Is the solar panel & battery combo ready to change energy markets?
Store the sun
The big idea right now for solar and batteries is this: put solar panels on your roof, a battery in the backyard…
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The big idea right now for solar and batteries is this: put solar panels on your roof, a battery in the backyard…
State-by-state mandates have helped drive the deployment of renewable energy — namely solar and wind power. All of this deployment requires energy storage, and so the grid battery storage market is primed for growth.
A Midwest startup wins a big business plan competition by showing the promise of its technology to create a longer-lasting lithium ion battery that also can charge at a faster rate than what batteries in smart phones can deliver today.
The auction of U.S. battery maker A123, expected to kick off today, will determine if the tech will stay in the U.S. with Jonhson Controls or be snapped up by Chinese conglomerate Wanxiang. The controversy exposes fears over China and the politicization of electric vehicles.
The demand for lithium-ion batteries hasn’t grown as quickly as many battery developers have anticipated, and that leaves a rather bleak near-term outlook for startups who had counted on the rise of electric car, grid storage and even laptops as lucrative markets.
Battery maker A123 Systems, which was awarded a sizable federal grant, has finally filed for bankruptcy protection, after bleeding cash for months. Johnson Controls will buy up some of the assets.
A Japanese consortium of government groups and tech companies teams up with a New Mexico utility and a federal lab for a smart grid demonstration project to figure out how to integrate solar electricity and energy storage into an electric grid.
Can the startup accelerator model work for battery companies? The folks behind CalCharge, the brainchild of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and California Clean Energy Fund (CalCEF) that hopes to attract some 30 battery companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, think so.
A123 Systems was supposed to be a success story about an innovative U.S. battery company, but it has struggled to live up to that expectation. The company on Tuesday posted lower revenues and greater losses for the first quarter of this year, about two months after it launched a program to replace defective batteries.
Lithium ion battery maker A123 Systems announced that it will replace some of the battery modules and packs that it’s sold that could contain defective prismatic cells, and that includes batteries for Fisker’s electric car the Karma.
Today wireless charging for cell phones is pretty kludgy. But the idea — and eventually the goal of Powermat — is that one day the cell phone companies will embed the company’s wireless charging tech right into the phone itself, making wireless charging a whole lot more simple.
Boston-Power, which once dreamed of building a lithium-ion cell battery factory in the United States, announced Tuesday it has lined up $125 million of investments to shift a big part of its business to China and thin its operation in the U.S. by about 35 percent.
Only 72 percent of China’s wind-power sources are connected to its grid — meaning there’s a good deal of wind turbines that are spinning that aren’t providing usable clean power. Battery maker A123 Systems hopes its first deal in China can help with that problem.
The market for electric vehicles is moving more slowly than expected. That’s why companies like Johnson Controls are focusing more heavily on “start-stop” vehicle technology, which is a system that automatically cuts off the engine of a gas-powered vehicle while it’s idling.
The next-generation of lithium ion batteries aren’t just here to power the first wave of electric cars, they’ll be providing better energy storage for gadgets and computers, too. Leyden Energy is launching a lithium-ion battery for laptops that won’t degrade for at least three years.
Stanford University spinout Amprius has landed $25 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Chinese firms IPV Capital and Qian Neng Fund, to bring its silicon nanowire lithium-ion battery anode technology to commercial production, most likely for consumer electronics batteries.
Utilities know they have to figure out how to store energy produced intermittently, such as wind and solar, or store energy from fossil-fuel power plants to keep the grid loaded when wind turbines and solar energy equipment aren’t doing their best.
And the DOE loan guarantee train keeps on chugging. This morning the DOE says it has offered its 14th loan guarantee — a $17.1 million conditional commitment to AES to build a 20 MW energy storage system using A123System’s (s AONE) lithium ion batteries.
Turning battery breakthroughs into a sustainable business means requires a team to find the “killer application” for their particular technology, and figure out who’s willing to pay for it, says Maurice Gunderson, a senior partner for CMEA Capital’s Energy and Materials group.
Boston-Power has raised $60 million in fifth-round financing — cash that the startup hopes will fuel a rapid expansion of its capacity to build energy storage devices for plug-in cars and the electric utilities.
Who can you expect to be very aggressive about going after the lithium reserves found in Afghanistan? China’s electric vehicle players. China is swiftly becoming an electric vehicle powerhouse, recently surpassing the U.S. as the world’s largest automobile industry.
Coda Automotive, the startup that aims to build electric cars in China for the U.S. market, has just announced the close of a whopping $58 million Series C round of financing to help launch its first vehicle — the Coda Sedan — in California later this year.
Aptera Motors, the developer of three-wheeled hybrid and electric vehicles, says it has raised new funds from NRG Energy and needs to raise a whole lot more from the federal government as well as private markets.
Chrysler and NASA plan to share data and research related to battery systems, energy storage, materials engineering, radar, robotics and other technologies over the next three years as part of a new alliance announced this morning.
In the weeks since restrictions lifted on insiders holding the bulk of A123’s stock, some executives have started to cash out. The transactions represent just a trickle of cash compared to the wealth created on paper in the first day of trading.
Chinese automaker Geely, which is known for its low-cost compacts, plans to buy the loss-making luxury brand Volvo for $1.8 billion from Ford Motor (s F). How does the deal play into China’s larger role in the nascent electric vehicle market?
As the solar panel industry dusts itself off from a long-anticipated glut in 2009, another green technology — large format lithium-ion batteries…
The shaky status of Saab — the loss-making auto brand that General Motors threatened to shut down late last year before finally…
Well, I am sold. There is now a real reason to buy the iPad. As if all of the other functions weren’t…
I recently wrapped up my first project with a client where we used Google Wave (s goog) for document collaboration and wrote about the…
[show=liketotallyawesome size=large]When you’re a member of the YouTube vlogger elite like Philip DeFranco, there are lots of different opportunities available to you.…
Emerging technologies are not for investors with faint hearts. Bulls with great expectations for innovations that can transform markets are often socked…
Updated with comment from Ener1: Norway-based electric vehicle developer Think has narrowed the “short list” of locations for its first North American…
Updated with additional info from ActaCell: Lithium-ion battery startup ActaCell has just added the state of Texas to its corral of high-profile…
Governments and many companies in the U.S. and Europe all but forgot about battery innovation over the last 10-15 years, according to…
Vehicles and consumer electronics connect on a lot more levels than plugging an iPod into your car stereo. According to Ford Research…
For the founding team of startup Envia Systems, working at battery companies before starting their own helped them realize a gaping hole…
Farm Groups Win Battle for Offset Oversight: In a major victory for agriculture groups and defeat for environmental organizations that hoped the…
[qi:_earth2tech] As Earth2Tech pointed out earlier this week, everyone and their mother is building home energy management tools these days, including Google.…
[qi:032] The other night I watched “Corpse Bride.” The Tim Burton flick was streamed from Netflix via my Time Warner broadband subscription,…
Before unveiling the concept version of its Model S sedan, an $57,400 electric car that Tesla Motors wants to build using loans…
Military applications for clean technology have caught our eye in the past — from mobile fuel-cell systems designed for the battlefield to…
As it ventures into renewable energy, 3M (s MMM) is also making strides in its other energy business: batteries. The Minnesota-based manufacturer…
Electric car makers and clean energy developers can’t take all the credit for a battery boom, but they have earned a nod…
Ever since World of Warcraft started showing signs of cancer-like growth — ravenously consuming massively multiplayer online game subscribers — video game industry entrepreneurs and investors have hunted for a WoW killer, the next big game capable of toppling the 11.5 million subscribers developer Blizzard has amassed worldwide. They need to stop looking.
On the heels of news that it had scored a deal with laptop maker Hewlett Packard (s HPQ), lithium-ion battery maker Boston…
John Doerr, the prominent cleantech venture capitalist for Kleiner Perkins, gave his standard earnest speech before a Senate Committee hearing on how…
The global market for electric vehicle batteries could grow to $19 billion by 2010, and Japan’s Toshiba Corp. (s TOSBF) wants an…
We’ve heard very little about the early-stage vehicle battery startup Sakti3, only that the company had been backed by Vinod Khosa’s firm…
The DOD this week awarded $2.4 million the development of li-ion batteries and $2 million for lead-acid batteries.
Google today said on its official blog that it has developed optical character recognition technology to the point that its search engine can read any scanned document in Adobe’s PDF format, effectively turning scanned images into words that are searchable and indexable.
While the price of gas has been dropping from $4.00 down towards $3.00 in recent weeks, I still pay attention to which…
Battery maker TonenGeneral Sekiyu K.K., a Japanese subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, has started construction of a $325 million battery plant in South Korea which will make the critical separator film needed to maker lithium-ion batteries. The plant will sell the film to battery maker LG Chem.
Berlin’s autobahn will be getting a charge from the “e-mobility Berlin” program Daimler AG officially unveiled today. The automaker is working with…
Tesla Motors will be charging up Daimler’s electric Smart ForTwo cars with its own lithium-ion battery technology, the German edition of the…
It’s a hybrid party, and everyone is coming. The latest manufacturer to RSVP is Hyundai, the one time Korean upstart that’s become…
EEStor, maker of the supposedly killer energy storage device, might soon plug its “electrical energy storage unit” (EESU) into the grid to…
Darned if this doesn’t look like a Smartphone Edition device to me, but nope, it’s a super-thin Pocket PC Phone Edition device,…
Blake Ross, one of the more high profile members of the Firefox team, has been quietly working on a new start up…
MySpace is now the number one site in the U.S. in terms of market share of visits says research firm Hitwise. Over…
Now that I impulsively ordered a Samsung Q1, I’m scouring the web for every review I can find. Most of them provide…
Verizon Wireless and partner Microsoft are set to announce the launch of a new online music store, VCAST Music, at CES. The…
Its been more than a year since i first heard about Prof. Negroponte’s fabledHundred-Dollar Laptop. Launched with much fanfare, we still have…
The citizens of Lafayette, Louisiana vote today to approve the funds needed to build a city-wide fiber optic network for high-speed internet…