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1. Earth2Tech Week in Review
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2. Daimler to Electrify Autobahn With "e-mobility Berlin"
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3. Solar Bulls Finally Have a Good Day
Earth2Tech Week in Review
Craig Rubens - Misc
The conventions are over and we have the candidates. Energy will remain an important issue throughout the campaign, so stay caught up on the cleantech news.
Quiet Revolution Breaks Out in Small Urban Wind: Quiet Revolution, a London-based small wind turbine maker, says it has raised £7 million ($12.49 million) to expand production of its first vertical axis wind turbine and to develop its other wind turbines.
Toyota, GM Push Electric Vehicle Test Fleets In Order to Beat the Crowd: The race to debut an electric car from a major automaker is on and Toyota and GM have both bumped their schedules forward a year to 2009.
Detroit Electric Ditches ZAP Joint Venture, Looks to Malaysia for Production: Detroit Electric is a full-on company with reportedly $300 million in backing. ZAP is transitioning to being an electric car distributor, including DE vehicles.
AlwaysOn Green '08 Winners, Synthetic Genomics Best Overall: Craig Venter’s startup topped the list of some of the biggest players in cleantech.
Facebook's Virtual Plants For Real Forests: How are a small army of Facebookers using cutesy cartoons to save trees?
Daimler to Electrify Autobahn With "e-mobility Berlin"
Craig Rubens - @CNN
Berlin’s autobahn will be getting a charge from the “e-mobility Berlin” program Daimler AG officially unveiled today. The automaker is working with German utility RWE to put more than 100 electric cars on the city’s roads by 2010. Under terms of the joint venture, Daimler will provide electric vehicles from its Smart and Mercedes-Benz lines while RWE will install some 500 charging points around the city.
The announcement gives no legs to the rumors circulating about Daimler’s possible partnerships with a slew of cleantech startups. Last week, the Financial Times reported that electric car poster child Tesla Motors would be supplying the batteries for the Smart cars, but the release doesn’t say whose batteries will be in them.
It does, however, say that as early as next year Daimler could put that same lithium-ion technology into serial production for its Mercedes S 400 BlueHYBRID. Reuters had reported that battery giant Continental would be providing the lithium-ion batteries for the luxury hybrid, so perhaps this isn’t the deal Tesla Elon Musk said he was working on with Daimler? Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche told German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung earlier this year he was “in talks” with Agassi’s Better Place, but the Silicon Valley startup tells us that they are not involved with the e-mobility program.
The 500 "electricity filling stations" will be capable of identifying individual cars and owners allowing for charging of the vehicle and the credit card on account as well as “smart charging” or “vehicle-to-grid charging,” all features Agassi promises his charging stations will provide.
So far, the only partners announced in this project are Daimler and RWE, but we’re hopeful some cleantech startups will be helping with Daimler’s electro-auto-revolution.
Image courtesy of Daimler.
Solar Bulls Finally Have a Good Day
Kevin Kelleher - Big Green
The tug of war between bears and bulls in the solar sector continued this week, with the bulls finally gaining some ground on Friday after what had been a bearish week.
Solar stocks closed mixed Friday despite a flash of good news that could dispel a cloud that has hung over the market for months: New Energy Finance (via Clean Edge) reports that the Spanish government plans to boost a previously proposed cap on solar power capacity, quoting press reports and industry insiders.
The ministry of industry, tourism and trade now plans to allow up to 450MW of capacity in 2009 and 2010, according to multiple media reports. That is above the annual 300MW cap suggested by the ministry in a draft proposal to the Spanish energy commission in July.
It’s not the 1 gigawatt level that many had hoped Spain would lift the cap to, but industry pressure on Spain is likely to remain heavy so there’s the possibility of more concessions. SunPower, Suntech and Yingli -often mentioned as the companies with the greatest exposure to the Spanish market - were flat to 4 percent higher on the news.
Friday also saw Hoku Scientific, a maker of polysilicon used in solar modules, rocket up 14 percent to $6.32 after Hoku signed more than $1 billion in contracts to supply polysilicon with three companies, Kinko Energy, Tianwei New Energy and Wealthy Rise International. To manage the deals, Hoko terminated a suply contract with Sanyo Electric and Solar Fabrik AG.
As of Thursday’s close, the PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy ETF had fallen 9 percent over the previous five days. It started off Friday falling even further before the positive news lifted shares again.
Friday continued a pattern in the sector established in the past few weeks of solar stocks drifting down in the absence of news, with investors reacting encouragingly to individual companies with positive news. That may be a fluke, but it may also be a sign that some of the momentum that had driven stocks - upward and downward - over the past year has moderated for now.
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