General Motors announced plans to invest $246 million to begin manufacturing electric motors at the company’s transmission factory in Baltimore, Maryland. The company said electric motors could become as important to the company as internal combustion engines and that manufacturing the motors in-house will help to lower costs and improve efficiency. Expansion of the Baltimore plant will be supported in part by a $105 million grant awarded by the Department of Energy in August. And, of course, the entire company is being supported by a $50 billion investment made by the US government. GM is the first major automaker with plans to build electric motors in the US, and manufacturing is scheduled to begin in 2013.
Industry groups for the US wind industry and the US geothermal power industry separately released 2009 statistics this week. Despite economy-wide recession, the wind industry broke all previous records by installing nearly 10,000 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity. That’s roughly equivalent to the amount of new natural gas-fired capacity added for the year. The American Wind Energy Association gave full credit to the Recovery Act for keeping project financing alive. However, they noted that manufacturing in the industry is down for the year and called for long-term incentives and a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) to keep the industry growing.
The Geothermal Energy Association said the number of US projects in development increased by 46% in 2009. The US currently has a total of about 3,152 MW of operating geothermal power. With the new projects underway this year a total of more than 6,400 MW are now in development in 14 US States. The GEA also credited the financing incentives in the Recovery Act, as well as $342 million allocated by the Department of Energy to research and development, which is expected to boost emerging technologies in Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS).
Better Place, the California startup that is working to create charging infrastructures for electric cars around the world, announced new equity financing of $350 million. The deal, led by the bank HSBC, marks one of the largest clean tech investments in history, and brings total funding for Better Place to $1.25 billion.
Better Place said it is on schedule for 2011 launches in Israel and Denmark. And the new funds will be used to expand into other European and Asian markets.
Tessera Solar and its sister company Stirling Energy Systems (SES) unveiled their first concentrating solar power plant in Arizona. The system is relatively small at 1.5 MW but it is the first commercial scale deployment of the SunCatcher systems, which is a unique form of solar thermal technology. The systems consist of large parabolic mirrored dishes that follow the sun. The dishes concentrate sunlight onto a Stirling engine that converts the heat into electricity without the use of fluid and steam-driven turbines. Tesera has 1,500 MW of projects in the pipeline in California and Texas, and investors will likely be keen to see how well this first plant performs, as it is truly a one-of-a-kind technology.
RWE Innogy announced plans to build a factory to produce biomass
pellets in the south Georgia. The plant will
have an annual production capacity of 750,000 tons, making it the
biggest of its type in the world. The EUR 120 million project is in collaboration with BMC Management, a Swedish firm specializing in biomass manufacturing. The plant is schedule to begin operations in 2011, at which time the pellets will be shipped from the port of Savannah to European markets, where the demand to replace coal-fired power with biomass-fired power is higher than in the US. RWE Innogy said wood growth in Georgia forests is currently ahead of consumption due to downturns in the lumber and paper industries.
GA-Solar, a subsidiary of Spain’s Corporación Gestamp, announced plans
to build a photovoltaic solar plant in New Mexico with a capacity of
up to 300 MW. The company said it will invest $1 billion in the development of the project to be located on 2,500 acres in Guadalupe County. To date, only a handful of photovoltaic projects this size have been proposed in the US. The company offered relatively few details other than to say the project would likely take four years to complete. Corporación Gestamp is a $5 billion company in the steel, automotive, storage and logistics industries.
North Carolina-based utility Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK) announced plans to purchase a 14-MW photovoltaic solar project located in San Antonio, Texas. The company is developing a rooftop solar program in North Carolina, but this will be its first utility-scale power plant. juwi solar currently owns the project, which will employ ground-mounted thin film solar panels made by First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR). Electricity from the plant will be sold to San Antonio’s CPS Energy, and Duke said construction is likely to be completed by 4Q10.
Celebrity entrepreneur Ted Turner announced a strategic alliance with Southern Company (NYSE: SO) to pursue development of renewable energy projects in the US. According to a release they intend to start with photovoltaic installations in the Southwest US. But they also will explore the possibility of projects on land owned by Turner, who is the largest individual landowner in North America with more
than two million acres. Although Southern Company has yet to do much with solar energy, Turner isn’t new to the industry. In 2007, he sold Turner Renewable Energy to First Solar (NYSE: FSLR) for $34.3 million, when First Solar began expanding from manufacturing into plant development.
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