Electro Energy: Drained, or Ready to Recharge?
Bottom-Fishing for Batteries I believe that we have only seen the beginning of the current market decline. You should take that with a grain of salt, since I've been unremittingly bearish since 1999 and for more than half that time, the market has been going up. Even if the market has much further to fall, some stocks may have already taken most of the damage they are likely to take. Knowing that I might be wrong, I've started to do a little bottom fishing among companies that people have been starting to dump as the realize stock prices can...
Li-ion Motors and Frito Lay Ink Deal
Li-ion Motors. (HYBT) has inked a deal with Frito Lay to provide Hybrid Technologies' Lithium vehicles as part of their fleet sales program. Frito Lay has agreed to purchase and take delivery of the Lithium Mini Cooper model as well as the Daimler Chrysler Smart Car Lithium version. The first deliveries are scheduled for the first quarter of 2006. These vehicles will be part of Frito Lay's Hybrid fleet and the corporation's commitment to "green philosophy" as well as its well known philosophy of working with the latest in American technology. You would have thought that...
Energy Storage as Transmission Explained
by Blackridge Research
The latest trend is that power transmission companies around the world are increasingly looking at energy storage technology to defer or replace transmission system upgrades. How this works is energy storage is placed along a transmission line and operated to inject or absorb power, mimicking transmission line flows. Going with names like “virtual transmission” in Australia and “GridBooster” in Germany, projects totaling over 3 GW of capacity are poised to increase system efficiency and reliability across the world.
Storage as transmission offers an array of benefits over traditional transmission infrastructure. They are faster to deploy, have smaller footprint,...
Anti-Hype in Lithium-ion Batteries Foretells Doom for Electric Cars
John Petersen Despite billions of dollars in private investments and public subsidies, lithium-ion battery technology has progressed at a snail's pace for years and battery developers have recently started to emphasize the importance of baby steps. For the first time in memory, anti-hype is becoming a dominant theme in stories about lithium-ion batteries. Examples from this month include: An interview with Wards Auto where the business manager of the DOE's Kentucky-Argonne Battery Manufacturing Research and Development Center explained that it takes about ten years to put a battery innovation into production and all of today's...
How Short-Term Supply Constraints Will Impact Booming HEV Markets
John Petersen For several weeks I've been writing about robust demand in Europe for a new class of HEVs that are usually referred to as "stop-start" or "micro hybrids." According to the EPA's website: "Stop/Start hybrids are not true hybrids since electricity from the battery is not used to propel the vehicle. However, the Stop/Start feature is an important, energy-saving building block used in hybrid vehicles. Stop/Start technology conserves energy by shutting off the gasoline engine when the vehicle is at rest, such as at a traffic light, and automatically re-starting it when the driver pushes...
Quantum Delivers First Vehicles of Hydrogen Hybrid Fleet to Santa Ana
Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide Inc (QTWW) announced the delivery of five hydrogen-fueled Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles to the City of Santa Ana, California. This is part of a larger South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) program to develop and demonstrate 30 hydrogen hybrid vehicles to fleets in Southern California. The formal delivery took place during a ceremony held today at the City of Santa Ana's vehicle fleet yard. In March 2004, the AQMD awarded Quantum a contract to engineer a state-of-the-art OEM caliber hydrogen fuel system, perform accelerated long-term durability testing, including crash testing. The complete...
Charging Your Portfolio With Tesla’s Gigafactory
By Jeff Siegel Last week, Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) announced that its next electric offering a competitively priced electric vehicle will hit the market in 2017. Dubbed the Model III, the 200-mile-range electric vehicle will go for $35,000. Certainly this was big news for electric car enthusiasts particularly those who can't afford an $85,000 Model S but yearn to drive one. But if you regularly follow trends in the electric vehicle space, at least the way I do, you know Tesla's announcement was just one of many big moves in the space over the...
Battery Recycling Realities for Energy Storage Investors
John Petersen One of the most fervently debated and poorly understood topics in energy storage is the subject of battery recycling. What percentage of the raw materials that go into a battery can be economically recovered from used batteries with existing recycling technology and infrastructure? While the details are quite complex, this article will offer a high-level overview of the economics of battery recycling for energy storage investors. Lead-acid batteries are the most recycled products in the world. The process is both straightforward and cost-effective. When batteries arrive at the recycling plant, they're put through a shredder...
Storage: The Best Renewable Energy Integration Strategy?
Tom Konrad, Ph.D. In order to electrify transportation, well need batteries, with ultracapacitors and compressed air playing supporting roles. Based on cost, John has been making the case that the batteries for economical cars are more likely to be advanced lead-acid (PbA) than the media darling, Lithium-ion (Li-ion.) I generally agree, especially since recycling Li-ion batteries is an expensive and difficult process, although I see a future where both cars and oil are simply more expensive, and we have far fewer of them. But transportation is only one application for energy storage...
Plug-in and Hybrid Locomotives; Another Sweet Spot for Axion Power
John Petersen I'm a cynic and a heretic when it comes to plug-in vehicle schemes because most defy the laws of economic gravity and violate a cardinal rule that Ford engineers developed for the EcoStar light delivery vehicle program in the early '90s: – The unloaded weight of a plug-in vehicle should never exceed 70% of its loaded weight. Investors who pay attention to this simple rule can easily distinguish between pipe-dream vehicle electrification schemes that are nothing more than feel-good eco-bling and realistic vehicle electrification projects that make economic sense. For the last...
Alice in EVland Part III; Cost Benefit Analysis For Dummies
John Petersen Sometimes I think bloggers like me are the real dummies. We spend so much time delving into the minutiae of a stock or sector that we manage to obscure the big picture with too much detail. I've certainly been guilty of that particular flaw over the last couple years and want to offer an apology to readers I've confused rather than enlightened. Yesterday a reader sent me a copy of a presentation that Exide Technologies (XIDE) used in its December 2010 Investor Meetings. The slide on page 6 of the presentation did a great job...
Two Stocks For Grid Storage – ZBB Energy and Axion Power
John Petersen On March 4, 2011 the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory published a comprehensive review of "Electrochemical Energy Storage Technologies for Green Grid" that is a must-read for serious investors who want to understand the technical and economic intricacies of the energy storage sector. It explains why storage is a key enabling technology for wind and solar power, the smart grid, efficient transportation and a legion of high-technology manufacturing and service enterprises that can't survive without reliable power. It also explains why energy storage is an investment mega-trend that will endure for decades. While I normally try to...
Conference Brief – Solar & Storage Finance
Renewable energy finance has many different kinds of participants, as revealed recently at the Solar & Storage Finance conference hosted in NYC. . Listening to the live actors from the financial side of the renewable power industry moved the issues off the page, to a more concrete experience of their specific concerns, including the extent to which their distinct missions were siloed, how they are competitive, and how they synergize.
The presentations were organized to highlight these differences. Several panel discussions were set back-to-back the contrast between lenders vs tax equity investors, both in terms of their goals, but also...
Toyota’s Straight Talk On Plug-in Vehicles
John Petersen Most investors know that Toyota Motors (TM) is the world's biggest manufacturer of hybrid electric vehicles, or HEVs. Since 1997, Toyota has sold over two million cars using its Hybrid Synergy Drive® and earned a sterling reputation for fuel efficiency and customer satisfaction. What many don't realize is that Toyota is also the world's biggest manufacturer of advanced automotive battery packs. Toyota entered the battery business in 1996 when it bought a 40% interest in Panasonic EV Energy, a joint venture company that was formed to make NiMH batteries and battery packs for the Prius. Over...
Battery Investing for Beginners, Part 3; Resetting The Cheap vs. Cool Baseline
9.30.09 Cheap vs Cool John Petersen I've been blogging about pure-play energy storage device manufacturers since July 2008. By mid-November I'd assembled a short list of thirteen pure-play public companies that accounted for almost 25% of the $30 billion global battery market. Frankly I was shocked to learn that major battery manufacturers like Exide (XIDE) and Enersys (ENS) that report billions in annual sales carried tiny market capitalizations when compared with far riskier technology development companies like Ener1 (HEV) and Valence Technology (VLNC) that would be little more than rounding errors on the big boys' financial statements....
Beacon Power Announces Third-Quarter 2005 Results
Beacon Power Corp (BCON) reported revenue of $304,064, compared to revenue of $80,902 in the third quarter of 2004, an increase of $223,162, or 276%. Revenues for the nine months ending September 30, 2005, were $1,258,503, compared to $264,793 for the same period in 2004, an increase of $993,710, or 375%. Beacon Power reported a net loss of $2.1 million, or ($0.04) per share, compared to a net loss of $1.9 million or ($0.04) per share for the third quarter of 2005 and 2004, respectively, representing an increase of approximately $0.2 million or 16%. They ended the...
