Boston-Power is going to Asia to mass-produce its high-performance lithium-ion batteries.

The Westborough, Mass.-based battery maker on Tuesday named Hong Kong-based GP Batteries as a “strategic partner� to expand production of its Sonata rechargeable batteries, which are to be used in select Hewlett Packard notebooks (see HP Adopts Green Batteries for Notebooks, With More to Come).

Under the five-year agreement announced Tuesday, GP Batteries will dedicate a lithium-ion battery factory in Taiwan exclusively to making Sonata batteries. That factory is expected to double its 2008 monthly production this year, Boston-Power announced.

Terms of the deal with GP Batteries, and projected production rates from the Taiwan factory, weren’t disclosed. But Boston-Power did say that HP plans to deliver Sonata batteries to customers in the first quarter of this year.

The news comes on the heels of a $55 million investment Boston Power landed last month, bringing its total take to $125 million since its 2005 founding. Investors included Foundation Asset Management, Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, GGV Capital and Gabriel Venture Partners (see Boston-Power Gets $55M More to Produce Lithium-Ion Batteries).

CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud told Greentech Media last month that Boston-Power was able to produce about 300,000 batteries per month, but wanted to reach “multiple millions per month� production in the near future.

Boston-Power is hoping to land another deal with a notebook vendor this year, and is working with HP on putting its batteries in other portable devices.

Its Sonata batteries can go through 1,000 charging cycles before losing their capacity to hold power, which is about three times more than conventional lithium-ion batteries.

The federal stimulus package will help greentech companies weather the economic downturn, but it also could lead to some undesirable effects.

“It’s critical for the industry to view the stimulus package and all the helping hands as incredibly temporary,� said Michael L. Goguen, a general partner of Sequoia Capital. “We don’t want a company to depend on the government. It’s easy to be deluded into thinking that you are in a sustainable business because you’ve got all those money [from the stimulus package].�

Goguen’s comment, made at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco, is a reminder that government aid comes with potential side effects. The federal and state government had played key roles in promoting the growth of solar and other greentech sectors even before the financial market crumbled. Now that they are making even more money available, will the tech industry become co-dependent?

For H. Jeffrey Leonard, CEO and co-founder of the Global Environment Fund, the need for government dollars also reflects the importance of financing, which dwarfs the importance of technology development during this tough economic climate.

“The structure of the cleantech market is changing dramatically. What really matters is project financing,� Leonard said at the forum.

Investors also can’t expect high return any time soon. Leonard said back in the mid 1990s, limited partners were making a 30 percent return in the stock market, so investing in startups wasn’t so lucrative. Now that the stock market is tanking, the LPs are looking for other opportunities and adjusting their expectations.

“It’s hard to make consistent double-digit returns in a subsidized industry,� Leonard said.

President Barack Obama's energy and climate assistant says the United States needs a unified federal standard for regulating greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks — and automakers, perhaps surprisingly, aren't that upset by the idea. That's the gist of a report from the Washington Post, detailing comments made Sunday by Carol Browner, who is head of a newly-created White House position to coordinate energy, environment and climate change policies across federal agencies. The idea is to form a unified policy that combines Environmental Protection Agency emissions regulations and the Department of Transportation's mileage standards, the Boston Globe reports. Browner laid out the plan at the Western Governors Association meeting in Washington, D.C. Part of the new regime would involve the cap-and-trade legislation that President Obama wants Congress to pass this year, according to the Post, which cited unnamed White House sources. Obama has said he wants a carbon cap-and-trade system to help reach a goal of cutting the nation's greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and the White House intends to release a budget this week that includes projected revenues from auctioning off emissions allowances under such a system, the Post reported. You might think that automakers would be upset at the idea of new federal regulations, but according to the Post, spokespeople from General Motors and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers trade group reacted positively to Browner's remarks, saying they would provide more certainty. Perhaps that's because they would rather see a federal standard in place than state-by-state regulations. California's plan to regulate vehicle greenhouse gas emissions was rejected by the Bush administration in 2007, but the EPA said earlier this month that it would reconsider that decision. That could open the door to an additional 13 states that want to set tail-pipe emissions limits stricter than current national standards (see Obama to Seek to Allow California, Other States, to Impose Emission Standards). Automakers also might be hoping a unified policy will ease President Obama's push to make cars 40 percent more fuel-efficient by 2020, with improvements set to start with 2011 models (see Obama: Cars Need to Improve Gas Mileage by 40%) Or perhaps it's because, with billions of federal bailout dollars in their pockets and their hands out for billions more, companies like GM and Chrysler aren't in a position to second-guess the government's efforts to push them to make their vehicles greener (see U.S. Automakers Get Federal Bailout).

Fool’s gold is an apt symbol for the future of sustainable energy, though not (we hope) in the obvious sense. It’s a case of less being more. There’s a growing recognition that many sustainable energy technologies are not always produced sustainably, particularly when it comes to key materials like platinum, lithium, indium and high-grade crystalline silicon. It comes down to scarcity, toxicity, costly processing or a combination. Researchers are beginning to look for less toxic, earth-abundant materials to generate and store energy. MIT’s Tonio Buonassisi is leading an effort to systematically search for safe, abundant semiconductor compounds for photovoltaics. Efforts like this aim to produce energy systems that have long-lasting supplies of raw materials, have minimal negative impacts on the environment, and lower the cost of producing clean energy. Researchers from UC Berkeley have taken the concept a step further. They’ve produced a study that shows that if our goal is to use photovoltaics to meet a large portion of our electricity needs, some of these abundant compounds are the best way to go based simply on the economics. Here’s where fool’s gold, which has fooled gold hunters for ages with its similar color and sheen, comes in. The Berkeley study looked at 23 compounds for the total potential electricity that can be generated from systems made with the known reserves and cost per watt. They combined the results to identify materials with the greatest long-term potential for generating electricity. The clear winner was pyrite, or fool’s gold. The runner-up was amorphous silicon, already widely used in the photovoltaics industry. The study counters the prevailing assumption that the best way to push photovoltaics into the mainstream is to improve device efficiency without increasing costs. We also need to look at lowering costs without sacrificing too much efficiency. It turns out that less efficient but markedly cheaper materials can be a better route to making solar a dominant source of energy. The study should bring encouragement to the many researchers working to make dye-sensitized, organic and nanostructured solar cells commercially viable. Maybe it’ll also spur a renewed interest in making solar cells from fool’s gold. Eric Smalley is editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.

 

Solar-thermal power supporters often cite energy storage as a benefit the technology brings. But it may not be practical for commercial deployment. At least not now. 

Charles Ricker, senior vice president of marketing and business development at BrightSource Energy, said the company isn’t adding the energy storage component its projects because it doesn’t make financial sense.

“We have the ability to add storage, but we are not doing that in any of the projects we are doing,� said Ricker during a panel at the UC Berkeley Energy Symposium Monday. “The return on investment isn’t there.� The Oakland, Calif.-based companies have deals to supply solar power to PG&E and Southern California Edison. 

Increasing the size of the solar-thermal power plant is a better way to design a profitable project, Ricker said.

Solar-thermal power plants are meant to be large-scale projects that, partly because of their sizes, can cost lower to build and operate than projects using other types of solar technologies. Unlike a power plant using solar panels, a solar-thermal power plant requires a lot more land for the array of mirrors to concentrate the sunlight for generating steam, which is then fed to a generator to produce electricity.

During that process, the heat used for steam generation can be stored in a tank containing materials such as molten salt, which remains a liquid when heated above 430-degree Fahrenheit. The salt can be pumped to generate steam at night to run the generator. This process can keep a solar-thermal power plant operating when the sun isn’t shining, a feature that sets this type of solar power plant design apart from solar panel-based systems (attaching batteries is too expensive).

But adding the storage component doesn’t make financial sense at this time, Ricker said, because the most lucrative way to make money from solar is to supply the power when utilities need it the most. That would be in the early afternoon when it’s hot and the air conditioning is on full blast. Power producers can sell electricity at a premium during peak hours. 

“A lot of companies are talking about solar as a baseload plant,� said Ricker, referring to the idea that a power plant can meet the continuous energy demand of the market it serves. “We don’t see that.�

 

When it comes to using billions of federal stimulus dollars to build out a "smart" electricity distribution grid, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn't want state regulators standing in the way. That's the gist of comment the Nevada Democrat made at a Washington D.C. clean energy meeting Monday, according to Reuters. Reid plans to introduce energy legislation on Thursday to speed the building of transmission infrastructure to bring remote solar-thermal, wind and geothermal power sources to population centers — and the bill would, among other things, seek to give the federal government the authority to build new transmission lines whether or not states like it, he said. While states will have a role to play in where transmission lines go, "there may come a time when the federal government has to step in" to overrule their objections, Reid said at the National Clean Energy Project, an event hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. (The event was a who's-who of energy and political big-wigs, including former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Texas oil billionaire and wind power and natural gas-fueled vehicle evangelist T. Boone Pickens, among others.) Reid's comments came the same day that Senator Jeff Bingaman said he wants to bring a separate energy bill to Congress in the next four to six weeks, one that would also deal with energy efficiency and incorporating renewable power into the nation's electricity system. The New Mexico Democrat is chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which would take up Reid's bill once it is introduced. Whether Bingaman envisions the same federal powers on siting transmission lines as Reid's comments appeared to call for wasn't clear, though Bingaman did say that he wants to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission more authority to modernize the nation's power grid, according to Reuters. Given that the stimulus package signed into law by President Barack Obama last week contains $11 billion to upgrade power transmission and distribution infrastructure — and $4.5 billion in matching grants to be given out to smart grid-related projects — it might not be surprising to see lawmakers and policy chiefs looking to assert more control over state utility regulators as to where transmission lines go.  Energy Secretary Steven Chu said last week that he intends to push for federally funded smart grid efforts to adhere to standard technologies to avoid today's efforts from lapsing into obsolescence in the years to come. (It's likely that the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which received $10 million in the stimulus bill to develop a smart grid interoperabilty framework, will play a role in defining those standards).  The lobbying over grabbing a portion of the stimulus package's smart grid funding is already underway, with utilities like Pepco and Pacific Gas & Electric and companies like IBM and Cisco Systems seeking to position their smart grid projects for a piece of the funding, Bloomberg reported Monday.   

Beacon Power Corp. (NSDQ: BCON) has found a second customer — utility American Electric Power — interested in using its flywheel energy storage systems for so-called frequency regulation services. Beacon will build and operate a 1-megawatt facility for the utility's subsidiary Columbus Southern Power Company to help electricity grid operator PJM regulate the frequency of power over the transmission grid, the companies announced Monday. Like Beacon's existing project with ISO New England, flywheels will be used to keep grid electricity flowing at a constant 60 hertz, or cycles per second. Such frequency regulation takes up as much as 1 percent of all the power produced in North America, a need that's mostly met by fossil fuel-fired power plants responding to signals from grid operators. Thus, using flywheels instead could lead to big reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, according toa December study that Beacon commissioned looking at the potential effects of a 20-megawatt flywheel-based frequency regulation system. Of course, Beacon hasn't built a 20-megawatt frequency regulation system yet. In fact, the Tyngsboro, Mass.-based company recently scaled back its first project with ISO New England from 5 megawatts to 3 megawatts (see Beacon Power Seeks to Raise $4.1M). The company now operates a 1-megawatt pilot project for the grid operator, and is seeking a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a 20-megawatt frequency regulation plant in Stephentown, N.Y. Beacon has had a bit of a rough ride developing its flywheel technology, including a 2006 test malfunction that led to delays (see Beacon Picks Up Speed). In November it reported a third-quarter 2008 loss of $5.6 million on revenues of $4,000, compared to a loss of $2.8 million on revenues of $373,000 in the same quarter of 2007, but did start receiving its first revenues from ISO New England in the same month. The American Electric Power project is set to start construction in mid-2009.