Nine out of 10 households will get tax cuts or payment rises and more money will flow into clean energy as Australia's 500 largest polluting companies start paying a carbon tax of $23 a tonne from mid-2012.

Ford Motor Company debuted its first all-electric vehicle, the Focus Electric, at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show Friday. It is one of five new electrified vehicles that will be available in North America and Europe by 2013.

Radiation from Wi-Fi networks is harmful to trees, causing significant variations in growth, as well as bleeding and fissures in the bark, according to a recent study in the Netherlands.

Sharp will acquire Recurrent Energy, a U.S. developer of solar energy projects, in a deal that will give the Japanese company a stronger position in the fast-growing solar-power generation business, the companies said Wednesday.

A team at London's City University has been granted a patent on a new 'green' technology that stops phone, laptop and MP3 chargers eating electricity even when nothing is connected to them.

Oracle's board of directors has weighed in against a shareholder proposal calling for the creation of a board-level committee on sustainability, according to the proxy statement for the vendor's upcoming annual meeting.

Japan's NEC Corporation may have found the answer to the nagging debate between saving the environment without necessarily starving the population. And NEC found the answer while addressing the demand for durable plastic for the electronics industry.

MIT researchers have used nanotechnology to develop a robot that can autonomously navigate across the surface of the ocean to clean up an oil spill.

Capitalizing on the buzz around green IT, Seagate and Western Digital have released new "green" hard drives designed to use less power (in part by spinning more slowly than the latest generation of drives) and produce less heat (thus requiring less cooling).

Environmental issues exposed by the media and driven by consumers have placed IT departments under pressure to develop "green" data centers. Factors including the reduction of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in large data centers often provide the impetus for becoming green. A recent report issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) highlights the need for data center efficiency and demonstrates the increased pressure that IT departments are under.