring since 2007, electronics maker Kyocera plants goya — aka Momordica charantia or bitter melon — on trellises in front of windows and walls to provide shade at its facilities in Japan and in other [...]
Read more Kyocera’s Green Curtains
Happy Earth Day! Things have been kinda slow around here, mostly due to my commitments over at sites like eWEEK and Datamation and an ongoing (if glacially paced) upgrade to this blog. But it’s Earth Day, and it would be criminal for this Green IT blogger to not chime in. This year, as we face [...]
Read more Earth Day 2013 Highlights
Green energy companies came so close to reaching a significant milestone last year. According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s Office of Energy Projects, 49.1 percent of all the new electrical power stations installed in 2012 relied on renewables. According to this article in Renewable Energy World, the total was 12,956 MW. December was a big month. [...]
Read more FREC: Renewables nearly half of all new US electrical capacity in 2012
You may be asking, what’s E2? E2 stands for Environmental Entrepreneurs. A Natural Resources Defense Council partner, the group is dedicated to proving that environmentally friendly business practices and economic growth don’t have to be mutually exclusive goals. Besides advocacy, E2 has been surveying the green jobs landscape. And according to E2′s clean energy report [...]
A couple of IT companies made a strong showing on the EPA’s National Top 50 list of renewable energy buyers. According to the EPA, companies qualify for inclusion by meeting the following conditions: Organizations can meet EPA Partnership requirements using any combination of three different product options: (1) Renewable Energy Certificates, (2) On-site generation, and (3) [...]
When you can’t innovate, sue? Unfortunately, that seems to be the extent of the competitive strategies chapter in today’s corporate playbook. The Verge — quickly becoming one of my favorite tech blogs, FYI — has a great post on how Honeywell sicced its lawyers on Nest, the home energy management startup behind the lust-worthy, iPod-inspired [...]
Read more Nest to Honeywell: Bring it!
What happens when you cloud-enable a smart thermostat? You get delicious updates, that’s what. Nest is rolling out updates to “Nesters” over the next couple of days. According to the smart energy startup, they include some neat touches like iPhone, Android or Web apps with more controls. An exciting new addition is Energy History. As [...]
Read more Nest Floats 2.0 Update
Video: The arrival of technology-laden EVs promises to empower and liberate car fleet managers in ways they could only just imagine a few short years ago. Just ask Rolf Schreiber, Google’s Electric Transportation Manager. As you know, Google is big on cleantech. And one of the ways it promotes this is by keeping a fleet [...]
Read more OnStar app brings cloud-based EV fleet management to Google
My non-meat-eater friends may want to skip this post. But the rest of us carnivores will be pleased by this new discovery. It turns out that those LEDS that are popping up at supermarket display cases don’t just bathe your food products in a crisp, energy-saving glow. They also extend the shelf life of some meats! [...]
Read more Go meat! LEDs prolong shelf life
This is eerie… Lately, the topic of infographic burnout has been making the rounds. This is mainly due to clumsy (and copious) marketing attempts, flimsy ‘facts’ or firms that are pushing outright lies using pretty pixels. I was just thinking today how this infographic on wind turbine noise from GE was the exception. Simple. Eye-pleasing. [...]
Read more Wind turbines quietly win over skeptics
This work by Pedro Hernandez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
