May 22 2009

The Green Seen

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy caught our attention this week:

• The recent commencement ceremony at Arizona State University celebrated the first class of graduates from ASU's School of Sustainability as well as the featured address by President Obama. Thirteen students received degrees from the new school, which was founded in 2006. It currently has 55 graduate students and more than 300 undergrads.The school is the first in the U.S. to offer degrees in a multidisciplinary field blending environmental, economic and social advancement.
• Google has joined partnerships with eight electric utilities in the U.S. and abroad to use Google's "Power Meter" software to link up with smart meter devices to track energy information in the home. The utilities include six in the U.S., one in Canada and one in India. The lone California utility in the program is San Diego Gas & Electric.  The utility expects its smart meter customers should be able to track their energy on Google's Web site by the end of the year.
• France plans to quadruple its solar power capacity in the next two years, targeting 300 megawatts by 2011 at an investment of $2.04 billion. France currently generates nearly 88 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Meanwhile, neighboring Italy expects to slow down solar expansion this year after adding about 450 MW of photovoltaic plants since 2007. Growth has been stalled by delays in bank financing.
• Luxury automaker Daimler AG has invested $50 million to acquire a 9 percent stake in electric car-startup Tesla Motors. That values Tesla at $550 million, or about half the value of troubled General Motors Corp. based on GM's closing stock price on Thursday. "It's sort of amusing to see the valuation being half of General Motors," says Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard.

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