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What makes IBM's 'green' data center tick
CNET News' Martin LaMonica gets a tour of IBM's lab for green IT where the data center uses networked sensors and liquid cooling to ...
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Tesla Test Drive: Time to Try an American Car?
MoneyWatch picked six American cars to check out now. The sleekest of the bunch is the new Tesla Roadster, which does zero to 60 ...
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The new eco-friendly Samsung Reclaim
Natali Del Conte shows us the new eco-friendly Samsung Reclaim from the product launch in New York.
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How does a solar cell work?
How does solar conversion work now and how do we want it to work in the future? Paul Altivisatos, interim director for Lawrence Berkeley ...
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What drives solar stocks?
At the Intersolar Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Vishal Shah, solar equities research analyst at Barclays Capital, predicted that the U.S. ...
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Opportunities for investing in solar technology
At the Intersolar Conference in San Francisco, Scott Stephens, Photovoltaic Specialist for the U.S. Department of Energy, explains why he's optimistic about the future. ...
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Capital flowing into green
At Greentech Media's Green Building Summit in Menlo Park, Calif., Cascadia Capital CEO Michael Butler discusses three subsectors of the green-building industry that recently ...
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Who will manage the smart grid?
At Greentech Media's Green Building Summit at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., tech executives discuss the future management of smart-grid technology and whether ...
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Speeding up construction on ‘green’ homes
At Greentech Medias Green Building Summit at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., Serious Material Chairman Marc Porat discusses the challenges associated with building ...
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Tech execs talk smart design for ‘green’ buildings
At Greentech Medias Green Building Summit at SRI International, in Menlo Park, Calif., tech executives discuss what is needed to construct and design "green" ...
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Tomorrow's smart grid
At the Churchill Club's 11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends, venture capitalists discuss whether the smart grid and smart meter trends will continue to ...
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The future of clean-tech investing
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Counting carbon to find bottom-line benefits
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E-motorcycle hits S.F. streets
CNET News reporter Mats Lewan takes the brand new Zero S electric motorcycle for a test drive in downtown San Francisco. Currently, electric scooter-style ...
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'60 Minutes': Powered by coal
Coal is America's most abundant and cheapest fossil fuel but, as Scott Pelley reports, burning it happens to be the biggest contributor to global ...
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The Green Enterprise: HP
Hewlett-Packard plans to cut its global energy use 20 percent by 2010. Correspondent Sumi Das looks at "green" strategies the company is implementing to ...
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Revving up the electric-car industry
At the Green:Net conference in San Francisco, John Clark of GridPoint and Richard Lowenthal of Coulomb Technologies discuss how the largest obstacle for next-generation ...
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Getting green consumers to take action
At the Green: Net '09 conference in San Francisco, Erin Carlson, director of Yahoo for Good, breaks down the demographics of green-minded consumers who ...
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What is the smart grid?
At the Green: Net '09 Conference in San Francisco, Jesse Berst, managing director of Global Smart Energy, breaks the smart grid down into three ...
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From Internet to enternet, creating the energy network
At the Green: Net '09 Conference in San Francisco, Bob Metcalfe, a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners, explained how Washington actually helped the ...
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The lightbulb of the future?
Silicon Valley's Luxim has developed a lightbulb the size of a Tic Tac that gives off as much light as a streetlight. News.com's Michael Kanellos talks to the company about its technology and its plans to expand into various markets.
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The Green Enterprise: HP
Hewlett-Packard plans to cut its global energy use 20 percent by 2010. Correspondent Sumi Das looks at "green" strategies the company is implementing to accomplish its goal, such as designing new energy-efficient datacenters and helping make cities more eco-friendly through IT. She also talks to Bonnie Nixon, HP's director of sustainability, about the company's recycling efforts and its plan to eliminate unsafe materials inside its PCs.
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How does a solar cell work?
How does solar conversion work now and how do we want it to work in the future? Paul Altivisatos, interim director for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at UC Berkeley, explains how a solar cell works and how the solar energy of the future, via a solar fuel generator that converts energy the same way plants do, can become more efficient. He says that rather than looking for what's next, he looks to the end result--an ideal usage for materials.
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The new eco-friendly Samsung Reclaim
Natali Del Conte shows us the new eco-friendly Samsung Reclaim from the product launch in New York.
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What makes IBM's 'green' data center tick
CNET News' Martin LaMonica gets a tour of IBM's lab for green IT where the data center uses networked sensors and liquid cooling to lower energy use.
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Tesla Test Drive: Time to Try an American Car?
MoneyWatch picked six American cars to check out now. The sleekest of the bunch is the new Tesla Roadster, which does zero to 60 in under four seconds.
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E-motorcycle hits S.F. streets
CNET News reporter Mats Lewan takes the brand new Zero S electric motorcycle for a test drive in downtown San Francisco. Currently, electric scooter-style and offroad bikes can be used on the streets. But the Zero S can reach up to 60 mph, and its creator, Zero Motorcycles, says it's the first electric high-performance street motorcycle that's ready to ship.
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Fill your car for $1.10 a gallon?
Menlo Park, Calif.'s ZeaChem has come up with a way to turn wood chips into ethanol that will sell for around $1.10 a gallon or less when it comes out in 2010. Brewing and petrochemical technology go into the mix. News.com Editor at Large Michael Kanellos talks with founder Dan Verser and CEO James Imbler about their plans for cheap fuel.
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The Green Enterprise: Cisco
Networking giant Cisco Systems has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its operations by 25 percent in the next four years--with the help of technologies it's created. Cisco also wants to help customers do the same. Correspondent Sumi Das looks at green innovations at Cisco, including: an HD video-conferencing system, energy-efficient data centers, and a new office environment that encourages employees to work from unassigned spaces.
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The Green Enterprise: Gaia Napa Valley Hotel & Spa
In our second installment of the Green Enterprise, ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das takes a look at the green innovations in use at the Gaia Napa Valley Hotel & Spa, such as solar energy powering the hotel, environmentally friendly guest rooms, and an energy usage meter that shows guests how much water and electricity the hotel is using minute by minute. She also talks with Gaia's creator, Wen Chang, about his motivation for building a green hotel and his mission to provide eco-friendly tourism.
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Refining vegetable oil into diesel fuel
At the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Peter Bell, co-founder of Renewable Fuel Products, explains that his company's reactors are small and mobile enough to be loaded onto the back of a truck and taken wherever the waste oil is being created. They process an end product that can be used wherever people use diesel, with no special modifications. Through money from carbon credits, he says that developing countries will soon be able to gain access to this reactor as well.
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Male Speaker: We are bio-fuel technology company
based in Silicon Valley. We developed a little reactor
that turns vegetable oil into diesel fuel. It's diesel
fuel that meets the specification for existing hide o
column based fuel. We call it biodiesel 2.0. The
technology, it's a tiny little reactor, processes about
50,000 gallons per year. We process vegetable oils like
soy, tall o waste, and Inaudible. This is the process
of the reactor. Basically put in heat, prestock oil,
and out comes the finished fuel. Propane gas comes off
the top and a little bit of water, those are the
by-products, and we use the propane to run the reactor.
Obviously, vegetable oil is not a new source of oil.
The trick is to use it as a fuel is to reduce the
viscosity. You can put a kit on board to reduce the
viscosity so you can use vegetable oil directly as a
fuel, or you can reduce the viscosity chemically. Most
people do it using Inaudible other oil companies use
hydro-cracking. Most people go through a bio diesel
process, it's a very complicated process. Put in oil,
put in methanol, put in some catalyst, out comes the
finished product, blend it with the regular diesel fuel
and you have a product that's ready to go to market.
The challenge for bio diesel 1.0 is obviously low adopt
rates because of run-away feed stock costs, less
suitable in a carbon-constrained world, and it's slated
to be a Inaudible fuel or an additive. Renewable
diesel is what folks call second generation fuel. The
neat -- the neat thing about renewable diesel is that
it's an alternative fuel that meets the existing
specification for diesel fuel, enables production of
renewable fuel from vegetable oils, but goes directly
into the existing infrastructure. There are a lot of
folks doing this. It requires hydrogen catalyst to make
the reaction happen. Normally you go about putting it
into an existing refinery, the reactor cracks the oil,
you have the catalyst to control the reaction, and out
comes this fuel that meets specification. Our
technology does the same -- is the same process, but we
figured out how to do the reaction without requiring a
catalyst or without requiring any hydrogen. So we're
totally disconnecting the refining technology from this
whole infrastructure. Processing complexity comparison
of our technology versus everything else. Obviously, we
look at bio diesel, there's a lot of steps you have to
go through, you've got to strip the FFAs, add methanol,
you've got to separate the fuel, and eventually you end
up with a finished product. Renewable diesel, a little
bit more efficient, but obviously you have to add
hydrogen and crack with a catalyst before you finally
end up with a fuel. With our produce, a one-step
produce, and you end up with a finished product. The
technology scale comparison is quite dramatic. If you
compare us against the renewable diesel refinery, these
are vast infrastructures. The biodiesel company is a
little bit smaller, and our technology fits on the back
of a trailer. This is a picture of us taking our
reactor up to UC Davis where we do testing. What this
allows is a distributed refining. So for the very first
time we've allowed the refining to be taken out of the
refining infrastructure and put where the feed stock is.
And what's neat about this is it will allow an
exponential development of feed stocks that's never been
-- never happened before. So feed stocks can now be
right next to where the refining happens. I'll go
market strategies. Initially want to Inaudible with
existing biodiesel refineries to take their high FFA
waste feed stocks from there and turn that into fuel.
So we make the diesel bit while they make the biodiesel
bit. To make a B 20 blend. Second generation feed
stocks, we think there's a big opportunity there with
Inaudible and then obviously third gen radiation feed
stock availabilities is in the algae world, and we are
uniquely positioned to process algae because we don't
care about the amount of water in the feed stock, it
doesn't effect our reaction. And in the developing
market -- in the developing world we think there's a
big, big opportunity for distributed refining throughout
the world, and for the first time carbon credits allows
for these folks to actually pay for this piece of
equipment.
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