Tag: industry news

Sonnenbatterie GmbH announced the closing of a $9.4 million round of equity financing led by new investors Chrysalix SET and Munich Venture Partners (MVP). The investment round also included follow-on financing by prior investor eCAPITAL. The company has sold close to 4,000 units of its intelligent energy storage system to home owners, farmers and businesses since entering the market in

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Almost everybody will agree that the power grid is undergoing radical rethinking and re-engineering. The old issues of reliability and capacity are still with us, but the new issues of renewable and sustainable generation technologies like solar and wind, the last-mile dilemma and escalating power demands coupled with significantly rising costs to the consumer are fueling the grid-level debates like

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For many more people than realize it, electric cars are already adequate for their needs and better than a gasmobile for their bank account and quality of life. However, it often isn’t good enough for disruptive technology to be better than the incumbents. It has to be much better. The target for electric cars, in order to meet that challenge,

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NTPC Limited, the largest power producer in India, has a pipeline of about 4 GW of solar power capacity, and is looking to significantly expand its solar power plans. The company recently announced that it has signed yet another agreement to set to a large-scale solar power plant in the state of Uttar Pradesh. The installed capacity of the project

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What’s the best car of 2014? According to Top Gear, it’s the BMW i8, a plug-in hybrid electric car with a slick look, great acceleration, and the ability to conveniently charge up at home. This is no small deal. Top Gear is a humungous show with a big worldwide following… and it doesn’t have a history of taking a liking

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Wind power is one of our favorite topics. It’s often the cheapest option for new electricity generation, and it may well be the greenest. It is comparable to solar on greenhouse gas emissions, and uses even less water than solar (0.001 gallons per kWh vs 0.030 gallons per kWh), and hundreds of times less than fossil fuel and nuclear power

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Yet another scientific study has undermined one of the shoutiest claims of the anti-wind movement – that inaudible sound waves (or infrasound) emitted by operating wind turbines causes people living close by to wind farms to get sick, with a litany of symptoms ranging from anxiety, to nausea to migraine, heart disease, sleep deprivation and tinnitus. The study by the

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A new large-scale battery energy storage system was recently unveiled at the Alt Daber solar power plant in Germany by the companies Belectric and Vattenfall, via a ribbon-cutting ceremony. This new energy storage facility — the first large-scale battery storage system to be installed at a large PV farm in Europe — was designed with the intention of putting the

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Utility-scale energy storage is often discussed like it’s the flying car of renewable energy, but unlike the flying car, there is an immediate need and an eventual trillion-dollar global market to go along with it. After speaking with EnerVault’s new CEO, Ron Mosso; Temporal Power’s President and CTO, Jeff Veltri; and Bic Stevens, who is a former venture capitalist and

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IBM researchers in India have discovered that 70% of discarded laptop batteries have enough capacity to power an LED light bulb for 4 hours per day for a year. This is due to the fact that laptops lose their portability long before their batteries are completely dead (or their battery life becomes unacceptably short), so they are discarded early. Conventional

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