Last post, I put out numbers for the actual costs for producing energy from the six major sources normalized over their entire life-span. The idea being that someone is going to lay down billions of dollars to build and operate energy systems to produce a trillion kWhrs of electricity, but what is the actual cost versus how much will they have to pay? The results were 4.1 ¢/kWhr for coal, 5.1 ¢/kWhr for natural gas, 3.5 ¢/kWhr for nuclear, 4.3 ¢/kWhr for wind, 7.7 ¢/kWhr for solar, and 3.3 ¢/kWhr[...]
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Chinese companies have yet to gain the respect of institutional investors. That’s the finding of a just released Barron’s survey of the World’s Most Respected Companies. The top of the list is filled mostly with American companies like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), IBM (NYSE:IBM), McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD), Amazon.com (NYSE:AMZN), and Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT); and Japanese companies like Toyota (NYSE:TM) and Honda (NYSE: HMC). Only three Chinese companies, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL), CNOOC (NYSE:CEO), and China Construction[...]
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When you've got a great idea - the hope is that it will just 'catch fire' and that word of mouth will drive your success. Investors, board members, even friends and family seem to expect that the market will simply beat a path to your door. And for certain kinds of social apps with easy and powerful recommendation mechanisms, that's possible.
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ExxonMobil and Craig Venter made a big splash back in 2009 when they announced a research alliance to explore the potential for milking oil out of algae. Exxon said that if Venter's Synthetic Genomics Inc. managed to isolate an algae strain that produced enough oil, it would be willing to invest $600 million in commercializing the technology. Way to go green, Exxon!
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"There's no crying in baseball," shouted Tom Hanks' character Jimmy Dugan, a women's baseball team manager in A League of Their Own, the movie based on the former All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
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The ceremony Friday at which Tesla delivered the first Model S cars had all the trappings of a typical auto company pep rally, save for an actual marching band. But as I watched the Model S roll out the door, it struck me what a survivor its factory has become.
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