The New Zealand-based clean tech company LanzaTech has just announced a successful run of its new technology for reclaiming industrial waste gasses to produce 2,3 Butanediol, a foundational chemical from which spring a variety of products including fuels and even plastics.

If LanzaTech’s technology proves successful on a commercial scale, it provides yet another pathway for the world to continue manufacturing products, including energy products, without continuing the high-risk harvesting of fossil fuels that has wrecked so many local economies. It also provides another alternative for producing plastics and fuels without using food crops or taking land out of food crop production.

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Need some shade on your company parking lot? Instead of a putting up a dumb structure that merely shades the parking lot, take a look at this solar powerhouse made by Ohio-based ProtekPark Solar. The company builds extremely sturdy pre-engineered covered parking structures specifically designed to support solar panels as the roof.

Why make electricity when you’ve got a business to run? You could be making some money on the side from making solar electricity. You can do it off your roof at home too, but I’m thinking there’s more space over your parking lot. The bigger the space, the more power it makes.The more solar power you can make, the more you can earn. That’s because in certain states now, you can get paid to make electricity through trading SRECs.

About seven states enable you to go into solar farming and earn cash from it. In New Jersey you could earn serious cash over the next 15 years from making solar power.

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A simple, cheaply produced thin plastic film placed on top of solar panels that could boost their power by 10% has just passed extensive testing by the NREL. The light-bending film was developed by researchers focused on innovative applied optics and light ray management at Genie Lens Technologies in Colorado, and the company would license the production of its FUSION film through a subsidiary, SolOptics.

In tests performed by NREL at its Golden, Colorado research campus, the film delivered conversion efficiency gains ranging from 10% to 12.5% depending on testing conditions, on a variety of solar panels, at a cost of under 10 cents a watt.

The gains in efficiency are amplified by its low cost, driven primarily by its integration into existing glass and plastic film manufacturing processes and its use of readily available and inexpensive materials.

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Two heavy-duty manufacturing powerhouses, Peterbilt and Eaton Corporation, have teamed up to give garbage trucks a fuel saving green twist.  This spring, Peterbilt announced its new Model 320 Hybrid which uses Eaton’s new hydraulic hybrid system to achieve up to 30% in fuel conservation, along with a consequent reduction in emissions and greatly reduced maintenance costs, too.  Now four of the sustainable behemoths are set for their first run in Michigan, in the green-minded city of Anne Arbor.

If garbage trucks seem unlikely candidates for a green makeover, consider that Caterpillar recently launched a fuel-saving diesel electric hybrid tractor, and the U.S. Army is developing fuel cells to reduce the use of petroleum fuel in its Abrams tanks. Just goes to show that significant opportunities to cut down on fossil fuels – and money – can pop up just about anywhere, and we’ve only just begun to tap the potential.

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As Europe forges ahead with larger and larger wind turbine sizes for off-shore wind, a design change may now be required. The incentive to build larger turbines is that when you increase the size of the turbines you decrease your costs per megawatt significantly.

Another is that the best wind resources, the ones with no environmental controversy are further off-shore, in deeper water. As European countries venture further offshore in search of the best wind farm locations, the size of the turbines goes up as the water gets deeper.

But a proposed new 10MW turbine built by Norwegian turbine developer Sway would be as high as a 30 story building above the sea, 533 feet tall with 476 foot blades. This is so much larger than the 5 MW turbines that were even recently on the cutting edge of turbine design, that an entirely new kind of foundation design may be needed.

Instead of fixing the turbine to the sea floor – the turbine that Sway has been developing since 2004 allows an enormous, lightweight turbine to sway around a fixed base and to even swivel on it to create energy as wind direction changes. There are many designs for floating turbines. Like them, this idea will take a smaller scale model to test its effectiveness.

But that “small” test turbine size will itself be twice the size of most US wind farms with 2.5 MW turbines. Just the test will require a 5 MW turbine!

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A historic agreement has been signed by a consortium of appliance manufacturers  and environmental groups that will keep 550 million metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere over 30 years by setting new Federal minimum standards that raise energy efficiency increases nationwide in a range of consumer appliances by 2014.

The recommended standards and tax credits will save the US more than 9 quads of energy over 30 years, or roughly enough to meet the total energy needs of 40 percent of American homes for one year, according to a DOE analysis.

The new minimum standards they agreed to mean that all refrigerators will reduce current energy use by at least 20%, clothes washers by 40%, air conditioners by at least 10%, dishwashers by 14% and clothes dryers by 5% over the next 4 years.

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Nearly all of the globe’s top 30 mega-cities are in the tropics, in developing nations. As they develop – while simultaneously, over the coming decades; the climate heats further, the demand for air conditioning in these gigantic mega-cities (in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria) is going to skyrocket, according to a study by Michael Sivak at the University of Michigan.

The potential is for a huge increase in energy demands. India’s 18 million people, just in Mumbai alone could potentially need energy for cooling that is equivalent to a quarter of the demand of the entire US.

Simultaneously, climate change itself makes it imperative that the world replace fossil sources for electricity to run the air conditioners that will help make a warmer planet bearable.

As a result, one of the most rapidly growing new business sectors will be in innovation in low carbon cooling technologies.

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A newly developed A/C refrigerant developed by Honeywell for the European market to have 99.7% lower global warming potential (GWP) will be used by GM to cool its entire fleet of 2013 models.

The new low emission coolant was developed by Honeywell initially to meet EU standards which have long been much more strict than US NHTSA standards governing greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

Now that the US is beginning to develop EU level clean vehicle standards, Honeywell’s HFO1234yf will have a new market in the US as well, and GM is the first on board to announce incorporating the environmentally friendlier refrigerant in its line-up here.

Names like Buick, GMC and Cadillac may seem hardly synonymous with green driving. But the new GM, (which, like Honeywell is a member of the breakaway Chamber of Commerce for clean energy) has a more fuel-efficient 2013 Chevy line-up ( including the Volt) which will also use HFO1234yf.

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Solyndra was the very first of the renewable energy companies funded through the (newly renewable energy-friendly) Department of Energy under Secretary Chu, who guaranteed a $535 million loan so Solyndra could build a factory to make its innovative cylindrical CIGS thin film solar modules. That factory is now due online this fall in the Bay Area’s Fremont, ahead of the original schedule.

Now Southern California Edison (SCE) has awarded Solyndra (through its subsidiary, Photon Solar) a bundle of 20-year power purchase agreements to build about 16 MW of rooftop PV systems distributed atop 15 commercial or industrial buildings in Southern California.

Solyndra’s subsidiary, Photon Solar will build the Solyndra systems, the largest being a 3 MW array on a commercial or industrial building in Buena Park. Seven of its 15 sites will be a megawatt or more. The start-up just completed their largest array to date, a 704 KW system on the LCS Industries building in New Jersey.

The company expects to triple its manufacturing output once the first 250MW of capacity ramps up. It has almost a billion in VC funding for its innovative easy-install tubular CIGS thin film modules.

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In a daring display of green chutzpah, a hair care products company called Zotos International, Inc. has seemingly come out of nowhere to grab the title of biggest wind energy generator of any U.S. manufacturer.  The company has just won approval install a $7 million, 3.3 megawatt wind power project for its facility in Geneva, New York.  The American Wind Energy Association has said that the project is the largest of its kind in the U.S.

The project went through with significant help from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which chipped in about 30% of the cost of the project.  Also helping to win approval from Geneva officials was the company’s commitment to donate the equivalent of 5% of the wind power back to the city.  It’s all part of Zotos’s plan to achieve 100% renewable energy at the facility by 2011.

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