Energy

You may think you know how much electricity you're using, but there's a whole lot more you could--and should--know.

Despite living in the information age, most of us are basically in the dark when it comes to electricity bills, with just a rough idea of how much we consume every month and what it will cost.

Over the last few weeks, I've been testing a whole-house energy monitor from startup Wattvision, which actually answers basic questions, such as how much and when you consume electricity and how it trends over time. I also hooked up my home's real-time electricity feed to another startup's analytics Web service called PlotWatt to get more detail on what's consuming energy.

A couple of hardware gadgets made it all possible, but using the services showed me that a lot of the action in home energy is moving to software and up into the cloud. In the case of energy monitors, back-end analytics can provide insights and recommendations a simple metering device can't. And if you have a smart thermostat or home automation system, you can remotely control your heating, cooling, lights, and appliances from a smart phone or PC.

But before getting into the gadgetry, one has to ask: why bother with energy monitoring? Is it green? Does it help me lower my bills? Is there a good payback? … Read more

A group of scientists has gone offshore in an effort to bypass the food-versus-fuel debate.

Startup Bio Architecture Lab today published a paper in Science it claims will turn seaweed into a viable feedstock for fuel and other chemicals.

Making fuel and chemicals from crops such as corn and sugar cane requires significant quantities of land and fresh water, creating competition for resources with agriculture. Macroalgae such as seaweed, by contrast, grow in salt water and are relatively productive energy sources because they are 60 percent carbohydrates and don't contain lignin, which binds up useful molecules in many earthbound … Read more

Electric carmaker Coda Automotive thinks its car batteries are versatile enough to buffer the electric grid.

The company today announced a venture called Coda Energy, a business unit created to build stationary energy storage systems.

The expertise Coda acquired in designing lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles translates directly to the grid energy storage world, the company said. Its battery system includes an active thermal management to keep batteries at a safe temperature and it has a manufacturing partnership with Lishen in China to make products at large scale. It plans to make modular energy storage systems that can be … Read more

For many, the ballyhooed smart home of connected devices will start with the lowly thermostat.

Startup EnergyHub today is releasing data from a study of customers who bought a Wi-Fi enabled thermostats tied to EnergyHub's Web service. It found that letting consumers operate the thermostat from a familiar PC or smartphone application, rather than on the thermostat itself, makes a dramatic difference in how often the programmable features are used.

An Internet-connected thermostat also allows people to remotely control home heating and cooling. Being able to adjust home temperature from the office or commute, for example, appears to be … Read more

Perhaps you'd be more willing to buy an electric car if you knew that you could sell those pricey batteries down the road.

Nissan and electric power company ABB yesterday announced a partnership to test the technical and commercial feasibility of repurposing used EV batteries for energy storage on the grid and in homes. ABB will work with a joint venture called 4R Energy (for reuse, refabricate, resell, recycle) created by Nissan North America and industrial conglomerate Suminoto to research secondary uses of EV batteries.

The partnership intends to make a prototype stationary lithium ion battery system with at … Read more

Researchers think they've found a low-cost machine for producing materials that can convert waste heat into electricity: the microwave oven.

A team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last week published a paper in Nature Materials that describes an improved method for making thermoelectric materials. Members of the team have also created a startup company to commercialize the technology.

Thermoelectric devices are already in use today in portable coolers or to heat car seats, either by making electricity from heat or using electric power for cooling. Many scientists and engineers are trying to improve the efficiency of these devices and … Read more

A solar farm in California will be the largest to use an emerging type of thin-film solar technology, another competitive force bringing down the price of solar.

Japan-based Solar Frontier will supply solar panels built with solar cells that use a combination of copper, indium, and selenide. The project, which will produce 150 megawatts at peak times, will be in Kearn County, California and is expected to be completed next June.

Project developer Enxco and Solar Frontier said the thin-film technology has a favorable year-round energy production, not only during its peak output. The technology is "compelling to major … Read more

Pushing to stay one step ahead of rivals, First Solar today set a new mark for the efficiency of its solar panels.

The company said that it achieved 14.4 percent efficiency in converting sunlight to electric power for a panel in its research labs. At the individual solar-cell level, the efficiency is 17.3 percent. (Solar cells are assembled and linked together in a solar panel).

For solar-panel manufacturers, efficiency and production costs are the two primary levers to differentiate products. With the ramp-up of well-financed Chinese manufacturers, the price of solar panels has plummeted over the past three … Read more

Startup Joule has secured the money to take its potentially breakthrough biofuel technology to a larger scale.

The company today announced that undisclosed private and institutional investors led a $70 million funding to build a larger demonstration plant. The announcement was made at the Technology Leaders in Future Energy conference in Abu Dhabi. Founding investor Flagship Ventures also joined the round.

Founded in 2007, Joule took a clean-sheet approach to making biofuels which now are primarily made from corn or sugar cane. Its process uses a genetically engineered version of cyanobacteria to produce diesel or ethanol using only sunlight, water, … Read more