SiliconBeat

OK, it’s an old joke about Al Gore saying he invented the Internet.  But a press release this morning from Dot Eco LLC Partners says Gore and his Alliance for Climate Protection will support that group’s effort to secure and promote the .eco domain.

The release notes that ICANN will soon take applications for new domains, meaning we’ll soon start seeing URLs that just don’t end in .com, .org, .edu and .gov.  In fact, cities are applying, so perhaps we’ll be seeing .paris and .sanjose addresses.

More from the release: “The proposal for .eco would establish a permanent address for web sites and email addresses concerned about global warming and environmental issues. The profits will mainly be dedicated to supporting environmental causes.”

Dot Eco LLC was formed in 2008 by Fred Krueger and Clark Landry. Its advisory board includes actor Roger Moore, a former 007, and Davis Guggenheim, who directed Gore’s star vehicle, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The group’s Web site is here.

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 »