Tesla is a business built, in part, on government regulations and incentives, from a Department of Energy loan guarantee in 2009 to the regulatory credits it sells to other automakers, which have driven a third of its $32 billion in profits since 2012. Now, the company’s energy business — a rare bright spot amid faltering demand […]
Tesla pleads for Senate to spare its booming energy business Read More »
Plenty of materials — from sulfur and sodium to manganese and organic molecules — have tried to topple the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery. And, so far, they’ve all failed. Organic batteries, which are built from some of the most abundant chemicals here on Earth, including carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, has been perhaps the most frustrating failure.
XL Batteries is using petrochemical infrastructure to store solar and wind power Read More »
Renewables notched another win as Amazon signed contracts to buy 476 megawatts of wind and solar on the Iberian Peninsula. The power purchase agreements with multinational utility Iberdrola should help Amazon feed new data centers it has planned in the region. Last May, the company said it would invest $17 billion in infrastructure projects, including
Amazon continues renewable energy spree with 476 MW purchase Read More »
Phillip Man was burned out. He had founded a watch trading company with his flatmate, but the grind was wearing him down. “We did that for ten years,” Man said. “It’s very difficult to keep yourself motivated when you know the whole reason for your operation is to sell expensive stuff to wealthy people.” He
Former watch trader is now building the AWS of grid storage, Terralyr Read More »
Phillip Man was burned out. He had founded a watch trading company with his flatmate, but the grind was wearing him down. “We did that for ten years,” Man said. “It’s very difficult to keep yourself motivated when you know the whole reason for your operation is to sell expensive stuff to wealthy people.” He
Former watch trader is now building the AWS of grid storage, Terralayr Read More »
Meet Storio, a French startup that’s focused on providing smart energy storage for commercial and industrial customers. Founded in 2023, the startup raised a €5 million seed round earlier this year (around $5.5 million at current exchange rates) and has signed its first client. Storio believes solar panels have a bright future. But the company
Storio is helping other businesses unlock more value from solar energy Read More »
When Elon Musk published Tesla’s first “master plan” in 2006, it seemed a bit far-fetched that batteries would end up changing the automotive industry, much less global power production and consumption. Today, as electric vehicles continue to gain market share and massive batteries displace smoke-spewing power plants from the electrical grid, that notion seems less
Zeno emerges from stealth to crib Tesla’s master plan for Africa and beyond Read More »
Nearly 20 years ago, Andrew Bissell was sitting in the living room of his beachfront home in the Edinburgh area. He and his wife, Susan Lang-Bissell, had just sold their medical imaging startup, and he was pondering his future. “Do we retire or do we go again?” Bissell told TechCrunch. Around that time, he was
Sunamp’s thermal battery uses a chemical found in salt-and-vinegar potato chips Read More »
Wind and solar power have become so cheap to install, and at times so abundant, that utilities don’t know what to do with it all. Sometimes they’ll even pay the owners of other power plants not to generate electricity. In response, scientists and engineers have been racing to find inexpensive ways to store that power
Cache Energy’s mysterious white pellets could help kill coal and natural gas Read More »
Cindy Taff was standing out in the flat expanse of Starr County, Texas, in early 2022 when she felt it. “It was literally vibrating the ground,” she told TechCrunch. “That was an ‘ah-ha’ moment for me.” Her startup, Sage Geosystems, was testing equipment used to harvest heat from deep in the earth. The team had
