A Los Angeles company building charging stations in Chicago for electric vehicles is jumping into the battery business.
350Green LLC, which is installing 280 charging stations in Chicago and the suburbs, confirmed Thursday that it plans to open a $3.5 million assembly plant on Chicago's Northwest Side to produce Acer Aspire 7735Z batteries to store electricity produced by the sun, wind or, during off-peak times, from the electrical grid.
The idea, said Mariana Gerzanych, chief executive of 350Green, is to tap those batteries during peak demand times on the grid — like on hot summer days when air conditioners are being used. Electrical grid operators pay so-called peak shavers like 350Green for agreeing to tap stored battery power to reduce demand on the grid.
"It will make a big difference in the industry," Gerzanych said. "As the electric car industry grows, we can connect it more and more to solar."
The Acer Aspire 5742 batteries are small, but some will have about the same storage capacity as those used in the all-electric Nissan Leaf, Gerzanych said. The first are expected to roll out by January. Gerzanych said the plant would employ about 86 people.
The facility, to be located at 2500 W. Bradley Place, would be paid for in part by a $1.5 million grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity and $800,000 in tax-increment financing from the city. Both subsidies have been approved and are in the final sign-off stages, according to Gerzanych.
Byron shutdown still a mystery: Almost three months after the Byron nuclear plant suddenly lost power, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is trying to determine what happened and whether a similar outage could occur at other nuclear plants.
According to a special inspection report released late last month, inspectors spent 15 days at Byron trying to get to the bottom of the outage. The plant lost off-site power, which was supposed to automatically trigger backup diesel generators to turn on. But the generators had to be switched on manually. As a result, a 1,136-megawatt nuclear unit at Byron shut down.
No one was injured, but the NRC said it wants to be sure it doesn't happen again.
The plant is owned by Chicago-based Exelon. The NRC said it is working to determine if plant operators could have prevented the incident or if a larger design problem caused the system breakdown.
Illinois riding the wind: Other than California, Illinois installed more new wind capacity than any other state in 2011, spending $1 billion, according to an annual report from the American Wind Energy Association released Thursday.
The state ranks fourth in the nation for wind capacity installed, with enough to power about 750,000 homes. About 30 facilities making wind components employ 6,000 people in Illinois. Illinois has the third-highest number of jobs in the wind industry, after Iowa and Texas.
Still, wind is a fraction of the state's overall energy footprint. About 3.2 percent of electricity is produced by wind turbines, just above the national average of 2.9 percent.
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NU student-run company wins $100K: NuMat Technologies, a startup company led by students at Northwestern University, won $100,000 in financing last month at the second Clean Energy Challenge. The company developed a technology that can produce fuel tanks for natural gas-powered vehicles that are cheaper, safer and have a larger capacity than what is available.
More than 100 early-stage and student-led companies applied to the Challenge. Ten early-stage finalist and eight student finalists presented business plans to a panel of investors, corporations and entrepreneurs at an event in Chicago. The finalists were coached by volunteer mentors working with the Clean Energy Trust, a nonprofit technology accelerator in Chicago.
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