Metals Tech

Porsche may be known for sports cars — and sporty SUVs, lately — but it wants to be known for performance-oriented electric cars in the near future.

The German automaker announced Monday it would double its investment in plug-in hybrids and pure EVs by 2022 to more than 6 billion euros ($7.43 billion). Along with the already pledged Mission E pure electric due next year, the company promises to develop other vehicles on that platform. Porsche will further invest in what it’s calling “new technologies, charging infrastructure and smart mobility.” Porsche got into the smart mobility game last year with the Porsche Passport pilot program that launched in Atlanta.

“Alongside development of our models with combustion engines, we are setting an important course for the future with this decision,” Oliver Blume, chairman of the Porsche AG executive board, said in a statement following the organization’s move.

A big chunk of the investment is going into the Mission E development, based on the 2015 concept car, which will be Porsche’s first full EV. The company has already said it would go from 0-62 mph in less than 3.5 seconds and a range of 500 kilometers (310 miles) based on European measurements. In short, the Mission E is Porsche’s mission to build a true Tesla Model S rival. Therefore, its investment is also covering upgrades to its main assembly plant in Zuffenhausen, Germany for the production of EVs.

But Porsche is also devoting funds to creating a charging network, especially important since it stated again on Monday that the Mission E would be able to charge in as little as 15 minutes. In addition to being part of the Volkswagen Group’s charging investments, Porsche said all of its dealers would be part of the charging network.

It may be strange to think of Porsche as an electric vehicle company, but it’s offered performance-oriented plug-in hybrids for some time now, including cars like the bonkers quick Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid we drove last year. Expect more plug-ins of Porsche’s traditional models, as well as many permutations of the Mission E, and a company that’s trying to maintain its heritage as all automakers electrify.

Byton, the new China-based company that unveiled a tech-centric all-electric SUV concept at the big tech trade show CES in January, is now tapping some outside experts to bring self-driving car technology into their future vehicles.

Byton announced Monday that it has partnered with self-driving vehicle technology startup Aurora. The buzzy startup, led some of the best minds in self-driving cars, will work on bringing Level 4 autonomous vehicle capabilities into Byton vehicles. The two companies will conduct a pilot deployment of Aurora’s L4 autonomous driving systems on Byton vehicles in the “next two years.” The pilot will be in California, Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said. Urmson previously led the Google self-driving project before it spun out to become Waymo, a business under parent Alphabet.

Level 4 is a designation by SAE International that means the car takes over all of the driving in certain conditions. In Level 5 autonomy, a vehicle is driverless in any and all circumstances and environments.

The two companies will also “explore” using Aurora’s self-driving system in Byton’s series production vehicles, which aren’t expected to be in mass production until the end of 2019 (at the earliest).

The announcement is the third partnership for Aurora, which launched a little more than a year ago. Aurora works with automakers to design and develop a package of sensors, software, and data services—the “full stack,” in industry lingo—needed to deploy fully autonomous vehicles. The company has been working with Volkswagen for months on integrating its self-driving system into custom-designed electric shuttles for VW’s new Moia brand. Volkswagen aims to launch commercial fleets of self-driving electric vehicles in two to five cities beginning in 2021, beginning with Hamburg and Silicon Valley.

Aurora is also working with Hyundai.

The partnership shows Aurora’s progression from secretive startup to player in the race to commercialize self-driving vehicles. And it reveals more about Byton. However, the China-based startup still has a long way—and lots of money left to raise—before its ambitions become actual products that customers can buy and drive, or be driven by, around.

The company has raised $320 million from outside investors. Additional sources of funding from lenders will be used to help build the factory in Nanjing. Byton, formerly Future Mobility Corporation, plans to raise additional capital from investors in a Series B round this year. Construction on the factory began in September 2017 and the building is expected to be completed by the third quarter of this year. Trial production will begin in early 2019.

Sales are set to begin in China in 2019, and sales in the United States and Europe to start in 2020.

Byton was founded by Carsten Breitfeld, the former head of the BMW i8 program, and Daniel Kirchert, the former managing director of Infiniti China and a longtime BMW executive. Not a lot was known about the company until recently.

In January, Breitfeld and Kirchert revealed the medium-ish SUV crossover that they call an SIV, or “smart intuitive vehicle.” The concept vehicle, which the founders say represents about 80% of what the production vehicle will look like, is loaded with technology. There’s a sweeping display that takes up the entire dashboard, another touchscreen on the steering wheel, “smart” connected features that will let future customers use hand gestures, and voice commands via Amazon’s Alexa assistant to control aspects of the car. The vehicle will even monitor the driver’s heart rate, weight, oxygen saturation, or blood pressure.

The SUV will come with Level 3 autonomous capabilities, Byton says. This designation, determined by SAE International, is what’s described as conditional automation. This means that the car can handle most aspects of driving in the right conditions with the expectation that the human driver will respond when asked to intervene.

The Nissan brand will get four full electric vehicles and Infiniti will receive two over the next five years, a top Nissan Motor Co. powertrain executive says.

Those six battery-powered vehicles are the Japanese automaker’s share of the 12 EVs that are now planned for Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi through 2022, according to a multiyear business plan announced last September by alliance CEO Carlos Ghosn.

Ghosn’s business plan did not break down the number by brand. But Toshihiro Hirai, Nissan’s corporate vice president for powertrain and EV engineering, detailed Nissan’s share of the arrangement.

The six Nissan vehicles include only full EVs, not hybrid powertrains such as the company’s new e-Power system.

E-Power, introduced in the Japan-market Nissan Note in 2017, is a range-extender hybrid that uses a small gasoline engine to generate power for an electric motor that drives the wheels.

A Nissan survey of drivers found that 95 percent of respondents thought e-Power made the Note more fun to drive, Hirai said.

The EV plan reflects only the next five years. Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa separately last month revealed a longer range plan in which, starting in 2021, every new vehicle coming out of Infiniti will be either an EV or an e-Power system vehicle.

By the time some companies are ready to go public, their names are household words, synonymous with red-hot products, snappy logos or larger-than-life founders. Think Facebook, Visa or Blue Apron.

Then there’s Indianapolis-based IEA Energy Services LLC, which is about to go public in a merger worth up to $345 million. Its leaders are the first to admit their company’s name might draw blank stares.

“We’ve kind of flown under the radar in Indiana, that’s for sure,” CEO J.P. Roehm said.

What IEA does is build wind- and solar-energy projects around the United States, including the 9,000-acre Benton County Wind Farm north of Lafayette, along U.S. 41. IEA is a big player in a booming industry, but hardly a household name.

Part of the reason might be that it spent most of its 71 years under a different name, White Construction, toiling in the unglamorous business of building roads, excavating sewage lagoons and erecting buildings.

How the company evolved from bulldozing dirt to erecting gigantic wind turbines is a tale of corporate reinvention and plenty of hustle, part of a deliberate effort to keep up with changing times.

In the process, IEA has built itself into one of the nation’s largest providers of infrastructure services for renewable energy. It has completed more than 190 wind and solar projects in 35 states, including more than 14 gigawatts of wind-energy generating capacity—enough to power 10 million homes.

These days, IEA is riding a huge wave, fueled by the nation’s continuing embrace of wind energy. In 2016, the company rang up revenue of $602.6 million, nearly triple that of a year earlier, $204.6 million. Big customers include huge energy companies, such as Enel Green Power, NextEra Energy and Algonquin Power.

And the company’s future, along with the national outlook for the wind sector overall, seems bright. According to a January report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, wind is expected to keep growing at a steady clip, surpassing hydro this year as the nation’s largest renewable-electricity generation source.

That’s because hydroelectric projects have remained flat in the past decade, while new wind projects are expected to grow 9 percent this year and 8 percent next year.

It might be fitting for IEA to be based in Indiana, home to more than 1,000 wind turbines, with installed wind capacity of 1,897 megawatts. Indiana ranks 12th among states in production, in part because its flat terrain, especially in northern Indiana, leads to higher windspeeds.

The state’s wind sector continues to click along, although it has cooled a bit from its red-hot days of a decade ago, said Douglas Gotham, director of the State Utility Forecasting Group based at Purdue University.

“It’s not exploding like it was,” Gotham said. “But it’s still increasing, maybe 10 percent a year.”

And IEA said it expects business to grow, fueled by demand for construction and engineering services to a flurry of wind projects around the country.

“Industry experts, including the U.S. Department of Energy, are predicting significant growth in renewable-energy production capacity over the coming decade,” the company said in a recent government filing.

Family affair

Yet IEA has been in the wind business fewer than 15 years, making it both a young player and an old hand at the same time in a quickly growing market.

In the process, IEA has built itself into one of the nation’s largest providers of infrastructure services for renewable energy. It has completed more than 190 wind and solar projects in 35 states, including more than 14 gigawatts of wind-energy generating capacity—enough to power 10 million homes.

These days, IEA is riding a huge wave, fueled by the nation’s continuing embrace of wind energy. In 2016, the company rang up revenue of $602.6 million, nearly triple that of a year earlier, $204.6 million. Big customers include huge energy companies, such as Enel Green Power, NextEra Energy and Algonquin Power.

And the company’s future, along with the national outlook for the wind sector overall, seems bright. According to a January report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, wind is expected to keep growing at a steady clip, surpassing hydro this year as the nation’s largest renewable-electricity generation source.

That’s because hydroelectric projects have remained flat in the past decade, while new wind projects are expected to grow 9 percent this year and 8 percent next year.

It might be fitting for IEA to be based in Indiana, home to more than 1,000 wind turbines, with installed wind capacity of 1,897 megawatts. Indiana ranks 12th among states in production, in part because its flat terrain, especially in northern Indiana, leads to higher windspeeds.

The state’s wind sector continues to click along, although it has cooled a bit from its red-hot days of a decade ago, said Douglas Gotham, director of the State Utility Forecasting Group based at Purdue University.

“It’s not exploding like it was,” Gotham said. “But it’s still increasing, maybe 10 percent a year.”

And IEA said it expects business to grow, fueled by demand for construction and engineering services to a flurry of wind projects around the country.

“Industry experts, including the U.S. Department of Energy, are predicting significant growth in renewable-energy production capacity over the coming decade,” the company said in a recent government filing.

Family affair

Yet IEA has been in the wind business fewer than 15 years, making it both a young player and an old hand at the same time in a quickly growing market.

On the way to the hunting grounds in the Dakotas, White noticed a small wind farm going up in western Iowa. He stopped the bus and went over to look. What he saw looked familiar yet intriguing enough to make him pay attention.

“It was road building. It was large foundations, both of which we had been doing for years, both in industrial plants and as part of large bridges,” Roehm said. “Those wind turbines take large cranes to put up, and Buddy was like … ‘I have one of those cranes.’”

“That’s what gave him the spark. He came back and told those of us in the company at the time, ‘I’ve figured out how we’re going to reinvent ourselves.’ And literally, we started knocking on every door that we could find of people who were building [wind farms] at the time, which were far and few between.”

The national wind market was small—equivalent to one good-size project today. But White saw a big opportunity. The company hired a construction director from a turbine manufacturer in 2004 to try to get a foot in the door of an unfamiliar business.

Within two weeks, the company won its first project. Two weeks later, it won another. Three weeks after that, it got its third.

Industry takes off

Although White Construction hustled to get those jobs, it was also reaping the benefits of good timing. The wind industry was just emerging. Wind-farm developers were looking for skilled contractors who could build roads, pour foundations and erect the giant towers and blades.

“It was exactly the right time,” Roehm said. “A year earlier would have been too early. A year later would have been too late.”

Around this time, White Construction began lobbying the Indiana General Assembly to enact a standard for renewable electricity. Other states had passed laws requiring electricity generators to have a minimum amount of their output, say 10 percent or 15 percent, from renewable sources.

Such a move would have created a guaranteed market for renewable-energy companies, including White. But some environmentalists here said Buddy White and his team showed an unusual dedication to the mission.

“I was impressed by White because they were so passionate about Indiana, so keen to see the state be at the front,” said Jesse Kharbanda, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council. “You would see White Construction showing up at any kind of event or trade fair where they could showcase their ability to erect wind turbines.”

In the late 2000s, Indiana lawmakers came close to setting such a standard. One year, such a move to create a renewable electricity standard of 10 percent by 2018 passed both chambers, only to die in conference committee.

Yet White had an entire country in which to look for business, and it took advantage of a market with few big competitors. The company grew revenue sixfold over the next half-dozen years.

Private-equity buyer

Soon, a private-equity firm, Oaktree Capital Management LP, based in Los Angeles, took notice. Buddy White, who owned 100 percent of the company, had been looking for a way to cash out, and Oaktree, founded in 1995, was looking for a way to beef up its energy portfolio.

Oaktree bought White Construction for an undisclosed price in 2011. In connection with the sale, Oaktree set up a company called IEA (for Infrastructure & Energy Alternatives) with the goal of acquiring companies providing engineering and construction services, with a focus on wind and solar.

Officials from Oaktree did not return several calls to IBJ seeking comment.

Today, IEA’s website is full of colorful photos of projects completed, from Texas to Hawaii. The company has about 2,000 employees during the peak construction season. IEA estimates it builds 30 percent of the U.S. wind energy market and has erected more than 7,200 wind turbines.

The company also constructs solar projects and does general engineering, but it counts on wind projects for 80 percent of revenue.

For all its blistering growth, IEA faces its share of risks. Its recent filings spell out dozens of risk factors, such as potential decrease in federal incentives for renewable-energy projects, rising labor costs and the possibility of miscalculating the cost of big projects.

Some energy experts say the wind sector has plenty of challenges to keep even sharp operators on their toes.

“A big challenge is that wind is intermittent,” said Phil O’Connor, president of PROactive Strategies, a Chicago energy consulting firm, and former Illinois public service commissioner. “There’s not a steady output. So wind generation often depends on energy storage, which is in its early stages.”

Despite the challenges, IEA has shown an ability to turn a profit. The company earned $65.5 million in 2016, compared with combined losses of $115 million in the previous two years. IEA attributed much of those losses to its decision to abandon its solar and wind operations in Canada in 2014 and refocus on the U.S. wind energy market.

Headed for Wall Street

For IEA, the route to going public is not the traditional one. The company announced in November it would merge with New York-based M III Acquisition Corp., which incorporated in 2015 and raised $150 million the following year in an IPO. M III is what the SEC calls a “blank check company”—one formed for the purpose of seeking a merger or acquisition.

M III’s chairman and CEO is Mohsin “Mo” Meghji. Before forming the company, he was head of strategy for Evansville-based Springleaf Financial, a consumer finance company whose name is now OneMain Financial.

IEA splits its headquarters offices between Speedway and the north side of Indianapolis. After the merger, the firm will remain headquartered in Indianapolis and will be renamed Infrastructure and Energy Alternatives Inc.

Under the deal, IEA and M III will combine through two consecutive mergers. The deal is expected to close by spring. Afterward, Oaktree Capital will own about 34 percent of IEA’s common stock.

Roehm, who will continue as CEO, has spent his whole life around the company. His father worked for White Construction for 50 years as a vice president and estimator. Roehm spent summers during high school and college doing odd jobs for the company.

He graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1997 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and went to work full time at White the same year, scouting out projects and negotiating contracts. He was named president and CEO in 2014.

The plan for going public, he said, is to continue to grow, but to diversify so that wind energy will decrease as a percentage of revenue over time.

“The whole point of going public is diversification and continued growth. Growing the business into a nice, midsize general contracting firm located in Indy is something we hope to do over the next several years.”

 

Have you had a chance to get behind the wheel of the incredible new Toyota Mirai yet? This hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is only up for grabs on the west coast as of right now; it hasn’t quite made it east to our Clermont Toyota dealership. However, we expect it to arrive in the near future and in the meantime, we have tons of other green options – namely, new Toyota hybrids. But what’s so great about the Toyota Mirai?

What’s so great about the new Toyota Mirai?

If you think you’re going green by getting into the driver’s seat of a hybrid car, get ready to take things to a whole new level. While hybrids are low emission vehicles that help cut down on smog formation, hydrogen fuel cell cars like the Toyota Mirai are ZERO emissions. They only put out water vapor, giving “clean performance” a whole new meaning. Toyota has been a renowned leader in the hydrogen fuel cell technology industry, and last year they sold 3,000 hydrogen fuel cell cars in the state of California. And they’re determined to keep that number rising year over year, providing the rest of the country with these ultra-green options.

Think you might be interested in taking the new Toyota Mirai for a spin when it arrives at Toyota of Clermont? Check out some of the details that go along with this green car:

• It creates its own electricity utilizing hydrogen, oxygen, and a fuel cell – no gasoline is necessary
• It puts out water vapor rather than emissions
• It can drive 312 miles without having to recharge
• It showcases specially engraved 17” alloy wheels
• You’ll love top safety technology like a front and rear parking assist sonar and a Blind Spot Monitor with Rear Cross Traffic Alert
• Staying connected is simple with features like a premium JBL Audio system, the Entune App Suite, and IntelliTouch controls for audio and climate
• The interior is comfortable and stylish with premium leather trim and heated front seats

And the best news yet? When you purchase the Toyota Mirai, you get three free years of “fuel” to keep you out on the road.

Go green today at Toyota of Clermont

Not sure you’re ready to go THAT green just yet? Toyota of Clermont has a wide selection of hybrid cars for sale. These green vehicles use a mixture of gasoline and electricity to get up and running and are eco-friendly in so many ways. Here are a few options you can test drive today:

• Toyota Prius
• Toyota Prius c
• Toyota Prius v
• Toyota Avalon Hybrid
• Toyota Camry Hybrid
• Toyota Highlander Hybrid
• Toyota RAV4 Hybrid

And you can take any and all of them for a spin right now.

 

Funding to support the Canadian Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association will enhance global profile of Western Canadian clean technology companies

Companies in Western Canada’s hydrogen and fuel cell (HFC) industry will benefit from additional support to raise their global profile, generate industry growth and create jobs across Western Canada.

The Honourable Hedy Fry, Member of Parliament for Vancouver Centre, on behalf of the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada, announced over $670,000 in funding to support the Canadian Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association (CHFCA) at Ionomr, an organization member located at VentureLabs in Vancouver.

The CHFCA’s mission is to support Canadian corporations, governments and educational institutions that are developing, demonstrating and deploying hydrogen and fuel cell products and services. With this funding, the CHFCA will be able to bolster the HFC sector’s activity in key global markets and accelerate trade and investment.

The funding will also help the CHFCA to develop and implement marketing strategies and webinars to target potential overseas investors in Canadian clean technology businesses. By showcasing Canada’s leadership in the HFC sector, the CHFCA member organizations hope to attract significant global investment, provide exposure to local companies and fuel job creation in Canada.

Currently, the Canadian hydrogen and fuel cell sector contributes 2,000 knowledge-based, high-tech jobs to Canada’s economy. This funding will assist the CHFCA to further the Government of Canada’s priorities to support clean technology and innovation.