power

Ausra's Las Vegas solar thermal plant comes online

Solar thermal company Ausra on Monday opened a Las Vegas factory meant to produce enough equipment each year to provide 700 megawatts of power.

The 130,000-square-foot facility is designed to manufacture massive mirrors and absorber tubes, employing 50 workers and leading to the creation of 1,400 construction jobs at solar sites.

Ausra makes utility-scale solar equipment that it says costs 30 percent to 40 percent less than photovoltaics. Its compact fresnel reflectors use relatively small amounts of steel and the same kind of glass used in building construction, according to Ausra.

"We're ready to respond now … Read more

Green tech news harvest: Redesigning suburbs, cooking carbon, and mapping wildfires

Correction June 30 11:30 a.m. PDT: See below for details.

A sampling of green-tech news with quick commentary.

High fuel costs threaten suburban lifestyles - The Boston Globe Does America need a redesign? Rising gas prices could drive an exodus from suburbs into city centers.

Novomer launching plastic made from CO2 - Greentech Media Plastic made from carbon could be used in electronics and solar equipment.

Google Earth maps California fires - Google Earth Blog Tagged maps and NASA satellite imagery help to pinpoint some 1,400 fires raging in California.

Number of flights to plummet by summer's end - The New York Times … Read more

Solar financier SunRun pulls in money

SunRun, a company that offers solar-electricity financing, announced Tuesday that it has raised $12 million from Foundation Capital.

The San Francisco-based start-up is one of handful of new companies looking to make solar panels an easier purchase for consumers through financing.

Solar electric panels have a hefty up-front cost--between $20,000 and $35,000-- depending on the size, before rebates.

Although buyers will generally recoup the initial outlay in lower electricity bills in about 15 years, the high cost has restricted solar electricity to a niche audience, say solar industry executives.

Rather than buy the panels, SunRun customers buy the … Read more

JVC NX-PN7 dual iPod speaker now available

Back in January, JVC unveiled the NX-PN7, an iPod speaker system with not one but two iPod docks. The company sent out a press release today to announce that the NX-PN7 is officially available. Otherwise, it looks like nothing's changed since the unit's coming-out party six months ago. Despite doubling down on the music players, the unit is just 13 inches wide. In addition to being able to toggle between "iPod A" and "iPod B," the NX-PN7 features a clock, an auxiliary line-in, and a horizontal light beneath each iPod dock that can be … Read more

New technology could reduce power in data centers by 80 percent

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Power Assure was started a year ago by Donnie Foster and Clemens Pfeiffer, former Hewlett-Packard executives. For the last ten years, Pfeiffer--the CTO and brain behind Power Assure's patent pending Holistic Power Management technology--ran his own company, International SoftDevices, developing software for monitoring and restarting servers after they had failed.

"We realized one could use this to automate the switching on and off of servers, and we saw a business opportunity," recalled Pfeiffer, who is CTO of the start-up based here.

Power Assure's Holistic Power Management collects power usage data every minute … Read more

One megawatt of grid storage, 10 big flywheels

Beacon Power says its latest flywheel will provide one megawatt of storage to the electricity grid by the end of the year.

The company's carbon fiber flywheels, which are one meter in diameter, spin constantly at up to 16,000 revolutions per minute--a surface speed of about Mach 2, Beacon CEO William Capp explained Friday. Each 8,000-pound unit can provide 100 kilowatts of electricity for 15 minutes.

Combining 10 of those flywheels will give a utility one megawatt of storage, or 25 kilowatt hours--the equivalent of what a home consumes in a day.

Fifteen minutes of storage may … Read more

Power your Air with the sun

A new solar panel kit for the MacBook Air will both charge and power the laptop at the same time.

QuickerTek, a Wichita, Kansas-based company that sells accessories for Apple devices, calls its new portable solar power gadget the Apple Juicz MacBook Air Solar Charger.

The Juicz comes in three size and power options and has a one-year warranty, QuickerTek said Tuesday. As usual with solar energy, all that "free" power is going to cost you.

The smallest 19-watt Apple Juicz, which takes 14 hours to recharge the laptop, will sell for $500; the 8-hour, 29-watt model is $… Read more

Tech companies aim to untangle power supplies

SAN FRANCISCO--Oh, what a tangled web we weave when plugging in and powering personal electronics whose chargers are so varied that they typically end up balled up in rat's nests beneath our desks.

Help, albeit slow, is on the way, according to members of consumer electronics companies, green-tech start-ups, and venture capital firms at the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies conference Friday.

Attendees charging ahead to create power supplies that cause fewer headaches and wasted energy found hope when Westinghouse announced that it will support standards from start-up Green Plug, whose Greentalk protocol enables devices and power sources to &… Read more

News.com Daily Podcast: How cities are taking on climate change

Cities' green action plans; Yahoo loses a couple of prominent employees; and Republican and Democrats cast a vote for Microsoft.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

City governments' response to climate change ranges from cutting-edge distributed energy to adding more bike lanes and trees. Climate change experts from four cities--London, Toronto, Chicago, and New York--spoke at the Mass Impact Symposium Monday in Cambridge, Mass., and CNET News.com intern Holly Jackson had the chance to chat with reporter Martin LaMonica about what they said.

Plus, Yahoo loses a couple of high-level employees--and it's getting set to announce a deal … Read more

Out of the frying pan and into the power grid

If fry grease can run a Mercedes, why can't it power the restaurant it came from?

That's the idea behind Owl Power Company's Vegawatt power system, a machine that converts a restaurant's waste oil into electricity and hot water.

Co-generation, where a fuel is burned to make electricity, is regularly done at landfill incinerators or industrial biomass generators. There are also home co-generators, such as the Freewatt from Climate Energy.

Owl Power's twist on co-generation is that it lets restaurants use what's normally a waste product as a fuel for themselves.

James Peret, the … Read more