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Archive for March, 2011

Ceramic electric thermal storage (ETS) heaters are the perfect way to use cheap off-peak electricity which goes begging for customers at night. Some 25 Terawatt-hours of wind energy went to waste in 2010 because there’s just not enough of us burning the midnight oil. People use electricity during the day. Wind blows at night. Smart grid pricing is coming that incentivizes people to shift the load to balance it.

ETS heaters such as those made by Steffes amount to a form of distributed storage for excess wind power. Electricity is stored as heat in ceramic brick interiors of these heaters for as long as 24 hours, and released on demand.

They are smart-grid ready and have the ability to respond to real-time pricing, load & demand management, alternative energy, frequency control and other signals available from power companies. So when wind is not being used at night, these can soak up the excess, amounting to distributed wind storage.

For homeowners and businesses, thermal energy storage heaters are available that can provide heating on demand at off-peak prices.  The annual cost of ETS heating in electricity can be as little as $500 because of that differential.

As more states add more wind power, off-peak pricing will increase as states try to time shift electricity consumers to night time. Oklahoma recently discovered that once it was priced right, off-peak pricing was able to  eliminate the need to build a new coal fired plant.

Related articles

• 25 TWh of Wind Power Idled in 2010 in US – Grid Storage Needed (cleantechnica.com)
• Electric Storage Revolution Coming Soon? (enerdynamics.com)
• BPA Formalizing Plans to Curtail Excess Wind Energy in Oversupply (cleantechnica.com)
• Smart grids get dumb reaction (mnn.com)
• Lessons from Smart Grid Pilot in Canada Can Be Applied to New England (xconomy.com)

A lot of the innovation around next-gen car technology has focused on electric cars and biofuels, but there’s a massive need for technology that can make our current cars more fuel-efficient. On Thursday, a startup called Pinnacle Engines emerged with just such a technology and a round of venture capital backing, and the company says it can deliver an engine with 30 to 50 percent better fuel economy.

Pinnacle says it has created an entirely new four-stroke engine with a design that uses opposed-pistons and can operate in different modes depending on operating conditions, making it more efficient. The engine also has efficiencies via variable valve timing, direct injection, and turbocharging. Pinnacle says it plans to commercialize its engine by 2013.

Pinnacle is just one of a handful of startups working on more efficient engine technology. I caught up with Achates Power CEO David Johnson yesterday, and he said Achates is building a closed piston, 2-stroke engine that is 10 to 15 percent better than state of art diesel engines that exist today. EcoMotors is building a diesel engine with stackable modules, and where one of the engine modules can be shut off when it isn’t needed. (Here’s 7 startups building green car tech for a pre-electric world).

Achates and EcoMotors both have high-profile investors, as does Pinnacle, which has investors that include NEA, Bessemer Venture Partners and Infield Capital; it has raised $13.5 million from this group. Pinnacle also announced that Ron Hoge has taken over as Pinnacle’s new chairman and CEO.

Building new engines, getting them manufactured and convincing auto makers to put the engines in their cars is a long road. Achates says it could take three to six year depending on the project. Pinnacle’s engine is two years away from the market, and the company says it has a joint development and licensing agreement with an Asian vehicle maker.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Cleantech Was a Market Leader in Q4

One of the early problems with the cleantech sector was that many of the big public companies that offered exits for innovative cleantech startups hadn’t yet matured into aggressive acquirers. Oil companies, car companies and power companies didn’t necessarily have the culture of M&A. But I think we can safely say the power gear firms have finally woken up to delivering innovation by purchasing it.

A lot of that acquisition appetite has been around the smart grid and using IT to manage energy more efficiently, but some of it has been around renewable energy, too. ABB, Schneider Electric, GE, and, to a lesser extent, Siemens, have all now been actively buying up startups as well as big firms that are developing next-generation energy products, and some have been using their VC arms to find the leading startups.

This month, Schneider Electric acquired energy procurement and management company Summit Energy for $268 million, following in the footsteps of its joint acquisition (with Alstom) of Areva’s power grid transmission and distribution business. Summit manages $20 billion in annual power purchases for some 650 corporate clients, making it a power broker in its own right. If Schneider succeeds in integrating that market power with its grid and building power control technologies, it could add a whole new level of complexity — and potential — to the concept of the smart grid.

ABB has bought three smart grid software companies over the past year, including the massive, $1 billion-plus, Ventyx acquisition, along with Insert Key Solutions, and Obvient. ABB also recently acquired a 35-percent stake in Novatec Solar, a German company that makes solar concentrating gear.

ABB has a young venture arm that it uses to inject some Silicon Valley spirit into the power grid player, as Andy Tang, ABB Venture’s managing director recently explained to me. (Tang will be speaking at Green:Net 2011 on April 21 in San Francisco). Tang formerly was the founding managing director at DFJ DragonFund, and was a venture partner with Infineon Ventures. ABB has invested in electric car charging startup Ecotality, smart grid network player Trilliant, and data center efficiency company PowerAssure.

GE has long invested in startups and has been acquiring into the smart grid sector as of late. GE bought smart meter tech startup Remote Energy Monitoring earlier this year, smart grid network testing and management company Opal Software late last year, and plans to spend $520 million on Lineage Power, a provider of gear for data center and telecom power conversion.

Some of GE’s investments include smart grid software company Grid Net, home energy companies iControl and Tendril, energy storage company A123 Systems, and electric car maker Think Global. GE Energy Financial Services Managing Director of Venture Capital, Kevin Skillern, will be speaking at Green:Net, as will Grid Net’s EVP and Chief Strategy Officer Andres Carvallo.

While power gear companies might not have the acquisition appetite of their peers in the IT and web worlds, they’re slowly ramping up the hunt for innovation from entrepreneurs and innovative startups. For a complete list of smart grid acquisitions, check out our table here.

Image courtesy of Rennett Stowe.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Cleantech Was a Market Leader in Q4
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy
• Top 10 Greentech Companies of 2010

Last month, we covered an epic new study by Dr. Paul Epstein, the Director of Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment, and eleven other co-authors on the human health effects of coal and how much it is costing us in the United States.

The study, “Full Cost Accounting for the Life Cycle of Coal,” was the first to track the multiple human health and environmental impacts of coal from mining, electricity production, unused waste, and more. The result: coal is costing U.S. citizens up to $500,000 in health costs.

Now, Dr. Epstein and award-winning science journalist Dan Ferber have a new book out on a similar but even bigger topic, the health impacts of climate change: Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do about It.

The book, which is to be published on April 4 by the University of California Press, covers critical topics most probably don’t even consider when they think about climate change as well as solutions to it. It has already received some tremendous acclaim from leaders in this field.

Praise for Changing Planet, Changing Health

“You’ll never find a clearer or smarter explanation of one of the toughest problems the world faces as the Holocene ebbs and the warming era begins,” says Bill McKibben, who was named “the nation’s leading environmentalist” by the Boston Globe in 2010 and has numerous big achievements to his name.

“Changing Planet, Changing Health is a landmark book that will raise our consciousness about how we should respond to a growing emergency and save lives,” Al Gore says.

What Changing Planet, Changing Health Covers

The book explains how global warming is linked to cholera, malaria, Lyme disease, asthma, and other major health threats. It connects cutting-edge scientific and medical information with the true stories of people around the world in easy-to-read English.

The book also offers numerous sustainable solutions that would not only benefit human health and the environment, but would also help address other critical problems like fuel shortages, rising food costs, and financial instability.

You Can Win the Book!

We are hosting a book giveaway here on CleanTechnica. Here’s how you can enter to win: do one or more of the following (for each thing you do, you get your name in the hat) and let us know that you did so with a separate comment for each thing you do (we pick the winners by the comment number):

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3. Like CleanTechnica on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
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5. Comment below on what you think are the best solutions to climate change.

Oregon’s Bonneville Power Administration has filed a request to curtail wind generators without payment when there is surplus power on the grid from hydro and wind, according to a report by Mark Ohrenschall at Energy Prospects.

The newly announced plan is proving controversial with wind developers, unsurprisingly. A New York Times article last month estimated that wind generators could lose as much as $50 million per year under worst-case conditions of excess generation and limited transmission capacity to export power out of the region.

Wind farm developer Iberdrola Renewables wrote that the status of wind developers “as relative newcomers to the region should not deprive them of all the rights embedded in law, policy and contracts when difficulties loom.”

“All the region’s interests and stakeholders should do more than cast a wary eye on Bonneville’s proposals in this proceeding — they should collectively repudiate this arbitrary, discriminatory, and illegal proposal,” Iberdrola said.

The Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition called the draft ROD “an avoidable, and presumably inadvertent, instance of blaming the victim.”

Numerous commenters said the policy would hinder regional wind development and lead to problems financing projects and achieving renewables portfolio standards. From this perspective, the policy also would conflict with federal and other policies encouraging new renewables, which BPA is obliged to follow.

BPA has had to shut down wind farms several times (most recently during a storm in June) as there was too much energy on the grid due to high river levels and high winds combined with low demand. Electricity has to be used immediately, and when there is more being put on the grid than is being taken off and used, it creates a problem.

Although extremely uneconomical for wind developers, it is easier to shut down a wind farm than hydro or most other energy supplies. Last year, a staggering total of 25 TWh of wind power had to be curtailed around the country.

BPA said it would be a last resort measure, only after all else fails to soak up the excess, including “bilateral marketing, maintenance deferrals, using available reservoir storage, reducing balancing reserves and lowering output at Columbia Generating Station” (a nuclear power plant).

Oddly, despite an inundation of innovation in storage technologies, BPA makes no mention of any way of storing the excess wind power as an alternative. Do they not read Cleantechnica?

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Related articles:

• 25 TWh of Wind Power Idled in 2010 in US – Grid Storage Needed (cleantechnica.com)
• Bonneville Power to Wind Generators — Shut Down, and You Get Free Power (nytimes.com)
• BPA: $25,000 reward in wire theft from Kent substation (seattletimes.nwsource.com)