-
1. Renault-Nissan Charges Ahead With Electric Cars in China
-
2. The U.S. WiMAX Smart Grid: Cisco Backs Grid Net, Michigan Pilot
-
3. Announcing Our Green:Net Launchpad 10 Winners
-
4. V-Vehicle: DOE Decides Against Loan for Stealthy Car Startup
-
5. Politics of Greentech: Nanosolar, Schwarzenegger & Tax Breaks
-
6. Aptera Deposit Claims Drop by the Hundreds
-
7. Daily Sprout
-
8. Google PowerMeter Moving Closer to Smart Appliances
-
9. How Grid Operators Will Survive the Crush of 1M Electric Cars
-
10. Smart Grid Stimulus Funds Finally Trickling In
Renault-Nissan Charges Ahead With Electric Cars in China
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
The project has been more than a year in the making — Wuhan and Renault-Nissan initially signed a memorandum of understanding, “to promote the development of zero-emission mobility in China,” back in April 2009. And in late 2008, the president of Nissan’s China division announced that the automaker aimed to start selling electric cars in the country by 2012.
Although Nissan claims today that its arrangement with Wuhan makes it the “first international auto manufacturer to sign an agreement with a Chinese partner,” the company has had a joint venture with China’s third-largest automaker, Dongfeng Motor Group since 2002.
Still, moving ahead with the Wuhan project and the effort to carve out space for its plug-in cars in the world’s largest car market represents a significant step for Renault-Nissan, which aims to dominate the global market for electric vehicles. At the Guangzhou International Auto Show back in 2008, Nissan China president Yasuaki Hashimoto described China as “one of the most important markets for electric cars.” According to Pike Research, the country will lead the electric car-charging boom, accounting for nearly half of the more than 5 million charge point installations anticipated worldwide by 2015.
The Chinese government has thrown its weight behind electric vehicles, aiming to make it the world's leading producer of EVs and eventually also electric buses. With the project in Wuhan (one of 13 cities that the Chinese government has designated for promotion and pilot testing of electric and hybrid vehicles), Renault-Nissan will be near the front of the line of foreign-based automakers angling to benefit from government incentives such as hefty subsidies for local governments and taxi fleets to purchase electric vehicles.
These electric vehicle initiatives in China come as part of a larger push (in the form of incentives, mandates and other policies) for a greentech buildout in the fast-growing country. According to a report out today from the Pew Environment Group, China now leads the world in financing and investments for renewable energy — beating out the U.S. for the first time in 2009. Pew reports renewable energy investments in China reached $34.6 billion last year (primarily for wind, solar and biomass), compared to the U.S. haul of $18.6 billion.
Photo courtesy of Nissan
The U.S. WiMAX Smart Grid: Cisco Backs Grid Net, Michigan Pilot
Katie Fehrenbacher - Smart Grid
WTF is WiMAX? It's a high-speed wireless technology that service providers are using for the next generation of broadband services. It competes with a high-speed wireless technology being deployed by cell phone companies called Long Term Evolution, or LTE. The benefits of WiMAX for the smart grid are that it can provide a lot of bandwidth for applications like mobile workforce and can potentially be really cheap in the future because it's an open standard and has a growing ecosystem of large manufacturing partners including GE, Motorola (MOT) and Intel.
Four-year-old smart meter software maker Grid Net has been one of the chief proponents of a WiMAX smart grid, and the company tells us it has been working on the Michigan pilot with GE and Consumers Energy for some time. We should probably get ready to see more of these utility deals from Grid Net. Last week Grid Net brought on a high profile hire: Former Austin Energy CIO Andres Carvallo, architect of one of the first smart grids in the U.S. and the man who says he coined the term "the smart grid" itself.
The news that Grid Net has received an equity stake from Cisco, changes the landscape of the smart grid infrastructure players. Cisco moved into the smart grid networking infrastructure market last year and at the time CEO John Chambers told the Wall Street Journal that the company had an unlimited budget for smart grid initiatives.
But it has been unclear exactly what Cisco would be selling for the smart grid — at the GreenBeat conference last year Cisco’s Senior Vice President of the Smart Grid, Laura Ipsen, said that Cisco planned to launch some products directly in the smart grid market early this year. However, Ipsen acknowledged at that point at the end of 2009 Cisco was “zero for zero” in terms of smart grid products and revenue. (Laura Ipsen will be speaking at our Green:Net conference on April 29)
Cisco’s investment in Grid Net gives it another tool in its arsenal as a way into the smart grid network market. It’s interesting that Cisco has seemed to move away from WiMAX in other parts of its business, confirming with reporters earlier this month that it would quit the WiMAX radio access network business and would no longer make WiMAX base stations, but would still sell WiMAX edge products like Wi-Fi and femtocells to WiMax customers.
The company that could be the most affected by the Cisco/Grid Net move is smart grid infrastructure player Silver Spring Networks. As the first to move into the smart grid networking space Silver Spring has been dominating the market, snagging utility deals and planning on an IPO this year. Cisco has been one of Silver Spring’s chief rivals, despite the fact that Cisco has been a sleeping giant in this market.
There’s a long history between Grid Net and Silver Spring. As I explained in this early post on Grid Net, Grid Net’s founder and CEO Ray Bell was a former Cisco networking exec, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Foundation Capital, and became Silver Spring Networks CEO in 2003. Bell hired current Silver Spring CEO Scott Lang, but then left Silver Spring in 2005 over what he told me was "a different strategic opinion for how the smart grid should evolve."
Grid Net has been on a tear as of late and the WiMAX smart grid seem as close to reality as ever. Last week the Federal Communications Commission announced recommendations to Congress, which included that the smart grid should embrace commercial networks and broadband, and be able to provide real-time energy data to consumers.
For more related research on GigaOM Pro check out (subscription required):
New Opportunities in the Smart Grid
The Developer's Guide to Home Energy Management Apps
Announcing Our Green:Net Launchpad 10 Winners
Katie Fehrenbacher - Smart Grid
V-Vehicle: DOE Decides Against Loan for Stealthy Car Startup
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
The rejection has caught V-Vehicle by surprise. Founder and CEO Frank Varasano (pictured), a former exec at Oracle and Booz Allen Hamilton, said in a statement, “We were extremely surprised and disappointed by this decision.” He said a year’s worth of discussions with the DOE had left the company feeling “confident and optimistic that the loan applications would be approved.”
V-Vehicle first requested the two loans back in March 2009, and it expected to win the final yea or nay by March 1 of this year. That was the deadline for V-Vehicle to raise $350 million in equity or loans (or else request an extension) in order to trigger most of a $82 million incentive package on offer from local governments. According to V-Vehicle’s Wednesday release, the company has been in negotiations with the DOE since January 2010, working out the “terms and conditions for the loans and finalizing a conditional commitment letter.”
Given the decision announced today, however, it’s payback time. Time for V-Vehicle to pay back the state of Louisiana, that is. The company says it will reimburse the state some $6.2 million in tax dollars by April 1, as required under its agreement for a $133 million incentive package announced in June of last year to support work on the old GM plant. V-Vehicle began work on that project last July and planned to complete renovations and expansion by the third quarter of 2011 — assuming funding came through.
V-Vehicle’s future is now more uncertain than ever. The company says it, “plans to meet with its board to assess the situation, evaluate funding and strategic alternatives and develop its plan for moving forward.” And while Varasano says in the company’s announcement that, “We still believe that VVC is the ideal applicant” for the ATVM loan program, the scant details that the startup has released about its design suggest investments in other ventures could yield more dramatic fuel and emission savings and prove to be tax dollars better spent.
More V-Vehicle coverage on Earth2Tech:
Kleiner Perkins, T. Boone Back Auto Startup V-Vehicle
V-Vehicle Update: Testing a Prototype, Still Hoping for Federal Funds
Louisiana Greenlights $11.6M in Bonds for V-Vehicle Project
V-Vehicle Misses Deadline, Misses Shot at $87M?
As Green Car Loan Funds Dwindle, What’s Plan B for Startups?
Politics of Greentech: Nanosolar, Schwarzenegger & Tax Breaks
Katie Fehrenbacher - Clean Power
Thin film solar firm Nanosolar says it will be able to save tens of millions of dollars, and expand its business in California and create new jobs, thanks to a new manufacturing tax incentive bill signed into law by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday. Schwarzenegger, along with a slew of politicians and entrepreneurs including Senator Alex Padilla, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, and Nanosolar co-founder Brian Sager, held a press conference at Nanosolar’s headquarters and factory in San Jose. At the event Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 71, which will exempt greentech firms from paying sales taxes when buying manufacturing equipment within in California.
Tax breaks for manufacturing have become a common way for states and the federal government to encourage greentech companies to expand businesses and create jobs locally. The federal government is using the tactic, too. The Obama administration has been offering $2.3 billion in tax credits worth up to 30 percent of the costs for 183 manufacturing greentech projects in 43 states, paid for by the stimulus package.
But states are looking to offer sweet tax break deals to encourage companies to build factories and expand business within their borders — with competition heating up between states. Schwarzenegger emphasized that Nanosolar would remain in the state and expand and create local jobs due to the new tax credit bill. States like California have famously touted rich tax incentive packages to companies like Tesla, luring them away from competitors (Tesla ditched New Mexico for California’s better offer).
While today was a big day for Nanosolar — Sager gave the politicians a tour around the factory — this week has been a rocky one for the thin film solar maker. On Monday Nanosolar announced that its longtime outspoken CEO Martin Roscheisen had left the company, with no mention of the reason for his departure.
Aptera Deposit Claims Drop by the Hundreds
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
It’s not entirely surprising that Aptera might see some would-be early adopters of plug-in vehicles slipping in their commitment to the futuristic looking models promised by a startup on shaky financial footing. In its short history, one of Aptera’s biggest assets — aside from deep-pocketed backers — has been its enthusiastic core of supporters. But the longer Aptera’s model is delayed, the more options those eager EV buyers will have in the marketplace from companies such as Nissan and General Motors, among others.
Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur has explained in recent months that “production and delivery will be tied directly to funding." According to a November 2009 release, development efforts at the startup have "been outpacing the rate of fundraising,” and dwindling cash reserves forced the company to delay production of the 2e until 2010 (Aptera said in the town hall chat that it aims to launch production of the plug-in hybrid 2h 9-12 months after the electric model).
Hitting the new 2010 target, or any future production goals, and delivering vehicles to those 3,100 hopeful customers, will require Aptera to bring in fresh capital, and it's banking on either a federal loan or private investment to come through. The company plans to provide more details about its status and future plans next month. We’ll be tuned in.
Daily Sprout
Katie Fehrenbacher - Misc
Itron + SmartSynch: Smart meter maker Itron has been partnering with smart grid startups in spades, and at the DistribuTECH conference this week, announced it has a deal with SmartSynch, which will enable “utilities to use networks like general packet radio service (GPRS) for transmission of all critical metering and event data from their meters' wide area network.” — Smart Meters.
Oncor Week 2 Smart Meter Testing: Here’s the results from the second week of utility Oncor’s testing of its smart meters. Consumers in the Dallas area have complained of increased rate hikes due to smart meter installations. — release.
The Yike Bike: New Zealand’s latest electric bike is almost as small as a folding bike — Business Insider
GM’s Electric Two-Seater: “General Motors on Wednesday unveiled its Electric Networked-Vehicle (EN-V), a two-seater urban transport concept vehicle it’s developing in conjunction with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. (SAIC).” — CNET.
EnerNOC Grabs Small Foot: “Adding to its recent string of acquisitions, the Boston-based demand response provider snaps up Colorado’s SmallFoot to help reduce deployment costs for small commercial customers.” — Clean Tech Group.
Google PowerMeter Moving Closer to Smart Appliances
Katie Fehrenbacher - SYN Straight News
The partnership is all part of Google’s strategy to embrace third-party hardware developers for PowerMeter. But on another level the deal with Microchip could represent a step closer to using PowerMeter to monitor and manage smart appliances — washers, dryers, microwaves and other devices embedded with communications technology that can connect with utilities and third parties.
Microchip offers tools to developers to create applications for digital appliances that work with its microcontrollers, so it wouldn’t be too much of a leap to add in PowerMeter’s API as another developer option. Google, in its announcement yesterday, didn’t mention smart appliances and placed an emphasis on “energy monitoring devices — from utilities with smart meters, back haul networks and enterprise scale meter data management systems, to small embedded consumer devices.”
While Google seems to be more focused on partnering with smaller consumer electronics developers for PowerMeter right now, connecting directly to smart appliances eventually wouldn’t be such an unusual move. Just by connecting to a smart meter, Google PowerMeter can estimate the energy use of certain appliances by looking at total home energy use (see image). And last year Google’s PowerMeter team said that it while it wasn’t interested in adding any more appliance-specific data into PowerMeter’s API, it was going to leave the applications and appliance work to third parties. Hello, Microchip?
Related content on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
The Developer's Guide to Home Energy Management Apps
Where Not to Make Money: Energy Management Software
Image courtesy of Microchip
How Grid Operators Will Survive the Crush of 1M Electric Cars
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
To model the development of the nascent electric vehicle market, the IRC turned to the sales records for one of the most popular green cars to date — the Toyota Prius — while also taking into account “public-sector and private-sector goals and population estimates.” Based on that model and other calculations, the IRC found that the rollout of 1 million plug-in vehicles — most of them clustering initially in urban areas of the West Coast and Northeast — could cause wholesale energy prices in the near term to increase by as much as 10 percent. But the size of that impact will depend on “the region, available resources and load,” with higher concentrations of vehicles charging during shorter periods leading to larger price increases.
The IRC sees a few possible solutions:
“It appears that exposing customers to some mechanism, such as dynamic pricing, special tariffs, or managed charging, that would reduce charging over a higher-demand, concentrated time period, might help self-regulate the potential problem of price impacts from PEV charging.”
As the number of vehicles on the grid grows beyond the initial 1 million estimate, these types of mechanisms “will likely become critical.” That’s not all. The IRC also anticipates that as more vehicles come onto the grid and “transform from reliability assets to market assets,” it will require more complex charging schedules, more frequent communications, forecasting of resources and validation of transactions.
What’s more, grid operators will need to work with new types of organizations as automakers, retailers and others “with little or no experience in interfacing with the bulk power grid” start to take on the role of aggregator (grouping together 800-1,000 plug-in vehicles to provide services like scheduling battery charging based on pricing information and total grid load, or stop charging and reduce load on a targeted basis).
In all, an electric vehicle boom will mean more data and increasingly sophisticated interactions between grid operators and aggregators. As a result, the IRC says grid operators will need to invest in “increased communications capacity” to handle it all. The group breaks out some specific cost estimates:
- $480-$2,080: Monthly costs for secure communications
- $600-$3,000: Annual labor costs per PEV aggregator
- Up to $265,000: Onetime incremental cost for upgrading systems to support PEV aggregators
- $70,000: Total investment per aggregator to support connectivity between the aggregator and grid operator (including servers, engineering, network infrastructure, software and project management)
- $80,000: Onetime incremental cost to upgrade software and improve reliability
The IRC recommends several products and services for deployment in the near term, including what it calls emergency load curtailment, dynamic pricing and enhanced aggregation. Dynamic pricing established specifically for the load from plug-in vehicle charging might pave the way to a similar scheme for all of our energy use. As the IRC writes, “PEV-specific dynamic pricing may be one way to introduce dynamic pricing to customers while avoiding political sensitivities regarding dynamic pricing for existing retail loads.”
But the group isn’t entirely certain about the details, and calls for more research on consumer behavior, to understand how consumers will likely respond to price signals baked into retail electricity rates, especially when electric vehicles “result in significant fuel cost savings.”
Despite remaining questions, however, the IRC notes this isn’t entirely uncharted territory. The demand response products and services that are already “existing and evolving,” will offer, according to the report, “a good starting template for new rules and processes for PEV-related services.”
Smart Grid Stimulus Funds Finally Trickling In
Katie Fehrenbacher - Smart Grid
Utilities were starting to get worried about how long it was taking to see any of the funds. At the Wall Street Journal's Eco:nomics conference earlier this month, the CEO of Florida power company FPL Group, Lewis Hay III, expressed his concern that his company had not seen "a dime" of the $200 million smart grid stimulus grant it had been awarded.
One of the reasons for the delay was a lack of clarity around whether the smart grid stimulus awards were going to be treated as taxable income. But two weeks ago that issue was resolved when the DOE and the IRS announced that the IRS will provide a "safe harbor" for utilities that are in line for a piece of the billions in stimulus backing for smart grid projects.
That in turn has seemed to open up the gates for the DOE to start sending out contracts for stimulus grants like the first one it gave to Glendale Water & Power in the first week of March (because Glendale is a city it wasn’t subject to the tax issue). Katherine Hamilton, president of industry group GridWise Alliance, told us that most of the contracts for the smart grid stimulus package could be in utilities’ hands by the end of this month.
Of course, getting contracts in the hands of utility project managers is just the first of many steps to getting dollars into the hands of vendors and workers, but it's a good start. For a complete list of smart grid stimulus fund winners and losers see here.
For related GigaOM Pro research (subscription required) check out:
The Post-Stimulus State of Cleantech VC
Cleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and Beyond Demand Response Gets a Boost from Proposed FERC Rulings
Image courtesy of matti.frisk’s photostream Flickr Creative Commons
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment