Chevy’s Volt


Forget the current breed of hybrid, the Chevy Volt is a new approach. It’s got a 3 cylinder 1.0 liter turbocharged gas (E85) engine attached to a 53 KW generator, batteries that store 16KWh, and a 120KW (160hp) electric motor. The gas powered motor is not attached to the drivetrain, only to the generator. The range on pure electric is 40 miles, when the generator kicks it, it extends to 640 miles. It plugs into standard 110v power for recharge. If only they’d stop trying to make things look futuristic and just make a sensible car design with this power train, I would think they’re on to something…


Technorati Tags: Electric | Car | Hybrid

A colleague sent this to me yesterday. I’m warmed (pun intended) to see Walmart take a bold move toward energy efficiency. Using the roof space on it’s massive buildings to host solar arrays may make some sense. Certainly Google thinks so and Federal Express (Oakland, CA sorting facility) has had solar cells on the roof for some time now.

Independent of this specific proposal, it’s great to see some large corporations make concentrated efforts to lead in this area.

Note to Mr. LaMonica (author of the CNet piece) – the largest proposed single instance of solar generation is in China at 100MW and Germany has a 12MW plant in production now. While Walmart could aggregate into 100MW size, it’s not quite the same thing. Still beneficial, no doubt.


Technorati Tags: Renewable | Energy | Solar

One of our Partners brought this to my attention this morning and I thought it was worthy of a mention. Polaris Geothermal has completed it’s first round of equity financing recently using what looks to be a “spec company” approach – they seem to have a different approach in Canada to getting this done. See the press release here for details. Polaris is developing a 66MW geothermal power generation project near Leon, Nicaragua.


Technorati Tags: Renewable | Energy | Geothermal

Then we at Montara Energy Ventures want to speak with you. If you meet the following requirements, and want to sell your electricity, contact us:

• Electricity generated by some verifiably renewable means
• Ability to sell more than 80,000 MWh/year
• Desire to enter into a long term business relationship (>5 years)
• Location on or near US West Coast
• Preferred, power available within the next 12 months

If you know of a company that might meet these requirements, feel free to direct them this way for a conversation.


Technorati Tags: Renewable | Electricity | Purchase

This week, Southern California Edison signed an agreement with Alta Windpower Development, LLC. (subsidiary of Australia’s Allco Finance Group) to purchase the output of an aggregation of projects to produce some 1,500MW of electricity from turbines located in Tehacapi. That’s renewable at utility scale and it’s very exciting to see. I strongly suspect that a large portion of that 1,500MW is power that will be displaced when sites in Tehacapi are “repowered” – taking older, smaller turbines down and replacing them with larger, more efficient models. Regardless, it’s encouraging to see renewable projects on this scale.

To put 1,500MW into perspective, the average wind turbine has a capacity factor of 30% meaning the net average generation capacity at any point in time would be around 450MW flowing onto the grid. As a reminder, a MW of capacity is capable of generating a MW per time period, say an hour, to get megawatt hours (MWh.) A MW at 100% capacity and availability would be able to generate 8,760 MWh (non-leap year) or 8,760,000 kilowatt hours. This project will generate approximately 3.9 gigawatt hours per year (3,900,000,000 KWh.) Check your electric bill, it’s metered and billed in KWh, most households in the US consuming around 1,000 KWh per month. The net is, that’s alot of power coming from a renewable resource. Very encouraging.


Technorati Tags: Energy | Investment | Power Purchase