Tag: news

13
Oct

World War III: It’s here and energy is largely behind it

I’ve been advancing a thesis for several months with friends that World War III is now underway. It’s just that it’s not the war we thought it would be, that is, a confrontation between major powers with the possibility of a nuclear exchange. Instead, we are getting a set of low-intensity, on-again, off-again conflicts involving non-state actors (ISIS, Ukrainian rebels,

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13
Oct

SolarCity’s CTO Peter Rive on Solar Power Plus Energy Storage

SolarCity, the nation’s largest residential solar installer and financier, is coupling Tesla’s battery-based energy storage hardware with its rooftop solar systems.  Peter Rive, the co-founder and CTO of SolarCity, spoke at last week’s Energy Storage North America conference and said that the standard offering from SolarCity could eventually include storage. Rive added that the combination of solar and storage “won’t

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13
Oct

SolarCity CEO: Solar Loans Could Be Half of New Business by End of Next Year

SolarCity is now in the solar loan business as well as the solar leasing business. SolarCity has come to dominate the residential solar finance and installation industry by leveraging the no-money-down, third-party-ownership business model. That model has launched the company to more than 7,000 employees and a market cap of $5.3 billion. But in order to maintain its gaudy 30

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13
Oct

Ukrainian Government Approves Ambitious New Wind Energy Goals

A new National Action Plan state decree for the development of wind energy was recently issued by the Ukrainian government, after being approved by the country’s cabinet. The ambitious new goals called for by the decree include increasing the wind energy capacity of the country up to 2.28 GW by the year 2020 — which represents a 500% increase on

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13
Oct

Tesla’s Model D Is an All-Wheel-Drive, High-Performance Option

“The ‘D’ is already out there,” according to Tesla CEO Musk. Musk isn’t currently on stage in Southern California according to a phone report — but USA Today leaked the story early, and has since pulled the article that detailed some new features and performance specs of an extensively tweaked Model S. Business Insider caught the pulled article, and it

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13
Oct

New Fusion Reactor Concept Could Generate Unlimited Clean Energy Cheaper Than Coal

Fusion energy is often associated with Hollywood fantasy – think Tony Stark’s miniature Arc Reactor in “Iron Man.” But could a virtually unlimited source of zero-emission power actually become a reality? University of Washington engineers have designed a fusion reactor concept that could be cheaper than a coal-fired power plant with a similar electrical output. According to the results of

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13
Oct

Tesla’s Powertrain Group: Driving the Grid-Scale Energy Storage Business

Tesla and Elon Musk have a sparkly announcement coming tonight about driverless cars or all-wheel drive or Musk’s D or Heavy D or something. We will bring you news and analysis from Southern California as soon as that hype breaks. In the meantime, we heard from Tesla’s Director of Powertrain Business Development, Mateo Jaramillo, the keynote speaker at last week’s

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13
Oct

Tesla’s Model D Doesn’t Bring EVs to the Masses, But It Makes a Luxury Vehicle More Luxurious

Tesla Motors’ mission is to bring high-quality electric cars to the masses. But before it releases the much-anticipated Model 3, the company is making sure to leave its mark on the luxury vehicle segment. Last night, CEO Elon Musk unveiled an improved version of the Model S with all-wheel drive and semi-autonomous features. The so-called Model D (for dual) has

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13
Oct

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive Defends His Company’s Long-Term Business Strategy

Today, SolarCity is a much different company than it was before it went public. It has made numerous acquisitions in an attempt to control nearly every part of the value chain, from hardware to customer acquisition, making it a fully vertically integrated solar provider. Most recently, SolarCity acquired the high-efficiency solar manufacturer Silevo and broke ground on a gigawatt-scale production

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13
Oct

Who Leads the US Residential Inverter Market?

The U.S. residential PV market is one of the most consistent solar markets in the world. It has seen quarter-over-quarter growth in fifteen of the last seventeen quarters and is on pace to exceed 1 gigawatt of annual growth for the first time ever. In its Q2 2014 PV Leaderboard, released last week, GTM Research identifies the leading inverter suppliers

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