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The share economy just keeps stretching into new markets, and this time it’s towards the air: An Airbnb-like sharing service for private airplanes has just launched. Dubbed OpenAirplane, the company is essentially a vetting service for private pilots. Typically if a pilot has a private pilot’s license, he can only rent planes from his local flight school. If [...] Read more »

I can truly say that I’m surprised Tesla is dipping its toes into the battery swapping technology that has faced many challenges, particularly given the fact that recent sales from Tesla indicate that customers aren’t particularly worried about the range of the car or the charge times. That said, the move suggests that Tesla feels [...] Read more »

Over the past few years it’s become obvious to all involved in selling both residential and commercial rooftop solar systems that customers will balk at the hefty upfront costs of purchasing, installing, and maintaining a solar panel system. Into the fray have stepped companies offering financing solutions, ranging from power purchase agreements at fixed rate [...] Read more »

First, a big thanks to Ucilia Wang, who filled in for me these past six weeks! She brought analysis on everything from the solar industry to hydrogen fuel cell cars. And on the day I return, a familiar theme crops up on this Monday morning: another failure in the solar power industry. Bloomberg reports this [...] Read more »

Discerning cleantech readers I’ll be away for the next six weeks. But not to worry. In my absence you can enjoy blog posts and weekly updates from Ucilia Wang. Ucilia has deep knowledge in cleantech, including smart grid, renewable energy, and EVs. If her name is familiar, that’s because she’s authored research for GigaOM Research [...] Read more »

Europe accounts for about half the $77 billion dollar solar market and so today’s news that EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht is expected to recommend on Wednesday that the EU should levy tariffs of about 30 percent on Chinese made solar panels could seriously shift the balance of power in the solar market there. China [...] Read more »

Silver Spring Networks turned in its first quarterly report as public company. It’s mostly slow going at Silver Spring in terms of growth and  the company still takes a long time to recognize revenue on a GAAP basis because deals takes so long to be fully implemented. Wall Street paired the stock back about 5 [...] Read more »

Electric car startup Coda has filed for bankruptcy. This was not altogether unexpected and I actually caught myself thinking last week that we hadn’t heard from the company in a while. Well now we have. Coda had many problems. The car was 30K after the federal tax credit, which was just was just too expensive [...] Read more »

In this Weekly Update, I take a look at the Hub approach to community work spaces and office sharing, which focuses on programming not just desks and wif. Read more »

The quest for improved energy density in batteries is one of the most difficult technological feats to achieve but also an area of cleantech that has some of the most lucrative potential business applications. For starters, it would completely unlock renewable energy generation by solving the intermittency issues related to wind and solar power. Grid [...] Read more »