GE adds a bit of sodium to its diet
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
It kills me to see GE announce plans to invest $100 million in a new manufacturing facility in New York that will build sodium-nickel-chloride (or molten salt)batteries, an energy-dense storage chemistry that will be targeted at new hybrid-electric trains, tugboat electrification, and utility-scale storage for renewables and peak shaving. Some call them Zebra batteries, which is the brand name for sodium-nickel-chloride batteries made by Swiss-based MES-DEA.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m glad GE is making this investment. It’s just that it was a decision being contemplated three years ago by a group of Canadian companies that simply couldn’t round up the funding to make it work. Perhaps they were just a bit ahead of their time.
Here’s what I wrote in July 2006 about a small Ontario-based utility called Halton Hills Hydro and Mississauga-based battery company BET Services, which had set up a 100-kilowatt-hour pilot project to demonstrate the battery’s potential: (more…)
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca