Decathlon, a U.S. Department of Energy initiative, is well under way, with solar power innovators scrambling to get their projects ready for the competition. This year the event takes place at the National Mall’s West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C., between tomorrow (23) and October 2.
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The U.S. Department of Energy announced last week the 16 winning projects in 24 states that will receive funding for projects that support community planning for plug-in electric vehicles and charging infrastructure. The projects won funding as part of the Clean Cities initiative, a competitive program that
The U.S. Department of Energy has selected four projects for continued research into developing carbon capture technologies, with the goal of achieving 90 percent carbon dioxide removal.
While existing carbon capture technologies require enormous amounts of energy — adding as much as
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) BioEnergy Science Center (BESC) have made a discovery that could increase the production of ethanol and lower its costs.
They say they have pinpointed the gene that controls ethanol production capacity in a
I’m a transplant to New Orleans, and when you live some place like New Orleans, being a transplant matters. This is a town where people ask where you went to school, and they mean high school. A huge portion of the population lives on the block where they grew up, often in the very same house. People in
The U.S. Department of Energy announced that it is giving $36bn in federal grants to six small scale projects across five states whose objective is to produce drop-in advanced biofuels and other bio-based chemicals. The ultimate goal of the projects is to improve the economics and efficiency of cellulosic ethanol, also
Energy is a commercial property’s single largest operating expense. That’s a lot of power when you consider that, according to the most recent Annual Energy Review of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), 19 percent of all energy in the entire country was consumed by commercial buildings.
Starting today and until December 15, start-up companies can apply for one of the Department of Energy's thousands of unlicensed patents for greatly reduced cost and paperwork.
The Department of Energy's 17 national laboratories currently hold more than 15,000 patents and applying for them usually costs between $10,000 to $50,000
To increase the research, development, and utilization of clean technologies, the United States have created a number of program incentives, including grants, loans, rebates, and other funding opportunities. It is the belief of the United States that if more businesses and private individuals had the
In a previous post, I wrote about the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Innovation Portal, an online tech transfer tool designed to link energy technologies developed by U.S. national laboratories and other research institutions with potential licensing and commercialization partners.
Part of the events at the Electric Drive Transportation Association’s conference here in Washington DC was a press conference in which a few dozen of the currently- and soon-to-be-available EVs were displayed outside the Department of Energy Building. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and a few others spoke to an enthusiastic audience.
Besides being good for the environment for reducing emissions and being a renewable source of power, wind energy also uses less water than other types of power generation, stated the American Wind Energy Association recently.
This is an important aspect of energy generation
As the expected environmental benefits of biofuel made from food crops such as corn, rapeseed and wheat have not materialized, the race is on to find a competitive second generation of biofuels whose raw material is wood, grasses and non-edible parts of plants, which do not compete with food crops and forest coverage.
In a previous post, I discussed a greenwashing case against California LED lamp maker Lights of America (LOA).
In that case, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused LOA of making false or misleading statements about its products. The disputed statements allegedly misled consumers about the ability of certain LOA LED lamps to replace incandescents and included false claims of brightness and product life.
In that post I noted that the case was an example of an anti-greenwashing public enforcement action, one of the two primary legal means for combating alleged greenwashers.
Last month LOA became ensnared in the second type of anti-greenwashing activity, as an individual named Nathaniel Schwartz filed a consumer class action against the company.
The class action complaint (Schwartz-LOA-Complaint), filed in federal court in Los Angeles, cites the same allegedly false advertising claims as the FTC complaint (ftc-lights_of_america_complaint.pdf). Schwartz bolsters his claims with data from testing performed by Lighting Science, Inc. on behalf of LOA and from independent testing by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Specifically, Schwartz accuses LOA of making misleading equivalency claims about how its LED lamps compare with various wattage incandescent bulbs.
According to the complaint, the claims for 20/25 watt replacements and 40/45 watt replacements are false because LOA’s LED lamps produce significantly less light output than a typical incandescent light bulb at those wattages.
Schwartz accuses LOA of continuing to make such equivalency claims even after becoming aware of the DOE test results.
The complaint also alleges that LOA overstated the light output of several products by representing that the LED lamps produce a specific level of light output in lumens when the company’s own tests demonstrated that they produce significantly less light.
Finally, Schwartz accuses LOA of making unsubstantiated claims about the number of hours its LED lamps would last. While LOA claimed that many of its LED recessed lamps will last 20,000 or 30,000 hours, the complaint alleges that the company did not test any of its products to support the lifetime claims and the DOE testing proved the claims to be false.
The complaint lists several California state claims such as false advertising and unfair and deceptive business practices and requests that the court issue an injunction to stop LOA from engaging in the alleged unfair practices.
Schwartz has also requested restitution and disgorgement of all profits LOA made through the alleged unfair practices and says the amount of money at stake in the case is over $5,000,000.
Eric Lane is a patent attorney at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps in San Diego and the author of Green Patent Blog. Mr. Lane can be reached at elane@luce.com.