Greentech Media Bids Farewell

Sonder Agency

This is my last article at Greentech Media. Thank you all, and look for me on Twitter @jeffsaintjohn to keep in touch. * * *Greentech Media closes its doors this week. But the energy transformation it’s been chronicling for the past 14 years is just getting started. Since its 2007 founding, this site you’re on now grew from a slim-staffed… Read more

Shell Bets on Batteries for Ultra-Fast EV Charging

Sonder Agency

Shell will trial a battery-backed ultra-fast charging system at a Dutch filling station, with tentative plans to adopt the format more widely to ease the grid pressures likely to come with mass-market electric vehicle adoption. By boosting the output of the chargers from the battery, the impact on the grid is dramatically reduced. That means avoiding expensive grid infrastructure upgrades. It also… Read more

New Plans Reveal How China’s Grid Is Prepping for Net-Zero Carbon

Sonder Agency

In September 2020, China’s President Xi Jinping told the U.N. General Assembly that the country is aiming to be carbon-neutral by 2060.In December he set a 2030 wind and solar capacity goal of 1,200 gigawatts, up from around 450 GW today. The publication of China’s 14th five-year plan, covering 2021-2025, is expected this month. It… Read more

Report: ‘Grid-Enhancing Technologies’ Could Save $5B per Year by Boosting US Renewables Capacity

Sonder Agency

The U.S. could double its capacity for new wind and solar power, save billions of dollars and cut millions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions from its generation fleets if federal incentives can be aligned to deploy a suite of technologies to unlock the full capacity of transmission grids.  So says a new report from The Brattle Group, modeling… Read more

Grid Edge M&A Alert: Sentient Acquires Varentec for Dynamic Grid Control

Sonder Agency

The trend for Silicon Valley startups applying advanced technologies to solve utility grid problems is clear: Go big or stay home. After a decade of eking out a niche in the world of advanced distribution grid power controls, Silicon Valley startup Varentec has sold its key assets for an undisclosed sum. The buyer is Sentient Energy, another Silicon Valley… Read more

Winter Storm Forces Blackouts Across Texas

Sonder Agency

Unprecedented winter storms have hit Texas so hard and forced so many power plants offline that rolling grid outages that began Sunday night have grown into hours-long blackouts leaving about 2.5 million customers without power on Monday morning. Until those power plants can be brought back online, it’s unclear how many people will be left powerless and… Read more

Report Calls for a Ground-Up Overhaul of Federal Transmission Grid Policy

Sonder Agency

The policies that govern U.S. transmission grid planning and investment can’t support the country’s need for an unprecedented expansion of clean energy. Federal regulators need to declare the current paradigm “unjust and unreasonable,” and implement a new one to spur hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in a nation-spanning transmission build-out over the next… Read more

A Vibrant Cleantech Startup Ecosystem Takes Root in India

Sonder Agency

This is the second article in a series. Read part one here. Read part three here.It’s easy to see what’s motivating India’s emerging ecosystem of sustainable technology startups with a glance out the window from the office of Sangam Ventures in Gurugram, just outside of Delhi.Several floors below the firm’s balcony, power lines crisscross over piles of… Read more

Australia Looks to Smart Inverters to Cram More PV Into World’s Top Solar Market

Sonder Agency

The world’s top market for rooftop solar is looking for new ways to add distributed PV to its electricity system by fine-tuning its interplay with the power grid. This year, utilities in the Australian states South Australia and Victoria will roll out a "flexible exports" pilot. The AUD $4.8 million (USD $3.7 million) project, which will cover 600… Read more

Pearl Street Technologies: A New Way to Optimize the Transmission Grid

Sonder Agency

The modern, renewable-energy-rich power grid is an increasingly complicated machine to model. Maybe technology born of the massively complicated world of designing computer chips can help. That’s the genesis of Pearl Street Technologies’ approach to analyzing the complexities of power flows and planning parameters for the transmission grid. Its Suite of Unified Grid Analyses with Renewables (Sugar) software… Read more