Lithium News

A new cable car that carries passengers up to the top of the Staubern mountain in eastern Switzerland has become the world’s first to run on solar power.

The Staubern solar-powered cable car, which is being inaugurated from April 6-8, transports passengers from the Rhine Valley up to the Staubern restaurant and guesthouse at an altitude of 1,800 metres, situated between cantons St Gallen and Appenzell Inner Rhodes.

The small cable car, which can carry only eight passengers, is being promoted as a model of sustainable tourism. It is powered by electricity produced by solar panels located at the bottom and top of the cable car.  Energy is then stocked in batteries, enabling the family-run cable car to operate all year.

Solar power continues to spread in Houston, but still lags far behind in Austin and San Antonio, where residents and businesses, encouraged by local utilities, have added solar panels much more quickly, according to research released by a national environmental advocacy group.

Houston saw modest gains in solar power capacity in 2017 — the city has 9.5 megawatts of solar power, up 19 percent from 8 megawatts in 2016, according to the survey by Environment America (One megawatt is enough to power 200 Texas homes on a hot summer day).Ssolar power capacity in Austin and San Antonio, where municipal utilities offer incentives for solar power, grew by 27 and 37 percent, respectively.

San Antonio, which has 161 megawatts installed, ranked sixth in solar capacity among 69 U.S. cities survedy by Environment America. Houston ranked 34th.

Rooftop solar has advanced slowly here because Texas does not offer incentives to residents and businesses installing panels as many other states do. The state also does not have a net metering law, which allows the owners of rooftop systems to sell excess power back to utilities and provides another incentive for adoption of the technology.

The state, however, is seeing rapid growth in large, utility scale solar power. Utilty-scale solar — defined as a system having at least one megawatt of power — is expected to nearly double this year,, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates 90 percent of the state’s grid.

ERCOT expects to solar power capacity to reach about 2,000 megawatts by the end of 2018, up from 1,100 megawatts last year and just 15 megawatts in 2010. Solar capacity is expected to reach 3,000 megawatts by 2020.

More than half of the planned solar projects are in Pecos County, a West Texas hub for utility-scale solar power. Utility-scale projects are eligible for a state tax abatement — up to 80 percent for 10 years — but the real incentive for developers is the transmission that connects remote renewable energy projects to markets in the state’s populations centers.

More transmission lines are expected to be added in 2019 and 2020, likely driving another burst of solar installations.

New Mexico has the potential to add several thousand more jobs over the next decade if it leverages its existing capacity to create high-tech innovations for the evolving solar industry, according to a California-based public policy group.

The American Jobs Project released its report Tuesday, touting New Mexico’s connection to two national laboratories, research universities and abundant sunshine.

The nonprofit group’s recommendations include improving access to capital and bolstering commercialization of innovations made at the labs and universities such as coatings and small flexible solar cells known as “solar glitter.”

The report is based on dozens of interviews with members of the state’s business community and those in the solar industry. It concludes that as energy development transforms and demand grows, New Mexico could support more than 6,800 direct jobs from manufacturing and materials development, indirect jobs from suppliers and jobs that result from spending in the local economy.

The jobs could range from electrical engineering technicians to materials scientists and industrial production managers.

“Policymakers can support these jobs by taking advantage of increasing global demand and overcoming barriers to industry growth,” the report states.

Earlier this year, another report issued by the group focused on Wisconsin and the potential there for more jobs being supported by development of sensors and controls for the advanced energy industry. That report noted that Wisconsin, like New Mexico, had taken a hit when it came to manufacturing jobs following the recession.

According to the report, New Mexico has lost one-quarter of its manufacturing jobs and ranks near the bottom when it comes to manufacturing as a share of total employment.

The University of New Mexico’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research helped guide the policy group as it studied competitive advantages in New Mexico.

Bureau director Jeff Mitchell said the idea isn’t to compete with Chinese companies that are manufacturing traditional solar panels but rather to build the state’s capacity to get in on the ground floor with technologies that have yet to hit the market.

Much of the focus in New Mexico over the past two decades has been to recruit existing businesses to the state. Mitchell said that type of economic development can just as easily be attracted away by another state offering more incentives.

He said creating an environment that supports high-tech innovation can be a more complex, long-term effort.

“If what you’re looking at is something that’s embedded in a much more complicated value chain that has an innovation aspect to it, that’s much more difficult to lift up, pick up and reassemble in mass in China or somewhere else,” Mitchell said.

New Mexico is already home to more than 2,500 solar jobs, with 29 percent being manufacturing-based, according to the report. Nationally, the state ranks eighth for its share of total solar employment.

New Mexico also has nearly 100 firms working in the photonics industry, according to the report.

Aside from the “solar glitter” developed by a former Sandia scientist, Sandia is home to the National Solar Thermal Test Facility, which supports the development of next-generation concentrating solar power.

At Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, researchers are working on technology that converts light to energy. One project involves quantum dots that are tuned to absorb different parts of the solar spectrum.

“I think what’s critical here is the suggestion that this is an industry that’s going to continue to evolve and there’s an opportunity to be involved before it becomes massively commercialized,” Mitchell said.

“SENNA has 800PS on 1200kg, that’s about the power to weight that we’re looking for.”

That’s Jens Ludmann, chief operating officer at McLaren Automotive, and he’s talking about the ideal specifications of what he hopes will be the marque’s first purely electric road car. We’ll save you the number-crunching: 800PS is 588kW, a phenomenal amount of power for something that weighs the same as a Toyota 86.

For McLaren, any less than that wouldn’t be sufficient for a proper EV supercar. It’s also coincidentally nearly the same power-to-weight ratio as enjoyed by the Rimac Concept One, but McLaren wants to do things a little differently to the Croatian supercar start-up.

“We are investigating the pure electric technology for our products,” said Ludmann, speaking to Wheels at the Geneva motor show.

“We very closely look at what the technology can deliver, however we think for a pure electric vehicle the technology is not yet mature enough – and that has to do with the battery performance.”

Energy density is the issue. According to Ludmann, current battery technology is more than sufficient for everyday driving, but can’t manage the extreme charge/discharge requirement of racetrack use while also remaining light enough to preserve chassis agility.

Supercapacitors are off the menu too – McLaren is only looking at chemical batteries for energy storage. The tipping point of battery tech becoming viable for a McLaren EV seems distant.

“With pure EV, here at McLaren we still want our customers to be able to do 10 laps at a racetrack with full power on, power off, all the time,” he said.

“To do that you need a certain energy level in the battery and a certain power level that the battery can absorb and discharge. You need a very capable technology, and the battery technology today is not there for that requirement.

“To cruise in normal traffic for a certain distance you can do with today’s batteries, but again they’re very heavy so the power to weight is not very good – it’s not as agile.”

“To talk in numbers, the battery technology should achieve 500 watt-hours per kilogram. That is a level where it really makes sense. Today we are around 180 watt-hours per kilogram. So there is significant improvement required to get it where we want it to be.”

To put that into context, the 4.5kWh battery pack developed in 2015 by Rimac for the Koenigsegg Regera – and touted as the world’s most energy-dense automotive battery at the time – weighed 75kg, giving it a power-to-weight of just 60 watt-hours per kilo.

McLaren Engineering provides batteries for the current season of Formula E that boast an energy density of 216Wh/kg – but they’re purpose-built for those electric racecars with properties that are unsuitable for a road-going application. Achieving 500Wh/kg in a street-able vehicle looks like a tall order for the near future.

When will battery tech advance to the point McLaren’s engineers are satisfied? Ludmann says battery cell suppliers are estimating a five- to ten-year timeline on high-discharge rate, high energy density power storage. According to Ludmann, it’s the only thing holding a McLaren EV back from becoming production reality – every other aspect of the hardware, from motors, suspension and braking, is already sorted.

“It’s all resolved – easy. That’s not a problem at all, all the rest is not a challenge,” he said.

“But speaking of challenges, there’s a customer expectation question on the NVH behaviour: how does the car sound?

“If you do a pure electric car, what sound can you expect? That’s another question for the products that we do. The other cars that do pure electric are just for transportation purpose. Our cars are for entertainment purposes.”

The most recent tariff threats against China made Tuesday by the Trump Administration includes many components used in the power grid, energy storage and renewables sector, but some experts say those import taxes may only have minimal effect on their industries’ exponential growth patterns.

The president has warned of a 25-percent tariff against a wide range of Chinese products, including many related to the energy sector. The Office of U.S. Trade Representative’s document alleges intellectual property theft and unfair limitations on American goods going to China.

The office’s list includes hundreds of items. From the power grid sector, those include wind-powered electric generating sets, transformers, fuses, relays and switchgear, among other things. In the energy storage sector, the list includes lithium, air-zinc and nickel-cadmium storage batteries.

Energy Storage Association CEO Kelly Speakes-Backman is busy preparing for the ESA’s annual conference beginning later this month in Boston, but she took time to comment on the potential impact of the Trump tariffs on Chinese storage exports. The inclusion of those Chinese battery components will not impact the energy storage market in a dramatic way, she said.

“Nonetheless, ESA is concerned by the battery tariffs announced yesterday because the Administration is creating unnecessary uncertainty for the U.S. energy storage market,” Speakes-Backman said in the statement. “If these tariffs are adopted, the companies and people who plan, build, and service battery storage facilities will be faced with risk that may inhibit storage deployment, even as the U.S. looks to strengthen its energy infrastructure and enhance resilience.”

Research firm IHS reported that the global energy storage market installed about 6 GW in 2017 and should reach more than 40 GW by 2022. Numerous reports estimate that the storage market grew by triple-digits in each of the past three years.

Other reports noted that the tariff list excludes inverters and solar cells. Some observers expressed relief and optimism that the impact will be minimal on solar power growth in the U.S.