Companies and engineers worldwide are pursuing grid-scale energy storage technology that would allow distributed renewable energy sources to easily and efficiently feed electricity into centralized power grids. Once economically commercialized, such technology would find a gargantuan market. And a US-based company will jump ahead of the competition next year with its molten salt storage technique.… Keep reading →
“You’d think the thrill might wear off this whole renewable energy investing thing after a while. Nope—we’re still as into it as ever.” This week, Google announced an $80 million equity investment in six solar photovoltaic projects being developed by Recurrent Energy in Arizona and California. The deal marks the company’s 14th investment since it started eyeing project-level… Keep reading →
Funding at least 30 cleantech deals and deploying more than $500 million in summer 2013 In case you were unplugged for a while this summer, here are the companies that took in cash from the greentech VC community in the last few months. If we missed any VC funding event since June, let us know… Keep reading →
Energy companies love to brag about being the world’s largest, first or producing the most of something and the bragging is about to begin. The Shams 1 concentrated solar plant located in the UAE’s Western Region is currently the world’s largest, but not for long, as an enormous project in the US western desert is… Keep reading →
Poor performance for cleantech stocks this year may continue in 2013 despite some silver linings during 2012, a leading analyst and a panel of VCs recently warned.
Kevin Genieser, Managing Director and Global Head of Clean Technology Banking at Morgan Stanley, said that cleantech equities had underperformed this year despite a bright start to 2012 with three IPOs in the sector. Keep reading →
An 11th hour withdrawal from a long-anticipated initial public offering could be a potentially damaging blow for a cleantech startup trying to raise additional capital from the public markets.
But BrightSource, the concentrating solar power startup with 9 GW of projects in the pipeline, has not ruled out another attempt at a public launch. Keep reading →
The intermittent nature of solar power has long been its most obvious weakness. What happens when the sun stops shining? People still need power.
One California-based solar company, BrightSource Energy, says it has developed a way to solve the problem. On Monday the company announced that it will be including its SolarPLUS thermal energy storage technology to several of its concentrated solar power (CSP) solar plants. The storage units will allow power from the sun to be stored for the evening when the sun is no longer shining but demand is up. Keep reading →
