See that above? That’s the world’s largest battery energy storage station, or so says the State Grid Corporation of China and BYD. The two entities have just wrapped up construction on the Zhangbei-based project, which marries 40 Mega-Watts of renewable energy generation (both wind and solar), 36 Mega-Watt-Hours (MWh) of energy storage and a smart power transmission system. The goal? To provide a “stable solution for transferring vast amounts of renewable electricity safely to the grid on an unprecedented scale.” As it stands, BYD products 1GW of solar panels annually, and with China’s population still rising, it’s solutions like these that’ll help it grow while keeping efficiencies high. Soaking up rays for solar energy is all fine and well, but having a facility to capture and store it is where the equation really comes together; something tells us a few other nations will be scrambling to snatch the record in short order.

Continue reading China trumpets completion of ‘world’s largest battery energy storage station’

China trumpets completion of ‘world’s largest battery energy storage station’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yep, it’s that time of year where we look back at the trends of the year and then look forward to what we think the next year has in store. We know these lists have become a bit cliche by now, but they really do enable us to reflect on the big picture.

So, here we go. The top 10 trends in greentech in 2011:

1). Solar prices plummet: One of the most overwhelming market drivers of 2011 was the massive price drop of solar modules. Researchers have found that the price of solar dropped by 40 percent in 2011. Part of that had to do with Chinese solar manufacturers flooding the market with low cost solar, creating an oversupply and benefiting from low cost loans from the Chinese government.

The result of these rock bottom prices has produced several things: 1). solar module makers are selling solar for below prices they can afford and that has led to bankruptcies for many solar companies; 2). super low cost solar will just help the proliferation of solar panels for consumers as it has become even more economical; 3). solar panels are now substantially cheaper than solar thermal in many cases and some solar developers that previously were focused on solar thermal have decided to use solar panels instead.

2). India set to become cleantech power house: When you think of developing countries and cleantech, you think of China. But India is creating a major market through its solar initiatives, smart grid plans and water infrastructure buildout. A large part of the 1.2 billion population is moving into the middle class and that means they will want more energy, more clean water and more quality food. It’s one of the few markets where cleantech will be able to grow without major subsidies.

3). Biofuel companies push for IPOs., aftermath varies: The bulk of the IPOs from greentech companies in the U.S., came from biofuel firms with little revenues, no profits, and often times no commercial product. Amyris hit the public markets at the end of 2010, Gevo went public in February, Solazyme in March, and KiOR in June. Companies that have filed but haven’t actually gone public include Coskata (filed in December), Mascoma (filed in September) and Fulcrum BioEnergy (in September). Most of these stocks have faltered in recent months — will the ones waiting in the wings have a good response if they go public in 2012?

4). Batteries still suck: Batteries are still the pain point for electric cars and power for computing technology. While information technology is still moving at a lighting pace, thanks to Moore’s law, battery tech hasn’t progressed any close to IT. That doesn’t mean startups and researchers aren’t trying it’s just taking an awfully long time. Will 2012 show any surprising improvement?

5). Solar CIGS players held on: Despite the high profile bankruptcy of Solyndra and the difficult economics of the solar market, many of the thin film solar companies using the material CIGS are still holding on for dear life. HelioVolt and Stion found backers in Korea, Nanosolar is still around, and Miasole has changed its management team but is still pushing forward. However, we’d predict that some of these players will start to struggle even more in 2012.

6). Slow going for electric vehicles: GM’s Volt didn’t hit its sales goals for 2011 of 10,000 cars sold, particularly due to production issues. Nissan’s LEAF sold around 20,000 globally in 2011. And these were the largest EV sellers in 2011. Even worse, some electric car companies struggled and bowed out of the difficult market including Think and Aptera.

We’ll see if GM and Nissan can get their numbers up significantly in 2012, while startups Fisker and Coda have a lot to prove next year. Meanwhile Tesla will be launching its Model S sedan, so all eyes will be on Tesla as it continues to pioneer the independent EV market.

7). Waiting for IPOs: Despite a couple of biofuel IPOs, the IPO market for most of greentech remained shut throughout 2011. Companies that had been planning for months, if not years, to go public in 2011 were forced to find other options. Smart grid company Silver Spring Networks raised private financing even though it filed an S1 earlier this year, and eMeter opted for an acquisition to Siemens, instead of a long contemplated IPO.

8). Year of large solar power developers: While 2011 will be remembered as a troubling year for solar manufacturers, it also is a year when major U.S. power companies took a plunge into investing and owning a lot more solar power plants. Cheap solar panels mean solar developers are even more ready to buy them up and install them in sunny areas of the U.S. and a variety of state mandates are requiring more solar farms for utilities.

9). The politicization of clean energy and green jobs: Unfortunately Solyndra was the biggest — and the longest running by far — news story in greentech in 2011. That’s because the bankruptcy of the company and the lost DOE loan turned into a political talking point for house republicans. Expect more Solyndra sprinklings all the way up until the election in 2012.

10). The cleanweb is here: In early 2011, when cleantech exits were scarce and funding had dropped, many investors and startups were turning to the cleanweb, or essentially using mobile and web to manage resource constraint, from energy to water to food. These technologies, investors are hoping, will offer better returns similar to Internet companies. They are also much more capital efficient than large scale clean energy projects.

Image courtesy of Rob Boudon.

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Paring solar with data centers may not be a novel idea, but you’ll have a hard time finding companies that rely solely on solar electricity to power their servers. That’s because many of those servers need a reliable power source like the brain needs a steady supply of blood — solar energy is variable (it flows only when the sun shines).

But what if the use of solar power could help data center owners save energy, reduce the cost of cooling data center equipment and guarantee a steady power supply? That’s the idea that IBM is exploring as it anticipates a greater use of servers that run on direct current (DC) and can respond to queries from customers in developing countries where the grid isn’t dependable, said Roger Schmidt, an IBM fellow and its chief engineer for data center energy efficiency.

Using its research lab in Bangalore, India, as a test site, IBM is developing equipment that will make it feasible to use solar power to help eliminate power conversion steps that lead to power losses, which become heat and requires the use of cooling equipment. Giant data farm operators such as Yahoo, Facebook and Google are always looking for lower-cost and efficient way to cool their data centers.

Using solar to directly power data centers is rare, Schmidt said (he said he doesn’t know of any data centers currently doing that). That’s partly because solar production can fluctuate, and a data center needs a steady, uninterrupted supply of power. Marrying the two will require equipment and wiring to adjust the voltage and make sure power from the grid will flow in when not enough solar energy is produced.

The emergence of DC servers is making solar energy, which flows out of solar panels also in DC, a more attractive source of power supply. In a typical rooftop solar system, the solar panels come with an inverter that converts the DC to alternating current (AC) so that it can join the electric grid. In fact, the power that runs from a power plant to your home is all AC, and along the way the AC power goes through equipment to lower its voltage because many of the appliances and gadgets we use run on much lower voltages.

More efficient conversions

Power reaches data center buildings today in AC, and then it goes through some AC-to-DC-to-AC conversion steps before reaching the servers. Although the servers take in AC (they are AC servers), it actually converts that internally into DC. Each conversion step leads to a bit of power losses, and cumulatively the losses add up to a significant amount of power and they are dissipated as heat. Many companies are working on reducing that power loss, including startups such as Transphorm, which counts Google as an investor.

Some companies in the data center world – from equipment makers to data center operators – have been advocating the use of DC servers and other equipment as a way to eliminate a conversion step or two, which not only reduces power losses but also the amount of money and equipment needed to keep the data center cool. Server manufactures, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and of course IBM, have been rolling out DC servers.

Adding solar complements this effort to create a DC microgrid by eliminating an AC-to-DC conversion step. Solar also can be seen as a more reliable source of power for data centers in place like India, where the grid can go down three to four hours a day, Schmidt said. The Indian government has also set a goal of subsidizing the installations of 20 GW of grid-tied solar power and 2 GW of off-grid solar by 2022.

IBM has built a 50 KW solar array on top of its software lab in Bangalore to run its servers. The plan is to add a DC server, an ultra-fast IBM Power 775, and a “smart box” that will be able to take the DC power from solar panels and tweak the voltage to make it suitable to run the server, Schmidt said. The box also will monitor the power flow and make the switch to accept power from the grid when the solar panels aren’t producing much energy or not at all.

“If the move is toward DC power in a data center, the solar array provides a huge opportunity because it provides DC already,” he said.  “We want take advantage and hook directly up to our DC power server in that data center and eliminate some conversion losses.”

IBM, which sells not just servers and software but also services for operating data centers, wants to sell that box and the engineering know-how of wiring a solar array to power a data center, Schmidt said. He declined to say how long the project will take, except that it should be “less than a couple of years.”

Photo courtesy of IBM

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When PayPal went public in 2002, then executive vice president Reid Hoffman, spent some of his winnings on investing in an early round of Silicon Valley’s first solar thin film startup Nanosolar, according to an article in the New York Times. Hoffman, of course, later on founded LinkedIn, which went public in May of his year, but Hoffman hasn’t seemed to continue that sort of interest in funding early stage clean power and cleantech companies.

Those early shares of Nanosolar that Hoffman bought are likely worth a decent amount at this point. Other seed investors at the time included Spring Ventures investor Sunil Paul, Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and Benchmark Capital.

Nanosolar was reportedly worth billion at one point in 2008 when it last raised money, but I’m not sure how the company is valued now. As the demand for solar panels, particularly one’s not made of silicon, has dropped dramatically this year, and thin film solar companies have struggled, I wouldn’t be surprised if that valuation has dropped, too.

Back when Hoffman made that investment in Nanosolar, then colleague at PayPal Peter Thiel bought a Ferrari with his earnings, says the New York Times. Thiel has gotten a lot of attention recently for calling cleantech investing “a disaster.” 

So who was right back then: Thiel or Hoffman? Will Nanosolar struggle like its peer Solyndra has, going bankrupt partly due to cheap Chinese solar panels, and making Hoffman’s seed investment worthless? (And idealistic compared to Thiel’s sports car splurge). Or will the company be one of the solar leaders and add more cash to Reid’s coffers if it gets bought for a high amount of goes public?

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For lazy Sunday reading, I poured over Forbes fascinating article about Sean Parker, the ultimate of the web entrepreneur disruptors turned investor, of Napster, Facebook, Spotify and The Social Network fame (he was played by Justin Timberlake in the Aaron Sorkin movie). Last time I remember reading about Parker was late last year, when he told the New York Times: “It is not clear anyone will make money on their green-tech investing. It looks like it was a bubble.” Parker’s Forbes profile and his statement on greentech last year got me thinking: does the energy industry need more of these disruption-focused web-style innovators like Parker?

While the world needs more Parkers in general (for innovation and interestingness sake), I don’t think the energy industry will be disrupted as easily by these types of folks. Energy has fundamentally different parameters than web, and also often times needs to be built on top of the infrastructure already in place. The Forbes article points out how Parker excels at generating and propagating ideas that tend to dissolve the existing industries from which they emerge (think Napster and the music industry).

That’s one reason why Parker has so far been right in his statement last year that it’s not clear Silicon Valley will make any money from greentech investing. Here’s some of the reasons it’ll be a lot harder to disrupt energy:

Energy: Commoditization & science

Energy is a commodity: The same electricity emanates from your and your neighbor’s light bulbs regardless of if you are buying electricity from your utility, and your neighbor has shiny new solar panels on his roof. Electrons are electrons. Clean power will have to be commoditized to compete with fossil fuels, and solar panels themselves are quickly becoming a commodity product. You can see the coming solar commoditzation via the fall of Solyndra, which tried to innovate on solar panel design and manufacturing, as well as through the rapidly dropping price of solar cells in recent months.

Likewise liquid fuels are also mostly a commodity, too. Vehicle owners are looking for the cheapest price possible. Biofuels have so far failed to compete with the oil industry because of sheer cost and scale alone.

It’s very difficult to disrupt an industry that’s fundamentally built around a race to the bottom, and green companies are selling replacement products that are more expensive than their fossil fuel equivalents. Despite the IPOs of recent next-gen biofuel companies, none of these players are yet competing with oil companies in any way.

Green needs the help of the incumbents: In fact, it will be the traditional power companies and oil companies that could actually get the green products commercialized. Biofuel makers need the pipelines and economies of scale of the oil giants to reach low prices, and some have investments and support from BP, Chevron, Exxon, and refiner Valero. Even for clean power this is true — Total bought the majority of SunPower.

It’ll be about evolution, not revolution: Energy is too fundamental to society and economy to face such rapid change that happened for the Internet. Instead it will happen on the pace of decades, not months, and macroeconomic changes will be more disruptive than small startups. A spike in the price of oil and energy prices will do far more to promote green technologies than likely a Valley-backed startup.

Science needed: Major disruptions in cost will likely come from science breakthroughs, whether that’s for clean power, biofuels, or batteries that power electric cars or store energy for the power grid. A significant amount of this science R&D will come out of university labs, and government supported programs like ARPA-E. Not necessarily the stomping ground for web-hacker disruptors like Parker.

Exceptions: Cleanweb, Electric cars:

Yes, there are places were more hacker-style web disruption could be really useful — namely where the web meets energy. Longtime entrepreneur Sunil Paul calls this the CleanWeb — using mobile, social networks and web tools to deal with resource constraint. Because it actually is the web, the same web-rules about disruption and innovation apply. And that’s something Silicon Valley “gets” and can invest in.

Former web entrepreneurs like Match.com founder Gary Kremen (another Parker-style web serial founder) founded Clean Power Finance, which has found some success with its solar software and financing. Companies building analytics around big data and energy, like Opower, also seem to be doing well. Sean Parker actually has his own philanthropy-focused web project called Causes. VCs are increasingly focused on energy efficiency plays.

Another area that could provide more of an entrance for disruption could be electric cars. That’s because electric cars, if they catch on, aren’t necessarily commodity products (though, yes, their batteries are). Car buyers are willing to pay on a scale of prices for cars, depending on a variety of things like brand, style, size, and need. Former Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk has been tackling electric cars with Tesla, while former SAP exec Shai Agassi has been focused on a business around electric car infrastructure, Better Place.

Image courtesy of Magerleagues.

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As one thin-film solar company falls (Solyndra), another one is scaling up. Silicon Valley startup, Stion, on Friday officially opened the doors of its factory in Mississippi, marking a milestone for the company as it seeks to expand production quickly in an increasingly competitive market.

San Jose-based Stion makes solar panels that use copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS) instead of conventional silicon to convert sunlight into electricity. In January this year, the company announced the plan to build the Mississippi factory, which the company expects to eventually reach 500 MW of production capacity and require 0 million in investment. Stion completed a 10 MW pilot line at its headquarters last year.

The factory represents a nice coup for Mississippi lawmakers, who offered Stion a million loan plus tax and job training incentives to build and run the factory. Legislator and Gov. Haley Barbour recently lured another Silicon Valley startup, Calisolar, by offering the solar silicon producer a .25 million package to build a factory there.

Stion plans to expand its production in Mississippi in phases. The first phase is supposed to reach 100 MW of production capacity. The company held a grand opening ceremony for the factory on Friday, but it won’t start producing solar panels until later this year, Stion said. Manufacturers need time to test-run equipment and train employees before rolling out products.

Stion hopes to mass-produce solar panels at much lower costs than its rivals, a goal that is shared by many startups and is increasingly difficult to accomplish. Wholesale prices of solar panels have plummeted in the past three years as manufacturers in the U.S., Asia and Europe built many factories.

Chinese manufacturers, in particular, have expanded production rapidly thanks in part to the huge loans they received from government-run banks. The stiffened competition already has forced three American companies, including CIGS solar panel maker Solyndra, to file for bankruptcy in the last two months.

Stion raised a Series D round of million as of June 2010, including million from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer. Before that, it had raised .6 million in equity from investors including Khosla Ventures, VentureTech Alliance and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

To expand the Mississippi factory to 500 MW, Stion plans to raise at least another round of funding and will consider an initial public offering, the company’s CEO, Chet Farris, told us earlier this year.

Image courtesy of Stion

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