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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Tesla Motors’ battery Gigafactory took another step toward construction with the approval of incentives worth up to $1.3 billion by Nevada lawmakers. Governor Brian Sandoval signed the package of four bills into law one week after announcing that the Silver State would host the first of what could be multiple factories that will produce lithium-ion cells on a massive scale.
The costs of manufacturing PV modules, not to be confused with selling price, remained relatively flat for major suppliers between the first and second quarter of the year, according to GTM Research’s September PV Pulse. Yingli Green Energy was the one company to reduce all-in module costs by a significant measure, dropping 6 percent to 49 cents per watt. Only