Thin-film solar startup NuvoSun was recently acquired by Dow Chemical. Founded in 2008 by former MiaSole CEO Dave Pearce, NuvoSun designs PV cells and modules based on flexible Copper Indium/Gallium di- Selenide (CIGS) technology.
NuvoSun owns at least two pending U.S. patent
At GLOBE 2012, March 14-16, 2012 in Vancouver, Canada, David Kepler will be speaking in a special session entitled Building Blocks for a Sustainable Economy Dialogue. GLOBE put a number of questions to David about his role as Chief Sustainability Officer and about the importance that Dow places on its sustainability mission.
Dutch scientists say they have developed a process that uses nanotechnology to convert plant matter into the basic components of plastics, an innovation that could ultimately provide an alternative to oil-based plastics in the manufacture of thousands of everyday products.
The ever-changing solar market continues to move ahead with enormous strides. While such innovations such as the new “plug ‘n’ play” solar panels are creating buzz, there are a number of other significant innovations that are helping homeowners fulfill their energy-saving goals.
Dow Chemical is planning construction of a bioplastics plant in Brazil that the company says will produce plastic from sugarcane in volumes competitive with plastics generated from petroleum.
Later this year Dow, in a partnership with the Japanese firm Mitsui & Co., will start building a plant
The Dow Chemical Company is a multinational corporation that has its headquarters in the United States. Since 2007, it has been the second largest manufacturer of chemicals around the world by revenue, and since 2009 Dow Chemical has been listed as the third largest chemical company by market capitalization
Want to lower your utility bills or even get energy for free? Companies like Dow Chemical are developing solar shingles and other innovative technologies to turn your home into a personal power plant. Energy will be essentially free.
Three decades ago information was expensive and scarce. Data processing was autocratic, monolithic, and centralized. There were big mainframe computers ‘out there’ and ‘dumb’ users here. The personal computer, the internet, and mobile telephones changed all that.
Today information is essentially free.
Scarce data turned into the Internet torrent and now data is so abundant that the first company who helped us intelligently filter this onslaught of information became the most successful company of the last decade: Google. Today information technology is distributed, grid-independent, and scalable. Now billions of people with a mobile phone, personal computer, and internet connection can generate, store, process, and publish data. The basic architecture of information technology changed.
Energy is where data was three decades ago.
Dow Chemical Company, a worldwide leader in the global chemical industry, and sponsor of the 2010 Dow Live Earth Run for Water, has entered into agreements with the new Saudi Arabian King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for developing cleaner, new routes for producing chemical derivatives.
The two are also looking into ways for carbon capture –a method which proposes to suck up and store greenhouse gas emissions.
Although many of the chemicals produced by the American chemical giant are used in the petroleum distilling and petrochemical industries, with much of the company’s “raw material” is coming from Saudi Arabia.
Dow Chemical has developed a roof shingle that contains thin-film solar power cells and can be integrated into asphalt roofs, which are used in 90 percent of American homes.
Dow executives said the solar shingles can be handled like a regular asphalt shingle and can be nailed right onto a roof and walked on by roofers.
The company will begin test-marketing the shingles in mid-2010 and the company will initially target new home construction.
Even the CEO was initially skeptical about BioPetroClean’s simple and effective solution for cleaning up industrial wastewater, but it works; and now Dow Chemicals is onboard.
The idea that microscopic bacteria could cheaply and efficiently cleanse oceans of industrial wastewater may seem far-fetched. But it is just this premise that launched BioPetroClean, a Texas-based cleantech company with research-and-development facilities in Tel Aviv.
In fact, the technology is so effective that $57.5 billion industry giant Dow Chemical just announced a global commercial agreement whereby it will market and distribute the Dow-BPC Water Treatment System internationally. The agreement includes exclusivity across significant oil drilling and refining markets.
By Jonathan Williams
During this past summer, the world has seen multiple advances in the alternative energy field, particularly with algae biofuels. A week hasn’t gone by where I didn’t receive several press releases in my inbox highlighting the latest advances by one of the many algae companies out there.
However, while press releases look and sound good, nothing highlights the advances of a company, if not the entire field, than the announcement of a multi-million dollar partnership with a larger, well-known, and respected entity.
During this summer we saw just that, with multiple algae companies announcing their partnerships with larger corporations or entities.
To give you a brief overview on these partnerships, first came Algenol with their partnership with Dow Chemical researching algae as an ethanol fuel source. Next came Seambiotic with their announcement that they will be partnering with NASA to develop a jet fuel from algae. Most recently, and probably most importantly, was Exxon Mobil’s $600 million partnership with Synthetic Genomics to conduct extensive research on algae biofuels.