Industry news

ABB Group and BYD Co., Ltd., announced a strategic collaboration to jointly-develop new solutions for energy storage building on their complementary strengths. ABB’s products and technology for grid storage, electric vehicle charging and integrated marine systems, combined with BYD’s knowledge in battery technology, can broadly address worldwide energy storage requirements. This collaboration will accelerate the introduction of new solutions for

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Solar panels must be regularly cleaned and maintained in order to keep them operating efficiently and maximize the amount of sunlight they convert into electricity. With this in mind, a group of students from CalTech and UCLA have developed an impressive robot that cleans solar panels. The design won a third of $200,000 in prize money in the DOE’s National

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India currently has one of the largest populations of cell phone users in the world – the nation is expected to have 815 million users by year’s end. To help expand its growing communication network, the Indian government has announced plans to erect as many as 2,200 solar-powered mobile communication towers in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh,

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New Zealand’s Green Party has released probably the most ambitious part of its economic plan to woo voters ahead of the country’s general election later this week. The Green Party, which may look to come to power through a coalition with other like-minded parties, has proposed a comprehensive clean energy plan. The party want 100% renewable energy target by 2050,

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The Chinese wind energy sector is growing at tremendously. China is expected to exceed its 2015 target of 100GW wind capacity by 30%, reports Tim Buckley, Director Energy Finance Studies Australasia at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) for Reneweconomy. At the same time, China is rapidly diversifying away from coal, towards more nuclear, renewables and hydropower.

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Software that analyzes the complex interplay between solar PV, energy storage systems and customer energy use sounds like a great idea — but is it something that companies are ready to pay for? This depends on the level of maturity of the industry in question, and just what financial stake they see in capturing information that is now lost in

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Hawaii is facing some serious disruptions from its growing share of distributed rooftop solar, and it’s going to try Stem’s distributed grid energy storage as a solution. On Thursday, utility Hawaiian Electric announced it had picked the Millbrae, Calif.-based startup for a 1-megawatt pilot project on the island of Oahu. It’s a pretty small project, compared to the up to

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The battery is a result of the EiSiBatt research project that aims at developing a safe lithium ion battery technology. The anode of the new battery devised by the Siemens team is not made of graphite but instead of lithium titanate. For the cathode, the researchers replaced the usual lithium metal oxide another material, lithium iron phosphate. In addition, the

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Honda announced some great news about wind turbine efficiency at its transmission plant in Ohio last week, which pretty much got buried under an avalanche of news about the massive new Gigafactory that Tesla Motors has in the works. Though the two projects are very different, they both demonstrate the new normal of distributed, renewable energy projects replacing central fossil

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Does the idea of buying a brand-new Nissan LEAF for only €7,450 ($9,460) sound good? Of course it does, and you can! If you live in the Netherlands, or Rotterdam to be specific, and are a business owner…. Still. That’s a pretty amazing price tag — one that’s due to large national and local government incentives. Said incentives, of course,

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