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With 2010 finally behind us, and a full year of data to play with, it appears that green technology investments are firmly shifting from the supply side of the equation to the demand side. In other words, solar and wind power were on the outs last year, and energy efficiency was the up-and-comer.

That’s the conclusion I draw in my weekly update at GigaOm Pro (subscription required), and while it may not come as a surprise to industry watchers, it’s nice to have some numbers to back it up. Although solar startups continued to draw the most money in venture capital investment last year, energy efficiency startups garnered

greennumbers green technology investments investments supply demand energy efficiency

Chris Huhne, the UK's Energy and Climate Change Secretary, today said that by 2015 up to 100,000 Green Deal workers could be employed in the effort to upgrade Britain’s homes. Currently around 27,000 work in the insulation industry. Legislation to start the process of establishing the Green Deal is due to be introduced into Parliament next month.
The Green Deal is the Government’s new and radical way of making energy efficiency available to all, whether people own or rent their property. The work to upgrade the property will be paid back from the saving on energy bills.

greennumbers energy efficiency Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne green deal insulation

Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution. It's the biggest low-carbon resource by far. "Efficiency Works" [PDF], a major new report by Bracken Hendricks, Bill Campbell, and Pen Goodale, finds that a straightforward set of policies aimed at upgrading just 40 percent of the residential and commercial building stock in the United States would:

Create 625,000 sustained full-time jobs over a decade.
Spark $500 billion in new investments to upgrade 50 million homes and office buildings.
Generate as much as $64 billion a year in cost savings for U.S. ratepayers, freeing consumers to spend their money in more productive ways.

energy efficiency jobs investments greennumbers cost savings climate solution

Outlining its progress in achieving the comprehensive sustainability goals laid out under the PlanetFirst™ initiative, Samsung said it invested a total of 1.01 trillion Korean won (about US$865 million) in developing environmentally friendly products and building green manufacturing sites in 2009. The company has also reduced sales-normalized greenhouse emissions* from its manufacturing facilities by 31 percent and increased average energy efficiency of its new products by 16 percent.

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If the federal government established a standard requiring utilities to obtain 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, it would create 297,000 new jobs, according to a 2009 analysis by my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists. Echoing our analysis, a February 2010 study by Navigant Consulting found that a 25 percent by 2025 standard would create 274,000 jobs.\n\nEnergy efficiency programs also would produce more jobs. A 2009 study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that a national standard requiring utilities to institute programs reducing electricity demand by 15 percent and natural gas demand by 10 percent would generate more than 220,000 jobs by 2020.

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Going “green” needs to be high on every organisation’s agenda, whether it’s by improving IT operations and infrastructure, lowering operating expenses, reducing or avoiding capital expenditures, aligning with corporate green initiatives or by complying with new, complex regulations such as the UK’s Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency legislation that came into force this April.

sustainability crc carbon reduction commitment energy efficiency

LG has not been the brightest crayon in the box when it comes to gaining street cred for green labeling. They had their Energy Star label stripped from several of their refrigerator models after it was discovered that the fridges far exceeded Energy Star requirements for electricity consumption. Now they've been caught red handed rigging the testing process in Australia.

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Regardless of what the skeptics may think, there are indeed 20-dollar bills lying on the ground all around us. We only need the will -- and the ways -- to pick them up.

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"Energy efficiency can create 38,000 new jobs for North Carolinians while saving consumers $3.6 billion in energy bills, according to a new report released today by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The report, North Carolina’s Energy Future: Electricity, Water, and Transportation Efficiency, suggests a broad set of policies that can meet nearly a quarter of the state’s energy demand and enables North Carolina to become a national leader in clean energy development and deployment while boosting the state’s economic growth.

"

greennumbers aceee American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy energy bills north carolina energy efficiency clean energy

Energy Secretary Steven Chu — the rockstar geek Nobel Prize winner — announced at the first ARPA-E summit on Tuesday that the Department of Energy will hand out $100 million in a third round of grants to early stage greentech startups through the ARPA-E program. Specifically this round of grants will focus on energy efficiency technologies including grid storage, power converter technology, and building cooling technology

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IBM Research today unveiled a breakthrough method based on a mathematical algorithm that reduces the computational complexity, costs, and energy usage for analyzing the quality of massive amounts of data by two orders of magnitude. This new method will greatly help enterprises extract and use the data more quickly and efficiently to develop more accurate and predictive models.

In a record-breaking experiment, IBM researchers used the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world -- a Blue Gene/P system at the Forschungszentrum Julich in Germany -- to validate nine terabytes of data (nine million million or a number with 12 zeros) in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy.

Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required.

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Johnson Controls, announced today how they are taking unique advantage of Microsoft Surface technology to display its energy-efficient solutions for commercial buildings.

Johnson Controls Microsoft Surface energy efficiency

"While electronic devices have greatly improved in many regards, such as in storage capacity, graphics, and overall performance, etc., they still have a weight hanging around their neck: they’re huge energy hogs. When it comes to energy efficiency, today’s computers, cell phones, and other gadgets are little better off than those from a decade ago, or more. The problem of power goes beyond being green and saving money. For electrical engineers, power has become the primary design constraint for future electronic devices. Without lowering power consumption, improvements made in other areas of electronic devices could be useless, simply because there isn’t enough power to support them."

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Cold Aisle Containment case study presented at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group's Data Center Energy Efficiency Summit.

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OPOWER works in Energy Efficiency and Smart Grid software. Through a patent- pending approach, they convert large-scale customer engagement into an energy efficiency program that delivers energy savings to utility partners.

opower energy efficiency smart grid utility

Global investors representing $13 trillion in assets called on the United States and other countries on Thursday to adopt policies to fight climate change they said would unleash a potential flood of private money into renewable and efficient energy.

investors climate change Renewable Energy governments energy efficiency investments

"Take all the power stations in the United States. Together, they produce almost 1000 gigawatts of electricity - enough to boil several billion kettles simultaneously.

Now imagine building another five power stations for every one that already exists in the United States. That is about the amount of electricity generation that the world is on track to add over the next 20 years. And three-quarters of the new stations will use fossil fuels."

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machines designed to change humans, as the persuasive technology group of Stanford University, California, calls them, could save us huge amounts of energy and money.

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"Johns Hopkins materials scientists have found a new use for a chemical compound that has traditionally been viewed as an electrical conductor, a substance that allows electricity to flow through it. By orienting the compound in a different way, the researchers have turned it into a thin film insulator, which instead blocks the flow of electricity, but can induce large electric currents elsewhere. The material, called solution-deposited beta-alumina, could have important applications in transistor technology and in devices such as electronic books."

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Walmart, said it will use light emitting diode lights from Cree in new stores and retrofitted ones. In the first year, that will come to 650 stores alone.

The stores will replace ceramic metal halide lights, those honkers you see in the ceiling of big box retailers. The Cree bulbs will emit the same amount of light as a 70-watt bulb but use 82% less power.

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