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The current battery boom might feel familiar to those who lived through the clean tech bubble that burst a decade ago, with an awful lot of money being invested in what are still nascent markets.
But certainly they’re bigger this time around: The number of electric vehicles on the road has more than doubled in the last seven years, for example, and demand doesn’t seem to be slowing. Market share for EVs has been growing even as the overall automotive market has softened in recent years.
It’s been enough to convince automakers and battery companies to commit nearly $300 billion to building a raft of gigafactories around the world, including more than $38 billion here in the U.S. alone. That confidence has cascaded through the market, driving waves of investment that have resulted in over $42 billion in venture and private equity capital committed to battery research, development, commercialization and manufacturing.
For battery startups like Michigan-based Our Next Energy, betting it all on the automotive market, which is notoriously fickle, can be a risky proposition. Demand for cars and trucks often craters when the economy tumbles. EV sales have been historically tied to an even more volatile indicator: gas prices. As COVID showed, just a few ripples in the automotive supply chain can send shockwaves through the market. The automotive market has a lot of volume, sure, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that margins are typically thin.
As investments go, the automotive sector doesn’t seem like a great place to make massive, long-term bets like the kind required for gigafactories.
And yet the money keeps flowing, and companies like ONE and its investors are increasingly confident that this round of climate tech investments will turn out very differently from the last. What’s behind that bravado?
Why so many gigafactories? It’s not just EVs driving demand by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch
Enlarge / Each of those white structures contains lots of batteries that were built for cars. (credit: B2U)
Last week, a company called B2U Storage Solutions announced that it had started operations at a 25 Megawatt-hour battery facility in California. On its own, that isn't really news, as California is adding a lot of battery power. But in this case, the source of the batteries was unusual: Many of them had spent an earlier life powering electric vehicles.
The idea of repurposing electric vehicle batteries has been around for a while. To work in a car, the batteries need to be able to meet certain standards in terms of capacity and rate of discharge, but that performance declines with use. Even after a battery no longer meets the needs of a car, however, it can still store enough energy to be useful on the electric grid. So it was suggested that grid storage might be an intermediate destination between vehicles and recycling.
But there are some significant technical and economic challenges to implementing the idea. So we talked with B2U's CEO, Freeman Hall, to find out why the company decided it was the right time to put the concept into action.
Typically, when someone says you’re being strung along, it’s rarely intended to communicate anything positive. But in the case of String Furniture’s modular shelving system, the design classic continues to be associated with the best of modern design – a flexible, expandable, contemporary classic with an airy aesthetic that seems to never wear out its welcome regardless of era or interior space.
If it sounds like I’m an unabashed fan, you’re not mistaken. I recently invested in a 3-panel, 12-shelf configuration for my home office to join a pair of two-tier String Pocket wall units. Designed by Swedish architect Nisse Strinning in collaboration with his wife Kajsa Strinning in 1949, the design retains an inspiring vitality inspiring organization and display.
Today, String Furniture is dipping into their archives to refresh a 1955 classic originally designed by Swedish architect Olle Pira. Designed for the Helsingborg exhibition of 1955 in 1955, the Pira G2 modular shelving system has been updated by architect Anna von Schewen and the industrial designer Björn Dahlström in time for the 2023 Stockholm Furniture Festival, which ended February 11th.
The refreshed design retains the modular spirit of the original, robust yet visually transparent. “The ambition was never to design a retro-style piece of furniture, but rather to embrace the core idea behind the original PIRA and create a taller, wider version” explains Björn Dahlström.
The shelves are made of lacquered steel sheets and secure onto extruded aluminum poles, with a choice of walnut or white oak cabinets and bookends, with each shelf rated for over 110lbs of weight capacity – more than sufficient to ease concerns of any dedicated bibliophile and/or to accommodate for a designer’s large tome library.
While adaptable as a wall-mounted storage and display piece, the Pira G2 truly shines when configured as a free-standing shelving unit, operating both as a display and room divider with each shelf creating a window to the other side and carving out smaller, more intimate spaces in the process.
I’ve been on the hunt for a room divider to visually break up a long room for months now, and at first glance the Pira G2 seems to offer everything I would hope for in a storage solution. Alas, I realized I was indeed being strung along the entire time – at least in my specific case – as the Pira G2’s 318cm max height doesn’t quiet extend sufficiently high enough to secure onto our high ceilings. But for most homes, the Pira G2’s modular sheet-steel construction should offer a centerpiece presence engineered to last a lifetime.
We tested iDrive with its free Basic tier, which offers 10GB of storage. [credit: Jim Salter ]
If there's one rule of computing every system administrator preaches, it's to always back up important data. Unfortunately, even among sysadmins, this rule is often preached more than it is practiced—backups tend to be slow, cumbersome affairs that are ignored for years until they're (desperately) needed, by which time it's often too late to get them right.
Fortunately, backups don't need to be tedious—and there are plenty of relatively low-cost, consumer-friendly cloud services that make protecting your data easy. The five services we discuss in this article—Carbonite, Arq, iDrive, Spideroak One, and Backblaze—are cloud-based and inexpensive, and they operate seamlessly in the background.
For a backup service to work, it needs to be easy to install and use. Beyond ease of use, our preferred solution needs to be affordable and have a simple billing model. It also needs to operate reliably in the background, offer easy recovery, and provide archive depth—meaning you'll have backups to previous versions of your files in addition to the current saved copy.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When you have limited space, every square inch matters during the day and at night, which is why a wall bed is a great option for those who want reclaim that precious real estate once they wake up. The daily lowering or putting away the bed can seem like a cumbersome chore though, so we can see why a motorized version like Resource Furniture’s Tonale two- or three-seat sofa wall bed would be so appealing. In under 15 seconds, the bed silently opens out or folds up with the push of a button. Because a bed is no small object, automatic sensors detect if an obstruction is in the way, whether it’s an item, pet, or person, for added assurance of safety. With its clean lines, tapered steel legs, and kaleidoscope of available leathers and fabrics, Tonale looks stylish during the day with added functionality during the night for much needed rest.
For more information on Tonale, visit resourcefurniture.com.
Netherlands-based Teun Zwets is an emerging designer who is known for his work made from residual or waste materials. When Hans Lensvelt, CEO of the furniture label Lensvelt, reached out to the designer to work on a collaboration, the executive had just one requirement – that Zwets create a modular collection that could be produced in a series. The result was Le Petit Boudoir, a colorful collection of ten jewel-colored cabinets, all made from discarded punched metal sheets from Lensvelt’s manufacturing process.
While most designers start their design process by putting pen to paper, Zwets began by making cardboard prototypes. After the patterned cabinets were assembled, they looked like giant jewels when the collection was first presented in a white illuminated box, hence the name Le Petit Boudoir. When you look closely at each piece, you can see the various cut outs and shapes that are a part of Lensvelt’s furniture.
To learn more about Le Petit Boudoir, visit lensvelt.nl.
Photos by Peter Tijhuis.
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