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How Should We Pay For Renewables?

Stimulus or market? Arguments can be made for both.

What’s more beneficial to our country and environment — a rapid deployment of renewable technologies through specially crafted policies and incentives or letting markets determine which technologies win?

See the German solar miracle, which has made the cloudy country the largest solar consumer in the world and a major manufacturer of panels. California has become a hotbed of solar activity because of federal and state tax credits that cover… Read More ›

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Is Honda Really a Buy?

How come the Japanese giant isn’t out front with electric cars?

Given all of the drama in the auto business in recent years, it's been easy to overlook Honda (NYSE: HMC). After all, it hasn't had the epic global growth (or epic recall drama) of Toyota (NYSE: TM), nor a dramatic near-death-and-rebirth story like Ford (NYSE: F).

Instead, Japan's No. 2 automaker has been cruising along, continuing to pay a modest dividend to shareholders despite the global economic crunch, and continuing to keep its loyal… Read More ›

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Solar: Solaria Gets $20 Million More, Canadian Goes Giant, Abengoa Gets Thumbs Up

And JA Solar and SunPower say business is up.

Concentrators for photovoltaic modules may still be a zero-billion-dollar market, but money from investors continues to flow in.

Solaria, which combines a silicon solar cell and a concentrator in a single package, says it raised $20 million more today, bringing its total to $65 million.

Solaria's technology is based on dicing or "singulating" a standard crystalline silicon wafer and mounting these strips on a substrate with a lensing system that… Read More ›

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Coulomb Raises $15M in Third Round of Funding

Coulomb is building the infrastructure for electric vehicles, but it’s still unclear how many electric vehicle charging stations are needed. Wouldn’t you rather charge your car at home?

Charging stations are being erected all over the country.

Coulomb has a $37 million ChargePoint America program that will help put them all over the place. In just two years, the company has shipped 850 stations to cities around the world, including New York City, Orlando, Detroit, Amsterdam, Sydney, and Dublin.

Today, Coulomb Technologies announced it has raised $15 million in Series C funding. The new funds come from previous investors -- Rho… Read More ›

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Sundrop’s Solar Gasification Uses Total Concentration

Sundrop Fuels is a Colorado company that combines concentrated solar power (CSP) technology with biofuels production processes.

While most biomass-to-biofuels systems burn feedstocks as the first step in biofuel production, Sundrop uses concentrated solar energy to gasify the feedstocks into syngas that is then made into advanced biofuels.  According to the company's website, the very high temperatures of CSP create efficiencies in the process:

At the center of the Sundrop Fuels process is our proprietary Surroundsun^TM technology, a solar-thermal biomass gasifier that… Read More ›

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Smart Grid, Smart TV Part of a Continuum, Says Google Japan

The search giant doesn’t want to monopolize your data, according to chairman emeritus Norio Murakami.

The more things that are connected to the Internet, the more valuable Google's services could become.

That's what Norio Murakami, the chairman emeritus of Google Japan, asserted in an interview with Nikkei Electronics. The Internet of Things -- the futuristic web that will let refrigerators, TVs, demand response services and air conditioners talk and negotiate amongst themselves -- will create more opportunities for search services.

Although… Read More ›

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Power From the Atmosphere: Is it Real?

Not yet, but atmospheric wind companies say the prototypes work and are getting larger. Hear more at Stanford later this month.

It could slash the cost of wind power and greatly expand the size of the global footprint for wind.  

And, no, airborne wind power advocates add, they aren't crazy.

Airborne wind power -- a concept based on devices that can harvest power from the upper layers of the atmosphere or even the jet stream-- remains largely in the conceptual stage, but progress is occurring. Companies like Makani Wind Power, Magenn Power and Joby Energy have built… Read More ›

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Echelon Unveils its Magic Box for the Smart Grid

Everyone wants to put servers and switches on power poles. Here’s Echelon’s version.

Forget the smart meter. The new race in smart grid is to make the brain the field.

Echelon today announced the Echelon Control System (ECoS), a software platform, along with Edge Control Node 7000 series, hardware boxes animated by the control system. Together, the software and hardware allow utilities to monitor things like voltage fluctuation and outages and, ideally, to use this information to control the spread of outages or shave peak… Read More ›

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Top Ten Solar Venture Capital Investors

Solar VC investors sorted by style points and vision, not IRR.

The braintrust at Greentech Media suggested I write an article on the top ten solar venture capital firms. Even despite what Sanjay said in this article.

As I started writing, I realized that the normal metrics for grading VCs -- IRR, quality of exits, etc. -- don't apply to today's solar investors, at least not in any meaningful way.  The fact is that very little, if any, of the billions of VC dollars put into solar in the last few years have… Read More ›

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New Energy Technologies: Can OTC-Traded Firms Win in Energy?

Trying to do a lot with penny-stock resources

I'm not sure what to make of the company I just interviewed -- New Energy Technologies (OTC BB: NENE.OB).  And more broadly, I wonder what thinly traded, small-market-cap, over-the-counter traded stocks can add to the advancement of renewable energy markets.

For context, Investopedia explains Over-The-Counter (OTC) stocks:

In general, the reason for which a stock is traded over-the-counter is usually because the company is small, making it unable… Read More ›

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To Solve the Renewable Puzzle, Look West—to South Korea

South Korea’s broadband strategy in the late ‘90s could serve as the template for a U.S. supergrid.

Colorado's San Luis Valley is a solar energy developer's dream. Thanks to its altitude (roughly 7,000 feet above sea level) and the cloud-blocking capabilities of the surrounding snow-capped mountains, it gets more photons from the sun than just about anywhere else in the world. According to the Colorado Governor's Energy Office, a photovoltaic array covering just one-third of the valley could produce enough electricity for the entire country's… Read More ›

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Black Silicon Comes Back—and Cheaper Than Ever

The hyper-futuristic material for solar panels isn’t ready for commercial release yet, but NREL may have found a way to cut some of the costs.

Black silicon has been around for so long, it's hard to remember it hasn't come out yet.

'Black silicon' refers to silicon wafers rutted with billions of tiny, nano-scale pits. The irregular surface effectively traps a larger percentage of photons by preventing light from being reflected, similar to how holes in ceiling tiles absorb sound. In theory, this gives solar cells made from black silicon a higher potential for efficiency because more of… Read More ›

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Meter Data Management Market Heats Up

Colorado Springs Utilities inks deal with Ecologic Analytics as part of home energy management plan.

Last week, meter data management player Ecologic Analytics added another major customer to its roster when it announced that it won a deal to manage the data coming from 535,000 gas, electric and water meters for Colorado Springs Utilities . The Ecologic Analytics MDM is already being used by PG&E in one of the largest smart meter rollouts in North America. The latest deal adds Springs Utilities to a client roster that also includes Indiana… Read More ›

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Optimism, Incremental Changes Reign at PV Sec

The mood in solar is certainly better than last year, according to conference attendees.

Thank heaven for the little things.

The European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, also known as PV Sec, is underway this week in Valencia, Spain, and some of the early buzz is around the materials and components that can make slight differences in efficiency or cost.

"There is a lot being spent on incremental efficiency improvements," said Alain Harrus, a partner at Crosslink Capital who is in Spain at the moment.

Honeywell, for instance,… Read More ›

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Smart Grid AMI Networking: Phase II

Cisco, Arch Rock, Itron, Silver Spring Networks, and the next steps for AMI networking.

I was in a meeting discussing the smart grid market with a few partners and associates at Foundation Capital just under a year ago. In no uncertain terms, they laid out their opinion that the door was closed to any new entrants in the smart grid AMI networking space, that Silver Spring had it "sewn up." Granted, it was a bullish and self-serving opinion, given their backing of Silver Spring Networks, the player that everyone seems to be chasing.… Read More ›

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Oerlikon Solar Continues Driving Amorphous Silicon

Evolutionary changes in a-Si production yield big claims in efficiency and cost. 

Oerlikon Solar remains committed to amorphous silicon (a-Si) solar technology and, to that end, is promising improved efficiency trends and improved cost numbers.

Despite the demise of Applied Materials' SunFab a-Si business, Oerlikon clearly believes there's a future for the oft pilloried a-Si photovoltaic technology -- and the firm continues to make aggressive cost and performance claims.

Today, at the Valencia Spain solar show, Oerlikon Solar… Read More ›

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A Nervous System for Renewable Energy Projects

How do you know if your wind turbine is running? Sensors and networking.

When you look at the towering turbines and churning blades of a wind farm, you're missing a critical detail: the electronics inside.

National Instruments (NI) calls its real-time sensor networks, wireless sensor networks, and reconfigurable hardware "engineering tools." NI's guiding principle is the engineering maxim that if it can be measured, it can be made more efficient. The company's tools are just beginning to find acceptance as renewable… Read More ›

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SoloPower’s Flexible CIGS PV Panels Move Closer to Market

SoloPower gets UL approval for flexible CIGS.  But IEC approval is the more important certification.

There's a solar show in Valencia, Spain (the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference) this week and solar companies have to announce something.  SoloPower, a San Jose, California based CIGS photovoltaics vendor announced "a watershed breakthrough" in a breathless press release for their flexible CIGS PV panels in what they called "a first-ever achievement for the PV solar industry" that makes the firm the "first ever to receive UL… Read More ›

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Japanese Firm Equips Public Bus With PV Panels

Ryobi Group, which runs a bus transportation business in Japan, developed a future-oriented bus to commemorate the 100th anniversary of its foundation.

The bus, which the company calls "Solarve," is equipped with photovoltaic (PV) panels, LED lamps, and a system for viewing the surroundings of the vehicle.

"This is the world's first public bus that is equipped with solar panels," said a representative of Sanyo Electric Co Ltd, which supplied the PV panels.

The PV panels are mounted on the roof of the bus. They are made with Sanyo's crystalline silicon PV cells (HIT: heterojunction with… Read More ›