Panasonic is Quietly Selling Grid Batteries in the U.S.

As reported by Fortune: In a remote Nevada desert, a cell phone tower is operating largely from electricity generated by solar panels and stored in a collection of lithium-ion batteries. When the batteries are close to empty, a backup generator kicks in, but the ample sunshine in the baking desert means the generator is rarely used.

The gear was built by Japanese electronics giant Panasonic, and it’s one of two that rural wireless carrier Commnet Wireless is using to power isolated cell phone towers far from the power grid in Nevada. Panasonic is working with energy management partner PowerOasis on the wireless industry system, called Green Tower.

The technology is one of the first examples of Panasonic—through its North American division Panasonic Eco Solutions— selling grid energy storage technology in the U.S., outside of selling its batteries to U.S. partners like Tesla. And it might not be the last.

Jamie Evans, managing director of Panasonic Eco Solutions, tells Fortune that Panasonic is “exploring” and “considering” other ways to directly sell grid energy storage in North America. That could include battery banks connected to the power grid, enabling utilities to better manage electricity supply and demand, or paired with solar projects to enable the use of solar energy at night.

But the Green Tower tech is the only one Panasonic has “launched and is actively pursuing in the U.S.” says Evans.

An off grid battery pack and solar panel system from Panasonic is tapped by a cell phone tower in Nevada.Photo courtesy of Panasonic.

Panasonic is a massive electronics company that makes and sells batteries worldwide. In addition, Panasonic works with partners like Tesla that use batteries for their businesses.

The various arms and business models mean Panasonic can sometimes be a partner and supplier to a company like Tesla, while also being a competitor. Its partner relationships can be complicated.

For years, Panasonic has been providing batteries for Tesla’s electric cars, enabling Panasonic to become the leading electric car battery supplier in the nascent electric car market. Tesla and Panasonic have also agreed to be key partners when it comes to building Tesla’s large battery factory, known as the Gigafactory, just outside of Reno, Nev.

But both Panasonic and Tesla are increasingly interested in selling battery systems to utilities, commercial building owners and homeowners. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that his company, which unveiled its grid battery products in May, has seen high demand.

That’s because the market for energy storage is growing rapidly in some regions. In the U.S. there will be an estimated 220 megawatts of energy storage projects installed this year, mostly using lithium-ion batteries. That’s the equivalent of energy stored to power about 220,000 homes. By 2019, deployments could reach 858 megawatts of energy storage.

The rise of the market has attracted big companies and startups alike. Venture capital-backed tech companies like Stem and Advanced Microgrid Solutions have introduced energy storage businesses that are growing quickly. Meanwhile, older companies like GE have created their own energy storage divisions, and have been actively signing new deals with utilities.

Panasonic Eco Solutions is Panasonic’s North American arm that focuses on selling clean energy products and services to businesses and utilities. Over the past five years, the division has largely focused on building and operating solar panel farms, but it is now looking to expand. While the division is tiny compared to the rest of the company, Evans describes the group as “entrepreneurial-minded” and “growing rapidly.”

Panasonic wants to be a battery supplier for this new and growing market. But it also appears to be moving toward being a service provider that builds and operates energy storage. In addition Panasonic wants to be a brand associated with energy storage, not necessarily just the Intel-inside for batteries.

Panasonic already sells a battery system for homes in its own domestic market, Japan. A home owner can power most of their home’s energy use just from the solar energy generated by the panel and stored in the battery.

Europe and Australia are also potential new markets for Panasonic’s grid batteries. A couple of months ago, Panasonic announced a new deal to test its home battery systems with utilities in Australia. And recently Bloomberg reported that Panasonic plans to sell its home batteries in Europe, first in Germany, and then moving into France and the U.K.

Tesla, too, has been interested in selling its home batteries to customers in Germany because of the large amount of solar in the country. Indeed, German company Sonnenbatterie has already sold thousands of battery systems to customers there using lithium-ion batteries from Sony.

The market for energy storage is still young, and is just starting to grow. There will be room for many companies and many kinds of technology.

As the market grows, it will also help companies determine what part of energy storage is the most valuable. Is it the core chemistry inside the battery? Is it the cooling or power management systems that maintain the batteries? Is it the algorithms that automatically decide to charge and discharge the batteries when needed? Or is it the design of the battery packs?

All of the above will be important in different ways for different uses. But as the market matures, these answers will help companies figure out how best to get into the energy storage market.

Two More Galileo GNSS/GPS Satellites Launched by the EU

As reported by BBC News: Europe has put up another two spacecraft in its Galileo sat-nav system.

The satellites were launched on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana.

Their successful placement in orbit brings the number of platforms in the constellation to 10 - a third of the way to a full network of 30.

Lift-off occurred at 02:08 GMT, with confirmation of the satellites' separation from the rocket's upper-stage coming almost four hours later.

Image copyrightESA

Image captionTwo satellites can be carried into orbit by a Soyuz rocket

Galileo is a project of the European Commission, the EU's executive branch.

It is designed to complement the American Global Positioning System (GPS), while at the same time introducing extra precision for users.

Although dedicated services based on the European network will not be made available until at least 14 operational satellites are in orbit, the signals from every new addition in the sky can be exploited by receiving devices with compatible chipsets.

"There are a number of chipsets that have been developed and are in the market deployed in smartphones and navigation equipment for cars, for instance," explained Javier Benedicto, the Galileo programme manager at the European Space Agency (Esa is the EC's procurement agent).

"Those chipsets are already able to combine the Galileo signals with the GPS signals. That converts into an improvement of the availability of the navigation service which is experienced by GPS users today."

Image copyrightESA

Image captionGalileo is designed to have three planes of 10 satellites each (two spacecraft in each plane will act as spares)

The development path to a "European GPS" has been a tortuous one. The project is years late, and the completion cost - expected to be some €7bn by 2020 - is substantially higher than that originally foreseen by EU member states.

But Didier Faivre, the director of navigation at Esa, said the delivery cadence agreed in 2013 was being maintained.

"The famous '30 satellites by 2020' motto is our goal, and we're confident we can do it with additional procurement initiated this year," he told BBC News.

The satellites for Galileo are being made by a German-UK consortium. OHB System of Bremen is the industrial prime contractor and assembles every spacecraft bus, or chassis. The navigation payloads, including the atomic clocks that are at the heart of any sat-nav concept, are prepared in Guildford by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited.

Image copyrightESA

Image captionArtist's impression of an OHB-SSTL Galileo satellite in orbit

The consortium is now churning out two satellites every three months.

A pair is currently waiting to be shipped to French Guiana's Kourou spaceport from Esa's test centre in the Netherlands for another Soyuz launch in December. A further duo (these would be numbers 13 and 14) will soon enter final testing before also being shipped to Kourou.

Esa plans just one launch in 2016, sending up a quartet of satellites on the much bigger Ariane 5 rocket. The year 2017 would likely see two launches - one pair of spacecraft lofted by Soyuz, and another quartet on an Ariane.

To date, the EC has only ordered 26 satellites, so it will need soon to order more if it wants to attain the magic number of 30. However, the next procurement will almost certainly call for more than four platforms because of problems with three spacecraft already in orbit.

It is not clear yet whether this trio will be able to take their place in the final constellation. One had a power failure and can no longer broadcast on all its frequencies, and the other two were put in an incorrect orbit by their Soyuz rocket.

Engineers plan to make changes to Galileo's ground systems to take account of these inadequacies, but it is by no means certain that these modifications will allow the degraded satellites to assume a fully functional role in the network.

UPS Purchases 125 Hybrid Electric Delivery Trucks

As reported by Street Insider:UPS announced it has purchased 125 new technology hybrid electric delivery trucks, as part of a broader program to deploy electric-powered vehicles with greater range and performance.

The new trucks will deliver significant fuel economy equivalency gains - up to four times the fuel economy of a gasoline powered vehicle, compared to a 10 to 15% improvement with previous hybrid designs. They will be deployed in Arizona, Texas, Nevada, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida the first half of 2016.

The trucks were purchased under UPS's commitment to utilize advanced technologies to reduce the environmental impact of its fleet. While the new electric vehicles will cost UPS slightly more than a similar truck with a conventional engine, the company's sustainability commitment influenced the purchase decision. The vehicles are being manufactured by Workhorse Group, Inc., a Cincinnati-based company which manufactures electric drive systems for commercial trucks and can equip them with electric engines.

"These vehicles are a bridge to the delivery trucks of tomorrow," said Mark Wallace, UPS senior vice president global engineering and sustainability. "This investment will help create and grow the market for ground-breaking alternative propulsion systems that reduce environmental impact, reduce operating costs and save fuel."

UPS, with its suppliers, continues to work toward development of the next generation, zero emission trucks. UPS is collaborating with Workhorse to develop a more intelligent electric vehicle to determine when and where the batteries will be charged and re-charged. The initiative is part of UPS's Rolling Laboratory, a cutting-edge approach to optimizing the use of alternative fuel and advanced technology vehicles.

"These trucks are designed specifically to meet the stop and start needs of UPS's urban delivery routes," said Steve Burns, CEO of Workhorse Group Inc. "They rely on a very small internal combustion engine and lithium ion battery to deliver a 50 to 60-mile per day range. We are thrilled to work with UPS to develop and deliver innovative solutions to today's transportation challenges."

FedEx vs. UPS Fleet Size

'True Size Map' Proves You've Been Picturing The Planet All Wrong

As reported by Huffpost Travel: Did you know that California is more than four times the size of Portugal? Or that you could fit China, the U.S. and India into the continent of Africa, with room to spare? 

Prepare yourself for a whole new kind of geography lesson.

The True Size Map shows countries as many travelers would say they are meant to be seen: in their "true," relative sizes. The inventors of the handy online tool point out that most maps are based on the Mercator projection, a schema that distorts the scale of many countries because it enlarges nations as they get farther from the Equator. While helpful in some cases, this doesn't give travelers a totally accurate vision of the Earth's spatial layout. True Size's answer to map-making, however, will seriously put your trip into perspective. 

Visit TheTrueSize.com to toggle The True Size Map. 

The New Boss on Construction Sites Is a Drone

Drones are being used to capture video footage that shows construction progress at the Sacramento Kings' new stadium in California.

As reported by MIT Technology Review: For some construction workers, any thoughts of slacking off could soon seem rather quaint. The drones will almost certainly notice.

The site of a lavish new downtown stadium for the Sacramento Kings in California is being monitored by drones and software that can automatically flag slow progress.

Once per day, several drones automatically patrol the Sacramento work site, collecting video footage. That footage is then converted into a three-dimensional picture of the site, which is fed into software that compares it to computerized architectural plans as well as a the construction work plan showing when each element should be finished. The software can show managers how the project is progressing, and can automatically highlight parts that may be falling behind schedule.

“We highlight at-risk locations on a site, where the probability of having an issue is really high,” says Mani Golparvar-Fard, an assistant professor in the department of civil engineering at the University of Illinois, who developed the software with several colleagues. It can show, for example, that a particular structural element is behind schedule, perhaps because materials have not yet arrived. “We can understand why deviations are happening, and we can see where efficiency improvements are made,” Golparvar-Fard says.

The project highlights the way new technologies allow manual work to be monitored and scrutinized, and it comes as productivity in other areas of work, including many white collar jobs, is being tracked more closely using desktop and smartphone software.

Software developed at the University of Illinois can show different stages of construction.

Such additional scrutiny is sometimes controversial. The tracking of office workers raises worries over privacy, for instance, and fears that people may be encouraged to work excessive hours.

Golparvar-Fard concedes that this could be an issue, but he defends the idea. “It’s not new to the construction industry that there would either be people standing and observing operations, or that there would be fixed cameras,” he says. “Yes, making this autonomous has a different feeling for the workers. But you have to keep in mind that it’s not really questioning the efficiency of the workers, it’s questioning what resources these guys need to be more efficient.”

Such concerns aren’t slowing down development of the technology required for monitoring construction work. The falling cost of drone hardware and the availability of sophisticated control, navigation, and planning software have helped the aerial vehicles make a large impact on the agriculture industry already (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2014: Agricultural Drones”).

Monitoring activity across a large, complex construction site is particularly difficult because there are so many moving parts, and because the jobs being performed change frequently. A report published in 2009 by the National Research Council of the National Academies found that construction lags behind other industries such as manufacturing in terms of productivity, and blamed the situation on problems with planning, coӧrdination, and communication.

Another project involves tracking the activity of individual construction workers in video footage.

At the Sacramento project, video is being captured by a drone-operating company called ImageInFlight. The software developed by the University of Illinois team can show how different subcontracting teams are working together.

Lincoln Wood, regional manager for virtual design and construction at Turner Construction, which is running the Sacramento project, says that while it is common to monitor progress closely, the near-real-time aerial images and software analysis being used there provides a more comprehensive picture of what’s going on, and can highlight how a slowdown in one area may affect the entire project. “The nice thing about it is that it’s showing all the tasks in an area, so people are seeing the global impact,” he says.

The software developed by Golparvar-Fard and his colleagues includingTimothy Bretl, an associate professor of robotics, and Derek Hoiem, an associate professor of computer science, is also being used at a high-rise construction project in Arizona, and by Taisei, a large construction company in Japan.

The University of Illinois team is currently testing a system that will allow drones to attach cameras to locations across a building site, so that activity can be monitored continually. In experiments, they are also using a crowdsourcing platform to categorize workers’ activities in video footage. A manager can then see how different tasks are being performed overall, and how much time each individual is spending on a job.

This level of surveillance could prove even more controversial. A spokesman for the Laborer’s International Union of North America (LIUNA) said the organization was not aware of such technology, and declined to comment.

Verizon’s 5G Tests Show it to be Faster than Google Fiber

As reported by 9to5Mac: Early tests of Verizon‘s 5G technology show that it can achieve connection speeds 30-50 times faster than 4G/LTE – above the speeds offered by Google Fiber’s gigabit wired broadband. Even better, the company expects to have “some level of commercial deployment” by 2017, some three years earlier than expected, reports CNET.

To put that speed difference into perspective, the movie Guardians of the Galaxy would take around six minutes to download over a good LTE connection – while 5G would have it downloaded to your device in just 15 seconds …

There is, of course, a big difference between beginning commercial deployment with a select number of clients and you or I being able to get our hands on all that tasty, tasty bandwidth. There will also be the usual chicken-and-egg situation with faster data speeds: carriers waiting until there are enough devices capable of using it before they make it widely available, and manufacturers like Apple waiting until the network capacity is sufficiently widespread to make it worth adding to devices.

But Verizon does look to be upping the pace, moving tests out of the lab and into the field during the next 12 months. That could encourage others to speed up their own plans. South Korea had been expected to be first to launch, with a trial 5G network in place for the Winter Olympics in 2018, Japan aiming for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2020.

“It’s a very aggressive timeline,” said Rima Qureshi, chief strategy officer of telecommunications equipment supplier Ericsson. “It’ll be interesting to see what the reaction is.”

Trials have so far been limited to Verizon’s own innovation centers in Waltham, Massachusetts, and San Francisco. It will need the government to release more radio spectrum before it can go beyond field tests.

For technical trials themselves, we have what we need,” said Roger Gurnani, chief information and technology architect for Verizon. “Beyond that, 5G will require big bands of spectrum.”

Apple generally adopts a wait-and-see policy with new technology, having waited until the iPhone 5 in 2012 before adding LTE capabilities to its iPhones – almost two years after carriers began offering the faster connection speeds. It did, however, move more swiftly with LTE Advanced (LTE-A), adding support for the 150Mbit/s fast-track LTE service in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Toyota Investing $50M Over 5 Years with Stanford, MIT for Autonomous-Vehicle Research

As reported by MIT Technology Review: Toyota is investing $50 million with Stanford and MIT for autonomous-vehicle research that it says will focus on things like learning how to drive from humans, how to anticipate what people or other vehicles will do on the road, and how best to interact with people.

The Japanese automaker said Friday that it’s investing the money over five years, and it will be split evenly between the two universities. The project will be led by Gill Pratt, a roboticist and former program manager at DARPA who had organized the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

The auto maker has lured the organizer of the DARPA Robotics Challenge to lead its new AI research effort.

Pratt said safety and autonomy—of people, more than cars—are the overall goals of the artificial-intelligence research. Stanford plans to study topics such as decision making, reasoning, sensing, and perception, while MIT researchers will work on things like smart user interfaces and collecting and analyzing data from humans in hopes of figuring out how we drive.

Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, known as CSAIL, said her group’s priority is “building a car that is never responsible for a collision.”

Toyota reiterated on Friday that even as cars get smarter and more capable, it wants to keep drivers involved in the act of piloting them—a different tack from the one Google is taking with its fully autonomous vehicles that are roaming the streets in Silicon Valley (see “Toyota Unveils an Autonomous Car, But Says It’ll Keep Drivers in Control”).

Kiyotaka Ise, senior managing officer at Toyota and chief officer of the company’s research and development program, said Friday through a translator that he thinks it will “take quite a long time to have a driverless car.” But he also said that the company will continue to pursue the goal of an autonomous vehicle and, along the way, apply technologies developed for cars to help people drive.