Altair Nanotechnologies nets $7 million in Defense Appropriations Bill
Filed under: Emerging Technologies, Legislation and Policy
Following Altairnano's not-so-good news the other day (the Motley Fool said its stock "missed the mark"), the company must be pleased to announce some good news. To wit, $7 million worth of federal funds as part of the recently-passed Defense Appropriations Bill. The money will be used by Altair not for vehicles but for an advanced lithium battery and separate sensor programs. Five million is headed towards a U.S. Navy project that is intended to reduce the amount of diesel fuel the military branch uses. Altair's press release says that, "Currently, each Navy ship must run two diesel generators in parallel to ensure power is not lost should the primary generator go down. Altairnano's advanced lithium titanate energy storage pack could replace the back-up generator, allowing the Navy to reduce its consumption of fuel by millions of gallons each year." The other $2 million is for nanotech sensors to detect "minute amounts of explosive materials and chemical warfare agents."While neither of these is directly related to greener vehicles, reducing fuel use is an AutoblogGreen fave, and I think most of us agree that technological advancements in lithium batteries are a good thing. Whether throwing money at Altairnano as part of our country's war money is a good idea is another issue.
[Source: Altair, h/t to Harvest]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-14-2007 @ 6:16PM
Domenick said...
Their stock took a bit of a hit following the Motley Fool article. This news seemed to take it back up again. I knew I should have bought yesterday. >_<
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11-14-2007 @ 6:58PM
rick said...
Read the link under "anounce". This is for a 2.5Megawatt battery. The 2.0 Megawatt battery will ship to AES the big electric utility by year end. This battery is going to find best use as an industrial workhorse. Load leveling for utilities($9B market), taxis, delivery trucks, cranes, all sorts of industrial uses will pop up every day.
In their latest conference call Dr Gotcher said they have plans for a 20 Megawatt battery on the drawing boards! Awesome. Just Awesome.
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11-14-2007 @ 7:01PM
Dave Schmetterer said...
Ships are vehicles too - this development lets them burn HALF the amount of diesel fuel for electricity generation.
Seeing as how the larger Navy ships are compared to cities, this could also be a positive thing for energy generation and load leveling on land. I guess it depends how much it costs, the situation on a combat vessel at sea may not be comparable to a small town on land during peace time.
But if this unit could store energy from excess wind generation, or be charged during off-peak hours to lessen the peak loads of power plants - that'd be bigtime.
Not to mention that every improvement on a lithium battery - especially a mobile and most likely ruggedized one - is technology that may be applied to automobiles.
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