Tag: battery industry

If you know what makes a stealth bomber stealthy, you might already have an understanding of what a stealth wind turbine is just from reading the article title. Similar to the very low radar profile of a stealth bomber, stealth wind turbines don’t reflect radar signals as much as the typical kind do. Some wind farms have been rejected for

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Stem, a behind-the-meter energy storage startup, just closed on a $100 million fund to finance distributed energy storage at commercial and industrial customers. The fund is provided by B Asset Manager, a New York City-based investment adviser in the insurance industry, according to a release. Stem has also received venture funding from Angeleno Group, Iberdrola and GE Ventures. As the

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Last year, SolarCity, the leading residential distributed energy provider and financier in the U.S., acquired Zep Solar, a solar-module mounting startup, for $158 million in SolarCity stock. Zep’s system makes the solar panel itself part of the racking hardware via a specially grooved frame, eliminating rails and using the module frame as the structural and mounting element. That special frame

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National Drive Electric Week is Sept. 15 through Sept. 21, a nationwide event with the purpose “to heighten awareness of today’s widespread availability of plug-in vehicles and highlight the benefits of all-electric and plug-in hybrid-electric cars, trucks, motorcycles, and more,” according to DriveElectricWeek.org. The weeklong recognition of electric cars has a brief history, starting in 2011 as National Plug In

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Rarely will police activity look like the chase scene from Bullitt. That’s a good thing for precincts trying to make budget for the higher ups and, ultimately, the taxpayers who foot the bill. So what’s a police department to do with those Crown Vic gas guzzlers and their slightly more efficient replacements? Turn to electric vehicles, many in law enforcement

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SunPower Corp. has manufactured its one-billionth high-efficiency solar cell. This milestone was achieved 11 years after the company started manufacturing its A-300 solar cell in its first fabrication facility. Today, SunPower operates two fabs that will generate approximately 1,300 megaWatts of solar cells by the end of this year. To meet growing demand for SunPower solar systems, the company is

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A comprehensive look at how tiny particles in a lithium-ion battery electrode behave shows that rapid-charging the battery and using it to do high-power, rapidly draining work may not be as damaging as researchers had thought – and that the benefits of slow draining and charging may have been overestimated. The results challenge the prevailing view that “supercharging” batteries is

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Toshiba’s Rapid Recharge SCiB battery has been selected by Proterra to power their next generation of fully electric buses. Using a lithium-titanate chemistry, the SCiB batteries are resistant to thermal-runaway and yet can be rapidly recharged and discharged with minimal capacity loss over 10,000 cycles. The promise of fully electric buses is one of zero emissions, renewable energy, and a

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There’s no getting around the fact that clean energy took a popularity hit, particularly among Republicans, with the fossil lobby’s 2011 subterfuge: the phony Solyndra non-”scandal.” We can now say with confidence that there was never any “there there” (“hat tip” to normally pro-fossil fuels Joe Nocera, who wrote that the entire “scandal” was “phony”). But the constant drumbeat by

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Countries once considered as part of the Third World are making plans to substantially increase renewable energy capacity, while some in the developed world are contemplating getting rid of them altogether. The Central Asian country of Kazakhstan has set a target that will see renewable energy projects contributing 3% to the country’s energy mix by 2020. This would require the

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