Scientists at the University of Cambridge in the UK have found a way to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells by as much as 25% through harnessing more of the sun’s spectrum than most traditional silicon-based solar cells can.

The new design, developed at the university’s Cavendish Laboratory in the Department of Physics, can absorb both red and blue light, and generates electrons from photons at a two-to-one ratio on the blue light spectrum. Most current solar cells lose blue photon energy as heat, leaving them unable to turn more than about 34% of the sunlight they absorb into power.

The team, led by professors Neil Greenham and Sir Richard Friend, recently published results in a paper. The hybrid cells have an added organic semiconductor called pentacene, which helps harness blue light energy to strengthen the electrical current coming from the cell, making the product up to 44% efficient.

The university’s team also innovated on how the cells are made, by producing the cells in bulk using a roll-to-roll printing technique. While cheaper, more efficient photovoltaics sound promising, there remain hurdles to be overcome. The greatest costs in building a solar power plant are installation hardware, labor and land, so a cheaper solar cell is only a piece of the puzzle.

On the surface, the StartX Demo Day last night could have looked like any other accelerator pushing its latest class of startups. Nine groups got on stage and fired off presentations about how they were working on something cool, and why they deserved funding.

But it wasn’t the rash of lightweight consumer applications you often see at other demo days. These were Stanford students, particularly technical graduate students, who have been nerding out on solving real problems for years in their labs and dorm rooms, and who are now in the middle of commercializing their hard work. Big-name investors from around Silicon Valley unsurprisingly showed up to check them out.

Before I get into the companies, which ran the gamut from health care to batteries to professional networking, it’s important to understand what StartX is. It’s the non-profit accelerator arm of Stanford Student Enterprises, which is a student-run, independent organization that handles a variety of stores, directories, financial services and other businesses for students. SSE is the business branch of the student government, and it’s independent enough from the university that StartX companies get maximum freedom. They own their own intellectual property, and neither StartX/SSE nor any other entity takes any equity.

The only requirements are that at least one cofounder of each applying company needs to have enrolled at Stanford within the last three academic quarters before the application period, and that person needs to own significant equity.

The program is young — it started in 2010 and this is its fifth class. but it’s on the right track. The energy in the room was what you feel at that rare tech event where everyone present knows they’re getting in early on something big.

We’ll no doubt be covering many of the presenting companies in more detail over the coming months, but here’s a quick look at each, in the order they presented:

MindSumo: Employers want to find smart students with skills and interests that they can develop. The problem is that student resumes are normally skimpy on this information because, well, students have mostly been in school and not the workforce. MindSumo’s answer: partner with employers to create “challenges,” or sets of questions for students to answer. For example, Recology, a large recycling and trash disposal company, is currently asking “What can you do or make with glass (A LOT of it)? Propose three alternate uses for recycled glass so that we can use our resources in an innovative way and keep them from landfill!” Currently in private beta, MindSumo has already been running challenges for seven companies (some of whom are paying), with 500 or so Stanford students participating.

AgeTak: Health care data is currently separated across insurers and health care providers, which makes it hard for doctors to do comprehensive analysis of diseases and other conditions. AgeTak uses distributed databases to combine, anonymize and get user consent for data sharing. Founder Pratik Verma, who recently got his PhD in computation chemistry from Stanford, is on a personal mission here. His father passed away in 2010 from nerve cell disease ALS, which has no known causes or cures. His father’s only option was to participate in extensive clinical trials over the years, in the hopes that doctors would make breakthroughs by discovering trends among those afflicted. But, as Pratik discovered, data from patients was not being shared by researchers because it was siloed at institutions, and held back by privacy concerns.

Through AgeTak, the anonymized and aggregated data can be used by analysts, researchers, physicians and pharmaceutical companies. Insurance giant United Health is already using it for a drug claims database, and OptumHealth is using it to offer graphs that show consumers how their health care costs stack up against the average. AgeTak has already made $3.7 million in revenue; it’s headquartered in Minnesota with offices in Menlo Park and India. Check out this recent writeup by Barb Darrow at GigaOm for more details.

Zoku: If you’re trying to build a network — let’s say, to help with your new startup — you want to know who out there is doing something relevant to your needs. But it can be hard sorting through all the noise on Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites to spot the key people and activities. Zoku lets you combine your email and social networking contacts, then pick out people and actions that you want to keep track of. It uses algorithms to filter for what you care about, then shows you the signals – people who are visiting town, changing jobs, or doing anything else relevant to what you might need to get done — in a dashboard on its site.

Vi Energy: In what looks like the most ambitious technical idea out of all the presentations, Vi Energy is developing a new kind of rechargeable battery that promises to be three times cheaper and last 50% longer than anything on the market today. Over the past twenty years, lithium ion batteries have dominated, but they can be unsafe, have relatively weak capacity, and are expensive. As a mature technology, there’s only marginal improvements to be had from them. Sister-cofounders Meghali and Sonali Chopra have, with the support of top scientific researchers, already created a pilot battery that uses significantly cheaper raw materials, can be easily synthesized, and has a unique spherical morphology with conductive codings for better performance. Their lab tests already show that the new battery lasts longer than the lithium ion ones on the market today.

Breakthrough: This online mental health treatment startup has been featured before — on stage at TechCrunch 50 (Disrupt) back in 2009. It uses secure video and chat features to help people connect with professionals to get the help they need privately and immediately. As Leena noted before, clients can search for providers (including psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses) on a variety of criteria, including price, speciality (i.e. depression, schizophrenia, post traumatic stress disorder), and gender. On a provider’s page you can see his or her education, experience, pricing for services, the insurance the professional accepts, and even a video introduction of the provider explaining his or her specialities. BreakThrough certifies all providers are credentialed professionals.

TipTopMed: How much will a trip to the doctor’s cost? How much, in particular, if you don’t have a good insurance plan? That’s a question more and more Americans are asking themselves — that TipTopMed is trying to answer. Its site will show local providers, and include information about them like the upfront price, and other details about provider specialties. Users can then book an appointment, and pay online. Providers — mostly small and medium-sized businesses — want this because they lose lots of money on patients who can’t or don’t pay. The site is launching at the end of this month, and will feature a proprietary database of Bay Area health care professionals.

Smit’s Crew: The only entertainment-oriented startup out of the mix, it offers a web site and mobile app that lets venue owners (bars, clubs, etc.) create a type of loyalty program for regular patrons. The app lets customers receive advance notifications of discounts and other deals, particularly on slow nights, then buy them immediately. They then go to the establishment and show the waiter or bartender the purchase; because payment has been received, the food and drinks can be delivered immediately, without the hassle of trying to pay with cash or credit card at, say, a packed bar. Even more importantly, the app lets owners keep track of which people are visiting the most regularly and buying the most — this allows them to figure out who they should focus on providing the best service to. The “crew” concept lets customers group themselves together around specific establishments, so the venue can provide group discounts if they show up.

There were also two more health care startups that presented, but they haven’t publicly launched yet so I won’t be including them here. All in all, as you can see, this is a serious bunch of companies, that are interested in solving hard real-world problems.

Venture firms and law offices in Silicon Valley have sensed the opportunity to get in early, and they’ve rallied behind the effort. VC supporters, who provide dollars and mentorship, include Benchmark Capital, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Greylock Partners. Legal backers are Cooley LLP, Fenwick & West LLP, Dorsey & Whitney LLP, Goodwin Proctor, and Orrick. Resource partners include Amazon Web Services, First Republic Bank, Fog Creek Software, Github, Rackspace and Usabilla.

And even that distant global media and advertising conglomerate that owns TechCrunch is involved, it turns out, because it provides office space and other material support. So time for a Full Disclosure: I didn’t even know AOL was involved until I got to the event this afternoon — but good job, whoever made that call at my parent company. I also attended Stanford as an undergraduate, and while I have a variety of feelings about my alma mater, I generally expect a lot out of its graduates — maybe this connection is one reason I think StartX is pretty great? On the other hand, I worked at a key campus competitor to SSE, The Stanford Daily student-run newspaper. So maybe I’m biased against SSE and so my biases all equal themselves out….

The future of easy home energy monitoring may be a little bit closer, thanks to a government initiative designed to allow consumers direct access to their energy consumption data.

The White House’s new Green Button gives utilities a way to simplify and standardize sharing usage statistics with their customers via a one-click download. Two California providers, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric, already launched the feature, adding what is literally a green button to their websites. Utility companies in other regions are expected to implement it within the next year. Customers can click the button to download their personal usage information in one place.

The interesting aspect isn’t so much in the download itself, but what can be done with it. Federal officials hope this kind of data liberation will inspire developers to build apps and services that will help customers track and reduce their energy consumption. One study showed that subjects who were given access to their data reduced their usage by 8.7% just by tracking it. At scale, this could mean an annual savings of $32 billon per year on the country’s annual $369 billion power bill.

The Green Button was inspired by the government’s success with its Blue Button initiative, which allows veterans instant access to their health care data.

Quick, what’s the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil? Sorry, no: it’s not coffee. In fact, while hard data is scant, it may well be — of all things — carbon. No, really. According to the World Bank (PDF) , the global carbon market was worth a whopping 1.42 Facebooks US$142 billion in 2010.

Mind you, it’s not like container ships weighed down to the gills with graphite are crossing and recrossing the Pacific every week. What we’re actually talking about here is the trade in carbon offsets, ie, the absence of carbon. Very Zen, no? Techies should be comfortable with this notion; I seem to recall spending less time studying electrons than I did “holes,” ie their absence, while acquiring my EE degree…

Anyway, where there’s a $twelve-figures market, there are startups fighting for a share. In particular, there’s a battle on to see who will be the primary aggregator of carbon-market data. On one side, dominating the market, I give you the Goliaths Point Carbon, a tentacle of the Thomson Reuters kraken, providing “independent news, analysis and consulting services for European and global power, gas and carbon markets,” and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, doing much the same. On the other, I give you plucky little David eCO2Market, a Paris-based startup with an algorithmic sling.

Point Carbon and BNEF crank out tomes and tomes of research analysis and offer subscription-based information tools. eCO2Market dispenses with weighty reports, and disintermediates analysts and researchers. Instead it tries to build up the biggest, most thorough, and most up-to-date database of carbon-market information, and then gives its users algorithmic tools to search, slice, dice, and organize that data themselves. The more users pay, the better the tools. (They have a free tier, too, if you’re a data geek who wants to play with what they’ve got.)

“It’s our job to take this incredibly convoluted carbon area and put it into a nice little package for investors, environmentalists, everyone, and make it as easy as possible to find projects and their participants, buy credits, or make an investment,” says Chris Draper of eCO2Market. For instance, solar-power company ToughStuff uses eCO2Market’s data to find early-stage solar projects who might be ideal ToughStuff customers.

It’s anyone’s guess whether they’ll thrive. The carbon market is in something of a fraught state right now: aside from the embarrassing theft of millions of dollars worth of carbon credits by hackers a year ago, what the World Bank delicately refers to as “regulatory uncertainty” — ie the stalled attempts to cement a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — means that the near-term future is at best uncertain.

On the other hand, this year should see the launch of the Western Climate Initiative, a cap-and-trade system involving California, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec; and in the long run, though, cap-and-trade carbon markets are probably a growth bet. Either way, eCO2Market is an interesting example of a small startup disrupting an information market by replacing human-written research and analysis with big-data aggregation, algorithms, and visualization. The optimal solution probably features both…but it says here the scale will tip further towards the latter with every passing year.

Image: Global bubble map of carbon projects, from eCO2Market.

Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
Clay is moulded into a vessel;
Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.
- Tao De Ching

There’s a carousel in a small Cape Cod town that we visited this summer and the kids rode it a few times. The carousel is quite old and quite handsome and it makes a great diversion of an evening. I’m reminded now of trying to take pictures of the kids while they rode the carousel. For a while I’d wave and try to get their attention as they roared past, their laughter dopplering around the edge of the curve, and then, after four or five tries I’d give up and just watch. It’s a wheel, an endless circle, designed to delight and enthuse and distract.

Reading the recent back and forth between Stephen Fry – an Apple apologist – and Mike Daisey – an Apple user/abuser – I’m reminded of that carousel. The gist is this: Mike Daisey woke up the NPR-listening world with his long piece of Foxconn for This American Life. It was a great piece – dramatic, educational, and eye-opening – but it’s definitely nothing we haven’t seen before. Some could say that it was The Jungle of Chinese manufacturing, a tell-all with just enough outrage to make us rethink a great horror. But the problem is this: Daisey is an actor and knows how to bring out the story, just as John Steinbeck was a writer and knew how to populate the Dust Bowl with Christ figures. That doesn’t make the story less effective – it makes it more so – but it does make the story less true.

The problem is the endless circle of blame and apology. Daisey is correct in many of his assumptions, but offers a way forward that is currently unenforceable. But if you argue against Daisey’s points, you’re an apologist. But, as Paul Krugman writes:

We keep going over the same ground here. The argument can be delineated like this: Foxconn is an evil sweatshop. Apple is a huge Foxconn customer. They should change things. Two of those things are true, a third is false.

To be clear, I’m with the crowd that says that Apple is, at best, ignorant of Foxconn’s problems and at worst ignoring them. I agree things must change and Apple is in a great position to do it. But I don’t agree with the first point. I’ve seen sweat shops and Foxconn is a factory. If many of the major brands (I recall that Ford was a customer at one factory I visited) knew that their promotional USB keys were made in a building that looked like a gulag, they’d be skewered. Here’s hoping they are, one day. However, Daisey’s Foxconn story – written outside of the factory – and my own research, written inside the factory – don’t jibe. His discoveries that people get sick or are injured in factories are naive and I suspect his sample size of employees who approached him is far smaller than we realize. To go into the Foxconn factory is to see a place staffed by college-age kids and engineers who work 10 or so hours a day building electronics. There is no great Dickensian work house nor are there sad-eyed madonnas of the assembly line chained to the soldering irons. This isn’t the mundanity of evil – this is just mundanity.

Nor am I saying that Daisey’s interviewees are malingerers with an axe to grind. I’m sure their lives are ruined or much harder thanks to Foxconn. The value of Daisey’s efforts is his ability to give these people a voice in an environment that would normally quash that voice. He’s doing what artists must do – reflecting a time and place through his own lens.

My own opinion is simple: Apple needs to do more for the people in its manufacturing chain. I will not pretend that Apple can simply wave a magic wand and make every Foxconn employee rich and happy, but it has the cash and the wherewithal to further disrupt the Chinese supply chain and improve the lot of Foxconn’s employees. But I also agree with what one Gawker commenter said: “I believe Tim Cook will do more good for those employees (and already has, in point of fact) than Mike Daisey ever will.” Apple on the aggregate couldn’t care less about our existence nor does it deserve our undying respect and admiration. On an personal level there are plenty of folks inside Apple working and worrying about worker’s rights in China, but as an entity we are talking supply chains and price management. Apple makes excellent tools for our digital age, that’s it. To defend or excoriate the company is like screaming into the wind. However, through their constant rejiggering and improvements, they have essentially created a Western, ISO-compliant factory environment in a corporate culture that used to force underperforming employees to stand outside wearing a sign that said “I am a bad worker.”

What Daisey did is made us think. Did he do it the right way, using the right tools? Absolutely not. Will he improve the lot of the workers he interviewed? I doubt it. But will his efforts – and the efforts of many who came before him – help bring the Chinese worker out of penury? Sure, eventually.

I opened this piece talking about a carousel in Cape Cod, a delightfully bourgeois setting for a piece on poverty wage labor practices. I get to go to Cape Cod and put my kids on a carousel because my job involves dicking around on the Internet all day (I suspect Daisey’s does too). My one wish is that every Foxconn employee, at some point in their lives, will be able to sit down to an unhurried meal, chat with family, and maybe ride a carousel. I think it’s in Foxconn’s best interests to ensure that that happens – and soon – and I think that we’re nearly there. Things will get better, I’m sure of it, and I also feel that they already have.

Electric car drivers deserve to see their positive impact on the environment and their wallets, but the official mobile apps for the Nissan LEAF and Chevy Volt only display remaining battery. GreenCharge is a new iOS app released today that displays your car’s remaining charge, but also its current range, the local energy price, a log of its usage, and your cost and carbon reduction versus driving a gasoline vehicle. Finally, an app that shows how you’re saving both kinds of green.

The app was developed by Xatori Inc, creators of PlugShare, the largest electric vehicle charging network in the United States. It’s the second product from the Palo Alto-based company, fueled by $400,000 in seed funding and three full-time employees. CEO Forrest North engineered for Tesla and was the CEO of electric vehicle component company Mission Motors. CTO Armen Petrosian developed anodes for Amprius and was on the Stanford Solar Car Team.

Just like the official LEAF and Volt apps, the $9.99 GreenCharge wirelessly connects to your car via cell signals know as telematics. Once authorized, GreenCharge continuously records your EV’s usage creating a logbook of your total, peak, and average energy expenditure. GreenCharge ties this to local energy costs, providing the most accurate way to determine the cost of driving a electric car.

The app also gives you plenty to feel good about. You’ll see your monetary savings and the pounds of carbon offset by not driving a gas guzzler. You can put some friendly pressure on others to consider electric vehicles by sharing how much money you saved to Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Since Xatori’s PlugShare app is already free, it might make sense to add its functionality within a tab of GreenCharge for easy access. The ability to share other stats beyond money saved would useful too. An Android version of GreenCharge on the way.

A vague sense of helping the environment isn’t enough. EV sales won’t surge until their financial benefits become common knowledge.  By educating drivers and their social networks, GreenCharge could get the mainstream to plug in.

Today two musicians sat down with me to have a chat: Andy Ross of OK Go, and Eytan Oren of Eytan and the Embassy. But we weren’t there to talk music.

The dynamic duo actually built an iPhone app called InBloom — a Yelp-style application that offers up sustainable businesses and eco-friendly/dietary food retailers based on location — and sat down with me to tell us how it came to be, and what it’s all about.

The application is available now from the Apple App Store for free, and if eating healthy and loving our Mother Earth are important to you, InBloom is definitely on the top of my list of recommendations for you.

Buildings are blamed for as much as 40% of U.S. energy consumption, and while green construction is on the rise, identifying the best ways to make an older building more efficient can be a tedious manual endeavor. Retroficiency, whose aim is to disrupt the energy efficiency market, eases the process with the help of extensive data sets and predictive analytics.

Greening an old building traditionally involves a walk-through analysis or diagnostic hardware installation, but the Boston-based company’s new Virtual Energy Assessment (VEA) tool shows energy service providers which changes within the building will have the greatest impact on its efficiency. Retroficiency focuses on commercial real estate, which uses 18% of the country’s energy and spending close to $108 billion annually.

“The heavy lifting that takes weeks or months to do manually, we can do in minutes,” says Co-Founder and CEO Bennett Fisher.

Some of the things VEA might observe about a building are that the lighting turns on three hours before anyone arrives, or that heating and cooling systems sometimes operate simultaneously.

The product’s technology is largely powered by the company’s November acquisition of of Nexamp’s Clean Energy Solutions. To analyze a structure, VEA only requires the building address and a year’s worth of energy use interval data, compressing a process that can take several months into several minutes. This helps energy service providers quickly identify which buildings in their network have the highest efficiency improvement potential and what specific improvements will have the greatest impact within each of those buildings.

“Our mission is to scale energy efficiency,” says Fisher, “It’s what needs to happen if we want to make a dent in the environmental and carbon problem.”

Image by Retroficiency

First, Japan got the world’s first connected home garden device, and now it’s time for Nippon to get the world’s first cloud-based LED lighting system. Developed by Tokyo-based lighting tech startup Net LED Technology Corp., the so-called NetLED system will go on sale in Japan on February 20 (here‘s the company’s English website).

The 40W lights, which have a 40,000-hour lifespan, come with built-in Wi-Fi: users can control each tube over the web after installing the NetLed app on a smartphone, tablet, or computer (the iPhone app is already out, while iPad and Android apps will be released this summer). It’s possible to dim the lights (each tube has 10 different dimming levels) and to turn them on or off.

Users can control individual, multiple, or a set of lights (which can be located in separate rooms) via the app, which also offers a timer function. The system also makes it possible to track energy usage in real-time and to automatically aggregate data over an extended period of time.

Net LED says that when a company, for example, uses 200 of these lights, power consumption can be pushed down by up to 50%.

Using the app and Net LED’s servers is free.

The system’s own costs depend on how many lights are needed: the price for the control box/router set (see above) is fixed at US$780. One Wi-Fi-enabled tube (US$260) can be connected to up to three NetLED lights without a Wi-Fi module (those lights cost US$180 each), resulting in sets of four lights (as you can see above).

The WristQue may look like one of those cloth bracelets worn by old soul Sophomores who spent a semester in Prague and came back with dredlocks and an absinthe fetish, but it’s not. It’s actually a personal climate control system. Let me explain.

The bracelet identifies you to the building and allows it to follow you from room to room. Is the meeting room too cold? Press a button and it starts to warm up. It will also prepare rooms for your arrival, reading your patterns of movement over time. If it sounds creepy, it is.

MIT researchers Joe Paradiso and Brian Mayton began the project in October and connects with a number of environmental sensors to ensure a “smart” building stays smart yet allows “fine-grained” control over the environment.

It’s a concept right now but expect your building to know what’s up with you sooner than later.

via phonerpt

Flying a kite to produce power may conjure up images of Ben Franklin, who sought to prove lightning was electric. Makani Power releases a turbine blade into the air, seeking to harness wind energy at higher altitudes.

The Makani Airborne Wind Turbines, which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station.

Once in the air, the wing takes on a circular flight path, perpendicular to the wind’s direction. The crosswind hitting the rotors can pack more than 10 times the actual wind speed, and the blade can adjust position to meet it. Wind speeds can generally be twice as fast at altitude than near ground level as well, making the airborne blade potentially more powerful than ground-based turbines. Their light weight also makes them cheaper to produce than traditional turbines, and maintenance work can be performed on the ground.

When wind speeds drop below nine miles per hour, the blade shifts to hover mode and is reeled in to dock at the ground station.

The company was awarded $3 million from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, and has also received $20 million in funding from Google.

While these turbines have potential, they are still being tested. Makani plans to construct larger wings that can reach heights of 1,600 feet and power 600 homes. The company’s current timeline for the largest prototype is 2013, with hopes of starting commercial production two years later.

Watch one of the test flights here:

Photos by Makani Power

The hottest and coolest thermostat on the market this year was clearly the Nest. This intelligent hunk of steel looks great on a wall and, more important, helps save energy in the home. The Nest learns as you use it, ensuring your home is comfortable year-round.

We sat down with Matt at CES 2012 and he ran through the product and, more important, gave us some great advice on starting your own hardware start-up and how sensors are going to be everywhere soon – in the home and on our bodies.

Spiderman might soon lose his dominance in harnessing spider silk superpowers. Scientists from the University of Wyoming, the University of Notre Dame and Zhejiang University in China have managed to genetically modify silkworms to spin stronger silk using spider genes. The new material could be used for everything from bulletproof vests to replacing tough plastics.

Researchers have long been fascinated with spider silk, a natural material that is stronger than steel. Harvesting the stuff can be tricky, however, since spiders are poor candidates for farming. Not only are they territorial, eating each other when confined to a tight space, but they are hard to handle and produce a very small amount of silk.

Silkworms, on the other hand, have helped clothe humans for millennia without too much trouble. Crossing their genes with those of a spider could mean stronger materials that require less energy to produce. This experiment has been tried before, but Professor Don Jarvis’ team’s success lies in the high quantity and strength of silk produced by their squirmy subjects.

This is not the first time Wyoming’s researchers have experimented with spider genes: Transgenic goats, whose milk contains spider silk proteins, are already breeding on campus.

Currently, the modified silkworms contain only one kind of spider-silk-producing gene and the team hopes to have success with more genes in the future. If it works, spider silk farms might become a new source of materials for greener textiles, plastics and medical implants.

Photo via Flickr by Stéfan

In an unusual hybrid, British industrial designer Phil Pauley created Marine Solar Cells that harness energy from both the sun and water.

The web of energy generators capture energy off-shore, using a combination of floating photovoltaics and natural buoyancy displacement. Thanks to the reflective nature of water, the solar component’s efficiency is up to 20% greater than it would be land-locked.

The devices can be made using recycled materials and, by attaching the units to underwater mooring, can be placed nearly anywhere off-shore, creating subsea batteries or power plants.

The technology is currently in concept stage, so you won’t need to dodge them on your next water sport adventure, but it does have the potential to be a substantial source of new energy, especially if installed in turbulent high sea areas.

Photos by PAULEY Interactive

Today, Cool Planet BioFuels, Inc. announced that BP Technology Ventures has made an investment in the company’s C round led by Shea Ventures. Current Cool Planet investors,  General Electric, Google Ventures, ConocoPhillips, NRG and North Bridge Venture Partners also participated.

The amount of funding was not disclosed.

Cool Planet BioFuels is working to develop bio-based, renewable, reduced carbon gasoline that can be blended with conventional gasoline and used in today’s vehicles. The gas, which is chemically indistinguishable from crude oil derived product, can only be detected by radiocarbon isotope analysis.

Here’s how the company describes the process of making its fuel:

Our proprietary biomass fractionator technology extracts useful hydrocarbons from biomass, leaving behind the excess carbon as a high purity solid. The process generates activated carbon with a very high surface area which will allow it to be used as a soil enhancer similar to “terra preta.” By burying this carbon in an appropriate manner, we can greatly enhance soil fertility while sequestering carbon for hundreds of years. In contrast, normal plant decomposition occurs in just a few years, releasing the plant’s carbon as CO2 and even more harmful methane gas. Our process yields about the same amount of carbon as gasoline so, if we sequester this carbon as a soil enhancer, or simply bury it as coal, the associated fuel has a N100 Negative Carbon Rating.

BP, ConocoPhillips and others are currently testing and evaluating Cool Planet’s fuel and the company also expects to announce other strategic relationships in the coming year.

The C round financing was a year ahead of schedule (the B round closed this spring) because Cool Planet wants to speed  up the development of its modular fuel production plants which it plans to mass produce on a production line. Over the next few years, the company expects to deploy hundres of these plants around the country, in order to save on high transportation costs.

The terms of the B round were also undisclosed, but Cool Planet had raised $8 million in 2010 from GE and North Bridge.

Well, it’s that time of year again when families come together to stare moodily at each other over lunch and, in theory at least, we’re supposed to be thinking about others less fortunate than ourselves. To that end, stay you hand before you switch off the office PC and head off for some seasonal shopping. For those CPUs could be put to good work for charity, no less.

The Charity Engine is a non-profit volunteer computing grid. Based on Berkeley University’s BOINC software for grid computing – as used by dozens of famous ‘citizen science’ projects such as SETI@home. Charity Engine’s version of BOINC simply donates what it makes from research projects on its grid and donates the cash to charity, while incentivising users with randomly generated cash prizes. Profit from the commissions from science and industry is shared 50-50 between the charities and prize winners. You can use the invite code for the beta: CRUNCH.

Google is ending 2011 with an investment that brings its total of renewable energy investments to an impressive $915 million. The online search and advertising juggernaut this morning announced that it is pumping $94 million in a portfolio of four solar photovoltaic projects being built near Sacramento, California by a solar development company called Recurrent Energy.

From the blog post announcing the equity investment (PDF):

We’ve already committed to providing funding this year to help more than 10,000 homeowners install solar PV panels on their rooftops. But this investment represents our first investment in the U.S. in larger scale solar PV power plants that generate energy for the grid—instead of on individual rooftops. These projects have a total capacity of 88 MW, equivalent to the electricity consumed by more than 13,000 homes.

The facilities will serve serving the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD).

Construction on three of the Sacramento area projects will be completed in early 2012, with the fourth coming online later in the year, Recurrent Energy says.

The solar development company, as well as global investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (through a new venture dubbed SunTap Energy), are co-investing in the projects alongside Google.

AMEE, backed by O’Reilly and Union Square Ventures among others, set out in 2008 to map, measure and track all the carbon and energy data on Earth. That’s a big job. It’s since won contracts with the likes of the UK Government, CNN, Google, the list goes on. But what it hasn’t cracked is a consumer-facing app which gets the issue of ‘carbon footprints’ into the mind of the ordinary member of the public.

Remember when Greenpeace totally didn’t like Facebook and its use of ‘dirty energy’ in its datacenters? Well, they’re best buddies now. Greenpeace and Facebook this morning announced that they’re teaming up on the promotion of renewable energy and “develop programs that will enable Facebook users to save energy and engage their communities in clean energy decisions”.

Facebook also committed to using clean and renewable energy to power its own operations.

The news comes two years after the global campaigning organization launched its Unfriend Coal Campaign, enlisting online activists to call on Facebook to power its data centers with clean energy instead of coal. That campaign ends today.

Marcy Scott Lynn, of Facebook’s sustainability programme, said it looked forward “to a day when our primary energy sources are clean and renewable” and that the company is “working with Greenpeace and others to help bring that day closer”.

As part of the agreement between Greenpeace and Facebook, the social network behemoth committed to the pursuit of “ongoing research into energy efficiency” through the Open Compute Project, which Greenpeace will also work to support.

Greenpeace says it is currently the most ‘liked’ environmental nonprofit organization on Facebook.

As you may have heard, Google is getting into the holiday giving spirit these days, as it late last night announced that it has dished out an additional $40 million in philanthropic grants, targeted at science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), girls’ education, and even fighting slavery. (You can read more in Google.org SVP Shona Brown’s blog post here.)

These grants brought the total that Google has funneled into nonprofit and academic institutions over the course of the year to $115 million — and that’s on top of the $1 billion the company invests in programs like Google Grants, Google Apps for Education, which offer free support and services to non-profits and educational institutions.

As part of the $115 million in philanthropic grants awarded over this year, Google has funded 16 programs in STEM and “girls’ education” (nine of which are in the U.S.) for a total of $14.7 million. These programs include the Tech Museum of Innovation, the D.C. Public Education Fund, Girl Scouts of Northern California, the Computer History Museum, Boston-based Citizen Schools, and U.K.-based Generating Genius. The rest include:

• Platform Bèta Techniek
• Bletchley Park Trust
• Concord Consortium
• Girlstart
• MateFitness
• Roberta Initiative
• Robin Hood
• Teach For All
• Science Gallery
• World Wide Workshop

In support of girls’ education, Google also dished out funding to the African Leadership Academy, which “provides merit scholarships to promising young women”, as well as across the continent, and the Afghan Institute of Learning, which brings literacy to the young women of rural Afghanistan. Others include:

• CAMFED International
• Free the Children
• 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World
• Omega Schools Foundation
• Akili Dada

Google also awarded 14 grants to recognize “the entrepreneurial spirit” behind companies using the Web, open source programming, and other tech platforms to improve access to information — something Google has obviously long been passionate about. These include companies like Vittana, which offers loans to students with great credit history in the developing world, Code For America, which received a grant of $1.5 million in an attempt to help governments become more transparent, connected, and efficient by connecting web developers to leaders in civic services.

DoSomething.org also received $2 million in funding to help connect mobile and wired teens with causes they care about, as well as Switchboard, a company that helps African health care works connect with local mobile providers to create free networks and communications channels. The other 10 organizations include:

• Fundación Cibervoluntarios
• Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente
• Engineers without Borders Canada
• iLab Liberia
• Inveneo
• Mercy Corps
• Public.Resource.Org
• Samasource (TC coverage here)
• Stanford University, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
• Team Rubicon

The last portion, $11.5 million, was apportioned to organizations that will help free people from modern-day slavery, which you can read about here.

There are some amazing companies in this list of grant recipients, and Google has clearly spent more than a little time researching some of the more inspiring and big-picture-minded non-profits and technology companies operating out there today. Sure, this is just the season when Google spends some time promoting its charitable grants, but if you have a few minutes, it’s worth checking these organizations out. There’s a lot of value here.

For more, check out the video below:

Excerpt Image credit to Gayle Laakmann McDowell