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…)

Lots of news to report from the Great White North, where we’ve got a great stable of cleantech companies — even if they are generally underappreciated and underfunded. Speaking of underfunded, I’d just like to highlight that Canadian cleantech companies raised just $49 million (U.S.) in the third quarter. For perspective, U.S. companies raised $1.75 billion. If we apply the standard 10x calculation to figure out where Canada should be, we would have raised $175 million. We’re not even close. That said, California took a lion’s share of U.S. funding — $1.1 billion. That means the rest of the U.S. raised $650 million, putting Canada’s share in the ballpark. Clearly, California is skewing the results and eating everyone else’s lunch. But I digress.

Here’s what’s going on in Canada: (more…)