Tag: battery industry news

A new report by investment analysts from Citigroup says that in the US “the Age of Renewables” has begun. This is confirmed by the most recent public announcements from First Solar and SunPower, two of the largest solar power producers in the US, which both continue to see solar costs coming down rapdily. Analysts from McKinsey have become convinced that

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This week, both Beijing, China’s national capital, and Shanghai its leading financial city, launched pilot emissions trading systems. These pilots will run for two years, until the end of 2015.  They join the city of Shenzhen, on the Hong Kong border, which launched a pilot carbon market in June this year. Guangdong, Hubei, Tianjin and Chongqing are also planning to

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This week, ministers and delegates gather in Bali to try to thrash out a new multilateral trade deal. It seems likely that a deal, if it materializes, has been reduced to addressing trade and customs procedures, rather than the core issues of reducing tariffs and trade barriers. Given this minimalism, it is high time to think about the benefits of

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The Australian national science agency CSIRO has undertaken a study into how the electricity grid in Australia could develop over the coming decades. Giles Parkinson, editor-in-chief of the Australian website RenewEconomy, discusses the four scenarios that SCIRO explores: “leaving-the-grid”, in which one-third of Australian consumers go off-grid; “prosumer” , which is similar but has active utility companies that lead the

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The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) is seen as the most authoritative set of energy scenarios in the world. Yet when we test the forecasts for the growth of renewable energies in the WEO’s main scenario against reality, we find that the WEO consistently comes out too low. Each year from 2006 on the WEO has had to increase

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China’s renewable energy revolution is powering ahead, with the year 2013 marking an important inflection point where the scales tipped more towards electric power generated from water, wind and solar than from fossil fuels and nuclear. This means that its energy security is being enhanced, while carbon emissions from the power sector can be expected to soon start to fall.

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NEC Corporation has announced the commissioning of an Energy Storage System (ESS) for Enel Group subsidiary Enel Distribuzione, Italy’s largest distribution system operator. The ESS can store two megawatt hours (2MWh) of renewable power for release into the grid as required, making it the largest in Italy and one of the largest in Europe*. The ESS has been connected to

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It’s now possible to use solar energy directly to produce some of the most important materials used in solar energy technologies, thanks to a new “breakthrough” from researchers at Oregon State University. The advance means that the costs of some types of solar energy technology could be notably reduced within the near-future, according to the researchers. “This approach should work

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Growing agave and other carefully chosen plants amid photovoltaic panels could allow solar farms not only to collect sunlight for electricity but also to produce crops for biofuels, according to new computer models by Stanford scientists. This co-location approach could prove especially useful in sunny, arid regions such as the southwestern United States where water is scarce, said Sujith Ravi,

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Experiments at the Vienna University of Technology can explain the behaviour of electrons at tiny step edges on titanium oxide surfaces. This is important for solar cell technology and novel, more effective catalysts. It can be found in toothpaste, solar cells, and it is useful for chemical catalysts: titanium dioxide (TiO2) is an extremely versatile material. Alhough it is used

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