On December 17, Heliene, Inc. (Heliene), held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new solar panel manufacturing plant in Sault Saint Marie (the Sault) that will provide much-needed domestic content for projects that take part in Ontario’s feed-in tariff (FIT) program. The company expects the facility to produce 20 MW worth of panels per year and create fifty-seven alternative energy
San Jose-based SunPower has become one of the first solar power companies to submit a response to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an independent not-for-profit organization that compiles and keeps the world’s largest database of primary corporate climate change information.
The company said that in 2009 its global
In the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon, BP’s stocks have rallied, Halliburton has been named to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and many people are wondering if the world has slipped into a self-induced amnesia.
But not Mark Mills, founding partner of Digital Power Capital, a private equity firm that invests in energy-oriented technologies. To Mills, a
An activist caravan to bring one of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels back to the White House symbolizes not only the time the U.S. has lost in developing new energy technologies – but also the urgent need for taking action on climate.
As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C.,
Farmers and solar energy businesses are relieved after the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) announced on August 13 that recent changes to the pricing scheme for small-scale, ground-mounted solar panel installations under Ontario’s micro feed-in tariff (microFIT) will not be applied retroactively.
Late last month, Toronto-based Atlantic Wind and Solar Inc. announced an encouraging step forward in the transition to a greener economy. The firm is planning to launch a brand new financing program designed to help organizations develop large-scale wind and solar energy projects. The Renewable Energy Finance program will focus on helping companies complete
US private equity firm Blackstone has decided to invest $300 million in one of the leading solar PV companies in India, Moser Baer (Private) Limited.
Moser Baer (NSE: MOSERBAER) has a diversified portfolio ranging from manufacturing of computer peripherals to fabrications of solar panels. While their
There is a new entrant to the realm of solar panel accessories that are said to increase panel performance while decreasing costs. Joining solar trackers and microinverters is a new polymer film called FUSION by Genie Lens Technologies. The film, embossed with microstructures that bend sunlight, may be installed like a sticker on panels already in use, improving by up to 10 percent the
By now, you’ve probably had your fill of 2010 prediction lists about cleantech and renewable energy, but no such list was worth its bytes if it didn’t mention energy storage. The absence of scalable energy storage solutions is the Achilles’ heel of renewable energy generated from intermittent sources, such as sun and wind. But when it said late last month that it hopes to start selling a lithium-ion storage cell for home use around fiscal 2011, electronics giant Panasonic signaled that it could be filling that energy storage void.
Details about the battery are sketchy, at best. Panasonic’s president Fumio Otsubo told the Japanese newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun about the planned product but didn’t mention how large the energy storage system would be, or how much it would cost. He did say the device would be able to store a week’s worth of power for a single home—which sounds impressive but is a poor metric, since the amount of energy a single family home consumes in one week can vary drastically from block to block and from city to city. Still, storing a week’s worth of energy for even a small home with relatively low energy needs would be a major accomplishment.
It’s cleaning up space junk, and is giving us lab-on-chip biofilters for detecting contamination. Now nanotechnology has produced a coating for windows or solar panels that repels grime and dirt. Expanded battery storage capacities for the next electric car could be within reach too.
New Tel Aviv University research, just published in Nature Nanotechnology, details a breakthrough in assembling peptides at the nano-scale level that could make these futuristic visions come true in just a few years.
Operating in the range of 100 nanometers (roughly one-billionth of a meter) and even smaller, graduate student Lihi Adler-Abramovich and a team working under Prof. Ehud Gazit in TAU’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology have found a novel way to control the atoms and molecules of peptides so that they “grow” to resemble small forests of grass.
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