The Week in Cleantech (July 2 to July 6) – Is The Grid The Next Alt Energy Fontier?

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2024
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On Tuesday, Dallas Kachan at Inside Greentech gave us the scoop on a recent GE move (NYSE:GE) to gain greater access to the European wind market. Interesting how GE is leveraging its capacity in the finance realm to complement its Ecomagination efforts. On Tuesday, Chris Coad at Seeking Alpha wondered whether high gas prices where increasing demand for hybrids. The reverse begs asking: would a collapse in gas prices lead to a material drop in demand for hybrid cars? On Wednesday, Dan Lewis at AEI directed us to an interesting article on vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRBs) (PDF document). While this piece focuses primarily on the potential of VRB technology and on VRB Power Systems (TSE:VRB.V or VRBPF.PK), a leader in this field, the main take-away is the growing need to develop medium- and large-scale power storage solutions. This is so because wind and solar are variable power sources and this variability can threaten the stability of power grids. Competitor technologies to VRBs include flywheels, which we have discussed in the past. Given the projected growth for wind and solar over the next decade, this is an ancillary market that investors should keep an eye on. On Thursday, Tyler Hamilton at Clean Break told us about the new kid on the cleantech media blockGreentech Media. The more competition, the better! On Thursday, Rob Hsiung at Clean Times told us about South Korea’s plans for solar growth. That feed-in tariff is indeed absurd – might be interesting to find out which solar companies have exposure to South Korea. On Friday, Dana Childs at Inside Greentech told us how Canadians had just invested another $149M in cleantech. As stated in the article: “these funding announcements are keenly watched by North American venture capitalists as a source of high-quality investment opportunities.” This is also interesting for public market investors wishing identify some potentially interesting future opportunities. The Week in Cleantech is a weekly roundup of our favorite cleantech and alt energy blog posts and stories from across the web. If you know of a good piece that you think should be included here, don’t hesitate to let us know!

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