Advanced Energy Perspectives

Surprise! Electric vehicle-maker Tesla is once again in the news. Earlier this month, CEO Elon Musk announced that he will take a six-day road trip from Los Angeles to New York City later this year to demonstrate the capacity of Tesla’s forthcoming cross-country charging structure. He plans to spend about an hour and a half charging the car each day.

News broke this week that venture capitalists invested more than $500 million in advanced energy technologies this summer alone. Investment powerhouses like Morgan Stanley, Kleiner Perkins, and Google Ventures joined firms like Kholsa Ventures and Energy Technology Ventures to close funding rounds at more than 30 companies. These companies represent a diversity of technologies, including solar, smart grid, electric vehicles (motorcycles!), and efficiency.

What if you could harness the power of the ocean waves to power your home? Ocean and tidal power generation has remained a largely untapped market in the United States so far, but that could be changing soon. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the U.S. could be sitting on up to 1,400 terawatt hours of potential electricity generation per year from wave and tidal energy.

This week Tesla Motors released its Q2 revenue numbers, which, as Greentech Media pointed out, “crushed” the company’s second quarter projections. The company’s Q2 revenue was $405 million, beating out expectations by $22 million and bringing Tesla’s 2013 revenues to $956 million for the year. According to Motor Authority, so far this year Tesla has recorded a net income of $41 million. Share prices of Tesla jumped 14% following the announcement.

This week marked the Department of the Interior’s first offshore wind auction, which raised $3.8 million from awarding leases in the Department’s designated “offshore wind areas,” designed to move development from lease to completion on an expedited basis. Deepwater Wind LLC, based in Providence, RI, won the bid for an area off the RI and Massachusetts coast in what Interior Director of Offshore Energy Tommy Beaudreau called “a very robust and competitive sale.” Jeffrey Grybowski, Deepwater Wind’s CEO, said the site could be generating power as early as 2018.