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The Lyle, Texas-based startup is already making its batteries in three smaller-scale manufacturing facilities, Carlos Coe, CEO and founder, said in an interview last month. It's also testing them with Hawaii Electric Power, in a project meant to stabilize the intermittent power coming from wind turbines, and has had one 500-megawatt battery powering a remote observatory in Antarctica since 2006, he said.

Now it's seeking to raise up to $475 million to contribute to a factory at a closed Ford Motor Co. plant in Wixom, Mich. capable of turning out about 2,000 megawatts of batteries per year, Coe said see Green Light post).

That plant, meant to be built in partnership with Santa Barbara, Calif.-based solar panel maker Clairvoyant Energy, could also see the two companies integrate their solar power and battery systems, Coe said.

"We would represent the power electronics portion of the equipment they'll be producing in the future," he said. "The new approach would be integrating our approach with large-scale solar."

While he said it was too early to say if this meant solar-plus-battery systems rolling off the factory floor, "it's a fair thing to say we're working toward that direction," not just with Clairvoyant but also with other solar panel manufacturers he declined to name.

As for in-the-field proof of concept, Xtreme is testing its PowerCell batteries in applications from pickup truck-sized replacements for diesel generators to megawatt-sized units in the Hawaii wind power project, Tom Cain, partner with Xtreme investor Sail Ventures, said at the GreenBeat conference in San Mateo, Calif. last week.

Cain described PowerCell as a fiberglass battery designed back in the 1990s in an effort by Corning, British Aerospace and Ford Aerospace. The battery was spun out into a company planning to develop it for California's erstwhile zero-emission vehicle market – a plan that collapsed, along with General Motors plans for its EV1 electric car, when the state backed off its ZEV timeline, Cain said.

Xtreme Power, founded in 2004, bought the technology, and has since raised about $20 million from investors including Sail Ventures and the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, the Austin Business Journal reported in June. That explains why the PowerCell technology hasn't gotten much attention before now, Cain said - but he's not afraid to attract attention now.

"This battery is unlike anything the world has ever seen," he said. That includes cost – about one-tenth the cost of comparable sized lithium-ion systems, he said.

If the technology can live up to its promises, "Xtreme Power has the potential to introduce a disruptive technology to the current energy storage landscape," Sam Jaffe, senior research analyst at IDC company Energy Insights, said in a Friday email.

Beyond the combination of high-power output, high-energy density, long cycle-life and high efficiency, "We've heard that they can sell their battery systems for $500/kWh [kilowatt-hour] and still make a profit," Jaffe wrote. That price would be well under the kilowatt hour prices that are typically quoted for other battery systems, which are meant for large-scale energy storage applications. And it could approach the price points for mass energy storage systems like pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage (see Top Ten Smart Grid: Energy Storage and Grid Energy Storage: Big Market, Tough to Tackle).

Xtreme Power itself hasn't given price figures for its PowerCell. It also says that its battery shouldn't be called a lead-acid battery.

Still, most observers, including Jaffe and Dan Rastler, energy storage program manager for the Electric Power Research Institute, place Xtreme Power in a class of so-called "advanced lead acid" battery systems seeking to make key improvements to age-old lead-acid chemistries (see Green Light post).

"This is one of several lead-acid battery technologies we've been following," Rastler said Friday. Lead-acid batteries can offer the advantages of working with cheap, safe and easy to recycle materials, he noted.

Beyond Xtreme Power, EPRI is interested in learning more about technology from Australia's Ecoult and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO), advanced lead-acid batteries from Japan's Hitachi and GS Yuasa Group, and systems being developed by large-scale battery manufacturers East Penn and Exide, which are teaming up with startups providing new technologies, Rastler said (see Axion's Lead Carbon Batteries: Sweet Spot for Micro-Hybrid Vehicles?).

Source: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/xtreme-power-super-dry-battery/

“It's the ultimate irony; I love it,” he said.

The 50-year-old building will house manufacturing of Xtreme's large-scale power systems and Clairvoyant's solar panels.

Clairvoyant and Xtreme plan a total capital investment of $475.4 million and the creation of 2,500 direct jobs over the next five years, according to a briefing memo prepared by the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

Hardee expects the real estate deal to close in the second quarter of next year.

Clairvoyant plans to create up to four solar panel manufacturing lines at the energy park, with a capital investment of $857 million over four phases, and is expected to create 751 jobs over five years.

Once completed, Clairvoyant will have the capacity to produce more than 2.5 million solar panels a year at the Wixom site, potentially replacing the need for one large coal plant every year.

Xtreme will focus on large-scale systems to store power generated by windmills, solar panels and other technologies.

Redevelopment work is expected to start next year, with manufacturing to be under way by 2011. The companies are looking for tenants to fill the 2.4 million square feet of manufacturing space not being used by the joint venture. Hardee said leases will likely start being signed next year.

The deal was the result of a nine-month negotiation involving Clairvoyant, Xtreme and Ford Motor Co., facilitated by the MEDC.

Hardee said Michigan made sense based on both the involvement of the MEDC and the facility itself.

The Wixom Assembly Plant was one of Ford's largest and oldest manufacturing sites, producing 6.6 million vehicles during its 50 years of operation.

Production began in 1957 when Wixom became Lincoln Division's new national headquarters and the sole producer of all vehicles for the Lincoln Division. Over the years, Wixom Assembly produced the Lincoln Continental, Town Car, LS, Mark VI, VII and VIII, as well as the Ford Thunderbird and Ford GT.

At its height, more than 5,000 workers were employed at the plant. The Wixom plant employed approximately 1,000 workers when it closed in 2007.

“The facility has such good bones,” Hardee said. “It puts us one year closer to going to market because the heavy-duty infrastructure is already there.”

Source: http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20091115/SUB01/311159986/1002

But behind some of the buildings' walls, a group of renewable-energy companies are working to transform the defunct assembly into a manufacturing park for equipment such as thin-film solar panels and energy-storage and power-management systems for solar- and wind-power systems. Xtreme Power, which makes the energy-storage and power-management systems, and Clairvoyant Energy, which develops thin-film solar production capacity using equipment from Oerlikon Solar, have agreed to buy the space from Ford — with the help of about $100 million in tax credits and funding from other government sources. (Image, left, shows the front view of the manufacturing park. Courtesy of Ford Motor Co.)

The assembly plant turns out to be ideal for thin-film manufacturing. For one thing, it's in a very convenient location near road, rail and numerous suppliers of key materials, such as glass, said Chris O’Brien, head of North American market development for Oerlikon. "One of the most important materials to a PV module is glass. A number of glass suppliers in the area who have historically been suppliers to the auto industry currently have excess capacity, so there are natural synergies there." The structure of the building also is well-suited to house thin-film manufacturing machinery, he added. "The plant is idle, available, in a region that has a skilled labor force that's experienced in manufacturing and [has] some terrific [research and development] facilities nearby."

The project has been cited as a poignant example of an attempt to replace some of the country's thousands of lost automobile-manufacturing jobs with green jobs. It's also one of the latest pieces of news highlighting the ability of some renewable-energy companies to benefit from the recession — and especially from the auto industry's pain.

In a just-released report, Clean Tech Job Trends 2009, research firm Clean Edge lists the project as one of several examples of clean-tech companies opening factories in towns that have experienced plant closures in the last few years. In Newton, Iowa, for example, 1,800 employees lost their jobs in 2006, when Whirlpool bought home-appliance maker Maytag Corp. and closed its offices and plants in the city. Wind-turbine-blade maker TPI Composites, which last year opened a factory in Newton, Iowa, already employs 325 people there today and hopes to expand to 500 employees by 2010. Setting up shop in those areas gives companies access to skilled workers who need minimal retraining, according to the report. [Editor's note: for more on Clean Tech Job Trends 2009, check out today's In Focus: Clean Edge Says Clean Tech Jobs are Everywhere.)

Other examples from the report include thin-film solar company Konarka, which last year opened a manufacturing facility in New Bedford, Mass., at the site of a Polaroid factory that closed in 2007; and green-building materials company Serious Materials, which this year bought and reopened a Kensington Windows factory that had closed last year. (See chart, below. Courtesy of CleanEdge)

Buying Assets on the Cheap

The principal of buying assets when they're cheap is hardly a new idea, and renewable energy is no exception. Valero Renewable Fuels bought a group of ethanol factories from bankrupt VeraSun Energy Corp. back in April, paying only about 25 percent of the estimated cost of building those factories from scratch. Solar and other cleantech companies are hoping to do the same thing: take advantage of the low prices available today to expand their manufacturing capacity cheaply and to position themselves to grow when market conditions improve.

It's not just the big companies either. Sure, German solar company SolarWorld offered to buy Opel facilities from General Motors Corp., later dropping its bid. But in some ways, the recession has been a boon to startups that might have otherwise had difficulty raising the capital to buy manufacturing equipment, or persuading manufacturing partners to buy the equipment, especially if they plan to start small.

Take concentrating-photovoltaic startup Skyline Solar, which plans to have its systems made in metal shops that make parts for the automobile industry. Tim Keating, vice president of marketing for the company said the company expects to make "multiple megawatts" of its systems on those automobile lines starting at the end of this year.

And SunModular, a startup developing a component to help keep crystalline-silicon panels cool — which it claims can boost a system's electricity output by between 5 and 10 percent — also plans to use the extra capacity at automotive-supply factories to keep its manufacturing expenses low.

Aside from the manufacturing capacity, the hard times for the auto industry also means good deals for capital equipment, including machines for plastic molding and sheet metal fabrication, CEO Eugenia Corrales said. "There are a lot of large capacities available and we can leverage [them]," she said, adding that the automotive downturn has been "a good thing for us." "We're not having to convince suppliers to buy big new pieces of equipment. They already have it." Meanwhile, other companies are finding ways to make use of automotive technology for renewable energy. Artemis Intelligent Power in September scored a £1 million grant from the U.K. government to convert its hydraulic pump and motor technology, currently used in automotive applications, to make wind-turbine transmission systems.

Of course, it also makes sense for companies going after government funding — especially in the United States — to underline a connection to auto-industry suffering. One of the goals of the stimulus has been to replace lost jobs with new green jobs, and the automotive industry has suffered more than most others. Some companies aiming for stimulus funding have been currying favor with government agencies by planning U.S. manufacturing plants or locating projects — complete with green jobs — in Detroit. “There is no way to avoid the political context in which all this has happened,” said Harrison Wellford, founder and managing director for consulting firm Terrawell Energy. Building projects in regions that are hurting the most, such as in Michigan, helps, he added.

The connection between solar energy and cars may be growing in other ways too. Toyota launched a solar-paneled Prius for its 2010 model. Fisker Automotive, which scored a $529 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy last month, has designed its Karma sports car with a solar roof. And SolarCity in September announced it had built a solar-powered electric-car-charging corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco in California.

While SolarCity chief executive Lyndon Rive said he wouldn't call the small — but growing — market for electric vehicles a driver for solar power, he certainly would like electric-vehicle owners to install solar panels on their homes and businesses. "The focus is adding all the ingredients to live a carbon-free lifestyle," he said. "If every car was an [electric vehicle], it would help the problem, but not solve it. You need [electric vehicles] combined with solar to start making a difference."

Source: http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/10/solar-energy-and-detroit-renewable-companies-see-advantages-in-auto-industrys-pain

• Ohio Module Manufacturing Co. taking over ArvinMeritor's Southwest Detroit plant, saving 200 jobs that manufacture complete chassis modules for the Jeep Wrangler. The Toledo-based company plans to invest $21.4 million into the facility.
• Detroit-based Strategic Staffing Solutions plans to spend $7.3 million to open a new IT center in the Motor City. That deal is expected to create 437 jobs.
• Williams International expects to invest $12 million to update its Commerce Township facility so it can build small gas turbine engines for military, industrial, and commercial aircraft applications.
• The transformation of the old Ford Wixom plant received a big boost with $137 million in tax credits over 20 years. Clairvoyant Energy Solar Panel Manufacturing and Xtreme Power plan to turn the facility into an alternative energy manufacturing base that will create 3,250 jobs as part of an $856 million project.

Source: http://www.metromodemedia.com/innovationnews/medcbrownfieldprojects0139.aspx