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1. The Energy Revolution in Texas: Sell Quality of Life, Not Kilowatt Hours
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2. Daily Sprout
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3. At $33K, Nissan LEAF to Be One of Cheapest Electric Cars
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4. Solar Patent King Boeing Teams Up With Stirling Energy Systems
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5. Coda's China Battery Venture Piles On $100M
The Energy Revolution in Texas: Sell Quality of Life, Not Kilowatt...
Katie Fehrenbacher - Featured
Few (who will be speaking at our Green:Net conference on April 29) and spoke on Tuesday at the KEMA forum, says retailers in Texas will need to increasingly look to offer services, like electric vehicle miles, the comfort of a constant 71 degree home, and instant access and control over home energy settings, to be able to compete in competitive market places. As Few puts it:
“Today electricity is a commodity that competes on price. Unfortunately the price model doesn't hold a lot for our industry. But through competition we can create innovation, and Texas has a chance to lead the way on this.”
During his talk today, Few used his experience in the telecom world (he previously worked at cell phone maker Motorola) as a lens for viewing the recent introduction of competition to electricity markets. If companies don’t keep pushing forward on innovation, he said, they’ll risk ending up on the losing side of a strategic battle like Motorola did with Nokia. And competition in Texas won’t only come from other retailers, says Few, but also through the ecosystem of infotech companies that have been emerging in the space including Cisco, IBM, phone companies AT&T and Verizon, and even Google with its PowerMeter product.
Of course the Texas deregulated energy market has had its ups and downs over the past couple of years. Electricity rates have shot up at various times, when customers have expected deregulation to keep them low at all times. And the Texas market is highly dependent on the wildly fluctuating natural gas prices. In other markets like California, partial deregulation failed miserably (Enron!).
Reliant Energy, which is owned by massive power company NRG Energy, sells electricity and services to 1.6 million retail customers and is also the largest provider of electricity to businesses. At Green:Net Few will talk about how a utility can prepare for the coming electric vehicle boom.
Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - Misc
Chu on Blue-Sky Greentech: Asked what blue-sky technology he is most hopeful about, Energy Secretary Steven Chu cites photovoltaics and, “A new generation of biofuels that are direct substitutes for gasoline — so, better than ethanol — using agricultural waste: weed straw, rice straw, corn cobs, wood surplus.” — Washington Post
Kaiser Goes for Solar: “Kaiser Permanente, the biggest nonprofit health maintenance organization in the country, is going solar.” The company announced today with San Francisco solar company Recurrent Energy will “install solar power systems on 15 of Kaiser's hospitals, offices and other facilities across California by the summer of 2011.” — NYT’s Green Inc.
Nine Arrested in Carbon Trading Probe: “Spanish police on Tuesday said they had arrested nine people on charges of avoiding 50 million euros ($67.54 million) in tax linked to trading in carbon credits.” — Reuters
Power Plant Permit Requirements Delayed: The EPA confirmed this week “that power plants, refineries and other businesses emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide won’t be required to file for emissions permits before January 2011, confirming a decision the agency signaled last month.” — Wall Street Journal
Fiat: MultiAir Destined for World Domination: Fiat says “its newest crowning achievement – the MultiAir induction technology – will make its way here to the States with the release of the Fiat 500 and the company believes that the technology will prove so valuable” that eventually all automakers will use it in their gasoline engines. — Autoblog Green
At $33K, Nissan LEAF to Be One of Cheapest Electric Cars
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
The pricing announced today places the LEAF slightly under the retail prices slated for Mitsuishi's planned i-MiEV, Coda Automotive's Coda sedan, and Tesla's Model S (see: Electric Sedan Smackdown). It’s a fair amount higher, however, than the starting price for the conventional sedan models with which Nissan has said it aims to offer a competitive price.
Although the automaker has kept quiet until now on many specifics, Nissan’s director of product planning for North America, Mark Perry (who will be speaking about the emergence of the new networked car at our Green:Net conference next month) said last summer that pricing for the LEAF would be competitive with the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and the Nissan Altima — which start at less than $20,000.
As for the leasing, the LEAF’s $349 monthly payment comes in at a fraction of the lease payment for a Tesla Roadster, but on the high end compared to leasing offers available cars like the conventional Civic.
Nissan said late last year that it plans to provide the financing for most or all of the LEAF sedans in its initial rollout, as part of an effort to keep upfront costs down for customers. If Nissan is the one issuing the lease contract, the reasoning goes, then it gets to set the residual value (the car's projected worth at the end of the lease). In general, while other factors also come into play, the higher the residual value is set — based on more optimistic estimates of long-term vehicle value and potential after-vehicle applications for the battery — the lower the monthly lease payments will be.
Nissan first offered a glimpse of the LEAF’s so-called EV-IT system last summer, including an onboard transmitting unit connected through mobile networks to a global data center, and a plan to let drivers find info about available charging stations and view the driving radius within range of their battery charge level on a navigation map.
Nissan said today that it plans to roll into the base price Internet and smart phone connectivity, “advanced navigation,” remote controls for heating, cooling and charging (elements of an iPhone app Nissan showed off in prototype in July), as well as three years of roadside assistance. It’ll cost you an extra $940, however, to get a model tricked out with a solar panel spoiler, rearview monitor, fog lights and automatic headlights.
Solar Patent King Boeing Teams Up With Stirling Energy Systems
Katie Fehrenbacher - Clean Power
High-concentration solar PV technology uses mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight onto a high-efficiency photovoltaic cell. The technology provides more power than standard photovoltaic solar panels, and tends to be smaller in scale than the massive solar thermal plants (that don’t use PV) that are being built in the world’s deserts these days.
Boeing started developing the concentrating solar PV tech (dubbed XR700) back in 2007 in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Program. Stirling Energy Systems, which has the exclusive worldwide license to develop, deploy and commercialize the tech, will now use solar cells from Boeing’s subsidiary Spectrolab for the technology, and plans to deploy the systems commercially by 2012.
Stirling already makes utility-scale solar thermal technology based on a stirling engine called the "SunCatcher" solar dish. Stirling engines were invented centuries ago, and can be more efficient and quieter than internal combustion engines and use a closed system of gases to generate power. Most solar thermal technologies, by contrast, concentrate the sun's rays onto liquid, which powers a turbine.
Earlier this year Stirling, which was founded in 1996, and is based in Phoenix, Ariz., inaugurated its first project that uses the SunCatcher. Called Maricopa Solar, the 1.5MW solar project in Peoria, Ariz. (Maricopa County) uses 60 SunCatchers and sells clean power to local Arizona utility Salt River Project. Later this year Stirling says it will start construction of two much larger solar plants in California — a potentially 900MW plant in Imperial County, Calif. for San Diego Gas & Electric, and a 850MW solar plant in San Bernardino County, Calif. for Southern California Edison.
Stirling Energy has raised $100 million from Dublin, Ireland's NTR, which in the process took a 52-percent stake in the company. Stirling isn't the only company turning to stirling engines for solar power. One example is Infinia, which is backed by a gaggle of A-list Silicon Valley-ers, including Bill Gross' Idealab and Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital. (Gross will be speaking at our Green:Net conference next month.)
The CEO of Stirling Energy Systems, Steve Cowman, said in a release this morning that adding on Boeing’s concentrating solar PV tech will help the company “[E]xtend our reach into the solar market for future technology deployments with a product that shares many of the SunCatcher's key differentiating features – scalability, low water use and high-efficiency.”
Coda's China Battery Venture Piles On $100M
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
This comes as the latest step for the startup in its effort to leverage China’s lower labor costs, as well as the country’s “success in rechargeable-battery technology, and its substantial investments (both made and committed) in R&D for electrified transport,” as McKinsey Quarterly has put it. At the same time, Coda aims to capitalize on the larger budgets of U.S. consumers and EV-friendly policies in California, where it plans to debut an electric sedan outfitted with battery packs made by its JV with Lishen in Tianjin, China.
According to Coda’s release today, this funding for the battery joint venture will enable Coda and Lishen to “rapidly” set up commercial production of the power system for Coda’s planned electric sedan, and support “mass manufacture” of energy storage for transportation and utility applications.
Coda, which spun out of low-speed electric vehicle maker Miles EV last summer, also said today that it has added on funds to the Series C round first announced in January. Spokesperson Matt Sloustcher tells us this morning that the company’s total equity financing now “exceeds $100 million,” up from $74 million in January. The company does not expect to close the round for another “few months.”
Back in January, Coda marketing director Kara Saltness told us that the Series C round of funding would "[B]e allocated to the final safety certification testing" of the Coda Sedan and also "to scale up production of our battery systems." The company also hopes to set up battery manufacturing in the U.S. at some point, possibly with funding from the Department of Energy.
The Coda Sedan has been in the works for more than two years now, under several names and just about as many price points. Miles initially estimated the model would cost about $30,000, but when Coda unveiled the sedan last summer, the estimate had climbed to $45,000 (before tax rebates).
Saltness told us earlier this year that the company is "confident" the sticker price when the sedan launches will actually be less than $45,000. Coda CEO Kevin Czinger tells Reuters this morning the price will likely be in the “low $30,000s.”
Coda plans to begin making deliveries in the fourth quarter of this year (in January Saltness said Coda expected to to produce a total of 1,600 vehicles in 2010 and the same number of battery systems at its new plant in Tianjin, China with Lishen). By the end of 2011, the company says today that it hopes to deliver more than 14,000 vehicles to customers in California.
Photo courtesy of Coda Automotive
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