The company LightSail Energy started out a few years ago with a student’s modest idea for a compressed air scooter, and now it has just raised $37.3 million in private funding to bring utility scale, compressed air energy storage to the market. That’s a big leap not only for the … [continued]
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration. Electricity storage technologies that can operate on timescales such as hours or days are often deployed at specific times of day to take advantage of variations in the price of electricity (see chart above, right). Storage operators can buy electricity when prices are lower (overnight … [continued]
Here’s the bulk of a recent University of Minnesota story I was notified of via email at the end of last week — looks like an important new energy storage technology: A University of Minnesota invention could help make storage of solar and wind energy more efficient and economical. … [continued]
Some other top cleantech posts from the past couple weeks or so: Wind Power 1. Vestas published an interesting video on the chemistry of wind turbine blades (above) — interesting. 2. “A consortium led by GICON Grossmann Ingenieur Consult GmbH has developed a floating platform designed to be used for offshore … [continued]
A new report released yesterday by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research shows that Minnesota can meet 100% of its electricity needs with in-state wind and solar power, and (with ample energy efficiency investments) at a comparable cost to its existing electricity supply. The notion that solar and … [continued]
Energy storage is always an issue, whether it’s storing enough power to run an electric car or storing enough solar-generated electricity to supply power while the sun isn’t shining. KEMA, a global energy consultancy company headquartered in the Netherlands, recently released a report analyzing U.S. energy storage over the … [continued]
While technology has helped change the economics of electricity production (in favor of renewables and distributed generation), this new dynamic can as easily be controlled by the incumbent utilities as the old paradigm of centralized fossil fuel power generation.
In Electricity Energy Storage Technology Options – A White Paper Primer on Applications, Costs and Benefits – a white paper by EPRI; the Electric Power Research Institute finds that if regions in need of energy storage can defer transmission investments by investing in energy storage instead, then it can pay to invest in storage instead, depending on the costs.
If you’ve ever blown up a balloon and let it go flying across the room, you’ve got the basic idea behind a new technology for storing energy from wind power: use compressed air. ARPA-E, the federal agency charged with providing seed money for transformative energy technology, is so impressed with … [continued]
Yesterday Attorney General Jerry Brown announced a completely new kind of renewable energy legislation, introduced by State Assembly member Nancy Skinner (D) – designed to add more renewable energy storage to the grid. [social_buttons] You’ve heard of Renewable Energy Standards. These are (state level only, so far) rules that require … [continued]
