Tag: industry news

AES Corp. (AES) said it’s planning to build 100 megawatts of battery capacity in Northern Ireland to store excess wind power and release it when generation is low. The battery array would be built at the company’s Kilroot power station, northeast of Belfast, AES said in a statement yesterday. The Arlington, Virginia-based company applied to the System Operator of Northern

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Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) appealed New Jersey’s ban on direct auto sales, arguing that the decision thwarts the carmaker’s mission of providing sustainable transportation and unfairly favors entrenched franchise dealers. The action comes as Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer and co-founder, fights with car dealer groups across the U.S. to let the Palo Alto, California-based maker of electric Model

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The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s final version of a draft energy report reinforces atomic power’s role in the country’s future and falls short of advocating specific goals for renewable energy use. The policy describes nuclear as “an important base-load energy source,” according to a 78-page draft obtained by Bloomberg News. The plan, the first update to the nation’s

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Investigators reduced the search area in the Indian Ocean for a missing Malaysian Air jet by almost two-thirds, a day after announcing ships detected pings similar to those from a plane’s black boxes. The Ocean Shield, which detected a pair of signals this weekend as it pulled a U.S. Navy towed pinger locator through water, heard no further pings, said

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Toshiba Corp. (6502) supplied batteries to a Kyushu Electric Power Co. (9508) project on two remote islands south of the Japanese mainland that seeks to demonstrate technology to store energy generated from wind and solar power plants. Two- and three-megawatt systems using lithium-ion batteries were delivered to Tanegashima and Amami Oshima, the Tokyo-based electronics maker said today in a statement.

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Panasonic Corp. (6752) plans to boost sales by about 34 percent during the next five years as it seeks to expand in areas targeted for growth, including its lithium-ion battery business. The consumer electronics company targets 10 trillion yen ($98 billion) in revenue in the 2018 fiscal year, President Kazuhiro Tsuga told reporters in Tokyo yesterday. That compares with the

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Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), the electric vehicle maker co-founded by Elon Musk, plans to use only raw materials sourced in North America for its proposed $5 billion U.S. battery factory. The Silicon Valley company won’t look overseas for the graphite, cobalt and other materials needed for its so-called Gigafactory, said Liz Jarvis-Shean, a spokeswoman. “It will enable us to establish

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AES Corp. (AES), the biggest operator of electricity-storage systems, is now seeking to sell batteries big enough to substitute for power plants. The Advancion systems will cost from $10 million to $500 million, depending on size, and will be offered to utilities and renewable-energy developers in arrays as large as 500 megawatts, said Chris Shelton, president of Arlington, Virginia-based AES’s

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A 40-foot trailer loaded with 25 tons of liquid metals may be the solution to the renewable-energy industry’s biggest challenge: making sure electricity is available whenever it’s needed. A Boston-area startup founded by MIT researchers is working to turn this new concept into a commercially viable product, liquid-metal batteries that will store power for less than $500 a kilowatt-hour. That’s

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Researchers from ETH Zurich and Empa have succeeded for the first time to produce uniform antimony nanocrystals. Tested as components of laboratory batteries, these are able to store a large number of both lithium and sodium ions. These nanomaterials operate with high rate and may eventually be used as alternative anode materials in future high-energy-density batteries. The hunt is on

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