Smart Grid Blog

Tokyo Electric Power Co. and nine other regional utilities may need to spend 5.1 trillion yen ($56.3 billion) in 20 years to upgrade Japan’s power grid if a draft climate-protection legislation is made law. The utilities would need to spend 2.5 trillion yen to install batteries and the rest on smart meters and other devices Continue reading →

Fuel cells, which decades ago powered the moon mission, are quietly making their way into businesses and homes, and some see them as the future of power production. Instead of burning fuel to make heat that then drives a turbine, fuel cells use an electrochemical reaction similar to that inside a battery to make electricity. Continue reading →

Creating a revolution in the way energy is produced and shared, distributed solar energy is one of the top clean energy topics of the day. Chicago utility company ComEd (an arm of the energy giant Exelon Corporation) has a new pilot project in this field that will outfit 100 Chicago-area homes with solar photovoltaic panels Continue reading →

A competitive America is also America that finally has a smart energy policy. We know there’s no silver bullet here.  We understand that to reduce our dependence on oil and the damage caused by climate change, we're going to need more production in the short term, we're going to need more efficiency, and we need Continue reading →

A passing cloud can be curtains for a solar-electric system, suddenly cutting generation dramatically. Production shoots back up as soon as the cloud is past. Then it ends at sundown, only to resume at dawn. Wind energy is also intermittent. Electric utilities can accommodate these fluctuations in modest amounts, but adding lots of distributed solar Continue reading →

Toshiba Corp., Japan’s biggest maker of nuclear reactors, said it was selected to supply electrical gear for Okinawa Electric Power Co.’s trial of a localized smart grid project. The trials will start in October this year, Tokyo-based Toshiba said in a statement today. The project that will include rechargeable batteries and solar power system would Continue reading →

From the most expensive vehicles to the smallest consumer devices, batteries will play a starring role in this generation of smart products—and it’s one of the key investment areas that Cynthia Artin will be covering in her Smart Money column in the next few months. Better battery performance is a clear requirement for mass market Continue reading →

“Fiscal 2009 marked a turning point for Electrovaya,” said chief executive Sankar Das Gupta in a statement. “Over the course of the past year we have increased our presence in the global market for lithium ion batteries used for electrification of vehicles and for smart grid applications.” He emphasized that Electrovaya, for the first time, Continue reading →

To date, vehicle recharging has been random with little thought placed on system demand. Fast forward and it is apparent that PHEV’s will increase expodentially and be concentrated in metropolitan areas. Utility planners have been reviewing scenarios where large numbers of plug in vehicles converge on a geographic location, i.e. Cambridge, MA or Palo Alto, Continue reading →