The Detroit News is reporting that Tesla has closed on a $465 million low-cost loans from the Energy Department to work on its next electric vehicle, the Model S sedan.The funds will apparently be used by the company to build manufacturing plants in California. The loan, which closed on Monday and was approved back in June, will come from the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which has about $25 billion to dole out to automakers manufacturing energy efficient vehicles. The Mode……

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Oh, brother — you had to see this coming, didn't you? Soon after details of the California Energy Commission's proposed TV efficiency standards leaked out, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has fired back a shocking press release in order to sound the alarm and get people in opposition. Acco……

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SolarBotanic is a company which researches and specializes in an emerging tech dubbed biomimicry — which seeks to mimic nature, and use nature-inspired methods to solve human problems. SolarBotanic is focusing on energy production, and, to that end, they’ve developed what they call Energy Harvesti……

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The New York Times is reporting Google will announce a free web service tomorrow called PowerMeter that’ll let users track energy consumption in their homes or business, provided there’s a means to upload the data. That part of the equation’s gonna be up to other companies to create compatible de……

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The Greener Gadgets Conference is coming up in a few weeks here, so we thought we’d bring you some highlights of the design competition it’s sponsoring. First up, Recompute is a fully sustainable design for a desktop computer — meaning that it makes use of low-impact manufacturing, uses fully recy……

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The brainchild of designer Sang-Kyun Park, LightDrops is an umbrella that uses the piezoelectric effect of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) to transform falling rain into electricity, which is then used to light LEDs installed on the umbrella's underside. The heavier the rain falls (and the harder it hits ……

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Just imagine — yapping for hours on end to your dream lover could actually leave your cellphone with more juice than what it started with. This completely bizarre scenario could theoretically become a reality according to new research from a professor at Texas A&M University, and it's all thanks to t……

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These days people are looking everywhere to find new, cheap, and plentiful sources of electricity, and while you wouldn’t call it new, the ocean is certainly cheap and plentiful. Plentiful too are the people attempting to convert its motion into power by tapping its waves or extracting its heat. But what……

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The new Energy Star 3.0 TV specification — this time including a test for how much electricity televisions use while turned on, not just while off — goes into effect next month. According to CNET's tests, the difference in power saved by more efficient (but not necessarily ideal PQ) default settings cou……

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Got OLED on the brain? What about FED? Holograms suit your fancy? Regardless of how you feel about the world's latest and greatest up-and-coming display technologies, we've got one more that you should probably keep an eye on. Funai has just announced the development of a swank new panel that consumes……

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