Green building
          Green building encompasses everything from the choice of building materials to where a building is located.

 Top Ten U.S. Cities with Most Green Technologies

1) Los Angeles, CA

2) San Francisco, CA

3) Houston, TX
4) Washington D.C.
5) Dallas-Fort Worth, TX
6) Chicago, IL
7) Denver, CO
8) Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN
9) Atlanta, GA
10) Seattle, WA

The Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008

1.  THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR

          With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss researcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling's company Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country. (Image: Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique)

2.    NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON

      Carbon capture and sequestration has a seductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil — so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground.

It turns out, however, that it's not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth's crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could selectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gases going up the flues of fossil fuel plants.

That's where two classes of special cage-like molecules come into play, ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he'd made a new amine that seems particularly well-suited to working under real-world conditio Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier -- and therefore, more cost effective.

Perhaps better still, Yaghi's lab's technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators — want.

5.   SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS

          When most people think of harnessing the sun's power, they imagine a solar photovoltatic panel, which directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity. 

6.  OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE

  President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promise of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focused on turning Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhouse. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White House.

7.  SOLAR CELL PRODUCTION GETS BIG, GIGA(WATT)BIG

          Every clean tech advocate's dream is a power-generating technology that could compete head-to-head with coal, the cheapest fossil fuel, on price alone. Nanosolar, one of a new generation of companies building solar panels out of cheap plastics, could be the first company to get there. Early this year, the company officially opened its one-gigawatt production facility which is many times the size of most previous solar facilities.

          Nanosolar, in other words, has found a process that can scale: it works as well in production as it does in the lab. That's the main reason that the company has picked up half-a-billion dollars in funding from investors like MDV's Erik Straser.

8.   PROJECT BETTER PLACE FINDS HOMES

          Green technologies are dime a dozen, but a business model that could allow an entirely new, green infrastructure to be built is a rare thing.

          Doing just that is the centerpiece of SAP veteran Shai Agassi's vision for Project Better Place, a scheme that would distribute charging and swappable battery stations throughout smallish geographies like Israel, Hawaii and San Francisco. So far, there's very little steel in the ground, but in early December, the company's first charging location opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Agassi's plan is one of several projects — like new biofuels rail terminals — that could create fundamentally new energy ecosystems.

          Some of these systems, however, are actually throwbacks to earlier eras. As Peter Shulman, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University likes to remind his students: in the early 20th century, before the Model T, one-third of all cars were electric. (Image: Joe Puglies/WIRED)                                                                          

10.  CALERA'S GREEN CEMENT DEMO PLANT OPENS

          Cement? With all the whiz bang technologies in green technology, cement seems like an odd pick for our top clean technology of the year. But here's the reason: making cement — and many other materials — takes a lot of heat and that heat comes from fossil fuels.

 What is a Netbook?

          Mini-laptop computer designed for mobility, wired and wireless online access, word processing and general office applications. Weighing in at 2-3 pounds (.9 – 1.4 kilograms) and featuring LCD screens between 6-10 inches (15-25 cm), the netbook is perfect companion for people on the go who want connectivity without lugging  much heavier, full-sized laptop along. Many manufacturers offer netbook models including Asus® Acer®, Hewlett Packard®, Dell®, MSI® and others.

          To achieve the lightest weight, netbooks do not have integrated compact disk players. Instead most feature two or more Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports,  video-out port, SD card reader, integrated speakers and microphone and headphone jacks. Netbooks also feature built-in camera for video blogging and Skype. Keyboards are 5% - 20% smaller than  standard board, and memory and disk drive space vary, dependent in part on the operating system installed. Battery life also varies between models, ranging from two to seven hours.

           Netbooks with less memory and smaller static drives generally feature AAA portable Linux operating system, while models with more RAM and platter drives come preinstalled with Windows XP or Linux. Portable Linux operating systems can get by with minimum 512 Megabytes (MB) of memory, and as little as 4 Gigabytes (GB) of internal storage on static disk drive (SDD), though they can also come with much higher specs. netbook with the XP operating system can have as much as 2 GB RAM and 160 GB platter disk drive, making XP models more expensive and slightly heavier than leaner Linux models.