Batteries

One megawatt of grid storage, 10 big flywheels

Beacon Power says its latest flywheel will provide one megawatt of storage to the electricity grid by the end of the year.

The company's carbon fiber flywheels, which are one meter in diameter, spin constantly at up to 16,000 revolutions per minute--a surface speed of about Mach 2, Beacon CEO William Capp explained Friday. Each 8,000-pound unit can provide 100 kilowatts of electricity for 15 minutes.

Combining 10 of those flywheels will give a utility one megawatt of storage, or 25 kilowatt hours--the equivalent of what a home consumes in a day.

Fifteen minutes of storage may … Read more

Tech companies aim to untangle power supplies

SAN FRANCISCO--Oh, what a tangled web we weave when plugging in and powering personal electronics whose chargers are so varied that they typically end up balled up in rat's nests beneath our desks.

Help, albeit slow, is on the way, according to members of consumer electronics companies, green-tech start-ups, and venture capital firms at the Alliance for Universal Power Supplies conference Friday.

Attendees charging ahead to create power supplies that cause fewer headaches and wasted energy found hope when Westinghouse announced that it will support standards from start-up Green Plug, whose Greentalk protocol enables devices and power sources to &… Read more

A two-year payback for buyers of future hybrids?

Car battery company EnerDel predicts that consumers will start getting a two-year payback on hybrid electric cars, once a new generation of batteries are mass-produced.

Charles Gassenheimer, the chairman of parent company Ener1, gave a presentation at the Jefferies Global Clean Technology Conference on Thursday in New York, where he said lithium ion batteries in development will bring costs down substantially.

He said EnerDel intends to have a manufacturing line operating in 2010 that is capable of making 300,000 car batteries a year for hybrid electric vehicles that run partially on a battery and partially on an internal combustion … Read more

Green news harvest: Carbon footprint mashup, silicon oversupply

Oversupply of Silicon Worse Than Expected - Greentech MediaExpect lower solar-photovoltaic costs: good for buyers, bad for suppliers. Also note that thin-film cells are forecast to represent 25 percent of production in 2010. New Report Reveals Huge Variation Between Cities' Carbon Footprints - Wired ScienceCool mashup of Brookings Institute data measuring different cities' carbon footprints.

Toyota building $192M green-car battery plant - Associated PressThe great car battery race is on in earnest: plant will make nickel metal hydride batteries now used in the Prius. Also rumored is a Toyota lithium ion battery plant. T. Boone Pickens' green scheme - Fortune… Read more

MTI Micro plans fuel cells for digicams

MTI MicroFuel Cells is hoping to use its portable fuel cells in digital cameras.

The company, a subsidiary of Mechanical Technology, announced Wednesday that it is already working with a Japanese optics manufacturer to adapt its integrated Mobion fuel cell technology for digital cameras.

Fuel cells are being explored as potential power sources for everything from data centers to SUVs. Over the years, MTI Micro has designed products for the industrial and military markets, but as of late, the company has been making a big push on the consumer electronics side, with the hope of replacing lithium ion batteries with … Read more