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Silicon Valley, California: Cleantech Hubs

Silicon Valley, a region that has a knack for turning budding innovation into booming industries, is emerging as a significant cleantech hub in North America. Its home state of California also is gaining strength as a magnet for cleantech startups and a model for environmental and energy conscious policy makers, putting the state on target to be among the economic winners as markets grow.California pulled in $2.1 billion, or 26 percent of the total cleantech funding for North America between 2002 and 2006, according to an analysis by the Cleantech Venture Network. The state had a banner year in 2006, attracting more than $1 billion in cleantech investment, or 37 percent of the North American total for the year.The investment is likely to spur economic growth in cleantech-related industries. In the white paper “Creating Cleantech Clusters: 2006 Update,” analysts from the Cleantech Venture Network and E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs) calculated that $4.8 billion in venture capital invested in California cleantech companies between 2005 and 2010 would produce 75,000 jobs over the next two decades and create $17.2 billion in incremental annual revenue.Silicon Valley attracted almost half the total amount of venture capital invested in cleantech companies in California between 2002 and […]

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Budding Clean Energy Technologies Get Test-Bed

The Austin Technology Incubator’s Clean Energy Incubator and Austin Energy have agreed to create the first test-bed environment in the United States for alternative energy companies to prepare their technologies for commercialization.The partnership will allow clean technology companies to accelerate their path to market through early product validation with a leading utility. The test-bed partnership, supported unanimously by the Austin City Council, will allow Clean Energy Incubator member companies to plug into different parts of Austin Energy’s grid to prove their technologies. “A major slowdown in getting clean energy companies to market is early utility validation,” says Joel Serface, director of Clean Energy Incubator. “Through our test-bed partnership, Austin Energy will give critical feedback and credibility to startups who prove themselves in Austin Energy’s environment.” For the past three years, Austin Energy has been ranked as the No. 1 green energy program in the country by the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, generating more revenue than its closest competing utilities in Portland, Ore. and Los Angeles. Its Green Choice program has sold more than 334 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy last year. A report by SustainLane, a green media company, released last week named Austin the No. […]

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Germany: Approval Granted for World's Biggest PV Project

Germany-based juwi group has received building approval for the world’s biggest photovoltaic (PV) power plant, the 40-megawatt “Waldpolenz” solar park. The thin-film solar PV plant is being built on a former military air base east of Leipzig, with an expected completion date of the end of 2009. Currently the biggest PV plant in the world has an output capacity of around 12 megawatts. The area is about one kilometre wide and two kilometres long. It takes more than an hour to walk around it. “The surface area of the PV installation compares to about 200 soccer fields,” says juwi co-managing director Matthias Willenbacher. The plant will be built on half the 220 hectares of the base and will be comprised of 550,000 First Solar thin-film modules. At about Euro 3,250 per kilowatt (U.S. $4,226), the plant is 20%-40% cheaper than the going German market price. “Large-scale projects such as these make a huge contribution to making solar electricity more competitive,” says juwi cofounder Willenbacher. “Within just a few years the price of solar electricity produced on your own rooftop will be cheaper than the power supplied by the energy utilities,” says Willenbacher. “Photovoltaics will then reach completely new dimensions because […]

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Missed Opportunity at Oscars: Editorial

by Rona Fried Al Gores’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth” won Academy Awards for best documentary and best song. That’s great. Gore said he hopes the visibility will encourage millions more people to watch the film. He also announced that for the first time, the Academy Awards are “green.” The audience paused as they waited to hear what being “green” meant. Instead of taking the obvious opportunity to educate the billion or so people watching from around the world on what being green means – by showing examples of greening the Oscars – he and Leonardo DiCaprio simply asked people to live greener and to visit the Academy’s website for ideas. The Oscar ballots were made from partially recycled paper; organic produce was served at the Governor’s Ball; there were measures to reduce energy use and increased recycling; rides in hybrids for stars and presenters; meals for the hundreds of crew and cast members were served on reusable plates and biodegradable dishware; and leftover food was donated to a local shelter. To us greenies, this doesn’t make an event green, but it’s a start. But to the huge audience watching it would have been a tangible, concrete introduction to what kinds […]

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