Tuesday’s memorandum of understanding was short on details, and the two companies cited its “non-exclusive” nature. That means GM and LG Chem, the maker of the battery cells for the Volt’s 16 kilowatt-hour batteries, may be announcing more partners in the future.

Just about every battery company and electric and hybrid vehicle maker seems to be looking for an afterlife for batteries that are too depleted to drive vehicles, yet still have up to 80 percent of their original capacity available for less stressful duties. In fact, that’s seen as critical for making EVs and plug-in hybrid vehicles more affordable, since much of the additional cost comes from the expensive batteries.

Nissan announced in October that it would form a joint venture with Sumitomo to recycle lithium-ion electric car batteries, like those in its upcoming Leaf all-electric sedan. In April, the Renault-Nissan Alliance announced similar projects in Europe with utilities Enel in Italy and Endesa in Spain.

The action isn’t limited to major automakers. EnerDel, the Ener1  subsidiary supplying lithium-ion batteries for Think City EVs, is working with Japanese conglomerate Itochu on a grid storage pilot project. Last week, BYD, the China-based, Warren Buffett-backed EV startup, announced a MOU with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to build batteries to back up wind power. Of course, all of these projects are still in the R&D phase.

Then there’s A123, which already has a significant presence in grid storage and could find ways to bring its vehicle batteries to that market. Pike Research estimates that the grid-connected lithium-ion battery market will grow to $1 billion by 2018, mainly driven by the economies of scale that will come to the industry as it ramps up for the automotive sector. Samsung, for example, plans to start producing lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles next year through a joint venture with Germany-based Robert Bosch, and has said it is also targeting grid storage applications.

ABB — a sometimes slow-moving behemoth in the power grid field that generated annual revenue of $31.8 billion in 2009 — has been getting more involved in other smart grid and energy management projects lately. Last week, its venture arm invested $1.5 million in startup Power Assure, which makes software to match data center power consumption to server utilization.

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Here are a few things that I know for sure:

• We’re more afraid of success than failure. Why? We generally know failure. We must know it to be in business for ourselves. Success, on the other hand, is uncharted territory. It changes things, and although we have the internal butterflies of hope and excitement about what’s to come, we also can’t help but feel a little uncertain and afraid of the unknown.
• We know what we need to do to succeed. We simply avoid it. Sometimes we avoid it out of fear of success or failure. Sometimes we avoid it because it seems too simple (solutions, in our minds, should be more complex). Other times, even if we hate to admit it, we avoid it out of laziness or because we’d rather be doing other things, like hanging out on social networks or surfing the web. No, we know what we need to be doing, but success comes by having the discipline and courage to actually do it.
• It’s not about the office supplies. I used to visit Office Depot probably once a week in search of that end-all, be-all solution for getting my business off the ground. It had to be there (right?) in all those reams of colorful paper and all those organizational systems. If I could just bring more order to my office, I thought, I would surely succeed. I visit the office supply store about twice a year now, after finally realizing that the solution isn’t there, and if there needs to be order, it’s probably internal and is more mental than physical.
• It is possible to bootstrap it. Just as we want that complex solution (so we avoid the simple and obvious route in search of it), we also want it to cost a fortune (more avoidance). In the past six months, I’ve conducted probably 100 interviews with entrepreneurs and small business owners, and while there were a few (very few) occasions where they suggested having enough initial financing to get a business off the ground, most entrepreneurs shared stories of starting on a shoestring and using cost-effective promotion techniques (like the media, word-of-mouth and content marketing) to build their companies.
• We must take care of ourselves. As business owners, this is usually the one we struggle with most, but taking care of ourselves is vital to the success of our companies. Balancing the demands of a business and a life can be challenging, and some would say that it’s an impossible feat, but somewhere around those demands, we have to make room for our own needs. It’s not the easiest thing to do, especially when there are deadlines and clients to please and promotional efforts to be done. At the end of the day, there are not enough hours, but kind of like an athlete maintains his or her health in order to perform at the highest level, we must do the same.
• Entrepreneurs and small business owners are a helpful bunch. I can’t imagine that a more helpful group exists out there than entrepreneurs and small business owners. Nowhere else will you see one business owner help another before he helps himself. When you first go into business for yourself, competition is the word that sticks out in your mind, but eventually, you begin to love seeing other businesses succeed, and instead of feeling envious, you feel inspired.
• Our businesses can’t be a state secret. It’s funny now to think about how little promotion I wanted to do for my business in the beginning; it was so intimidating and nerve-racking. Now, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. In the beginning, marketing and promotion have that ick-factor associated with them, but over time, you come to appreciate the value of your own products and services, but even when you come to appreciate it, that doesn’t mean everyone knows about it. We have to be willing to put ourselves out there and tell the world about our businesses.

I think the biggest lessons I’ve learned are not the most obvious ones; they’re not the ones I thought I needed to know, nor are they the ones that can be learned from a book. Those lessons (the ones where someone says, “Here’s how you promote your business through the media,” or “Here’s how you do social or in-person networking.”), those are the easy ones. The hardest lessons for me have been the ones I’ve had to learn on my own the hard way, through trial-and-error and candid looks in the mirror.

What business lessons do you know for sure?

Photo by Flickr user txd, licensed under CC 2.0

The idea behind this pairing is that the joint venture — dubbed Shenzhen BYD Daimler New Technology Co. — will be able to “capitalize on Daimler’s know-how in electric vehicle architecture and safety,” as well as BYD’s battery technology and electric drive systems. As J.D. Power and Associates analyst Mike Omotoso told us last year, BYD boasts, “a large research capability — they have 3,000 engineers in Shanghai and plan to employ 10,000 more engineers in Shenzhen.” So an automotive partner stands to “get a head start by using BYD’s engineers instead of starting from scratch themselves.”

The vehicle expected to result from this collaboration will be marketed under a new brand jointly created and owned by the German-Chinese duo. Already BYD, which counts Warren Buffett among its backers, has launched a plug-in hybrid model called the F3DM and an electric car named the e6. The F3DM initially rolled out for fleet customers in late 2008, and came in well below the company’s ambitious sales targets for 2009. But BYD started selling it to consumers in March of this year and hopes to launch its electric e6 in the U.S. by the end of 2010.

Daimler has previously touted its registration of more than 600 patents related to battery-powered vehicles over the last three decades, but the company has over the last year or two shown a heightened sense of urgency when it comes to carving out a piece of the nascent plug-in vehicle and battery market — a potentially multibillion-dollar opportunity by the company’s estimates.

The German automaker has set up joint ventures with Evonik Industries to produce lithium-ion battery cells and packs, and last spring took a 10 percent stake in electric car startup Tesla Motors (Daimler later sold a portion of its stake to Abu Dhabi’s Aabar Investments). Just last month Daimler announced a comprehensive partnership with the Renault-Nissan Alliance to share powertrains and architecture for compact cars and light commercial vehicles. Among other projects, the companies plan to cooperate on electric versions of Daimler’s Smart Fortwo (pictured) and explore “opportunities to co-develop technologies related to electric vehicles and batteries.”

Amid all of these alliances taking shape across the electric vehicle spectrum, China holds particular interest. Today’s Daimler-BYD deal comes at a time when China has only recently overtaken the U.S. as the world’s largest auto market, and when the country’s car companies are jockeying to leapfrog legacy automakers that haven’t yet mastered the technology. The Chinese government has put some policies in place supporting greener cars, and it is widely anticipated (according to multiple reports in Chinese media and comments from global automakers) that Beijing will soon establish new subsidies for electric vehicle buyers, possibly by the end of this month.

Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetsche emphasized in a statement Thursday, “the vast potential of electric mobility in China” and said the partnership with BYD, “adds another dimension to our growing presence in this important market.”

Other companies seeking a foothold in the country’s nascent EV market include charging infrastructure startup Better Place, which announced an agreement with China’s Chery Automobile last month to jointly develop electric vehicle prototypes that can have their batteries switched out (as shown in this video demo of a Better Place battery switch station), with the stated goal of securing one of the government’s regional pilot projects for electric vehicles.

Still, hurdles remain for electric vehicles in China, as in markets around the world. Honda’s chief executive Takanobu Ito told Reuters earlier this week, “There needs to be a major breakthrough in battery technology,” adding the forecast that it will take a decade or two before all-electric vehicles become a mainstream choice. At the same time, Ito said, “If there is a suitable chance, we hope to work with China to (develop) batteries.”

Images courtesy of the North American International Auto Show, Daimler and BYD

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Japanese mobile phone and Internet operator Softbank made an initial investment of $20 million in Ustream, with the option to acquire additional shares by July 2011 that could bring its total investment in the live and mobile streaming startup to $75 million. With its initial investment, Softbank currently owns 13.7 percent of Ustream, valuing the company at around $150 million. If Softbank chooses to exercise its warrants, the additional $55 million investment would make it the company’s top shareholder.

Ustream specializes in live and mobile video streaming, so an investment by a mobile operator makes sense. And expanding into Asia presents a huge opportunity for Ustream. Although the startup had 50 million unique users in January, China alone has more than 700 million mobile subscribers, according to Bloomberg.

Ustream has built live streaming applications for a number of mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone and Google Android mobile phones. The startup also has built a fairly lucrative live streaming business that’s been used for a number of live events, including the red carpet premieres of Avatar and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Ustream also recently introduced a pay-per-view service that will allow its customers to begin charging users to view streams of live events.

Ustream had previously raised about $13 million, including $11.1 million in Series A funding from Doll Capital Management and Band of Angels, as well as an additional $2 million it picked up last summer.

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Villaraigosa’s plan comes as part of a larger effort to attract cleantech investment and manufacturers of batteries and charging stations to the area. Countless regions around the country are engaging in similar efforts, assembling juicy incentive packages for companies like A123Systems, V-Vehicle and Tesla Motors. But Southern California is building momentum toward a significant role in the growing EV ecosystem: the launchpad, where some of the earliest plug-in vehicle models will roll out to customers, and where many of EV-related challenges for the power grid will be figured out.

California as a whole offers an early test market for plug-in vehicles, thanks in no small part to state incentives and regulations tied to goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For Southern California in particular, key figures in the push to become a green car hub include utilities Southern California Edison (a partner in Villaraigosa’s plan) and San Diego Gas & Electric (which is partnering with the Renault-Nissan Alliance and planning to install 2,300 charging units in next 1-2 years), both major players in the smart grid buildout. Back in March, President Obama stopped by SCE’s 15-year-old Edison Electric Vehicle Technical Center, which has teamed up with Ford Motor to deploy a test fleet of plug-in Ford Escape Hybrid SUVs.

On the tech innovation side, plug-in car startups Fisker Automotive, Coda Automotive and Aptera are all headquartered in SoCal. And AC Propulsion, which first developed the prototypical technology that evolved into the Tesla Roadster, calls San Dimas, 30 miles east of Los Angeles, home. When it comes to manufacturing, Tesla Motors, while based in Silicon Valley, will likely assemble its planned Model S in the Long Beach area, making use of facilities once used for the region’s aerospace industry.

But while Southern California is home to key players across the spectrum of work to produce electric vehicles for the mass market, it may be the region’s charging infrastructure efforts in coming months and years that ultimately transforms its old car culture. As Enid Joffe, president and founder of infrastructure installer Clean Fuel Connection said at this summer’s Plug-In 2009 conference in Long Beach, putting in a plug — a basic necessity for drivers to switch off gasoline — may not be rocket science, but it’s complicated by the amount of coordination that’s required.

SDG&E’s Bill Zobel told us earlier this year that when electric cars hit California in the 1990s, utilities, car dealers, the local government and drivers lacked understanding of the “requirements for an owner walking off the lot with a plug-in car.” With the next generation of EVs, he said, “We’ll be much more prepared than we were last time.”

Image courtesy of Eyeshotpictures Creative Commons Flickr.

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The event remains under investigation, but Toxco believes it was caused by an internal short in one of the batteries in storage at the Trail facility, which handled batteries ranging from smaller cell phone batteries up to some weighing 1.4kg (about 3 lbs.), Canada’s Globe and Mail reports. This adds fresh fuel to smoldering fears about the safety of lithium-ion batteries (you might recall the reports and photos of laptop fires caused by overheated lithium batteries in years past) for use in the upcoming generation of plug-in vehicles, as well as for recycling and disposal of the devices.

Part of the danger with lithium stems from the fact that it reacts violently with water — that’s why the more than 50 firefighters called to the Toxco blaze let the chemical burn out. According to Canada’s Globe and Mail, Toxco took several measures to keep the volatile battery chemical in check, cooling batteries to nearly 200 degrees below 0 degrees Celsius, and storing them in 45-gallon drums on wooden palettes within “earth-covered concrete bunkers.”

These days a slew of venture-backed battery companies see opportunity where lithium-ion batteries fall short, and they’re building part of their business case around promises to deliver safer and more stable batteries for electric vehicles, and at higher energy densities (in general, the higher the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, the more volatile the technology).

The solution proposed by Berkeley, Calif.-based Seeo, for example, comes in the form of a nano-structured solid-state battery based on a polymer electrolyte, rather than the liquid electrolyte that has been the “weak link,” according to founder and technology director Mohit Singh, and is the cause of much of the safety concerns. The startup also claims its battery can operate at a much higher temperature compared with currently available lithium-ion batteries — opening the possibility for use in more rugged, outdoor applications, such as attached to a solar system.

Planar Energy Devices, meanwhile, is developing large-format and thin-film batteries with a “laminated safety separator,” which Planar says protects cells from thermal abuse and will not melt and short with high heat like conventional separators providing a thermal shutdown mechanism.

We’ll likely see increased competition in the battery recycling industry itself in coming years, too, as more advanced vehicle batteries come onto the market. After 8 years or so on the road, a typical lithium-ion battery will exhaust its useful life in plug-in vehicles, but much of its value as an energy storage device remains. The Renault-Nissan Alliance, making some of the biggest bets in the industry on electric vehicles, thinks capturing that value through recycling and reuse could be a key to reducing the price tag for plug-in cars. Taking a lesson from Toxco, though, it seems making that process safer will be another important step.

Image courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

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The state-backed French Strategic Investment Fund will contribute €125 million ($185 million) to the project, which is meant to start cranking out batteries in 2012 at a Renault plant in Flins, with production capacity targeted at 100,000 batteries per year. While the joint venture’s batteries will be “available for sale to any manufacturer,” Renault says it plans to use them mostly for an upcoming model derived from its Zoe Ze concept vehicle — a car that the company plans to launch in mid-2012 and hopes will be the biggest seller in its family of electric vehicles. Also this morning, Renault announced that it has chosen the Flins plant to produce that upcoming city car, and it’s aiming for it to make up two-thirds of its EV sales in Europe.

The French Atomic Energy Commission is also joining the venture, and according to a release from Renault this morning, the European Investment Bank is considering a loan of up to €140 million in debt financing. In all, Renault says it expects the first phase of the project to require a €600 million investment.

Renault notes in its release this morning that the new project will “have a sustainable approach to its entire operations, including developing technologies to recycle batteries on site.” But battery recycling could have an impact on more than the environment. Renault-Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn said last month, when Nissan unveiled a new battery recycling joint venture, that he expects recycling and reuse in energy storage and backup power applications (secondary markets for batteries after their useful life in vehicle applications has been exhausted) to help make electric vehicles more affordable.

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Photo of Zoe Ze concept vehicle courtesy of Renault

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Renault has designed the Fluence five-seater (the least cutesy of the four models shown in Frankfurt today and pictured after the jump) to be compatible with electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place’s “Quickdrop” battery swap system. Today the two companies announced plans to roll out at least 100,000 of the cars in Denmark and Israel by 2016, with buyers having the option to subscribe to Better Place’s services when sales begin in the first half of 2011.

Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn told Bloomberg today, “When the history is written of how the market switched from gasoline to electric, the Fluence will be its Model T.” But it’s the compact Zoe, set to launch in mid-2012, that Renault expects to be the biggest seller.

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Astroturfing for Coal: A firm contracted by a coal industry group has been caught “astroturfing” — sending forged letters to members of Congress that were presented as grassroots political communications. — Grist

Renault-Nissan, Down Under: The Renault-Nissan Alliance and the State Government of Victoria in Australia have agreed to identify potential areas of co-operation in promoting the use of zero emission vehicles, such as Nissan’s new electric LEAF, in the state. — Green Car Congress

All Techs on Deck: The Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI, has released an analysis showing that the electricity sector could reduce annual CO2 emissions in 2030 by 41 percent below 2005 levels, but that it will require sustained R&D, demos and aggressive deployment of technologies including carbon capture and storage, renewable and nuclear generation, and significant efficiency improvements. — Press Release

BYD’s Battery Plays = Boon for Buffett: Warren Buffett’s investment in China-based BYD Auto has reportedly raked in some $1 billion for his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. What’s driving the rapid rise in BYD’s value? “Investments in hybrid automobiles like the plug-in F3DM and, even more importantly, high-tech lithium iron phosphate batteries.” — AutoblogGreen

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Renault-Nissan’s move is just the latest in a slew of deals for the alliance as it works to build a market and infrastructure for its upcoming electric vehicles. But it also represents the latest fleet play — one of the biggest for plug-in vehicles, given the reach of the companies involved (Arval and ALD’s fleets include a total of more than 1.4 million vehicles internationally) at a time when the business of fleet supply and management is attracting innovators from across the green transportation sector. As consumer vehicle sales slump and automakers look to test out their inaugural electric models in controlled settings, fleets offer a good match.

Today’s deals come on the heels of Canada-based Electrovaya launching a small car-sharing program for its Maya 300, a low-speed electric four-seater planned for the fleet market. And it comes less than two months after car-sharing company Zipcar jumped into the fleet management biz in hopes of crossing over into profitability by year’s end.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO, released a report on the new push for plug-in vehicles in federal fleets, and it highlighted a number of challenges — mostly having to do with high upfront costs, the need for charging infrastructure, limited supply and the fact that federal agencies face potentially conflicting mandates to reduce electricity use while adding on a new source of demand (the vehicles).

Among the key recommendations in the GAO report is for the Secretary of Energy to develop guidance for agencies acquiring plug-in vehicles. According to the report:

Such guidance might include assessing the need for installing charging infrastructure and identifying areas where improvements may be necessary, mapping current driving patterns, and determining the energy sources used to generate electricity in an area.

Depending on how quickly fleet initiatives from companies Renault (at large scale) and Electrovaya (at small scale) take off, and on how they pan out — they, too, may encounter customers worried about at high upfront costs and infrastructure needs — the government may be able to take some of these cues from private sector innovators.

“Kangoo be bop Z.E.” prototype photo credit Renault

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