Technology

Technology for a Sustainable Future

New innovative products and technologies are emerging daily to help mitigate pollution, reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and limit their continuing and overall impact on the environment. These technologies are creating new markets and growth potential, along with significant investment opportunities. Companies and investors that seize on these opportunities will be better positioned to thrive in a resource-constrained and environmental-stressed economy.

Globetrans works with companies and investors, building a bridge to mutual investment solutions. Our solutions focus on addressing environmental, social and economic risks associated with unsustainable business practices. Our efforts advance disruptive and innovative technologies and applications that enable the reduction and eliminate carbon emissions in all segments of the economy: energy, transportation, and throughout the supply chain of manufacturing, distribution, sales, and consumption.

The Solar Boom Takes Off in the Industrial Midwest [GTM Squared]
Greentech Media: Headlines 22-10-2019 14:13

Pacific Gas & Electric's top executives and members of its post-bankruptcy board of directors faced a nearly five-hour grilling from the California Public Utilities Commission on Friday over the communications, planning and execution failures of its massive fire-prevention power outage earlier this month. Amid public outcry over its handling of the five-day blackout affecting an estimated 2 million people, PG&E’s leaders had few successes to speak to, beyond the absence of fires. Instead, they offered apologies, explanations and promises to prevent future breakdowns like the multiple website crashes and overwhelmed conference-call systems that left customers and key government partners alike in the...

New renewables projects continued to fuel growth at NextEra Energy in the third quarter of 2019. The company’s pipeline of renewables and storage projects has ballooned past 12 gigawatts, executives said during Tuesday's earnings call. That capacity is up from 11.7 gigawatts in Q2 in part due to the addition of 747 megawatts of solar and 341 megawatts of storage. So far in 2019, more than half of the solar projects added will be paired with storage “as customers are increasingly interested in a near-firm low-cost renewable product," CFO Rebecca Kujawa said. NextEra has long been the largest owner of U.S. wind...

The airline industry has committed to curbing emissions growth to zero by the end of 2020. That’s no small task. Emissions from the sector are rising rapidly. The International Civil Aviation Organization anticipates that in 2020, global international aviation emissions will be 70 percent greater than in 2005. Last year flights worldwide produced 895 million tons of CO2 in total. And despite impressive improvements in the efficiency of new aircraft and the progress in certifying new types of renewable jet fuels (five thus far), the aviation sector burns 10 billion more gallons of polluting conventional jet fuel per year than it...

Los Angeles startup EV Connect closed a $12 million Series B to fund its electric vehicle charging software expansion. The company works with charging hardware vendors and builds software controls to govern them. EV Connect then reaches the market in two ways. It sets up charging stations on behalf of customers through its EV Connect Network, which manages about 1,000 customer sites and has 6,000 charging plugs under contract. The startup also offers its software as a platform for users to customize under the EV Cloud moniker. Japanese industrial conglomerate Mitsui & Co. and cleantech venture capital firm Ecosystem Integrity Fund led...

2019 has seen a steady evolution of policy, regulation and business model innovation at the grid edge. The themes of digitalization, decentralization, flexibility and resilience keep cropping up, touching sectors from EV infrastructure to microgrids, demand response and beyond. Reflecting on the third quarter in a new report, Wood Mackenzie's grid edge team highlighted key trends and developments in the U.S. and global grid edge ecosystem. Digitalization The global rollout of second-generation smart meters is a window into what’s next for customers at the grid edge. From July through September 2019, WoodMac tracked over 1.2 million second-generation smart meters contracted in the U.S. and...

The wind speeds off the Oregon coast are some of the strongest anywhere. And according to a new study, the cost to harvest that resource using a floating offshore wind farm has dropped by approximately two-thirds since a pilot project was abandoned in 2016. The study, published this month by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), modeled the potential cost of power from floating offshore wind farms sited at five zones equally spaced along a north-south axis at least 10 nautical miles from Oregon’s coast. The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for the hypothetical projects — 600 megawatts each, outfitted with 15-megawatt turbines,...

Faraday Grid’s mystery technology could be poised for a comeback — thanks to the man who led the company into insolvency in the first place. Andrew Scobie, Faraday Grid’s ex-CEO, has acquired his former company’s intellectual property assets after registering a new company, Third Equation, on September 4, according to a source familiar with the acquisition. Faraday Grid’s novel grid technology, called the Faraday Exchanger, promised to replace traditional power transformers, potentially cornering a massive market as the world builds out and updates its electricity infrastructure. But the company was placed under the control of insolvency administrators in August, less than seven months after securing a...

Will Amazon's order of 100,000 electric vehicles break the grid? The short answer is no. However, the order marks an important milestone for transport electrification. As the single largest EV purchase announced to date, the Amazon-Rivian deal will ripple through the electric vehicle and electric utility industry, creating new urgency around questions for fleet owners, utilities and regulators regarding the velocity of the energy transition and the impact on the electricity grid. Here are four takeaways from the deal. 1. Not the only corporate to embrace EVs, but the biggest On September 19, Amazon announced its order for 100,000 Rivian electric delivery vans. These vehicles...

Even a drastic uptick in renewable electricity has the globe on course for about 2.4°C of warming, according to a new analysis from DNV GL. The takeaways, while a slight variation on other scenarios of how a global energy transition may unfold, affirm what others have forecasted: The world is dangerously far from averting serious climate change. “The real message here is the urgency,” said Ditlev Engel, the CEO of the consultancy's energy group. “How many more proof points do we need to take the necessary steps to accelerate this transition dramatically? Because time is of the essence. … Technology is there, but...

In April, for the first time in the U.S., renewables generated more electricity than coal, according to the Energy Information Administration. Now that renewable technologies like wind and solar are largely commoditized, investors and utilities are looking for ways to improve their margins, and they're turning to startups in artificial intelligence to do it. There is a current wave of investment underway in digital technologies that are making renewables the cheaper, cleaner, safer energy option. Venture firms, incumbents and private equity have raised more than $3 billion in new renewable energy-focused funds over the last three years. Wood Mackenzie’s latest Energy Transition...

The US Energy Information Administration's latest Short-Term Energy Outlook was published this week, revealing electricity generation from coal in the United States will average 25% in 2019 and 23% in 2020, down from 27% in 2018 and continuing its steady decline to irrelevance.

In Wolfsburg this week, Volkswagen officials suggested that a family of urban electric cars with a range of 125 miles and starting at around $22,500 would be on sale by 2023. They will be basic transportation but still be capable of over the air updates.

British-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell has made it clear this week that, at least publicly, it has no interest in doing business as usual, rebuking US President Donald Trump and his administration to tighten methane while at the same time announcing it plans to be the largest power company in the world by the early 2030s.

In which Energy Secretary Rick Perry admits that the federal government has run out of ideas for saving the nation's coal power plants from certain doom

Many crossovers are called SUVs by their manufacturers but have far more in common with their sedan cousins than anything you’d take to Moab (or Mars, in 10 years?) for serious fun. So how does the Model Y stack up? Here’s what we know so far

A large segment of Tesla fans and market pundits are obsessed with hearing about every detail of how Tesla is doing what they are doing, but instead of feeding into that and potentially making statements that are difficult to follow through on, the Model Y announcement was a simple presentation walking people through the history of the company, and explaining what the next step was.