Interesting post on EcoSeed. Two reports from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford say Europe is not moving quickly enough to meet its climate goals.
The continent hopes to cut greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020.
But it is relying too much on underdeveloped renewables and ignoring the increase role coal is playing in energy generation. More private investment money is needed.
Read the rest of the post here.
Leave a Comment » | 
news | Tagged: Clean Tech, Europe, Global Warming | 
Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
Innovalight hopes to simplify the manufacturing of crystalline silicon solar cells with its inkjet printing technology.
Innovalight hopes to simplify the production of solar cells.
By printing with silicon ink, the number of production steps can be cut in half, which lowers costs, the Sunnyvale company claims. In June, the private firm installed a pilot system at its headquarters that it said was capable of printing more than 2,000 solar cells an hour.
The system, developed with Netherlands-based OTB Solar, produces crystalline silicon calls with a thickness of 50 microns.
On Monday, Innovalight made a second substantive claim: that its ink-based cells demonstrated 18 percent efficiency at converting light into energy.
The results were certified by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany, the company claims in a press release.
The goal is to bring its ink efficiency to over 20 percent, said Innovalight, which is working with several solar cell manufacturers.
Crystalline solar cells still account for 86 percent of the commercial market, despite the onslaught of low-cost thin film products.
Leave a Comment » | news | Tagged: Clean Tech, Innovalight, Solar Cells, Solar Ink | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
Over production, slowing demand and price declines have hemorrhaged the businesses of most solar cell producers this year.
But the pain hasn’t been spread evenly. Companies such as Suntech, Sharp Electronics and Q-cells have seen commanding market positions whittle.
Big dog First Solar has not. The company is poised to finish the year as the largest manufacturer of solar cells with 12.8 percent of the market, up from 7.5 percent last year, says iSuppli.
Its major competitors (listed above) will see their market shares decline, the research firm says.
First Solar has several advantages going for it. Its thin-film technology gives it low production costs and enables it to under cut the price of crystalline cells.
“With its capability to produce cells at a cost of 89 cents per watt in the second quarter, First Solar is generating stable operating margins, while its competitors are struggling to stay profitable,” iSuppli Senior Director Henning Wicht said in a research rerport.
The company also has maintained low inventories so that it is selling what it produces rather than stock piling it and has built established sales operations in Europe.
ISuppli estimates First Solar will manufacture 1,100 megawatts of solar cells this year, more than double last year’s total.
Second place Suntech will end the year with 6.9 percent market share, projects iSuppli.
1 Comment | news | Tagged: Clean Tech, First Solar, Q-cells, Sharp Electronics, Solar Cells, Suntech | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
The past 18 months have been a veritable killing field for IPOs.
Only six venture-backed public offerings made it to the U.S. market in 2008 and five during the first half of 2009.
"I think we will see some filings" this year with an increase by the middle of 2010, says PricewaterhouseCooper's D. Timothy Carey.
But now there is more chatter in corporate boardrooms of a comeback getting underway. This appears to be particularly true among clean-tech companies, which might expect to ride the coattails of the public’s fascination with solutions to global warming.
Big name companies such as Tesla and Solyndra are obvious candidates. (I have no specially knowledge that either has plans.)
But it seem clear that after a first half of the year spent worried about survival, talk among board members has turned to public offerings, says D. Timothy Carey, clean-tech leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“I think we will see some filings” this year with an increase by the middle of 2010, Carey said in an interview.
“I’m not here predicting we’re going to have a robust IPO market any time soon,” he said at an SVASE “Shaking the Money Tree” event in Palo Alto on Thursday evening. But there is a thaw going on.
A thaw also appears to be occurring with venture investing as well. During the first quarter of this year, VCs were consumed with steadying their own portfolios. By the second quarter, they began looking around at new deals, but the pace of investing remained low.
“My view is the second half is going to be better,” says Carey. A lot will depend on how fast federal loan guarantees and grants tied to the stimulus spending get into the market.
Smart grid and transportation seem to be the two biggest opportunities this year, he added.
Leave a Comment » | news | Tagged: Clean Tech, energy, IPOs | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
Taiwanese manufacturer AUO projects that sales of e-book and car displays will cross-over in 2011
It was mostly all about e-books this afternoon at the DisplaySearch Emerging Display Technologies conference in San Jose, Calif.
First with a presentation by C.T. Liu, the vice-president and general manager of AUO‘s consumer division – Taiwan’s largest flat-panel maker - who expects e-book display shipments to reach 3.6 million units this year, totaling $271 million. In 2012, shipments of over 18 million units will generate over $1.1 billion.
e-book readers to reach 77 million units in 9-years; touchscreen, colour in the horizon
Then, DisplaySearch analyst Jennifer Colegrove grew even more optimistic and estimated that the e-paper display market for e-books and e-textbooks (5 to 10 inches in size) will grow from 4 million units this year to 77 million in 2018, totaling $3.8 billion in revenues!
A huge growth, unless of course – as rumoured – Apple unveils one next week!
Finally, E Ink vice-president of marketing Sriram Peruvemba expects that by the end of year the number of e-books (small 5″ displays to 6″ to 8″ and sometimes 9″ for specific applications) will exceed 50, from about 25 different manufacturers.
Interestingly, Peruvemba believes that e-Textbooks will be the killer application for e-Paper/e-Book readers.
“On average, college students spend $650 per year on textbooks, which would pay for the device,” says the E Ink executive.
Peruvemba also showed a sleek 5″ e-book that fits in his jacket’s inside pocket. A colour version from E Ink is due by the end of 2010. Today, Fujitsu’s $1,000 Flepia is the only colour e-book reader on the market.
Follows a short video clip of the 3 presentations:
Leave a Comment » | chips, hardware, news | Tagged: auo, Colegrove, displaysearch, DSemtech, eink, flepia, fujitsu, Peruvemba | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360
An interesting post on EcoSeed about a new technology designed to generate electric power from air conditioners.
The WindAir system runs the hot exhaust of an air conditioner through a tubrin to generate electricity
Air conditioning is unquestionably a major source of power consumption in tropical and temperate climates. Estimates claim about a sixth of the electricity generated in the U.S. goes to cool buildings, and on hot summer days 40 percent of a region’s peak load can power air conditioners.
That creates an opportunity for EarthSure Renewable Energy Corp. and its WindAir system. The system takes the hot air exhaust from an air conditioner to drive a fan turbine. The turbine turns the wind into electricity, which can be sold back to the grid.
Whether the economics of using air conditioning exhaust can be shown to make sense is an unanswered question. The Woodbridge, N.J., company says only that WindAir can save significant amounts of money on electric bills.
It would be interesting to see an independent test of the system.
Leave a Comment » | news | Tagged: Air Conditioning, Clean Energy | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
By some accounts, China is ready to trounce the United States in solar cell production, just as the Japanese automakers did in the car market more than a decade ago.
China needs to resolve internal policy and subsidy differences, says FBR analyst Mehdi Hosseini
Lavish subsidies from the Chinese government coupled with cheap labor, low-cost loans and inexpensive electricity give these companies an advantage over the more market-dependent firms on the other side of the Pacific.
Forget that the Obama Administration approved $2.3 billion in tax credits for clean-energy manufacturers last month. The battle might as well draw to a close before it has begun – according to some media reports.
This analysis is far from universal. In fact, according to some industry watchers, the Chinese market isn’t likely to reach substantial volume for a several years, nor will domestic consumption in this Asian country soak up the excess capacity presently in the market.
Demand projections across the industry are exaggerated and need to be revised lower at the same time as unneeded capacity needs be taken out of use, says FBR Capital Markets analyst Mehdi Hosseini.
In the meantime, China’s production will not expand as fast as some project and will not exceed 1 GW until 2011 at the earliest as government officials struggle to work out policy differences, says Hosseini
Hosseini identifies three main problems:
*Differences among central government, local governments, finance ministry, Academy of Sciences and Electric Power Research Institute policies;
*Conflicting interests among manufacturers and utilities on subsidy levels;
*Insufficient tax credit supports and no clear feed-in tariff.
Until China comes to a consensus, maybe it won’t be the solar tiger some would have us believe.
2 Comments | news | Tagged: China, Clean Tech, Solar Energy | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
On the heels of yesterday’s Intel briefing, AMD is touring Silicon Valley this week to talk about its own strategy and vision ahead of the Windows 7 launch, due on Oct. 22.
Although most of the information is still under wraps until AMD’s own Sept. 10 event, we caught up with worldwide marketing vice-president Leslie Sobon at AMD’s headquarters in Sunnyvale where she was keen to point out some of the work the chip designer did to optimise its upcoming notebook and desktop platforms to support Windows 7 high-end graphics capabilities aka DirectX 11.
“We’ll have the first DirectX 11 games enabled on our graphics cards. You’re not going to see that from Intel… or nVidia either… It’s all about the compute shader… The first pieces of what comes out for DirectX 11 is in the gaming side but it actually translates even into entertainment and video visual quality,” explains Sobon.
Consumers don’t care about the processor
During our conversation, Sobon also commented on the complexity consumers are facing when choosing a new computer.
“Mainstream consumers don’t care about the processor in their system. They care about whether or not they can watch Hulu HD or if the Flip camera video actually runs on their PC. They don’t care if it’s a Turion, or an Athlon or a Core i5… they didn’t care for many many years,” explained Sobon.
AMD will support GPU overclocking
On overclocking – which is a way to increase the speed/frequency/clock of individual PC components like the CPU or the memory -, the AMD executive confirmed the chip designer’s commitment to continue offering a wide range of options for PC enthusiasts to boost or “overclock” every part of their computers, including soon the graphics processor (GPU)!
“What aren’t we doing to help overclockers. We’ve got the chipset that enables it, AMD overdrive that lets you optimise at your heart’s content on the platform side, as well as on the CPU side… We have the overclocking record,” adds Sobon.
For more on AMD plans, we’ll have to wait Sept. 10th!
2 Comments | chips, computers, hardware, Interviews, news | Tagged: AMD, cpu, gpu, Intel, overclock, sobon | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360
Interesting post on BusinessGreen. The news is that Japan is following in the tracks of Solaren of California and developing a solar-energy space station that it hopes to have in place in 30 years.
The $21 billion project calls for 4 square kilometers of solar cells and microwave technology to beam the energy back to earth.
The $21 billion project calls for 4 square kilometers of solar cells.
The goal is to generate 1 GW of capacity, or enough juice to light up 294,000 homes.
While the idea seems farfetched, it has some obvious merits. Solar radiation is more powerful at the edge of space than it is on the surface of the planet, so efficiency could improve. There also are no clouds to interfere.
The Japanese government hopes to launch a small test satellite fitted with solar panels in 2015. It hopes to have the station operations during the decade of the 2030.
One big challenge is in lowering the cost of transporting the solar panels 22,000 miles above the earth.
8 Comments | news | Tagged: Clean Tech, Solar Energy | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
More eco cars are headed to the market with Daimler’s Mercedes unveiling a fuel-cell vehicle, Nissan polishing an electric model and Tesla expected to announce a joint design.
Nissan's electric-powered LEAF is expected in 2011 at a family sedan price
Daimler’s Mercedes said it will begin shipping a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle – referred to as the B-class F-cell – in Europe and the United States next year. Two hundred of the cars are to be built by the end of the year and will make use of a high-torque electric motor.
Mercedes claims the B-class F-cell has a range of 250 miles on a tank of hydrogen and starts well in cold weather, a long-standing drawback with hydrogen vehicles.
Nissan is targeting the mainstream market with its LEAF, an electric vehicle with a 100-mile range. The family-oriented vehicle seats five, runs on lithium-ion batteries and its expected in 2011. It has a top speed of 90 mph.
As to its price, Nissan says, “we’re unable to give an exact price, but we’re targeting a price in the range of other typical family sedans.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk referred obliquely to a car Tesla and Daimler are jointly designing in a blog post this June. The vehicle is expected to be announced this year and “like the Smart EV…will also be an electric car that almost anyone can afford.”
Tesla has already said it is supplying Daimler with battery technology for 1,000 compact Smart EVs, and Daimler is providing engineering and production support for Tesla’s Model S, a $50,000 sedan expected in 2011. Daimler took a 10 percent stake in Telsa in May.
Leave a Comment » | news | Tagged: Clean Tech, Electric Cars, Fuel-Cell Cars, Hydrogen | Permalink
Posted by Mark Boslet
You are currently browsing the TechPulse 360 blog archives for September, 2009.
