About 1.6 billion people still rely on kerosene lanterns to read, work or study after dark, according to a fledgling company that hopes its LED lights will replace those lanterns, eliminating both pollution and fires. 

d.light design, the brainchild of Stanford Business School graduates Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, last month began selling its lights in India, where they say 72 million households use kerosene lanterns. 

The company’s products, some of which are charged by sunlight, range between $10 and $30, d.light President Tozun said in a recent interview. The Chinese-made lights all burn brighter than kerosene, and are safer and cleaner, he said.

The problem? Most of the people who use kerosene lanterns earn less than $1 a day, making one of d.light design’s products a seriously big ticket item.

 ”It would be like me buying a car or something,” Tozun said. “It’s a substantial investment for people to make.”

Nevertheless, d.light is betting that people will indeed save up to make that investment, especially with kerosene prices on the rise.

d.light, meanwhile, is keeping its profit margins low to make the lights affordable to more people. The key to making the business a success, Tozun said, is “getting to a massive scale.”

He declined to specify how many lights d.light would have to sell to become profitable, except to say: “Thousands is not going to cut it. It has to be millions of lights.”

As part of my job covering the world of alternative fuels, General Motors last week gave me the keys to a hydrogen-powered SUV, the Chevrolet Equinox.  You won’t find the Equinox in any showrooms, and in fact, the car I drove for four days is one of just 100 such vehicles in the United States.

Despite their small numbers, GM and others hope hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles will be critical to reducing greenhouse gases and our dependence on ever-costlier gasoline. Hydrogen can be produced by breaking apart water molecules, and it is also made by stripping hydrogen from fossil fuel natural gas. To see an animation of how a fuel cell works, click here.

I had fun driving emissions-free for a few days, but refueling once I had run low on hydrogen wasn’t so fun. That’s because there are just four places in the L.A. area where you can refuel a hydrogen car, and the lack of that infrastructure is one of the biggest impediments to getting them in the mass market.

Below is a brief video of my few days driving on hydrogen.

Video produced and edited by Syantani Chatterjee
  

The U.S. housing market may be in a serious slump, but competition for big chunks of land in the hot, dry Southwest is heating up.

Developers of solar and wind power projects are scrambling to get their hands on swathes of land in the U.S. West that not only have lots of sun or wind, but are also close enough to critical transmission lines.

“There is a lot of activity staking out that land,” said Dan Kabel, chief executive of Acciona Solar Power, the unit of Spanish building-to-energy firm Acciona that is building solar thermal power plants in the United States. “People keep talking to me about a land rush. They say there is a land rush. The evidence I’ve seen personally is the patchwork effect of all the applications for solar and wind. There is very active prospecting for solar land.”

The U.S. West is in such high demand because not only are the sun and wind resources enormous, they are also located near areas of burgeoning power demand, such as Southern California, Kabel said in an interview at Acciona’s Nevada Solar One solar thermal power plant in Boulder City, Nevada.

But even with all that competition, Kabel said, there is plenty of room for Acciona to grow. So far, it operates one solar thermal power plant in the United States, though more are in the works (he wouldn’t say how many.)

“There is a lot of desert out there,” Kabel said.

At the Reuters Global Energy Summit this week, Reuters reporters and editors spent a lot of time talking to energy CEOs and other top industry executives about soaring oil prices, carbon caps, and the outlook for renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

Then, we got personal.

Before we let them go, we asked the Summit guests what they were doing to reduce their own carbon footprints.

Predictably, the CEO of solar power company SunPower, Tom Werner, said he had solar panels on his house. OK, that was a no-brainer. But Werner is also an avid gardener who throws his groceries in the back of his car rather than use the supermarket’s plastic bags.

Other answers were more surprising, including when Steve Leer, CEO of coal company Arch Coal, said he was in the market for an electric car. Or, maybe that’s not so surprising, considering plug-in electric cars are recharged by power from the grid, much of which is generated by coal-fired plants. Hmmm. Food for thought, at least.

For our complete list of what energy executives are doing to reduce their carbon footprints, click here.

When Napa Valley winery Far Niente resolved to embrace solar power, it faced a big hurdle: how to install ground-mounted panels without sacrificing acres of valuable Cabernet vines.

Enter the latest solar innovation — solar panels that can float on the water rather than being mounted on the ground.

The system, which was given the witty name “Floatovoltaic,” was made by securing 1,000 solar panels on pontoons and floating them on an irrigation pond at the 100-acre Martin Sterling Vineyard, whose grapes make Cabernet Sauvignon wine.

With “Floatovoltaic,” Far Niente was able to save three-quarters of an acre of vines. It removed another acre of vineyard to accomodate a land portion of the system that boasts 1,300 solar panels.

The solar system generates up to 400 kilowatts of electricity at peak times, significantly offsetting the winery’s annual power usage, Far Niente said.

The installation was developed by Thompson Technology Industries Inc, installed by SPG Solar, and uses solar panels from Sharp.

Earlier this month, I toured a Waste Management landfill in Simi Valley, California as part of our series on how companies are turning household garbage and other waste into clean electricity. For our full coverage, click here.

The landfill, which is about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, surprised me at first because it didn’t smell and the 300 feet of trash was covered in dirt and grass. It looked just like an ordinary hillside.

On one side of the mound, however, trash from all over Ventura County was being flattened and buried into the ground, where the methane gas it produces will be collected and produced into energy to power 2,500 homes. This prevents the methane, which is 21 times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide, from entering the atmosphere.

In this video, Waste Management spokeswoman Kit Cole explains the process of burying household trash in the landfill to turn it into electricity:

If you’re tired of feeling guilty about driving a gas-guzzling car or cranking up your air conditioning, you could just try hanging your head in shame about that bottle of spring water you are sipping instead.

Yes, the foes of bottled water are at it again, this time in the form of an advertising campaign that aims to promote tap water and underscore the environmental costs of producing and disposing of plastic water bottles.

Tappening, a group that opposes bottled water, is spending $250,000 on a media campaign to promote its cause. Tappening is a joint venture of ad agency DiMassimo Goldstein and public relations firm Ericho Communications. It most recently launched a campaign called “Message in a Bottle” that aims to deliver one million empty water bottles to incoming Coca-Cola CEO Muhter Kent.

The campaign is the latest of many recent attacks on bottled water, including the urging of boycotts by the mayors of cities including London, San Francisco and Seattle.

“We can use our advertising and public relations abilities to un-sell bottled water hype,” said Tappening’s Mark DiMassimo.

The ads will appear as “wild postings” on construction sites in ten U.S. cities as well as in magazines and community newspapers, the group said. The ads claim that last year, plastic bottles generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide and that every year, 38 million bottles end up buried in the ground.

Can the running shoes we buy really help protect the environment?

According to a new list by nonprofit group Climate Counts, Nike ranked first among the world’s most climate-friendly companies.

In its second annual report, Climate Counts ranked companies based on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, support of global warming legislation, public disclosure of their efforts to address climate change, and whether they measure their impacts on the environment.

Nike ranked well in all those areas, garnering a score of 82 out of a possible 100 points. Stonyfield Farm, IBM, Unilever, Canon, General Electric, Toshiba, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and Sony rounded out the list’s top 10.

Google, Anheuser-Busch and Levi Strauss logged the largest score improvements, each jumping over 20 points since last year. The average company score improved 22 percent over last year, when Canon was the top scorer.

Who were the losers? In a word, restaurants.

Olive Garden and Red Lobster owner Darden Restaurants, Wendy’s and Burger King each scored zero out of 100 points, while KFC and Taco Bell owner Yum Brands registered a single point for encouraging reduction of energy consumption.

Jones Apparel Group was the only other company to receive a score of zero.

For Climate Counts’ full list, click here.

Solar power companies have been working around the clock to drive down the price of clean electricity from the sun so it can one day be as cheap as the energy we get from dirtier sources, like coal plants.

Until we get there, however, some solar panel installers have come up with a solution that they say will give more people access to solar energy. How are they doing it? By allowing customers to lease, rather than buy, the photovoltaic solar panels for their roofs.

It’s the same idea, really, that has enabled some people to get behind the wheel of a luxury car they could otherwise not afford — low or no upfront costs followed by a monthly bill.

SolarCity, based in Foster City, California, is one company that recently started offering leases to its customers. Chief Executive Lyndon Rive told Reuters he wanted to do away with the hefty cost of buying solar panels — on average about $20,000.

“Even those who really want to make an environmental change can’t part with $20,000… the solution is just too costly for them.”

Under SolarCity’s lease program, customers with a small home could pay as little as $70 a month for a 2.4 kilowatt system, Rive added. The company is also allowing customers who sign up before July 31st to put no money down on their system. After that, upfront costs should be between about $1,000 and $3,000, Rive said.

“We can essentially make it so that everybody can now afford clean power,” Rive said.

The leased projects will be financed through Morgan Stanley, and SolarCity said it will serve as a one-stop shop for both installation and financing.

Right now the program is only available in California, but SolarCity is expanding to Oregon, Arizona and has plans to go to the East Coast.

Looking for clean air and lots of greenery? Los Angeles is probably not the first place that comes to mind.

Still, the city as famous for traffic and smog as it is for sunshine and celebrities is working hard to earn the mantle of the greenest big city in America.

In its latest move, the L.A. City Council this week passed a law that will require all new building projects bigger than 50 units or 50,000 square feet to comply with the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) building standards. The city claims the move will cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 80,000 tons by 2012 — the equivalent of taking 15,000 cars off the road.

Mayor Antonio Villairagosa says the goal is the most aggressive of any big U.S. city. It is part of a broader plan the mayor laid out last year to reduce L.A.’s carbon footprint by 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.0

Still, critics point out that L.A.’s plan is not as aggressive as the one being pursued up North, in San Francisco — a debate the “Los Angeles Times” chronicled on Tuesday. In the story, advocates said L.A.’s move will have more of an impact on the environment because it covers so much more ground than San Francisco.

In the meantime, L.A. might have to take on an even bigger challenge — convincing the public that it can really go green.

As one LAT reader commented: “Los Angeles green? Only with paint.”