Every home has unique energy efficiency needs, but there are a lot of universal energy saving projects that will help homeowners lower their utility bills and take advantage of incentives that are available now.

Too often, advice about how to make your home more efficient falls into one of three categories:

Costs a lot of money and has a big impact: Geothermal heating, for instance. Great project, but it’s a big upfront cost for a long-term payback. Not everyone is in a position to do something like that right now.

Doesn’t cost much, but doesn’t have much impact: Insulating your hot water heater tank in a basement that already has wall insulation. (more…)

The companies now threatening to sue BP have only themselves to blame.

Call me a hard-hearted bastard, but I’m finding it difficult to summon up the sympathy demanded by the institutional investors now threatening to sue BP. They claim that the company inflated its share price by misrepresenting its safety record. I don’t know whether this is true, but I do know that the investors did all they could not to find out. They have just been presented with the bill for the years they spent shouting down anyone who questioned the company.

They might not have been warned by BP, but they were warned repeatedly by environmental groups and ethical investment funds. Every year, at BP’s annual general meetings, they were invited to ask the firm to provide more information about the environmental and social risks it was taking. Every year they voted instead for BP to keep them in the dark. While relying on this company for a disproportionate share of (more…)

We talk a lot about the need for America to lead the world in green manufacturing, and with good reason: a strong green manufacturing sector will create good, domestic jobs and boost exports, all while helping us reduce carbon emissions and break our dependence on foreign oil.

But it’s not just talk. We’re taking action to re-establish that leadership, and what’s happening today, down in Louisville, Kentucky, is a perfect example of how we’re going to do it.

Vice President Biden was in Louisville yesterday to visit a General Electric facility called Appliance Park, where (more…)

Virginia Tech’s Lumenhaus was just awarded the grand prize at the Solar Decathlon Europe 2010 in Madrid, beating out the University of Applied Sciences Rosenheim by less than one point in the event’s inaugural year.  University of Florida’s RE:Focus also shined, bringing home the public choice award via public online voting.  In its first year to be hosted internationally, this was a great showing by American Universities and a promising sign for the future of the US design and engineering industry.

Virginia Tech’s ‘Lumenhaus’ is a flexible pavilion style home inspired by Mies Van Der Rohe’s Farnsworth house.  Large glass walls to the North and South are shaded by their custom designed ‘Eclipse System’ which has the ability to slide open with the glass allowing the occupant to become more in tune with nature.  Rainwater collection, radiant floor heating and sun tracking solar PV panels are just a few of the (more…)

On a day when the rest of the stock market was tanking, Tesla Motors cruised to an IPO win worth $226.1million.

Concerns over consumer confidence, the European economy and growth in China brought the market to its lowest level of the year finishing down 268 points. Don’t tell Tesla. In a clear testament to the position the automaker has already achieved as a brand, investors lined up for a ride as the company became the first American car manufacturer to go public since Ford in 1956. (more…)

Many energy experts contend natural gas is the ideal fuel as the world makes the transition to renewable energy. But since much of that gas will come from underground shale, potentially at high environmental cost, it would be far better to skip the natural gas phase and move straight to massive deployment of solar and wind power.

For several years, many voices, including Texas energy baron T. Boone Pickens, have been touting natural gas as the best energy source to form a bridge between the current fossil-fuel economy and a renewable energy (more…)

Today I am going to highlight a bunch of interesting articles that have come out lately which interest me. Some of these will become future posts, but I want to highlight them as they come out to keep my readers up to date, and give you something to read in your spare time.

1. The USGBC issued a short white paper on Greening the Codes and the compatibility of LEED with green codes.  It is very good, and makes the point (more…)

Solar companies and the provincial government are working diligently to transform Ontario’s power grid into an environmentally friendly green system. Hay Solar and Mann Engineering recently announced that they are looking to offer farmers free barns, promising to furnish the sloped roofs with solar panels. Once operational, these photovoltaic panels will go to work, generating enough clean, free energy to pay for themselves in approximately 20 years. The companies believe (more…)

Rep. Ed Markey has been among BP’s toughest critics in Congress following the Deepwater Horizon blowout, accusing it, among other things, of lowballing its estimates of oil flow.

Markey is at it again. As you may have read, the Boston Democrat released an internal BP document that shows that early company estimates for worst-case oil flow scenarios were far higher than the company has ever acknowledged — up to 100,000 barrels per day if all containment mechanisms were to fail. Take a look at the document for yourself.

The document is not dated, but a statement from Rep. Markey that accompanied its release said (more…)

Recently, CleanTechies had the pleasure to speak with Phillip Ridings, CEO of Dragonfly Industries, Inc. We talked about the the company, its products, and what its products may mean for the clean tech sector. If Dragonfly lives up to it’s reputation it could easily revolutionize the wind industry.

CleanTechies: Phillip, can you tell us a little about the designs for the Dragonfly Turbine and MantaRay Power stations and what kind of plans you have for their future?

Phillip: Dragonfly is our land based wind turbine and (more…)