CalCharge – Building a Battery Innovation Ecosystem
A new public-private partnership was announced in May between CalCEF and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The goal of this new partnership – dubbed CalCharge – is to create a regional ecosystem to spur innovation in energy storage (battery) technologies. This group will bring together private technology companies, academic institutions, and government... Read More
Molecular-Level Energy Storage
This post was originally published on Scientific American’s blog, Plugged In on 7.25.11. When the sun dips below the horizon for the night, most solar panels become interesting roofing tiles, instead of valuable generation resources. During the day, a single cloud can quickly send residential solar power generators back to a fossil fuel-based grid for their electricity. This intermittency in... Read More
Texas Tackles Electricity Storage
“An electric vehicle is basically a battery with wheels.” Barry Smitherman, Chairman of the Public Utility Commission, This weekend, I started writing a post discussing the lack of an economically viable large-scale energy storage technology that we can use in the absence of natural formations such as mountains (for pumped hydro storage) or large caverns (for compressed air energy storage).... Read More
Energy Storage – a la Fulvalene Diruthenium (say what??)
The intermittency of many renewable energy fuel resources greatly inhibits the ability of these technologies to economically compete with non-renewable technologies like coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. In some ways, this is the opposite of the problem experienced by fossil fuel plants, which ramp their output up and down to meet demand that could jump up or drop down at any moment. When the... Read More
