What do the cleantech companies ElectronVault, SEaB Energy, and BlackGold Biofuels all have in common? Female executives at or near the top of the food chain.

Marissa Mayer, the recently appointed CEO of Yahoo, drew a lot of attention because of her gender and the fact that she was pregnant when (more…)

Last October, Popular Mechanics reported that non-practicing entities (NPEs) may have “bled companies for half a trillion dollars” between 1990 and 2010. Sometimes called “patent trolls” by their detractors, NPEs are generally defined as companies that obtain most of their revenue from the licensing and/or enforcement of their intellectual property. (more…)

In case you missed it, Vote Solar presented a webinar last week on a new financing model that may help unlock the pent up demand for solar among small commercial property owners. Check out the recording of the webinar below.

Many would argue that the small commercial market (more…)

With October now upon us, data providers are beginning to issue their preliminary analyses of cleantech investment in the third quarter of 2012 that just closed. This quarter, the Clean Energy pipeline service of London’s VBResearch is the first to weigh in, counting cleantech venture capital & private equity investment (excluding buyouts) as approximately $1.7 billion.

Data from other providers, like Dow Jones (more…)

The Bank of America Energy Efficiency Finance Program has provided low-interest loans and grants to community development financial institutions (CDFIs) to increase access to energy efficiency retrofits in low- to moderate-income communities. The program was launched in 2011. (more…)

Eric McAfee is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist, founding and funding companies in renewable energy, oil and gas, agriculture, networking devices and enterprise software. Given that level of success, I tried to absorb every word of his talk at last week’s Renewable Energy Finance Forum. (more…)

Those of us who maintain optimism for a future than includes sustainable practices in energy generation place a great deal of hope in “distributed generation” – the concept in which the model of buying electricity from huge utilities becomes increasingly irrelevant, and in which individual users generate more – or all — of their own. Such a schema has many obvious (more…)

Financing issues remain a problem in solar market growth. While third-party PPAs have become widely accessible and transformed residential and larger commercial sectors, funding still remains a real bottleneck for the small commercial market niche. To explore solutions, Vote Solar commissioned a report looking at the problem in more depth, and exploring (more…)

Shading, ownership issues, limited space and many other factors means that most American households simply aren’t suitable for solar panels. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that as much as three-quarters of residential buildings have physical restrictions to going solar. (more…)

When Garrett Hardin wrote his famous essay The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, he used the example of herdsman grazing their animals in a common pasture to exemplify the “tragedy” that results when multiple actors, acting independently and “rationally” (in the economic self-interest sense), will deplete a shared finite resource, even when it is in no one’s long-term (more…)