[GreenBeat]
One of the many unknowns about Toyota’s partnership with Tesla was whether it would result in a jointly produced car.
That won’t be known for many months yet, but Toyota has already taken a first step: It’s building Tesla’s battery into a test car so it can compare the Silicon Valley startup’s technology to its own lithium-ion pack.
Toyota president Akio Toyoda told journalists at a briefing today in Nagoya, Japan, that Toyota is building an electric vehicle with a Tesla battery pack.
The Japanese company’s in-house lithium-ion pack uses fewer, larger-format cells than the 6,831 commodity cells (essentially like mobile-phone batteries) that
Continue reading Toyota: We’re Building a Car to Test Tesla’s Battery
[JESSICA LUSSENHOP, SV411]
Tesla, the Palo Alto-based electronic car company, is coming to the rescue of the closed NUMMI plant in Fremont. In a surprise announcement yesterday, Tesla revealed a partnership with Toyota to build its new electric sedan at the famous factory. The Japanese carmaker will reportedly sink $50 million into Tesla. Industry insiders are buzzing that this is the first earnest interest shown by Toyota in the electronic vehicle market.
NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.), which first opened in the ‘60s, was an experimental partnership between General Motors and Toyota that taught Japanese car-making and business philosophy to GM
Continue reading Tesla and Toyota at NUMMI
[earth2tech]
Google has made its first direct investment into a wind power project, the search engine giant unveiled on Monday in a blog post. Google says it’s invested $38.8 million into 169.5 MW worth of wind projects developed by NextEra Energy Resources in North Dakota.
Google’s philathropic arm Google.org has previously invested in clean power startups, including solar thermal companies eSolar and BrightSource, geothermal company AltaRock, and high-altitude wind company Makani. Google also has a side project to develop solar thermal receivers.
But this investment comes directly out of the Google Inc. treasury. Google spokesperson Jamie Yood told us “You can think of
Continue reading Google Invests in Clean Power
[Danny Wool, SV411]
Is the Bloom box, the refrigerator-sized invention unveiled in San Jose yesterday, the much-vaunted holy grail of electrical power-generation, with the capacity to free us from PG&E ? Is it really the answer to California’s energy woes, a cleaner alternative to coal? Can it really convert all the methane gas from landfills or flatulent cows into a clean, renewable source of energy?
Read More at SV411.