Category: News

September 20 2017

Buffett-Backed BYD Looks Overcharged on China Electric Car Bets

China hasn’t formalized a timetable for phasing out fossil-fuel powered vehicles, but the share price of the country’s top electric carmaker has soared to stretched levels anyway. BYD Co., which counts Warren Buffett as an investor, has risen more than 40 percent over the past eight days amid optimism China’s government will speed up development […]

September 20 2017

Russian Nuclear Giant Joins Scramble to Supply Electric-Car Boom

Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation is joining the lithium rush.  After a collapse in the price of uranium, Rosatom Corp. plans to start mining and trading the metal used in batteries as it seeks to profit from the rapid rise of electric vehicles. “The evolution of the car business is going much faster than predicted,” Kirill […]

September 19 2017

With End of Subsidies in Sight, Green Backers Move Cautiously

Anna Hirtenstein For almost two decades, investors in renewable energy have been able to fall back on government incentives and subsidies to underpin the returns on whatever they back. Now, they’re starting to think they need to proceed with caution. Sharp plunges in the cost of wind turbines and solar photovoltaics have brought forward the […]

September 19 2017

Climate Change Could Dampen Argentina’s Recovery

Jonathan Gilbert “It’s like being at war.” That’s how Luciano Pieruci, a 26-year-old farmer describes his battle against the floods that swamped a swath of the 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of soybeans, corn, and wheat he tends in Argentina’s Córdoba province. “The low-lying fields have become lagoons,” says Pieruci, who decided to leave them unplanted to avoid […]

September 19 2017

Exxon Mobil’s Futuristic FuelCell Carbon Capture Just Might Work

Chris Martin Exxon Mobil Corp.’s foray into carbon capture and storage technology with FuelCell Energy Inc. “is making progress,” Cowen & Co. analyst Jeffrey Osborne wrote in a research note Tuesday. The technology has moved from the lab to a commercial test at a power plant in Alabama. The beauty of capturing carbon from coal […]

September 19 2017

Toyota President Says Hybrid Still Central as EV Momentum Grows

Kevin Buckland Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda says hybrid technology will remain central to the company’s strategy even as a rising wave of governments and automakers get behind plug-in electric vehicles. Asia’s biggest car manufacturer will continue to offer a wide range of powertrain options, and customers will ultimately decide which technology is successful, […]

September 19 2017

Subsidy-Free Wind Farms Risk Ruining the Industry’s Reputation

Jess Shankleman Energy companies that stunned the world by offering to build wind farms with no subsidy may ruin the industry’s reputation by never actually delivering on their promises. That’s the warning of industry executives, who are cautious about the future of zero-subsidy offshore wind farms planned in Germany this year. Developers led by Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg […]

September 19 2017

Schwarzenegger-Backed Battery Startup Ratchets Up Tesla Fight

By Elisabeth Behrmann Kreisel Electric GmbH, an Austrian startup that made waves by going toe-to-toe with Tesla Inc.’s Model S in a converted Porsche Panamera, is pushing to take its technology off the test track. After working out of a three-door garage on attention-grabbing projects like electrifying a Porsche in Steve McQueen’s 1971 Le Mans film, the company […]

September 19 2017

Clean Energy Is Approaching a Tipping Point

Reed Landberg The cost of renewables is plunging faster than forecasters anticipated just a few years ago as as technologies like gigantic wind turbines arrive on the market. That’s the conclusion of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, whose founder Michael Liebreich estimated that clean energy will reap 86 percent of the $10.2 trillion likely to be […]

September 19 2017

China Considers Opening Up to Foreign Electric Carmakers

China is discussing a plan to allow foreign carmakers to set up wholly owned electric-vehicle businesses in its free-trade zones in a major revision of a fundamental principle governing the country’s auto industry policy since the 1990s, according to company officials briefed on the matter. The plan, which is subject to change as a final decision […]