Financing the Energy Transition: $200M SPAC from TJ Rodgers, plus funding for nuclear fuel disposal, next-gen CSP and more
Another week, another wave of investments in the clean energy transition.
Morning Brief: Cypress Creek’s 162-MW Wagyu project is delivering power, Sunlight Financial hits $3 billion
Also in the brief: GP Joule completed construction of the first merchant solar project in Alberta, plus OutBack Power helps Power52 with installation training.
Form Energy’s stealthy ‘aqueous air battery’ with 150-hour duration gets another $70 million
The holy grail of energy storage has always been low-cost and long-duration. Form Energy intends on deploying a 1 MW/150 MWh system with a Minnesota utility before 2023, an unprecedented energy storage duration if successful.
Blue Planet Founder Henk Rogers on lithium battery chemistries and vanadium flow batteries
In his search for an effective long-term energy storage technology, Rogers gave vanadium flow batteries a try, leaving him with a number of 4-foot-cube tanks of vanadium redox electrolyte stranded on his ranch. They are available to a good home — make him an offer. Bring a trailer.
China’s ‘Liquid Sunshine’ project demonstrates PV powered methanol
A pilot project in China was brought online this month, combining 10 MW of PV with electrolyzers for hydrogen production and carbon dioxide hydrogenation to synthesize methanol. The methanol is supplied to the chemical industry, or can be converted back into hydrogen for energy use. And the project’s creators say their next goal is scaling the project up to 10 or even 100 times its current size.
CSP startup Heliogen scores $39 million in DOE funding for supercritical CO2 project
Startup founded by serial entrepreneur Bill Gross seeks to revitalize CSP with sCO2 technology that lowers costs, water usage, equipment size and plant footprint — and supports industrial applications in which PV may not be able to compete.
Jigar Shah: Policy action and tech deployments needed for power sector innovation
“We’ve averaged 2.4 cents a kilowatt hour for the last six months for PPAs. That’s actually too low. I think we would be fine at 3.4 cents… I don’t think that solar and wind industries would skip a beat [without their tax incentives], and they have other policy mechanisms.”
Morning Brief: Texas bill would tax wind and solar but not natural gas, Covid speeds up peak oil
Also in the brief: 100-MW Mustang Two Whirlaway Solar Farm comes online in California, Arizona utility APS offering $144M to tribes in coal-country, Q CELLS to build a 41-MW floating PV power plant.
Clean energy funding roundup: batteries under solar panels, carbon capture acquisition, ultracaps
Yotta Energy just won seed funding to install batteries under solar modules — in an architecture analogous to microinverters and optimizers.
