Interesting opinion article in the San Jose Mercury News today, about how Los Angeles is seriously challenging the Bay Area in the clean technology industry: In this month’s election, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs successfully defended our state’s clean economy from Proposition 23, the oil-backed attempt to suspend California’s landmark Global Warming Solutions Act. However, this is [...]

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Clean Energy, Jobs, Silicon Valley, Southern California by Benjamin Kuo

This week, the results of an architecture competition to envision what the Los Angeles Clean Technology Corridor might look like was announced. While–as beautiful as the graphics and architecture from the competition might be–what really counts, are concrete efforts to make it easy to start, maintain, and grow clean technology related businesses. Clean technology businesses [...]

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Clean Energy, Economy, Southern California by Benjamin Kuo

The folks over at the X Prize Foundation videotaped our interview with Peter Diamandis of the foundation, and Progressive Insurance’s Brian Desilva about the Progressive Automotive X Prize. We’ve embedded the video below… >

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Automotive, Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo

Not that most folks reading this read the daily newspaper anymore, but one example of why no one does, is this: The LA Times posted an article today, Silicon Valley becoming driving force for electric vehicles – postulating that Silicon Valley has become the center of the world for the emerging electric vehicle industry, based [...]

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Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo

Completely unrelated to Southern California’s technology industry, but one of the things which happens when you publish an online news site, is you get random press releases by the hundreds. Every once in awhile, you get one where you go “what were they thinking?!?!” Today’s prize for “what were they thinking” is a real estate [...]

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Clean Energy, Random by Benjamin Kuo

Katie Fehrenbacher at Earth2Tech has an interview with one of the most stealthy venture capitalists in the Los Angeles area, David Gelbaum of the Quercus Trust. Quercus–which very few people seem to realize is based in Los Angeles–is one of the most active investors in the clean technology area, but also one of the most [...]

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Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo

I was struck this week by a huge rash of energy-related, venture funding deals in the last few weeks, all focused on some aspect smart metering or energy monitoring: Power Assure, Advanced Telemetry, CPower, eMeter, Hara, Control4, Tendril, EcoDog, and Optimum Energy (just to name a few). There’s been a theme going around the clean [...]

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Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo

Here’s an interesting data point in terms of Southern California’s position over Silicon Valley in terms of the clean technology industry: this interactive map of “green businesses” in California created by the Environmental Defense Fund shows that LA has 398 companies, San Diego has 202 companies, compared with 173 companies in Santa Clara County and [...]

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Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo

Among the tidbits surfacing this Earth Day: Los Angeles has just rolled out a “solar map” which shows where across the Los Angeles County different solar power installations has so far been installed. The mash mapup shows how much solar power has been installed in different ZIP codes in the city, along with some details [...]

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Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo

Buy.com pointed out this week a study, done by a group at Carnegie Mellon, which shows that buying products online is better for the planet than retail stores. The study reports that buying online saves 35% in energy, and carbon emissions, versus a traditional retail purchase. Interestingly enough, it looks like your carbon-spewing, gasoline sucking [...]

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Clean Energy by Benjamin Kuo