Reno Gazette-Journal: Tesla Now Working on Gigafactory Interior Plus Data Center
For the past year, the exterior facade of Tesla Motors' Gigafactory 1 received most of the attention online, garnering plenty of images and video as it steadily rose in the high desert just east of Reno.
Now the facility's innards will start to get some play, too.
Work on the $5 billion battery plant's interior architecture is now underway in full force, as well as a data center to be located on the Gigafactory site.
Vox: New York's Revolutionary Plan to Remake Its Power Utilities
By now, many people are aware of the ongoing battles between customers with rooftop solar panels and power utilities around the country. At first blush, this can look like a standard story of scrappy outsiders versus evil corporations. But as I've been arguing, that's not quite right.
Utilities aren't evil. They are doing exactly what they are designed to do. The problem is the design. Right now, utilities operate in a regulatory environment that puts them intrinsically at odds with some of the coolest, most promising stuff happening in energy today: rooftop solar, energy storage in electric vehicles and household batteries, smart home energy management tech like the Nest thermostat, and various new ways of aggregating and managing demand.
States are beginning to understand this, and several are taking steps to reform how their utilities work. None, however, are going at it with the speed and gusto of New York.
Bloomberg: For Hourly Fee, This U.S. Lab Will Help You Make Batteries
Argonne National Laboratory, the U.S. government-funded center near Chicago that designed the first nuclear reactor to generate electricity in 1951, is looking to do business with battery storage developers.
The $760-million-a-year operation will charge small- to medium-size companies by the hour for its help developing energy storage technologies. Under the arrangement, businesses will approach the center with scientific problems -- from wear and tear on widgets to battery performance -- and Argonne scientists and engineers will consult and work alongside the companies at the lab for a fee.
Motherboard: One Quarter of the World Will Run on Clean Energy by the End of the Decade
The Paris-based International Energy Agency is perhaps the world’s most august energy advisory body. It was formed in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis to advise world governments on how to respond to supply shocks and to serve as a reliable source of nonpartisan information on global energy issues. Now four decades old and inclusive of 29 member states, it’s a pretty conservative institution.
Last Friday, it quietly released its very sexily-named Medium-Term Renewable Energy Market Report 2015. The report concluded that by 2020, 26 percent of the world’s energy -- over a quarter -- will be generated by renewable sources. The agency calls it “a remarkable shift in a very limited period of time.”
UPI: U.S. Slowdown Lifts Oil Prices
Crude oil prices continued a strong forward push Wednesday amid gathering signs the weak market is hurting the trajectory in U.S. shale oil basins.
Brent crude oil continued from Tuesday's dramatic rally to start trading at $52.57, up about 1.3 percent from the previous close. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark price for crude oil, gained about the same to start trading in New York at $49.15.
The price for WTI is up more than 6 percent since Monday. Low U.S. rig counts for the week ending Oct. 2 and Russian military intervention in Syria added positive pressure to crude oil prices at the start of the week.