SiliconBeat

For those who care, we thought we’d provide an update on Planktos, the carbon-credits business formerly located in Foster City.

It’s now based in Palm Desert and has a new majority shareholder — an entity known as Maidon Services Limited bought 45 million shares of Planktos, or 53.1 percent of its outstanding stock, for $200,000, from Solar Energy. $125,000 was delivered on the deal’s closing date, with the rest payable within the next 14 months. Solar Energy maintains the option of converting the final $75,000 it owes into Planktos shares for 25 cents each.

We have posted about Planktos a few times over the last year, first in September 2007 after the company said it had secured up to $2 million in a private placement from an investor it didn’t name.

A year ago Planktos said it was considering “winding down” its operations, and in March the company said it was forced to indefinitely postpone its ocean fertilization efforts once intended to restore marine plant life and generate ecological offsets for the global carbon credit market .

SunPower, the San Jose maker of solar power chips, revealed in a filing Wednesday afternoon it signed a deal a week ago to supply at least 100 megawatts of solar panels and systems between 2009 and 2011 to City Solar Kraftwerke, a German developer of large-scale photovoltaic power plants.

Without supplying any financial details, SunPower stated that the agreement “is a material revenue opportunity.”

Using last week’s dismal jobs report as a news hook, an organization called SaveThePlasticBag.com called for a suspension of anti-plastic bag initiatives to “Protect American Jobs During Economic Crisis.” Pictured here are some employees of an unnamed Los Angeles plastic bag manufacturer who traveled to the California state senate in Sacramento and are “deeply worried about the misinformation being spread about plastic bags.”

Taxing or banning plastic bags will result in the loss of about 4,000 “high wage paying American jobs, along with health insurance and retirement benefits,” according to the group’s press release, and is estimated to lead to the loss of another 8,000 jobs in the supply and distribution chain.

Did you know that Read the rest of this entry »

As part of the continued greening of Applied Materials — which last March announced the biggest deal in the company’s history when it said it received a $1.9 billion order for thin-film solar-panel production equipment for ”multiple solar factories,” — the Santa Clara company named Alexander “Andy” Karsner, a former Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, to its board of directors last week.

He began serving on the board “effective immediately” and will serve on its Read the rest of this entry »

The marketing folks at SunPower (along with its shareholders) must be salivating this morning after the San Jose maker of chips used in solar-power systems revealed in a press release that the U.S. Department of Energy has installed a 205-kilowatt SunPower solar-electric system on top of its Forrestal Building in Washingto n D.C. (Pictured is Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman at the unveiling this morning of the installation, one of the largest solar power systems in Washington, D.C.)

In its release, SunPower says it’s PowerGuard solar-electric system was chosen for the DOE’s rooftop “because Read the rest of this entry »

Randhir Thakur, who left Applied Materials in 2005 to join flash memory maker SanDisk, is rejoining the world’s largest manufacturer of chip-making equipment to become senior vice president and general manager of its s new initiative to develop equipment to be used in the production of chips used to harness solar power. Thakur had been an executive vice president at SanDisk in charge of its fab operations. Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe Systems, the graphics software developer based in San Jose, said it will buy a building under construction in Waltham, Mass., valued at $44.7 million, according to a press release today. The company will eventually relocate its 200 employees from leased facilities in nearby Newton and give it  “room for continued growth in the Boston area.” Read the rest of this entry »

NetApp, the company formerly known as Network Appliance, is hoping some of the green connected to a Guiness record-breaking stunt in Austria rubs off. The company put out a release today about a special exhibition that took place in Voralberg, a state in western Austria at which participants “21 bicycle stations to produce over 12.9 megawatt hours of energy… enough to power more than 12,000 average American homes for an entire year.” (Why Austrians would want to power American homes wasn’t made clear.) Read the rest of this entry »

Tesla Motors, the buzz-worthy San Carlos developer of that seeming oxymoron, green performance automobiles (pictured), said that Larry Sonsini has joined its board of directors. Sonsini, who is chairman of arguably the premier law firm of Silicon Valley–Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati–is referred to in Tesla’s press release today as “one of the country’s best-known governance experts,” having been named “one of the most influential players in U.S. corporate governance” by Directorship magazine. Read the rest of this entry »

With the proxy season in full flower, Intel released its own today and it came with one uninvited proposal on the agenda for the company’s May 21 shareholders’ meeting: a request that the company’s board set up a standing committee to address issues of “sustainability.”

The proposal was put forward by Harrington Investments, a “socially responsible” investment firm that we mentioned last week when Google’s proxy was released showing a proposal the firm put forward there calling for the creation of a board committee focused on “human rights.”

Read the rest of this entry »