Take a look inside Earth’s ‘greenest building’

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It is being called the “greenest building” on the planet. And it’s located right here in Seattle. Welcome to the Bullitt Center, a new six-story, 50,000-square-foot building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood that is designed to produce more energy than it consumes. Or, as the developer describes it, the building essentially works as its own… Read More…

Bill Gates invests in energy storage again, this time with battery maker Aquion

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In the past few years, Bill Gates has already invested in three energy storage companies — MIT spinout Metal Battery (renamed Ambri), Berkeley-based LightSail Energy and Bellevue-based TerraPower. Now, the Microsoft co-founder is putting his money to a fourth. Pennsylvania-based Battery maker Aquion Energy announced a $35 million funding round today that includes Gates as a new investor. The amount Gates… Read More…

Geek of the Week: This chemist and his team are hacking molecules for cheaper energy

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Anyone who has shopped for a ring knows that platinum doesn’t come cheap. Existing fuel cells rely on this precious metal as the catalyst to convert hydrogen into electricity, increasing the cost of fuel cells and limiting their potential reach as a source of energy. But what if the catalyst could be a cheaper metal,… Read More…

Northwest Energy Angels invest record $4.7 Million in 2012

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Despite decreasing overall venture capital investments in cleantech worldwide, Northwest Energy Angels announced today that its members invested $4,696,500 in 15 clean technology companies in 2012— eight new and seven follow-on investments — marking the single biggest investment year since NWEA was founded back in 2006. That’s a big increase from the $1.3 million the group invested for all… Read More…

TerraPower nuclear engineer emerges at stealthy energy startup SuperCritical Technologies

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Chal Davidson, the former lead engineer at TerraPower, the nuclear reactor startup backed by Intellectual Ventures and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has emerged at the helm of a new startup company by the name of SuperCritical Technologies. According to a description on Davidson’s LinkedIn page, SuperCritical is setting out to build modular, compact power plants… Read More…

Battery breakthrough: New technology promises to triple lithium ion capacity

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Remember those Energizer Bunny commercials touting batteries that kept going, and going, and going? Well, researchers at Washington State University have developed a new lithium ion battery that can actually keep going, and going, and going at about three times the current capacity. As part of the Science + Technology Discovery Series of the Technology Alliance Program,… Read More…

Renewable fuel startup spins out from Targeted Growth with investment from Avista

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Matrix Genetics has received an undisclosed investment from Avista Development, the venture capital arm of Spokane utility Avista Corp. The money will be used to complete a spin off from Targeted Growth, a Seattle agricultural sciences company whose technologies are used to increase crop yields. Matrix Genetics is developing technologies to produce renewable fuels and… Read More…

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen bankrolls Siluria in ambitious attempt to find an oil alternative

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital is co-leading a $30 million investment in Siluria Technologies, a San Francisco company that’s developing methods to convert natural gas into plastics, chemicals and transportation fuels. Siluria uses methane, which is the key component of natural gas and the world’s most abundant hydrocarbon, in a conversion process that includes advanced nanotechnology,… Read More…

MIT spinout Liquid Metal Battery lands $15M from Bill Gates, others

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Liquid Metal Battery Corporation, an MIT spin out that’s developing new technologies for electricity storage, has raised $15 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Total and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The technology behind the company was developed by Dr. Donald Sadoway, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was recently named one of Time Magazine’s… Read More…

Seattle geeks win Apps for Energy challenge with Leafully

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Sometimes it can be tough to put one’s energy consumption into perspective. But what if you broke everything down into something that everyone understands: trees. That’s the idea behind Leafully, a startup project from Seattle software developers Nathan Jhaveri and Tim Edgar. The duo just took home the top prize, worth $30,000, in the U.S…. Read More…