Texas-based Xtreme Power is one of the leaders of the energy storage world, designing and manufacturing large-scale solid-state energy storage and power management systems called Dynamic Power Resources for solar and wind power applications.

CEO Carlos Coe talked with CleanTechies about developments in the energy storage field.

CleanTechies:   You have two energy storage projects in Hawaii.

Carlos Coe:  The first project is on the island of Maui and it’s affiliated with the wind farm that’s on that island. And that project is a 1.5 megawatt project in size going on a 30 megawatt wind farm.  So that project was put into service the middle part of last year and has been in service since then and has done very, very well.

CleanTechies:  Any glitches? (more…)

CleanTechies caught up with Maurice Gunderson, senior partner of energy and materials at CMEA Capital, for some energy storage perspectives.

CleanTechies:  You were an investor in A123 Systems. When will bulk storage arrive?

Maurice Gunderson:  Bulk storage needs a little bit of definition. The kind of thing that A123 is doing is here now, and that’s a very high power storage for grid stabilization. And that makes sense in a lot of parts of the country. I make a distinction between that and very large bulk energy storage, which is intended to store power for very long periods of time, such as from wind turbines, and then release it over relatively long periods of time.

So the answer is there’s no real good battery solutions yet, but there’s a lot of smart people and a lot of money working on the problem and we’re going to see things emerging here within the next few years. The really practical ways to do very large storage right now come down to pumped storage. If nature gives you a canyon and environmental considerations don’t stop you from damming it up, you can make a very nice pumped storage facility. But that only exists when it occurs naturally. So there’s not a lot of places where you can count on building out new capacity of that type. (more…)

Israeli fuel cell start-up EnStorage Ltd. has raised $15 million in a Series B financing round.

U.S. private equity fund Warburg Pincus led the round, and was joined by all of EnStorage’s current investors, including Greylock Partners, Canaan Partners, Siemens TTB, and Wellington Partners, according to a report in “Globes“.

EnStorage was founded in 2007 by VP R&D Dr. Arnon Blum, Chief Scientific Officer Prof. Emanuel Peled of Tel Aviv University, Chairman Nachman Shelef, and former CEO Eran Yarkoni.

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MP2 Capital is a San Francisco firm that develops, finances and invests in distributed generation and small-scale utility solar projects throughout North America, selling the electricity produced by its projects to commercial, government and utility customers under power purchase agreements and feed-in tariffs.

Its latest project is a 445-kilowatt solar photovoltaic array in Winsted, Connecticut. MP2 Capital has entered into a power purchase agreement to sell all of the electricity generated to the Regional School District No. 7 for 20 years under a grant from the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund.

The system, which sits atop multiple rooftops of the school district, was built by groSolar and is composed of 1,937 photovoltaic panels from Canadian Solar. It is expected to produce approximately 492,000 kilowatt hours of clean solar electricity and save the school district $26,000 in energy costs during the first year of operation. Over the term of the agreement, the system is expected to produce approximately 9,380,000 kilowatt-hours to offset the school’s energy use.

Brad Bauer, co-founder and managing director of MP2  Capital, talked with CleanTechies about the project. (more…)

After making his fortune with Idealab and a host of technology start-ups, Bill Gross has turned his attention to renewable energy. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Gross talks about the solar power plant technology his company eSolar is developing and about the future of solar.

Bill Gross is not your typical solar energy entrepreneur. In a business dominated by Silicon Valley technologists and veterans of the fossil fuel industry, Gross is a Southern Californian who made his name in software. His Idealab startup incubator led to the creation of companies such as eToys, CitySearch, and GoTo.com. The latter pioneered search advertising — think Google — and was acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion in 2003.

That payday has allowed Gross to pursue his green dreams. (As a teenager, he started a company to sell plans for a parabolic solar dish he had designed.) Over the past decade, Gross has launched a slew of green tech startups, including solar power plant builder eSolar, electric car company Aptera, and Energy Innovations, which is developing advanced photovoltaic technology. (more…)

Bloom Energy has unveiled its long-awaited and much-hyped fuel cell technology, which it says can convert natural gas into electricity through an electrochemical process that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent and at a price competitive with far-dirtier coal-fired electricity.

With California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in attendance, Bloom co-founder and chief executive K.R. Sridhar unveiled his Bloom Energy Server at the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of its first customers, eBay.

Taking up no more room than a parking space and looking like a large refrigerator, the servers (at left) — which cost roughly $750,000 — convert natural gas or another fuel into electricity by creating an electrochemical process on a series of small, stacked disks.

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In advance of this fall’s launch of plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles, lithium ion battery manufacturers are breaking ground on manufacturing plants nearly every month.

Nearly $2 billion in stimulus funding has spurred the building of facilities in Michigan and Indiana that will start churning out battery packs by the end of the year, but the escalation in production has the potential to outstrip the demand for the batteries by as early as 2012.

As I said during yesterday’s interview on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the battery companies have understandable but potentially misguided motivations to quickly ramp up production. For battery companies to receive the full amount of stimulus grants and loans, they must meet specified goals for production capacity.

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Ford’s goal of electrifying its fleet appears to be running on all cylinders. The company is creating battery electric versions of both of its award winners –2009 Car (Focus) and Truck (Transit Connect Van).

Because energy storage will make or break the arrival of electric vehicles, Ford has joined GM in bringing the battery pack assembly and management under its tent.

Ford is investing nearly $1 billion in manufacturing facilities in Michigan that will include hybrid, battery-electric and plug-in vehicles as well as the lithium ion battery packs. Ford manager of global electrified fleets Greg Frenette explained that “there’s a strong tie-in marrying battery control…. to the rest of propulsion, and we’re in the best position to manage that.”

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By now, you’ve probably had your fill of 2010 prediction lists about cleantech and renewable energy, but no such list was worth its bytes if it didn’t mention energy storage. The absence of scalable energy storage solutions is the Achilles’ heel of renewable energy generated from intermittent sources, such as sun and wind. But when it said late last month that it hopes to start selling a lithium-ion storage cell for home use around fiscal 2011, electronics giant Panasonic signaled that it could be filling that energy storage void.

Details about the battery are sketchy, at best. Panasonic’s president Fumio Otsubo told the Japanese newspaper The Yomiuri Shimbun about the planned product but didn’t mention how large the energy storage system would be, or how much it would cost. He did say the device would be able to store a week’s worth of power for a single home—which sounds impressive but is a poor metric, since the amount of energy a single family home consumes in one week can vary drastically from block to block and from city to city. Still, storing a week’s worth of energy for even a small home with relatively low energy needs would be a major accomplishment. (more…)

“Absolutely awesome!” is how Jit Bhattacharya the COO of Mission Motors based in San Francisco, CA described a recent test run of their Mission One electric motorcycle. With Tesla already proving that an electric sports car can outperform its gas-powered predecessors, Mission Motors is seeking to show that electric motorcycles are every bit as capable at high-performance endeavors as their four wheeled counterparts.

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