Green tech investments soar

According to a preliminary report released last week by the Cleantech Group and Deloitte, global venture capital investment in green technology companies reached $4.04 billion in the first half of 2010, exceeding, slightly, the record set in the boom year of 2008, says the Guardian.

Venture investment in the second quarter rose to $2.02 billion, up 43% from the year-ago quarter. Investments in the first half of the year spiked 65% from the same period in 2009.

"There's been a very clear resurgence in solar activity and that is largely responsible for the strong quarter," says Richard Youngman, the Cleantech Group's head of global research.

Plans to build the world's greenest city in Portugal have received a major boost with news that developers have reached a wide-ranging agreement with networking giant Cisco to provide much of the technology infrastructure, according to BusinessGreen.com.

Technology start-up Living PlanIT has been working for several years on plans to build an entire new city for 225 000 people on a 17 square kilometre site in the Municipality of Paredes in northern Portugal.

The PlanIT Valley development is intended to be a major clean tech hub, providing a home to 110 000 researchers and engineers, as well as a demonstration of Living PlanIT's portfolio of design and building technologies, which combined are expected to result in a hi-tech city that boasts 'negligible' greenhouse gas emissions.

IBM reckons its supercomputers are the most energy efficient in the world, backed up by research from the Supercomputing Green 500 List, states TechEye.

According to the list, 17 out of 20 on the top 10 are built on IBM technology, and it also holds 65 of the top 100 positions.

For the second time the most energy efficient systems, according to the list, are the three QPace systems which run off the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor. All three are based in Germany, at the Julich Supercomputing Centre, the University of Regensburg and the University of Wuppertalare and tie for the top spot. Each produces over 773 Mflops per watt of energy.