The Week in Cleantech

The Week in Cleantech is a weekly roundup of our favorite cleantech and alt energy blog posts and stories from across the web. If you know of a good piece that you think should be included here, don't hesitate to let us know! This week, we particularly liked... On Tuesday, Mike Millikin at Green Car Congress detailed Citi's recently-unveiled climate change initiative for us. Yet more institutional money formally chasing climate and cleantech investments. On Wednesday, Mark Gunther gave us the run-down of Merrill Lynch’s green metrics. The issue of how blue-chip firms are positioning...

On Tuesday, Jennifer Kho at Greentech Media informed us that LDK's CEO was starting up a thin-film solar firm. Given thin-film's potential and the stock market successes of one thin-film maker in particular, the emergence of competition doesn't come as much of a surprise. And who else to do better than an already-successful solar entrepreneur. On Wednesday, Craig Rubens at earth2tech featured an interview where the CEO of PG&E painted the future of utilities for us. An interesting interview on the potential and challenges of plug-in hybrids and net metering. On Wednesday, Scott Krisner at Innovation Economy...

Tom Konrad June 25: Pure Technologies Expands in the US Pure Technologies Ltd. (TSX:PUR, OTC:PPEHF) today announced plans for a major expansion of its Engineering Services business through the establishment of up to five new regional offices in the United States.  Last year, Pure was struggling when the Arab Spring stopped work at their biggest customer, a Libyan water authority, but the company did an admirable job cutting costs and developing business in other parts of the world.  Work (and payments) from Libya resumed this spring, and the company's business in North America is growing at a breakneck...

Capstone(CPST), Siemens (SI) and China BAK(CBAK) announce deals; Brightsource withdraws IPO. Jeff Siegel and Tom Konrad April 9: Capstone Turbine (NASDAQ:CPST) Lands Another 10 Megawatts JS: Capstone Turbine (NASDAQ:CPST) announced this morning that it received about 10 megawatts worth of new orders from two oil and gas producers in the Eagle Ford shale play. For the past few years we've seen Capstone become one of the many beneficiaries of the oil & gas boom in the U.S. I expect to see Capstone continue to benefit from this space. That's the good news....

The Economist is currently running an interesting poll on whether we can solve our energy problems with existing technologies or whether we will need breakthrough innovations. Add your vote! On Sunday, Domenick Yoney at AutoBlog Green told us that electric bike sales were soaring world-wide. I'm not sure what's a good play on this, but an interesting trend to note nonetheless. On Monday, Matthew McDermott at TreeHugger told us about another biofuel feedstock we may not have considered. Earlier this summer, David Pauly at Bloomberg was telling us about yet another such potential feedstock, which apparently is...

On Sunday, TraderMark at Fund My Mutual Fund opined that the solar sector was headed for a shakeout. Well, he didn't quite opine that...he reported the major points from Greentech Media's Solar Market Outlook event. The main conclusion is that it's not only 2008 that's going to be a tough year for solar, but rather the next 3 to 4 years as the industry matures and consolidates. TraderMark argues that the solar sector will follow a boom-bust-echo path; we're currently just exiting boom times (read: incredibly rich valuations times) and the whole think is about to go bust, but...