Tag: battery industry

The Wireless Power Consortium today announced significant advances to the resonant extension of the Qi specification to offer even more options to the wireless charging industry. As wireless charging capabilities become ubiquitous in portable consumer electronics, many consumers will wish to charge all of their devices at a single location. Qi chargers have always been capable of multiple-device charging, but

Read more

Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere because today’s technology allows them to hold the most electricity of any other portable power source. But they could hold more if they ditched the ion in the battery’s anode and used only lithium. But lithium alone makes for an unstable battery – until today. Stanford University researchers say they’ve taken a major step toward developing

Read more

California, already the epicenter of distributed solar PV, is also a growth market for behind-the-meter energy storage. Companies like Stem, Green Charge Networks, Coda and the dynamic duo of SolarCity and Tesla are installing big batteries in buildings, mainly on the business case of reducing demand charges for commercial and industrial customers. In the future, those batteries could also help

Read more

Indian private sector companies are warming up to the idea of rural electrification floated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Indian government has promised 100% electrification of the country by 2019, and solar power would play a critical role in the achievement of this target. One of the largest manufacturers of solar power and heating products in India, Tata Power

Read more

The Gigafactory will produce cells, modules and packs for Tesla’s electric vehicles and for the stationary storage market. The Gigafactory is planned to produce 35 GWh of cells and 50 GWh of packs per year by 2020. The agreement will see Tesla prepare, provide and manage the land, buildings and utilities while Panasonic will manufacture and supply cylindrical lithium-ion cells

Read more

Texas Instruments today introduced the next generation of its integrated triple-output synchronous step-down switching regulators with smaller footprint and higher efficiency. The TPS65261 and TPS65262 DC/DC converters feature small QFN packages and up to 96 percent efficiency for such applications as digital television, set-top boxes, home gateway and access point networks, wireless routers, point-of-sale machines, and surveillance equipment. The new

Read more

KEMET has introduced a supercapacitor balancing development kit for its S301 family of 60mm diameter capacitors. Used in series, supercapacitors need electronics to ensure no capacitor goes over the rated voltage as the string approaches full charge – 2.7V in this case, see below. The kit includes two-stage active balancing circuits to ensure that voltage across each supercapacitor is approximately

Read more

KEMET has introduced a supercapacitor balancing development kit for its S301 family of 60mm diameter capacitors. Used in series, supercapacitors need electronics to ensure no capacitor goes over the rated voltage as the string approaches full charge – 2.7V in this case, see below. The kit includes two-stage active balancing circuits to ensure that voltage across each supercapacitor is approximately

Read more

Linear Technology Corporation introduces the LTM8046, a 2.5W output dc-dc µModule® (micromodule) converter with 2kVac galvanic isolation (production tested to 3kVdc) in a 9mm x 15mm x 4.92mm ball grid array (BGA) package. A minimum creepage distance of 4.3mm on the package exterior supports operation at a working voltage up to 400VRMS in a pollution degree 2 environment. The isolated

Read more

One of the world’s biggest solar manufacturers and project developers, the US-based First Solar, has predicted that utility-scale solar costs in Australia will halve over the next five years, becoming cheaper than wind energy by 2020. First Solar says this should mean that large-scale solar takes up an increasing amount of the capacity required to be built under the current

Read more