I would be remiss if I didn’t draw attention to a major announcement today by General Electric Co., one of the world’s largest companies by revenue with a $385 billion market capitalization.

Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE, launched a cleantech initiative called “Ecomagination.” Essentially, the company has decided to devote a tremendous amount of resources to the cleantech market, coming out with products that are cleaner and more efficient.

“We will focus our unique energy, technology, manufacturing and infrastructure capabilities to develop tomorrow’s solutions such as solar energy, hybrid locomotives, fuel cells, lower-emission aircraft engines, lighter and stronger materials, efficient lighting and water purification technology,” said Immelt.

“We will establish partnerships with our customers to tackle the most pressing environmental challenges and double our research spending to develop the products and services they need. And we will use these technologies to improve our own energy efficiency and environmental performance.”

Specifically, GE will double its annual R&D spending on cleaner technologies to $1.5 billion (U.S.) by 2010. It will reduce its own greenhouse gas emissions by 1 per cent by 2012, keeping in mind that by taking no action the company’s greenhouse gas emissions would have risen 40 per cent over that same period.

A company like GE jumping head first into cleantech, in such a defined and high-profile way, gives a huge shot of credibility to the space and will hopefully inspire other corporate giants to follow. And as Immelt made clear: “We plan to make money doing it. Increasingly for business, ‘green’ is green.”

This is a big deal, and one can feel the momentum building from here. As more companies embrace the same philosophy one can only hope they’ll try to one-up each other. I’ll spare my own analysis of the situation and point you to two blog entries that encapsulate the significance of today’s announcement. Check out Rob Day’s Cleantech Investing blog, or Joel Makower’s Two Steps Forward blog for great commentary.

Day makes an interesting point of fact. He says total venture capital spending in the cleantech space has been between $1 to $1.5 billion annually, and that this is what GE alone is planning to spend. “An indicator,” he says, “of how big a deal the GE announcement is.” 

Here’s a Clean Break column about advances and uses of LED technology that appeared in today’s Toronto Star. It talks about the growing use of LEDs for niche lighting applications and, increasingly, general illumination. Examples in the story include an X-mas light exchange program in Toronto, an LED-lit Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles, plans in Toronto to replace all traffic signal lights with LEDs, as well as the municipality’s decision to put solar-powered LED lighting in hundreds of bus shelters throughout the city. (The picture here is of the Vincent Thomas Bridge.)

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There’s no disputing that Thomas Edison was a bright guy, having invented an incandescent light bulb that could burn for more than 1,000 hours. It was a major breakthrough, and 125 years later we’re still faithfully using what is essentially the same technology.

But that technology is inefficient and wasteful, at least when compared with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. New advances in these semiconductor-based lights, those glowing dots commonly found in alarm clocks and stereo systems, are resulting in higher-intensity LEDs that are ideal in an increasing number of lighting scenarios.

Down the road, some experts believe, LEDs could challenge the incandescent bulb’s tungsten grip on general lighting  applications. And a growing number of decision makers are picking up on the trend, realizing that LEDs offer a way of lowering electricity consumption and costs….. MORE

Quantiam Technologies of Edmonton, backed by a $10 million public-private investment, has started a project to demonstrate a dramatically more efficient way of manufacturing olefins, the most widely produced group of petrochemicals in the world.

Nanotechnology played a role here in developing “catalytic” coatings that allow for the manufacturing of olefins at lower temperatures, meaning less requirement for heat energy and less burning of fossil fuels through conventional hydrocarbon steam cracking.

This conventional production of olefins — used in everything from plastics to lubricants to antifreeze — is energy intensive, resulting in more than $10 billion a year in energy costs and significant release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Quantiam claims its technology can lower energy costs by up to 20 per cent.

Sustainable Development Technology Canada invested $1.45 million toward the project.

Fuel Cell Technologies Ltd., a neat little company operating out of Kingston, Ont., says it has shipped a 5-kilowatt solid oxide fuel cell to the Memphis Botanic Garden for co-generation of heat and power, using natural gas as its source of energy.

“Supplying heat and electrical power to the convervatory greenhouse, the FCT system will be used to provide domestic hot water and maintain the tropical environment required in the greenhouse,” the company said in a release.

John Stannard, president and CEO of Fuel Cell Technologies, acknowledged the importance of having natural gas suppliers as partners. “These utilities have the potential to become major customers of FCT, and installations such as this confirm that the technology is on the path towards commercialization,” he said.

If FCT has its way, major natural gas providers such as Enbridge would sell solid oxide fuel cell units to households through long-term leases. The technology would not only replace the heating and hot water requirements of homes already supplied by natural gas, but would convert natural gas to electricity, thereby making natural gas companies direct competitors to local power utilities. The idea is that natural gas will some day provide all the power and heating requirement in any home, and that consumers/businesses will save from the efficiencies gained through co-generation.

The open question is whether a fossil fuel like natural gas is an ideal replacement for grid power, particularly as grid power becomes less dependent on coal and moves toward natural gas and renewables? Perhaps the co-generation aspect and the related efficiencies do make this a “clean” alternative. Of interest also is that FCT’s solid oxide fuel cell can easily be rigged to run on hydrogen when (assuming if) that infrastructure becomes readily available.

For more info on FCT and other projects it’s involved in, check out this article I wrote last August. In March, FCT also announced the installation of its first residential fuel cell at a government-funded demonstration home in Ottawa.

Zenon Environmental, whose membrane water filtration technology is attracting worldwide attention, has convinced a U.S. district court that three of its water treatment patents are valid.

Oakville-based Zenon filed a patent infringement action in October 2003 against Warrendale, Penn.-based U.S. Filter, a subsidiary of Siemens. U.S. Filter responded by challenging the validity of Zenon’s three patents

But the U.S. court, following a two-day bench trial in San Diego late April, ruled on May 5 that the patents are indeed valid.

This is a bit of a complicated affair. The original patent suit resulted in a negative ruling in November 2004, which Zenon is appealing. But in January the company launched a different patent infringement action regarding another patent from the same patent family. Bottom line is that the recent ruling about the validity of Zenon’s patents bolsters this most recent court action (which is going to full trial in 2006) as well as the appeal of the first action.