Bloom Energy is a Silicon Valley startup that unveiled on Wednesday its Bloom Energy Server which is a collection of fuel cells that can generate electricity at a low cost. A box the size of a pickup truck is made up of mainly sand and uses a electrochemical reaction between oxygen and natural gas to produce electricity.

This can be  an innovative advancement because it only uses solid oxide fuel cells and does not require any sun or wind and is twice as efficient as burning natural gas. The company was founded in 2001 and has about $400 million from venture capitals. The servers can provide electricity at 9 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour compared to 14 cents for power from the grid. This can give you back your return on investment in three to five years which is extremely good compared to the other green alternatives. Solar and wind technologies take a lot of up front costs and investments and makes it hard to justify the costs. Even with government incentives, solar power for homes still requires too much upfront costs especially since it takes at least 10 years to recouperate the costs. This can be a useful tool to provide portable electricity and also be useful to help bring electricity to poverty places that dont currently have electricity.

via SFGate

Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, IBM, and Alcatel-Lucent got grants from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for projects on improving energy efficiency in the IT and communicatio technology industries.

Yahoo got $9.9 million to design a data center that uses outside ambient air cooling.

Hewlett-Packard got $7.4 million for testing a data center design using alternative current and water cooling components.

Alcatel-Lucent got $1.8 million to test heat-sink structures and device-level liquid cooling technologies and another $300,000 to test methods to synchronize telecom network energy demand.

IBM got two grants totalling $4 million to develop liquid metal thermal interfaces for data centers and to develop software based cooling tools.

Tesla Motors is sending one of its electric sports cars on a 3,100 mile road trip from Los Angeles to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. What would normally take just 6 days is going to take 19 days since the Tesla can only go 244 miles on each charge. I have always viewed the Tesla as a nice dream car to own, but from realizing the limits of the range of this electric car, this trip sort of gives me a negative view of the car.

I am sure the car can be great for commuting daily if you can afford it but the fact that if you were to take the car on a road trip cross country would take three times as long sounds sort of lame. Of course a 3,100 mile road trip isnt something everyone does on a regular basis but you can’t even make it from San Francsico to Los Angeles (about 380 miles) in one charge makes the car seem a little more useless.

“On November 1^st the state abruptly cut all processing payments to its more than 2,400 recycling centers including 20 in San Francisco.  This was after an initial July cut of 85 percent.  According to a report put out by Californians Against Waste, the move is projected to cost consumers $100 million in increased fees for beverages, lead to the closure of 1,100 recycling centers, and put 5, 000 people employed in the recycling industry out of work – many of whom are at-risk youth, the Los Angeles Times reported.”

This is sad news to hear that recycling programs are being cut back. The state of California is broke and I guess is trying to cut back basically everywhich way it can, but green jobs are important to keep, especially if it is helping troubled youths. There will also be less recycling sites due to the cutback in subsidized recycling facilities.

via SFGate and MissionLocal.org

I volunteered at the San Francsico Green Festival 2009 that took place at the Concourse Exhibition Hall. Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco had made a guest appearance at the event as well and spoke about support for green jobs, hybrids, composting, etc.

Green Festival is a joint project put together by Global Exchange and Green America and I was helping the booth out at Green America to get people to make a video about their Green resolution. The festivals have numerous keynote speakers and had plenty of booths and vendors. There was some interesting stuff there and it was cool to see what kind of new things come up in the green scene every so often. There were plenty of cool eco fashion booths, organic food, renewable energy, and more.

CRC – computer recycling

Smart Strip

GameWhys – games for conscious living

Green Field Paper Company – plantable paper

Obon – pencils made from newspaper

OmGym – Yoga Inversion Therapy