Advanced Energy Perspectives

Remember Fisker Automotive? We figured we had heard the last of them after the bankrupt electric vehicle company was purchased in February by Wanxiang Group, a Chinese vehicle component manufacturing company that also bought Fisker supplier A123 Systems’ battery business out of bankruptcy. Not so. In an article titled “Is This Man Going to Be China’s Elon Musk?” billionaire and Wanxiang Founder Lu Guanqiu told Bloomberg that he will “burn as much cash as it takes to succeed.”

 “I’ll put every cent that Wanxiang earns into making electric vehicles,” Lu said.

This week AEE Member and electric vehicle charging station company ChargePoint announced that it had raised $22.6 million in a round of late-stage funding. Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins doubled its equity in the company, and other existing funders such as BMW and Rho Ventures also increased their investments. ChargePoint is the world’s largest and most open electric vehicle charging network. The company sells charging stations to retail centers, government facilities, apartment complexes, and other locations in the U.S. and Europe. ChargePoint currently boasts more than 17,000 charging locations worldwide.

Late last week a federal judge dismissed the latest lawsuit facing Cape Wind. Cape Wind Associates, the New England-based organization behind the planned offshore wind project, is no stranger to the courtroom: the organization has faced consistent legal challenges since its inception a decade ago. As recently as March, a court resolved most of the legal challenges then pending, enough for the developer to pursue financing for the project.

This has been a week of big deals. In the potentially biggest, Alstom announced that its board “has unanimously endorsed General Electric’s offer” of $13.5 billion to take over the company, according to Patrick Kron, Alstom’s chairman and CEO. GE is looking to take over the French company’s thermal power, renewables, and electrical grid components. If it goes through, the deal would be the biggest in GE’s history, and could add as much as $10 billion to the company’s revenue, according to GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. It’s a big move, but GE, an AEE Member company, is no stranger to advanced energy. “We would not have contemplated it without a certain amount of confidence that we knew the territory,” Immelt said.

The acquisition would be controversial, especially in Europe. Siemens, which is based in Germany, is also making a bid to gain control of the Alstom’s energy business in exchange for Siemens’s transportation market share. Although the Siemens proposal is less developed, France’s economy minister “demanded” that Alstom consider it as well. We will keep an eye on this story as it develops.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released its latest “Energy Infrastructure Update” last week, announcing that 100 percent of new electricity generation in the U.S. installed in the first quarter of 2014 came from advanced energy sources. Of the 1,150 MW of new domestic power sources, 584 MW came from new solar installations, 427 MW of new wind generation, 45 MW from a new natural gas unit, and the remaining from geothermal, biomass, and hydropower sources.