Talking About Storage for Renewable Energy
Efficient energy storage is key because we need to be able to access power when the sun is not out and the wind is not blowing. A recent TED talk delved into this subject. The lecture was delivered by...
View ArticleGravity Power’s Technology Has Great Potential
By spending years in the flywheel industry, Jim Fiske learned a great deal about grid-scale energy storage and its true requirements. After determining that flywheels were not the best option, he and...
View ArticleEnzyme Battery a Game Changer?
New research at Concordia University is bringing the world one step closer to cleaner energy. It is now possible to extend the length of time a battery like enzyme can store energy from seconds to...
View ArticleEnergy Storage is Key to Reducing the Cost of Fast Charging
“Fast” DC electric vehicle chargers that can charge up to 80 percent of a battery electric vehicle (BEV) in under 20 minutes are starting to sprout up in the U.S. Consumers are expected to be willing...
View ArticleIsentropic’s Pumped Heat Electricity Storage Runs Hot and Cold
Isentropic is a UK company that has developed an energy storage system called Pumped Heat Electricity Storage (PHES). Isentropic owns several international and U.S. patents and applications. U.S....
View ArticleMexico Invests Big in Solar Power
Conermex, one of the largest solar and wind power companies in Mexico, predicts that Mexico will double their capacity of solar within 2012, from 6 to 12 MW. Mexico’s National Solar Energy Association...
View ArticleCleantech Funding Springs Back
It’s easy to become discouraged about cleantech when headlines focus on one company after another that fails to make it work. Frequently the issue is not technology, but rather management, the supply...
View ArticleNew Energy Symposium’s Big Winners Are Small and Ultra-thin
In a previous post, I wrote about the New Energy Symposium held last month in New York City. The first day of the event featured a startup quick pitch competition, and the three winners of the...
View ArticleArgonne National Laboratory’s Director Talks About Alternative Energy
Eric Isaacs, director of Argonne National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research center in the American midwest, talks about alternative energy solutions. He emphasizes the research on how to improve...
View ArticleEnergy Policy – Hitting the Broad Side of the Barn
I’ve been thinking about my up-coming meeting with Dr. Raj Pachauri, who, among other things, serves as the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Pondering this in advance...
View ArticleBritish Company Presents Liquid Air As Energy Storage Solution
Storing energy produced during off-peak times is one of the challenges the renewable energy industry faces and which will be exacerbated as more intermittent forms of electricity generation enter the...
View ArticleWhat’s Old is New Again – Revisiting Energy Storage
The electrical grid is a complex network connecting thousands of power sources with millions of consumers all across the U.S. While producing enough power to supply the energy needs of a nation is an...
View Article‘Energy Democracy’ Becomes More Real
Will new technologies democratize energy much the way the Internet did information? Industry movement seems to point in that direction with the rise of the smart grid, time-of-day pricing, distributed...
View ArticleStorage in the Mist: LightSail’s Patented CAES Tech
LightSail Energy (LightSail) is a Berkeley, California, company that has developed compressed air energy storage technology which may be used for grid-scale storage. The company’s central innovation is...
View ArticleGame Changer? Integrated EV/Distributed Energy Proposal
This proposal involves a simple synergy of government incentives and distributed energy storage applications. But first, I’d like to briefly discuss some of the issues that this solution addresses. The...
View ArticleWind Power Storage
One of the problems with wind power is that when there is no wind then there is no power. Offshore wind could provide abundant electricity — but as with solar energy, this power supply can be...
View ArticleGE Tests High-Efficiency Wind Turbine in the Netherlands
General Electric recently announced it had started testing the prototype of what it calls the world’s most efficient high-output wind turbine. The new 2.5-120 is being tested in Wieringermeer,...
View ArticlePatent Pending Velkess Flywheel with Gimbal Remains Resonantly Undisturbed
A previous post reported on the acquisition of Beacon Power, formerly the largest flywheel player, after the company went bankrupt. One of the technical hurdles faced by designers of these whirling...
View ArticleMarines Push to Front Lines in Renewable Energy Innovation
Last month, at the U.S. Marine Corps’ Mojave Desert combat training center, some of the military’s best and brightest gathered to test the latest in energy-saving gear. The gadgets sound like ones that...
View ArticleGreen Patent PR
Picking up where we left off, I now have a preliminary draft of the Patent PR study (available here) and a better sense of how the subject matter of clean tech press releases fits into the full...
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