Staff analysis

What do you do with employees who occupy your factory?

If you're Danish wind turbine maker Vestas Wind Systems, you apparently cut them.

Vestas today confirmed it is cancelling plans to retool a U.K. factory from 40-meter blades to 44-meter blades, citing tough economic market conditions. So that's expected to mean the jobs of 600 people at the factory, located on the Isle of Wight on the English Channel, slated for closure on July 31.

Three of the Vestas squatters.

Martin Eberhard wants his second Roadster and his title back as the “founder” of Tesla Motors.

The former founder and CEO of Tesla filed a lawsuit against the electric automaker and current CEO Elon Musk for slander, libel, breach of contract and other complaints. The suit was filed May 26 with the Superior Court of San Mateo County, Calif.

Ze’ev Drori, former head of auto security systems company Clifford Electronics, took over for Eberhard in 2007 and was succeeded by Musk in 2008 (see Eberhard out, Drori in at Tesla)

Pacific Gas & Electric isn’t going to the dogs; it’s going to the cows. And rather than causing a ruining effect the ol’ saying implies, PG&E says it’s going to have a greening one.

The San Francisco-based utility (NYSE:PCG) launched a cow-powered contract today with renewable energy company California Bioenergy for its first greenhouse gas emission (GHG) reductions from a dairy farm. The investment is intended to yield 75,000 metric tons of verifiable GHG emission reductions.

Eli Hariton's new space-aged designs of a sky high solar facility have re-ignited excitement over such a pie-in-the-sky idea.

Recently, we gave word about PG&E partnering with Solaren to develop an incredibly expensive and potentially promising facility that would capture pure, unfiltered sunlight 24/7 and beam it down to earth in the form of microwaves.

Some of cleantech's most famous names are weighing in on U.S. lawmaker Chris Van Hollen's proposal for a bank with the sole purpose of financing cleantech projects in the United States.

The ringing endorsements? "Imaginative" and "creative," according to an e-mail Van Hollen's office sent out today.

Another imaginative, creative bank

A new study from software developer McAfee this week could put new pressure on lawmakers to do something about the spam problem.

This spam is definitely not the problem.

It turns out that unwanted e-mail messages are not only annoying; the writing, routing and deleting of spam uses about 33 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. That equates to the electricity used by 2.1 million U.S. homes.

It's more than a battle of namesake between Vinod Khosla investment Calera (not to be confused with Caldera, which bought parts of Linux vendor SCO) and scientist Ken Caldeira; it's an accusation of fraud and misrepresentation… to children!

Sparked by a new exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences detailing the controversial Calera process, the conveniently confusingly-named Caldeira, a Carnegie Institution scientist who has studied this exact process, started a Google Groups discussion challenging the scientific claims of the exhibit.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has finally admitted there is validity to the long-standing rumors of a dedicated venture capital arm at the Internet giant.

Google has officially launched the VC fund, Google Ventures, with about $100 million to invest in technology startups in in software, cleantech, biotech, health care and the Web.

A U.S. lawmaker from Maryland today took the first step to create a bank with the sole purpose of financing cleantech projects in the United States.

Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen introduced the Green Bank Act of 2009, which would create a bank initially capitalized with $10 billion funded through the sale of bonds. The tax-exempt government-owned bank would then be able to offer financing to clean energy and energy efficiency projects within the country's borders.

The name GreenBank is already taken by a commercial bank in Tennessee with roots dating back to 1890.

The world's smallest, cheapest car hit showrooms today in India, maintaining its price target despite violent protests that more than doubled the cost for a dedicated factory.

But despite the inevitable road congestion the Nano will add in India, the rollout of the Nano presents an example of an automaker slashing costs while improving efficiencies, meanwhile overcoming obstacles unheard of for the big manufacturers in Detroit.