A123 may have solved its short-term financial problems by raising $50 million in debt on Saturday. But the price of saving the beleaguered lithium-ion battery maker’s immediate concerns could lead to a “death by a thousand cuts” to its share price and long-term viability. That’s what some analysts are saying about A123&rsqu
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Our inaugural podcast covers a piece of highly charged news: the preliminary verdict from the Department of Commerce on the Anti-Dumping (AD) complaint which resulted in a 31 percent levy for most of the major Chinese panel manufacturers. We covered the verdict yesterday, as well as feedback from both sides of the dispute. Here's the text of the
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The U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) levied a second round of preliminary tariffs against Chinese solar module imports in the ongoing trade war between U.S. solar manufacturers and their Chinese counterparts. The following are the anti-dumping tariffs handed down in the ruling: Suntech: 31.22 percent Trina: 31.14 percent Named Chinese
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Now that AMI has become more of a steady-state business in the U.S., Gary High from Landis+Gyr talks about growth opportunities in emerging markets and innovation with utilities in the U.S.
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If, as currently predicted, Southern California Edison is unable to get its 2,200-megawatt San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) back in service in time for the heat of the summer, California’s power generation and delivery system will be profoundly tested. “An extended outage of both SONGS units may create local reliability is
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Here's a reprint of the fact sheet just issued by the Department of Commerce on the preliminary decision on the anti-dumping complaint from SolarWorld. (Click on the images to enlarge.)
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Shyam Mehta, Greentech Media's Senior Solar Analyst: While the margins are not as high as those seen in many previous U.S.-China antidumping cases (electrical blankets, steel grating), they are certainly much higher than Chinese manufacturers would have hoped for. Stacked onto the margins for countervailing duties, they amount to levels of
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The verdict is in. And it's not good for Chinese solar manufacturers. Although the official pronouncement has not been made -- we've learned from sources close to the case that the Commerce Departments's preliminary decision on SolarWorld's solar dumping petition against China has been handed down in a case that had the potential t
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A tsunami of Green Button applications is coming to an iPad, Android phone or computer near you, if you happen to be one of the 30 million or so Americans that has a utility that supports the Green Button initiative. The Green Button, which was announced last fall, is a feature that allows residential and commercial customers to download detailed
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A decision at the California Utilities Commission (CPUC) on May 24 could determine the future of distributed generation (DG) and, especially, of rooftop solar in the state. The decision involves two questions, a legality explicitly before the commission and an implied dispute between the state’s three investor owned utilities (IOUs) and rene
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Getting later-stage VC funding for a photovoltaic module company with an unproven technology can't be easy. It might barely make any sense to launch a startup in the current solar market, either. But Solexel, a Milpitas, California-based solar firm still in stealth, just closed on a $25 million C round, according to an SEC filing. The firm h
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Third-party financed residential solar — offering homeowners rooftop solar at no cost, then reaping the benefits of tax incentives and economies of scale — is all the rage these days. California saw third-party solar outpace homeowner-owned solar for the first time last year, with contenders like SolarCity, SunRun, Sungevity, Clean Power
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Standards, they’re so boring yet so essential. That is true in every industry, and particularly for energy intensive products. Just 10 years ago, a clothes washer used double the energy it does today. In the coming years, that figure will again be slashed again, thanks to the new standards released on Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Ener
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Opower, the energy management startup with the lead in U.S. utility deployments, had just expanded again. On Tuesday, it announced 15 new utility customers, bringing its list to 75 total, and six new expansions with existing customers like NSTAR and Consumers Energy. Looks as if the Arlington, Va.-based startup with about $64 million in v
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Tomorrow the U.S. Department of Commerce will announce its preliminary determination on the issue of whether Chinese solar manufacturers dumped crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells and modules into the U.S. market. But it’s important to understand that, irrespective of the alleged dumping, China’s top tier solar manufacturers do have a
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This is the first piece in a three-part series exploring thin film's place in today's solar market from the author of GTM Research's latest report, Thin Film 2012–2016: Technologies, Markets and Strategies for Survival. No other PV technology has seen as many false fits and starts or held as much promise as thin-film PV. Dur
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The mercury has just started to rise across the country, but utilities and system operators have already started to plan to cut down on peak demand. In Texas, this summer is expected to be nearly as hot as last summer, when excessive temperatures led to record-breaking energy use. To combat the weather, Centerpoint has turned to a company
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GTM Research analyst Emma Ritch and On-Ramp's COO, Jake Rasweiller, discuss the fragmented state of the communications market, the status of the DOE grant for On-Ramp's underground communications network, and the current issues and solutions around communications and data for utilities.
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Stion is having a CIGS solar panel sale. The VC- and strategic-funded CIGS solar firm sent out an email blast offering solar modules, "for as low as $.75 per watt." The email and a representative of the company would not disclose the volumes available or the terms of the offer for modules at that price. Aaron Thurlow, Stion VP of West Co
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Last year NRG installed three eVgo charging stations at its headquarters parking lot in Princeton, New Jersey. And as per the accompanying video -- David Crane the CEO of NRG, "dreams of a country with 50 million to 100 million electric cars on the road." If he also wishes for more charging stations in California, his firm --
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EEStor is the urban legend of a startup that is said to be building a supercapacitor material that would store more energy and charge and discharge faster than previous materials by a factor of ten. If true, it could change the technology of electric vehicle charging and utility-scale energy storage. We've made repeated attempts to conta
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Opt-out options for smart meters are popping up around the country, but they have all come with a cost for the customer, until now. The legislature in Vermont passed a bill that allows a customer to choose to not have a wireless smart meter at no additional cost. If there is already a smart meter in place, the customer will not be charged to remov
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Sovello, based in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, not far from Q-Cells, cannot pay its debts and has asked the Dessau insolvency court to restructure under its management, the company said in a release on its website yesterday. In early 2010, Sovello, the Q-Cells-Evergreen-REC joint venture, then on the verge of bankruptcy, was sold to German private equity fi
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A fight over the future of net energy metering (NEM) in California is expected to be decided in a May 24 California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) decision on the arcane question of how to define the NEM cap. It has become a battleground over NEM for investor-owned utilities (IOUs) and solar advocates. NEM, the solar industry’s key inc
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Awaiting a key U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) decision, American solar manufacturers are speaking out against SolarWorld’s campaign to raise tariffs on imported Chinese solar cells. Manufacturers including Dow Corning and Hemlock Semiconductor, GT Advanced Technologies, MEMC, REC Silicon, and Suntech America believe that free trade and g
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The ongoing U.S. Department of Commerce investigation against China for its solar industry subsidies that (we believe) distort the solar PV competitive and trade landscape will likely offer a couple of data points to ponder in the coming days. May 17, 2012: Preliminary determination of Anti-dumping Duty (AD) investigation. Countervailing Dutie
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A123 (Nasdaq: AONE) confirmed a record loss of $125 million in the first quarter of 2012 and said it would seek debt financing as it struggles with a massive battery recall that will take up its existing factory capacity for some time. It's the latest in a string of bad news for the Waltham, Mass.-based company around the March recall of batte
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Until just a few days ago, the Hatch five-megawatt concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) installation in New Mexico built and operated by NextEra Energy Resources held the title as the largest operating CPV plant in the U.S. Hatch has now lost that title and must find solace in maintaining its status as "Chile Capital of the World." The 30-m
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Smart thermostats have the ability to save homes and small businesses significant amounts of money. The secret is that people have to actually use the thermostats. Historically, smart thermostats have been vastly underutilized. Difficult to program and easy to override, the majority of smart thermostats were set to ‘hold’ and never rev
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Solar panels make fickle utility partners, with intermittent power output that sags and surges with every passing cloud, all of it happening out of sight of utility grid monitoring systems. As utilities see more and more solar coming onto their grids, they’re going to need some pretty sophisticated modeling and forecasting tools to keep it fro
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Sulfurcell changed its name to Soltecture in 2011, but could not change its destiny. Which, apparently, is insolvency proceedings. According to a release, "Having extensively explored new financing options, the executive management saw no other viable option for averting the company’s impending insolvency at the present time.&q
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Image Credit: The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Rembrandt The U.S. and China remain locked in a difficult trade dispute on solar panel manufacturing. Right now we're in a lull between the Countervailing Duties (CVD) and the Anti-Dumping (AD) judgments. That might not sound like much of a cliffhange
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As smart meter deployments wrap up in certain areas, the time has come to leverage the new systems with novel customer plans. In Texas, where smart meters have been installed in most of the state, TXU Energy has just launched its latest time-of-use plan, TXU Energy Free Nights. Much like the calling plans that proliferated during telecom deregul
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Highlights from the 2012 Networked Grid at The Washington Duke Inn on April 4-5, 2012. Hear what attendees had to say about the two-day summit on smart grid.
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How do you accurately assess and effectively manage the costs of integrating the new kind of variability from renewables like wind and solar into transmission systems that are habituated to the more familiar standards of fossil and nuclear generation? The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is considering a new formula for such a cost as
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SAS Senior Director and GM of the Utilities Business Unit, Carlos Romero, explains how experience from other industries allows SAS to help utilities gain ROI from analytics.
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If one needs a rationale for increased energy independence for any non-OPEC nation, here it is. Based on projections from the EIA's May 2012 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) could earn "an estimated $1,154 billion of net oil export revenues in 2012 and $1,117 billion
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There’s a key barrier between the technology that runs modern HVAC, lighting and other energy-intensive building systems today, and the quest to make it run more efficiently: a lack of energy data. Beyond the meters that record the entire building energy use, and perhaps some sub-metering for individual offices or building systems, there just
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S&C's Mike Edmunds dives into the technology behind EPB's distribution automation project -- which won Greentech Media's "Best DA Project in North America" in the Networked Grid 2012 Utility Awards -- along with the current prospects for community energy storage.
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This is what the $100 million that NRG Energy is obligated by a legal settlement to invest in battery electric vehicle (BEV) charging infrastructure in California will buy for plug-in car owners: A $50.5 million investment in 200 eVgo Freedom Station sites installed at carefully chosen commercial and retail locations, each with a level-three DC
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