Aquion Energy, based in Pittsburgh and founded in 2007, is using basic materials like sodium and water to build modular batteries that will be able to provide energy storage services for the power grid. The technology was developed out of Carnegie Mellon University by founder and chief technology officer Jay Whitacre.

The company’s battery pairs a carbon anode with a sodium-based cathode, and a water-based electrolyte shuttles ions between the two electrodes during charging and discharging. Many batteries have solvent-based electrolytes.

Aquion Energy employees assembling batteries at a rotary dial table

The purpose of using basic materials is to make a battery that is super low cost. That’s one reason why Aquion is focused on stationary applications, like the grid, where lower energy density can be an acceptable trade-off for lower costs and longer life. The battery can also withstand a wide range of temperatures without losing storage capacity, so could be installed alongside a solar installation without sapping a lot of energy for air conditioning to keep the batteries cool.

Aquion Energy has been planning on building a factory in Pennsylvania that could make its sodium batteries starting this year. About a year ago Aquion said it had leased a facility from the Regional Industrial Development Corporation in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and the company hopes the factory could create 400 jobs by the end of 2015.

Such a factory could cost between $75 million and $80 million to build, so it’s likely this funding will go towards moving into production. In the summer of 2011 Aquion raised $20 million. The Department of Energy has also supported Aquion’s technology development with a $5 million stimulus grant.

Kleiner Perkins’ David Wells played a key role in helping incubate this technology. Whitacre and Wells started talking in late 2007 and a year later Kleiner sponsored an incubator at Carnegie Mellon for Whitacre to develop the tech. Following that, Whitacre spun off the venture and began to work on commercializing the battery.

Bill Gates has also invested in battery startup Ambri (formerly called Liquid Metal Battery), which like Aquion is building a grid battery and looking to begin production in the coming years. Gates has backed at least 5 battery startups, according to a talk he gave back in 2010.

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By 11:00 AM EST, the stock had dropped a bit and has been hovering around $21. As of 3:00 PM EST, the stock was at $21.68.

Silver Spring also last night decided to make 4.75 million shares available, which was 1 million shares more than the company had originally planned. Silver Spring raised $81 million in the process. In addition, longtime investor Foundation Capital also plans to purchase $12 million worth of stock at the IPO price in a private placement.

Silver Spring sells wireless networks and smart meters to utilities that can be used to run power grids more efficiently and offer new types of grid services. The company counts large utilities as customers like PG&E, Florida Power and Light, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, and Baltimore Gas & Electric.

The company filed to go public back in the summer of 2011, and waited out the entire year of 2012 before actually going public. The company’s lead investors include Foundation Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

Silver Spring Networks CEO Scott Lang told me in a phone call from the New York Stock Exchange this morning that the company “couldn’t be more pleased” with the IPO and that the process was “oversubscribed.” In response to my question of why it took so long to go public, Lang said that there were external market conditions and volatilities that were outside their control.

“We had a strong year in 2012 and we were patient,” said Lang. Lang owned 2.8 percent, or 1.04 million shares, before the IPO. At $21 per share, that percent is worth $21.84 million. Typically investors and executives have to hold their shares for at least six months before selling them.

Updated at 3:00 PM EST with the most recent stock price.

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That’s a pretty modest IPO for the decade-old company, and is less than half of the maximum that Silver Spring originally planned to raise a year and a half ago. If Silver Spring does go public Wednesday morning, expect it to price its shares late in the day on Tuesday. Along with the IPO, longtime investor Foundation Capital also plans to purchase $12 million worth of stock at the IPO price in a private placement.

Silver Spring sells wireless networks and smart meters to utilities that can be used to run power grids more efficiently and offer news types of grid services. The company is increasingly looking to sell software and services, and not just infrastructure, to help it boost its margins.

Silver Spring has a lot of business, and is one of the leaders when it comes to selling smart grid networks to utilities. However the business is inherently slow going (with long sales cycles), and pretty low margin. In 2012, Silver Spring generated $196.74 million in revenue, which was slightly down from its net revenue in 2011 of $237.05 million. The company generated a net loss in 2012 of $89.72 million, which was a smaller loss than its net loss in 2011 of $92.36 million.

Because its sales cycles are so long, its backlog of deals and billings (what it’s billed customers for but hasn’t converted to revenue yet) are more telling of how much momentum the company has. Silver Spring says it had $304.33 million worth of billings in 2012, which was a jump from its $236.13 million worth of billings in 2011. Silver Spring says it has $508.06 million worth of deferred revenue by the end of the 2012.

We’ll keep you updated on potential pricing and the debut of the IPO.

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The funding round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures.

Read It Later relaunched as Pocket in April and made its app completely free. The company says it has nearly six million users, up from about 4.5 million in April, saving a million pieces of content a day. It is integrated into over 350 third-party apps, including Flipboard and Twitter. Thirty percent of the content saved to Pocket is saved from news and reader apps.

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The company provides leases or power purchase agreements to consumers who pay a monthly fee for the electricity from the solar panels installed on their rooftops. This way, the home owner doesn’t have to pay the expensive, upfront cost of the equipment and installation but still gets to use a cleaner source of power. Lease or power purchase agreements are long-term contracts – 20 years for those from Sunrun – that sometimes guarantee consumers lower electric rates than what they have been paying their utilities. This model has become popular in states such as California and Massachusetts.

Sunrun is part of a group of startups that set up shop about half a dozen years ago to tackle the emerging solar retail service market. Sunrun provides the financing and owns and maintains the solar equipment, and it’s built a network of contractors that do the installation work and help market Sunrun’s financial services. The company said it has has more than 20,000 customers in 10 states since its inception in 2007.

Since then, the solar retail service market has grown tremendously, and competition also has intensified. The company has run bill board ads and launched a new marketing campaign recently. Other solar service companies have used the same types of advertising as Sunrun. Some team up with nonprofits to market their services. Sungevity, for example, announced Wednesday it’s working with the Sierra Club, and customers who go to a Sierra Club website to sign up for Sungevity’s service will get a $750 cash gift card. Sungevity also will then donate another $750 to the Sierra Club.

Some of Sunrun’s venture-backed competitors include SolarCity, Sungevity and Clean Power Finance. SolarCity plans to do an initial public offering, and Sunrun, which recently hired a chief financial officer, could also be heading in that direction, too.

Overall, Sunrun has raised $145 million in venture capital. The latest round came from investors including Madrone Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital and Foundation Capital.

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Speaking by phone from his home in New Delhi, Wadhwa told us he had no experience in solar energy development before he started venture-backed Azure Power in 2007, though his electronic engineering degree has come in handy in technology assessment and project engineering. After years of working at companies such as Oracle and a consumer marketing software startup Loyalty Lab, he wanted to do something “more socially conscious.”

Up until now, Azure Power has been building ground-mounted solar power projects in India, in states such Gujarat and Punjab, where Azure built its first megawatt project in 2009. Since then, the company has completed or is building 56 MW of projects, Wadhwa said. An independent power producer, Azure engineers, builds and operates power projects to sell electricity to utilities.

The company recently won a project from the Gujarat state government to build one of the two 2.5 MW rooftop projects. The projects are part of Gandhinagar Photovoltaic Rooftop Programme, which means it will start in the city of Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, and expand to other parts of the state later. Gujarat has been teeming with solar power development thanks to its solar incentive program, and it recently celebrated the commissioning of 600 MW of solar power plants.

“Today power is built in remote areas and pulled into cities to meet the demand. You can change that equation and start generating power in the cities,” Wadhwa said. “This makes sense only when you have a power deficit. Cities in India have a huge power shortage.”

Electrifying rural areas

About 25 percent of India’s residents have no access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency’s “World Energy Outlook 2011.” That means 288.8 million residents don’t get to turn on the lights at night. About 80 percent of India’s electricity comes from power plants that burn fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. As Katie Fehrenbacher found out during her trip to India last year, blackouts are fairly common even in modern areas of the country.

Azure plans to install silicon solar panels on over 60 rooftops – 2MW on government and commercial buildings and 0.5 MW on residential ones – and complete the project by March 2013. Torrent Power, a private utility, will buy power from Azure at 11.21 rupees per kilowatt-hour for 25 years. Azure, in turn, will pass on 3 rupees per kilowatt-hour to rooftop owners, Wadhwa said. The national average for wholesale electricity from conventional sources is around 2-3 rupees per kilowatt-hour and about twice of that for the retail price, he added.

Azure has lined up money for the rooftop project, though Wadhwa declined to disclose how much or who the investors are. The company has gotten financial support from organizations such as the Export-Import Bank of the United States and International Finance Corp. (IFC), part of the World Bank. Export-Import Bank approved a $16 million loan to Azure last year for buying solar panels from First Solar and other equipment for a 5 MW project in the state of Rajasthan. IFC committed $10 million for two projects.

Last year, the solar power producer raised €10 million ($13.6 million) in convertible debt from DEG, a member of the KfW state banking group. The bank would convert the debt to equity, but it didn’t say what stake it would hold in Azure. Azure raised an undisclosed A round from Foundation Capital and Helion Venture Partners in 2008.

The foray into rooftop solar will afford Azure some lessons about aggregating small installations into a portfolio to attract investments and operating distributed solar projects. The company is interested in off-grid solar projects, but it has to figure out the right business model and mechanisms – such as prices and payment process – since the customers won’t be utilities but consumers themselves, Wadhwa said.

Photos courtesy of Azure Power

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Aquion Energy says it’s leasing a facility from the Regional Industrial Development Corporation in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and the company plans to start building out the factory infrastructure soon. Battery production will start in 2013, and the factory will create 400 jobs by the end of 2015, says the company.

In a time when DOE-backed companies and green jobs have become a hot-button political issue, Aquion Energy isn’t making a whole lot of noise with the announcement — which is probably a good thing. Moving from a viable technology to full scale manufacturing is a tough road, and one filled with twists and turns (it’s called the Valley of Death for a reason).

Founded in 2007, and developed out of Carnegie Mellon University, the company’s battery pairs a carbon anode with a sodium-based cathode. Water-based electrolytes shuttle ions between the two electrodes during charging and discharging, as opposed to solvent-based electrolytes.

Founder and chief technology officer Jay Whitacre told us that as a professor at CMU he “wanted to do something different,” and with assistance from students, he set out to identify materials that could be “massively used” and “incredibly scalable.” He focused on stationary applications, like the grid, where lower energy density can be an acceptable trade-off for lower costs and longer life.

The company says its battery can withstand a wide range of temperatures without losing storage capacity. That means the devices could be installed alongside a solar installation without sapping energy for air conditioning to keep the batteries cool.

Aquion Energy told us a year ago that a planned factory costs between $75 million and $80 million, and last summer the company raised $20 million.

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1). Seeo: Seeo was founded in 2007 and formerly based in Berkeley, which is home to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Mohit Singh, Seeo co-founder, and his fellow co-founders, Hany Eitouni and Nitash Balsara, first developed the technology. The company has now moved to Hayward, Calif., and the company’s innovation is to produce lithium ion batteries using a dry polymer electrolyte, instead of a more conventional liquid electrolyte (typically made up of a lithium salt in an organic solvent). The electrolyte is the medium that shuttled lithium ions back and forth between the cathode and the anode to charge and discharge the battery cell.

Seeo’s dry polymer electrolyte battery could lead to a longer battery life because it’s not flammable like the liquid electrolyte and sustains virtually no loss of capacity under prolonged exposures to high temperatures. While Nissan and General Motors say the batteries in their electric vehicles are good for 100,000 miles today, Seeo’s goal is to double that mileage. Using the polymer can also lead to a battery cell that can achieve 250 Wh/kg (a measure of energy density), compared with the less than 200 Wh/kg commonly found in lithium-ion cells today. Seeo recently started up a pilot production line that can produce 4 megawatt hours worth of battery cells per year. The company is backed by Khosla Ventures, GSR Ventures and a grant from the Department of Energy.

2). Pellion: This could be the world’s first commercial magnesium battery, which could be developed with better performance and cost than current lithium-ion batteries. The company has an investment from Khosla Ventures and according to the ARPA-E site, Pellion was spun out of MIT, and “will leverage high throughput computational materials design, coupled with accelerated materials synthesis and electrolyte optimization to identify new high-energy-density magnesium cathode materials and compatible electrolyte chemistries.”

3). Liquid Metal Battery: When Bill Gates backs your company, people pay attention. Earlier this year Gates gave Liquid Metal Battery seed funding for technology that sandwiches molten salt between two layers of liquid metal. The technology is the brainchild of MIT Professor Donald Sadoway (see our 15 Questions for the Don of Liquid Metal Batteries) and hopes to deliver a stable, low-cost, large-scale grid battery. The group has been building the battery at larger and larger sizes to prove the concept, from “shot glass” scale, to hockey puck, to pizza, and eventually to ping-pong table-sized.

In addition to Gates, the project received an ARPA-E grant of $6.9 million, and Sadoway said the funds helped the team move much more quickly, including expanding company operations to hire more staff, students and post-docs. The project also received $4 million from oil company Total.

4). Sakti3: Sakti3, based in Michigan, is developing battery cells with a solid-state electrolyte, and is backed by Khosla Ventures, General Motors, and Itochu. Sakti3‘s technology stems from research led by CEO Ann Marie Sastry, who heads up the University of Michigan’s energy systems engineering program, and the tech is supposed to double the energy density of a battery compared with existing lithium ion batteries.

Planar Energy System's Thin Film Batteries

Last month Sastry said that Sakti3 is “making battery cells on equipment that literally used to make potato chip bags, which is pretty cheap, but not low tech.” And the company hopes to have prototypes later this year.

5). Planar Energy Devices: Earlier this year the Economist noted that Planar Energy was about to complete a pilot production line that would print its lithium-ion batteries onto sheets of metal or plastic. The company makes thin-film batteries that are supposed to be able to charge in seconds, have a high energy density and capacity, last 400-500 life cycles and be safer than traditional lithium-ion batteries.

Planar was founded in 2007 as a spin-out from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the company is backed by Battele Ventures and Innovation Valley Partners.

6). Aquion Energy: Aquion Energy is using basic materials (sodium and water) that are widely available (and edible!) to build modular batteries that can provide a slew of services for a cleaner power grid at a relatively low cost. Aquion executives believe these bulk storage devices will help solar and wind power give expensive natural gas “peaker” plants a run for their money as the go-to choice for meeting electricity needs during periods of highest demand.

Founded in 2007, the company is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Foundation Capital. Aquion hopes to break ground on a 500 megawatt-hour manufacturing facility during the second quarter of 2012, and bring this facility online in 2013. That will depend on financing, of course.

7). QuantumScape: QuantumScape is an early stage battery startup that is commercializing technology from Stanford University, and which was founded, and is being led by Infinera co-founder and CEO Jagdeep Singh, and backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures. The stealth company is trying to create batteries that have the density of fossil fuels, and could one day change the economics of electric cars and grid storage. The company’s technology uses a new method for stacking trace amounts of materials together, which can lead to high energy and power densities, and also higher cycle life than standard lithium ion batteries.

8). ActaCell: ActaCell is a four-year-old company, which is working to commercialize low-cost, high-power, lithium-ion cell materials, and is based on research out of the Material Science and Engineering labs of professor Arumugam Manthiram at the University of Texas at Austin. The company is working on materials for battery anodes (which draws in lithium ions when a battery recharges) and cathodes (which draws out current), and is also conducting research on battery cell and pack designs, and has built a module for demonstration in hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicle applications.

Last month ActaCell said it started the process of scaling up its nanocomposite alloy anode material. ActaCell is backed by Google.org, DFJ Mercury, Applied Ventures (Applied Materials’ venture arm), and a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

9). Boston-Power: Boston-Power once dreamed of building a lithium-ion cell battery factory in the U.S., but recently announced that it’s lined up $125 million in funding and will shift a big part of its business to China, thinning its operation in the U.S. by about 35 percent. The factory near Shanghai will be able to produce 400 megawatt hours of battery cells, or 18 million battery cells, per year.

Boston-Power was founded in 2005 and sells both laptop batteries and batteries for electric cars. It’s electric car battery is supposed to be able to provide 50 percent more usable energy density by volume compared to competitors, have a 10-year lifespan and can operate at a wide-ranging temperature, down to -40˚C.

10). Atieva: Atieva was co-founded in 2007 by former Tesla Motors VP Bernard Tse and the company is working on software for monitoring individual battery cells, mechanical packaging and controls for vehicle battery packs. Using commodity cells, Atieva aims to produce customized packs primarily for smaller, independent car companies and recently won support from Chinese bus companies. The startup is backed by Beijing’s China Environment Fund III, Venrock, Mitsui & Co, and JAFCO Asia.

11). EnerVault: While most of these battery companies make lithium ion batteries or mobile batteries for gadgets and cars, EnerVault makes flow batteries, which are large tanks of liquid batteries that are used to provide energy storage for the grid. EnerVault has completed the design of its prototype battery and is counting on a demonstration project next year to help the company launch its technology into the market in 2013.

Flow batteries separate the energy storage materials and electrolyte from the cells in which the electrochemical reaction occurs. The design involves two big tanks, each of which contains a different mix of energy storage material and electrolyte. EnerVault’s design fills one tank of electrolyte with iron (the energy storing material) and another electrolyte tank with chromium. Pumps send the solutions from the tanks into separate chambers of a cell to generate electricity.

12). Envia: Envia develops low-cost cathode materials for vehicle lithium ion batteries and other energy storage applications, and the company is also expanding its focus to include anode technology. A battery is made up of an anode on one side and a cathode on the other, with electrolyte in between. Lithium ions travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte, creating a chemical reaction that allows electrons to be harvested along the way.

Envia is backed by GM Ventures, Asahi Kasei, Asahi Glass, Bay Partners, Redpoint and Panagea Ventures. The company also raised $4 million grant under the Department of Energy’s high-risk energy tech fund, ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy).

13). Better Place: Better Place hasn’t developed a new battery chemistry technology, but it’s been working on a breakthrough business model around electric car batteries. The company is launching its first networks in Israel and Denmark and is selling electric charging and miles as a service with a highly-subsidized electric car. Better Place has launched battery swapping stations and electric car charging stations all over the these two countries and is essentially adopting the cell phone and minutes business model for EVs.

Coda sedan

14). Coda Automotive: Electric car maker Coda Automotive has long emphasized how important batter management systems are, from air and liquid cooling systems to software to manage the charge. A couple months ago it bought battery management startup EnergyCS for its electronics and software that manage the charge and discharge of the energy from the battery pack. Coda told us last year that its battery management system was more sophisticated than Nissan’s for its electric LEAF. Along with EVs Coda plans to sell energy storage systems for uses such as supplying backup power and banking renewable energy and has a partnership with Chinese battery maker, Lishen.

15). Amprius: Amprius makes lithium-ion batteries with four times more energy density (the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery of a given size) compared to today’s state of the art technology. The key, according to Amprius, is a silicon nanostructured anode, or a material that draws in the lithium ions when a battery recharges. Amprius is backed by Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, VantagePoint Venture Partners, and Stanford University.

16). AES: Power company AES doesn’t make batteries, but it has been pushing the edge of using lithium ion batteries for grid storage and recently scaled up a 32 MW lithium-ion battery project in conjunction with grid operator PJM in West Virginia.

17). Next-Gen Sodium Grid Battery: Sodium sulfur batteries (NAS) are pretty much the cheapest form of battery for energy storage on the power grid, and power companies in Japan have been using hundreds of them for years. But a project from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and battery and electrochemical company Eagle Picher Technologies plan to use an ARPA-E grant to develop a next-generation sodium battery here in the U.S. for the power grid. The battery will be a planar-shaped sodium beta-battery that is supposed to be less expensive and with a 30 percent higher energy density than standard NAS batteries. Eventually the battery could cost $200 per kWh compared to the current costs of NAS batteries that are closer in the range of $500-$600 per kWh.

18). Contour Energy Systems: Contour Energy Systems, which was spun out Caltech and formerly known as CFX Battery, sells disposable coin cell batteries, with one of its first products being batteries that are specifically engineered to make 3-D TV glasses last longer than competitors. The company says its batteries will outlast standard coin cell competitors, such as Energizer, by about 60 percent, and its technology uses the volatile element fluorine that could deliver longer lasting, higher power batteries for devices spanning from smart meters to pacemakers, and — potentially years down the road — electric vehicles and laptops.

19). PolyPlus: An 11-year-old company named PolyPlus, which hails out of Lawrence Berkeley Labs and has a grant from the Department of Energy’s high risk early-stage ARPA-E program, has been working on batteries made of lithium and seawater (or just plain tap water for that matter) as well as batteries made from lithium and air. The water battery can achieve awe-inspiring energy densities (the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery of a given size) of 1,300 wh/kg (for small batches), and potentially 1,500 wh/kg at larger scale production. For comparison, standard lithium-ion batteries have closer to 200 wh/kg to 400 wh/kg. PolyPlus says one day its air battery could make electric vehicles with ranges from 300 to 500 miles.

20). Incremental development, not huge leap: Last year Paul Beach, president of battery company Quallion, gave a fascinating talk about the differences in progress between batteries and IT: “Moore’s Law has delivered a 10,000 times improvement over the years for chips, while historically batteries have shown a 3 to 4 times improvement,” said Beach.

Customer rides of the Model S Beta

Quallion works on these tiny improvements, including creating “ultrasafe” batteries, developing battery management systems for high voltage and high density batteries, and creating batteries with a wide operating temperature range.

21). Quantance: Quantance isn’t a battery maker, but it’s a chip company that makes an analog radio chip that helps boost the signal that a cell phone delivers to the base station and thus enables the battery in cell phones to last longer. Really? Cell phone companies care that much about extending mobile life, and not using new battery chemistry? Yes, yes they do.

22). Tesla Motors: Electric car maker Tesla also doesn’t make batteries, but it’s innovation is that it packages together small format batteries — the kind found in laptops and gadgets — into a battery pack that it can use for its EVs. Tesla commonly buys bulk batteries from Asian battery makers like Panasonic, and has been able to benefit from the economies of scale of these players. Next year it will launch an EV with a range of 300-miles.

23). 24M: 24M, which stands for the material concentration 24 molar, was spun out of lithium-ion battery company A123 Systems in mid-2010, and has plans to work on advanced non-traditional, lithium-ion based storage technology that uses a semisolid energy storage material, compared to the traditional use of solid materials. 24M raised $10 million in Series A funding from Charles River Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners, and won a $6 million grant from ARPA-E. The company has plans to work on a system for vehicles and grid storage that combine aspects of lithium-ion batteries and flow battery technology.

24). Leyden Energy:Leyden Energy has developed a lithium-ion battery containing salt in the liquid electrolyte in order to build more high temperature-tolerant and longer-lasting batteries. It cells for laptops can run over 1,000 cycles and three years, and a supplier called Dr. Battery is currently offering Leyden-embedded laptop batteries with a 2-year warranty.

Leyden is also interested in developing cells for the transportation market. Leyden has raised $38 million in venture capital since its inception in 2007 from New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Ventures and Sigma Partners.

25). A123 Systems: While public A123 Systems has been struggling in recent months, it’s managed to win over some electric car and grid players with its lithium ion battery tech, including Fisker, GM for its Chevrolet Spark, and China’s top wind maker Dongfang Electric Corporation.

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• Azure Power India: Indian solar power company Azure Power is adding on 110 MW of solar power generation in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Karnataka. According to VCCircle Germany’ development finance institution DEG has put in €10 million (Rs 68 crore or $13.6 million), and Exim Bank has given $16 million in financing. Azure Power India has been backed by Foundation Capital and Helion Venture Partners.
• SunEdison in India: According to The Economic Times, solar financing company SunEdison says it has secured project financing of Rs 500 crore from Overseas Private Investment Corporation, L&T Infrastructure Finance Company Ltd and Infrastructure Development Finance Company Ltd for 50 MW worth of solar panel projects in Gujarat and Rajasthan.
• More national subsidies:According to the Wall Street Journal: “India’s renewable energy ministry plans to introduce more fiscal incentives to boost local manufacturing of solar power equipment.” “The ministry proposes to have 4,000 MW to 5,000 MW of solar equipment manufacturing capacity by 2022, including 2,000 MW production capacity of poly silicon.”
• GE India new energy CEO: GE India has appointed Banmali Agrawala as President and CEO of its energy business in the country, reports the Economic Times.
• Smart grid India: Indian state-run transmission utility PowerGrid Corporation is exploring the possibility of setting up a `smart grid’ on a pilot basis, says The Economics Times.
• Missed solar deadlines:Bloomberg reports: “A third of solar power projects awarded by India in its first national auction may miss their January deadline for completion, an official at a state-run lender that’s helping to fund the program.”

Panchabuta is dedicated to bringing the latest news, information and analysis in Cleantech and Renewable Energy Industry in India.

Image courtesy of hiyori13.

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Four-year-old Aquion has developed a modular battery that uses basic, widely-available (and edible) materials, like sodium and water. The company says its bulk battery will be low cost compared to the current batteries that are being piloted on the power grid, and could be as cheap as one-tenth the cost of the alternatives. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) says that grid-scale lead acid batteries cost around $950-$1,590 per kilowatt, or $2,770-$3,800 per kilowatt-hour, and lithium-ion batteries cost about $1,085-$1,550 per kilowatt, or $4,340-$6,200 per kilowatt-hour.

Aquion’s goal is to use its grid battery to help utilities integrate more solar and wind power. Solar and wind are variable power sources (when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow they don’t produce power) and energy storage will be a crucial way to even out those ups and downs for the grid. Aquion also says its battery, which it thinks can last 20-30 years, can withstand a wide range of temperatures without losing storage capacity, meaning installing it onsite at a solar farm wouldn’t affect the battery’s performance.

Founder and chief technology officer Jay Whitacre developed the basic science for Aquion at Carnegie Mellon University. The battery pairs a carbon anode with a sodium-based cathode. Water-based electrolytes shuttle ions between the two electrodes during charging and discharging. Traditional batteries often use solvent-based electrolytes.

The idea was to create a battery out of the most basic elements that could produced at a massive scale for cheap. Aquion Energy business development chief Ted Wiley, described the battery to us as “literally edible—every single material in the battery.”

The company is now looking to transition from “an early-stage technology development organization into a full-fledged product company,” as Kleiner chairman Ray Lane described it earlier this year. Commercializing the tech will be tough. For example, just selling into a utility-scale energy project can take as long as three years, and the factory will cost an estimated $75 million to $80 million.

Image courtesy of Suicine, and Aquion Energy

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