Posts Tagged: "solar power"

Chinese solar farms make country a global leader in renewables despite world’s deadliest air quality

The Anhui solar farm is the world’s largest floating farm but its 40 MW capacity is much lower than other large photovoltaic power stations across the world. However, news reports have focused on the fact that the Anhui farm is the latest in a string of renewable energy plant construction projects, which have been ramping up in China. In recent years, that country’s central government has made steps towards building massive solar farms on land, including a 2,550-hectare plant in the Gobi Desert.

The new Elon Musk master plan for Tesla reeks of overconfidence

Elon Musk’s updated master plan reeks of overconfidence. He envisions entire fleets of autonomous Tesla vehicles while missing recent sales targets by thousands of units. He wants to pump massive amounts of money into R&D for autonomous technologies and new types of vehicles, but the company is having trouble with bleeding warranty costs which are double the amount seen at Ford or GM. The lack of timeline details in the master plan was not well received by financial analysts and Tesla stock was down by 3 percent in the days after the announcement.

Signs of turbulence in Musk’s business holdings grow as SolarCity reduces jobs commitment at Buffalo, NY plant

SolarCity was a little more muted on the topic of how many jobs it would create in Buffalo, and yet those promises are still being broken. News reports from the area pinned a definitive number on exactly how many jobs the Buffalo plant will create: 1,460. This included, according to news reports, at least 1,000 production jobs to create shifts of 300 to 400 workers which could operate the plant around the clock. A reported 400 jobs would be for engineers and require at least a bachelor’s degree. Residents of the city (including this writer) can tell you that, although the city has shown signs of pulling itself out of a decades-long depression, many hopes involving Buffalo’s immediate economic futures have been pinned on SolarCity, and the state has backed that hope up to the tune of $750 million. This represents most of the cash set aside for Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion initiative which is currently under heavy investigation by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara based on a series of subpoenas issued by federal prosecutors over the past year.

America’s aging electrical grid could benefit from smart grid tech

With an average price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour (Kwh) as of January 2016, the American electrical grid system still does a good job of getting electrical energy to consumers in a cost-effective fashion. However, the electrical grid is an aging infrastructure in desperate need of modernization. A 2013 report card issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a D+ grade to the country’s electricity infrastructure despite increased investment since 2005. A report card synopsis cites the age of distribution systems, some of which were in use during the 1880s, as well as weather events and limited maintenance as serious issues. As more electrical grid resources become connected to the Internet in the race to develop smarter grids, cyber attacks will become an area of growing concern, which utility providers will have to stay ahead of.

In midst of stiff corporate headwinds, Toshiba maintains spot as leading innovator

Toshiba exists among the giants of the U.S. patent landscape, placing sixth among all companies in terms of patents received from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2015; it took home 2,627 U.S. patents in 2015. This sixth-place showing sees Toshiba improving upon its 2014 rankings, where it took in the seventh-most U.S. patents. In terms of total U.S. patents, however, Toshiba actually earned less than it did in 2014, when it brought in 2,850 patents. In the three months leading up to this writing, Toshiba earned 677 U.S. patents, according to Innography’s patent portfolio analysis tools. The text cluster indicates that there remains a great deal of focus on developing semiconductor layer and memory technologies at Toshiba, although activities in control units, image processing and image data are also prominent.