Free Republic

As Tina wrote yesterday, Americans still favor government subsidies to companies unable to otherwise compete in the green-tech industry. That may be especially true of Nancy Pelosi and her family, but not exactly for reasons of environmental improvement. Let’s start with this report from The Hill, via Gateway Pundit and Instapundit, on the latest approved green-tech loan from the Department of Energy: DOE announced a $737 million loan guarantee to help finance construction of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-megawatt solar-power-generating facility in Nye County, Nev. The project is sponsored by Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve....

A while back, the WWF (no, not the World Wrestling Federation, but the World Wildlife Fund) announced a new computer document format that is supposedly impossible to print. That is, you can read it on your computer, but not print it; sort of like a digital Roach Motel: “Data checks in, but doesn’t check out!” Somehow this is supposed to save the rain forests, the planet, the toner shrubs, whatever. While lesser mortals may sniff that a deliberately non-printable file format is a stupid idea, I personally think it’s a brilliant idea, and I suspect it will spark a whole...

Would you spend $880,000 to save $147,000? Washington state did. Earlier this year the state opened a new 2,000 bed prison called the Coyote Ridge Corrections Center that some are calling the "nation's greenest prison." The prison meets LEED Gold standards, as required by a state law passed in 2005. While LEED Gold is particularly expensive, one aspect of the new prison stands out - its installation of solar panels. The prison features a "solar array that covers 16,929 square feet" that is rated at 75kw of energy. Installation cost taxpayers $880,000 -- money provided by a grant offered by...

For the last several months, several observers including ourselves have noted that whatever is going on at the “lower-value-added” end of the manufacturing and technology scale the real challenge China poses to the US lies not in the area of currency valuations, but in the “higher-value-added” regions of so-called “green” or “clean” technologies. The general argument here, as always, relates back to the fundamentally different role of the state in the economy in each of the two countries. In the US, the general consensus, shared by both Democrats and Republicans alike, is that the government should just get out of...

The smell of manure hangs over Greeley as it has for half a century. These days it's more than just a potent reminder of the region's agricultural roots and the hundreds of thousands of cattle raised on the city's outskirts. The stench smells like an opportunity. Investors are lining up to support a planned clean energy park that eventually will convert some of the methane gas released from the manure piles into power for a cheese factory and other businesses. JBS, which runs two of the largest feed yards and the local slaughterhouse, is testing a new technology that heats...

BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Anyone who has followed batteries knows the likelihood of a new technology to come along and save the world from itself is close to nil. All we can hope for are tweaks that incrementally improve battery performance. But there is a tweak that interests me, and it should interest investors as well. It's a lithium-titanate battery developed by Altair Nanotechnologies /quotes/comstock/15*!alti/quotes/nls/alti (ALTI 1.10, +0.05, +4.76%) , and it's now being experimented with by the U.K.'s Lightning car company, as well as at least one U.S. carmaker. What makes this battery valuable for automotive use is its...

Keeping track of your carbon footprint could become as simple as slipping a mobile phone in your pocket: a London-based start-up company has developed software for mobile phones that uses global positioning satellites to work out automatically whether you are walking, driving or flying and then calculate your impact on the environment. Carbon Diem's inventors claim that, by using GPS to measure the speed and pattern of movement, their algorithm can identify the mode of transport being used. It can therefore calculate the amount of carbon dioxide that a journey has emitted into the atmosphere – without any need for...

Solar Energy Firms Leave Waste Behind in China By Ariana Eunjung Cha Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, March 9, 2008; A01 GAOLONG, China -- The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word. This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said....

SAN FRANCISCO - Venture capitalist John Doerr made his name and fortune with early investments in Netscape Communications Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and other pioneering tech firms that went from scrappy startups to household names. Now Doerr and his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, are placing big bets on an emerging sector he calls "green technology," one he believes could become as lucrative as information technology and biotechnology. Menlo Park-based Kleiner Perkins plans to set aside $100 million of its latest $600 million fund for technologies that help provide cleaner energy, transportation, air and water. That's on top...