RNE has a post on a Morgan Stanley report on tesla's potential to hasten the utility death spiral - How Tesla could pull more consumers off the grid.

Investment bank Morgan Stanley says the global electricity utility industry is still underestimating the potential of EV maker Tesla to achieve a dramatic reduction in battery storage costs, luring more and more consumers to go “off-grid.”

In a detailed report released in late July, Solar Power & Energy Storage, Morgan Stanley said that energy storage, specifically that being developed by Tesla in its so-called “giga-factory” could be disruptive in US and Europe, and elsewhere.

It does not mention Australia in the report, but Australia has all the ingredients of a market perfect for such disruption – excellent solar resources and high electricity costs, and more specifically, high network charges.

“Given the relatively high cost of the power grid, we think that customers in parts of the US and Europe may seek to avoid utility grid fees by going “off-grid” through a combination of solar power and energy storage,” Morgan Stanley’s leading energy analysts write in the report.

“We believe there is not sufficient appreciation of the magnitude of energy storage cost reduction that Tesla has already achieved, nor of the further cost reduction magnitude that Tesla might be able to achieve. once the company has constructed its “Gigafactory,” targeted for completion later in the decade.“

This, of course, has massive implication for the incumbent utilities, not to mention for other consumers. The immediate response for networks has been to seek to raise fixed charges to protect their revenue, an option that Morgan Stanley says will be counter-productive.

Bloomberg has a report on the ambitions of one time Australian tidal power company Atlantis - Morgan Stanley-Backed Atlantis Targets India, China for Tidal Power Plants.

Atlantis Resources Corp., an ocean- current turbine maker backed by Morgan Stanley, plans to expand in China, India and South Korea after winning a bid in the U.K. to build the world’s largest tidal-power project.

Atlantis Resources may start building a 50 megawatt tidal farm by 2012 in Gujarat, a western Indian state, and conduct commercial-scale trials in South Korea, Timothy Cornelius, the chief executive officer, said an interview today.

“China’s the next big market for tidal energy,” Cornelius, 34, said in Singapore at the Clean Energy conference. “It has the most natural tidal resources in the world and can be home to more than 1,000 megawatts of tidal energy.”

Global production of electricity harnessing the ocean waves may climb ten-fold to as much as 300 megawatts in the next couple of years, said Cornelius, a former submersible engineer who splits his time between Singapore and London. The potential to produce marine power economically is about 24,000 megawatts, he said. It costs 2.5 million pounds ($4.01 million) per megawatt for a minimum 200 megawatt-tidal project, he said.

Business Green has a report on the latest example of the trend towards clean energy powered data centres - Morgan Stanley eyes up tidal-powered datacentre.

A group of investors, including investment bank Morgan Stanley, are set to fund a £250m off-grid tidal-powered datacentre in the north of Scotland, it was confirmed yesterday. The banking giant said it is to work with tidal power company Atlantic Resources Corporation – in which it holds a stake – to build the site by 2011.

The datacentre would require about 150Mw hours of power and the alliance wants this energy to be sourced entirely from tidal arrays.

The zero-carbon datacentre will seek to tap into increasing demand for greener IT systems and be opened up to third-party companies to hire space. " They will be looking for tenants for the datacentre," said a spokesman for the partnership.

The scheme must still secure planning permission to go ahead, and although the Scottish government has recently signalled its support for marine energy projects, only one commercial-scale tidal energy project has so far gone into operation in the UK – and that took 13 years to come to fruition.

However, the Morgan Stanley project is expected to avoid one of the main technical challenges faced by tidal energy projects, by connecting direct to the datacentre facility and not linking to the national grid.

The project is the latest in a series of innovative proposals designed to tackle datacentres' increasing energy use and associated carbon emissions. Globally, datacentres are responsible for the same amount of emissions as an average European country, according to research by Gartner – accounting for about a quarter of the 580 million tonnes used by IT equipment worldwide.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change estimates server farms are responsible for three per cent of electricity use in the UK, a figure expected to double by 2020.

Consequently, growing numbers of firms are investigating ways to power da tacentres using renewable energy. Earlier this year, submarine cable operator Farice signed a £12m deal with networking company Thus for a high-bandwidth internet connection between UK businesses and datacentres in Iceland that could be powered using emission-free geothermal energy.

Finance Asia has a report on Asian tidal / ocean current power company Atlantis - Tidal power company moves to the next level.

Atlantis Resources, a developer and manufacturer of electricity-generating tidal current turbines, has moved a step closer to a commercial-scale deployment of its technology with the acquisition of Current Resources, an energy origination and project development business owned by Morgan Stanley. ...

Power generation using tidal currents is the latest renewable energy source to emerge as a viable alternative to fossil fuels. The technology has yet to be deployed commercially, but the unparalleled predictability of the movement and intensity of tides suggests it has clear advantages for the power industry, versus some of the other renewable energy sources such as wind or solar power.

According to an Atlantis press release, ocean power, which includes tidal current power, wave power and ocean thermal energy conversion, represents a vast source of energy estimated at between 2,000 and 4,000 terawatt hours per year. The US and the UK combined have sufficient ocean power potential to meet around 15% of their power needs.

Having spent 10 years developing its turbines, Cornelius says Atlantis is now ready to become the first tidal power developer to establish mini-arrays (essentially farms or fields of multiple subsea turbines of 1 or 2 megawatts each). This will allow it to aggregate the necessary data about environmental and turbine performance before it moves on to apply for permits for projects of a much more significant scale.

“We are entering into an exciting phase where we will focus on the necessary steps to build up to meaningful commercial quantities of tidal generation projects,” he says. “The first step will be to deploy lots of between 5 and 10 turbines to allow governments and the regulators to get comfortable with the technology and the performance before we apply to scale-up. We hope to start deploying turbines by June next year, and building up to 2011 when we plan to enter the commercial side of deployment with projects that have a capacity of 150-500MW.”

These commercial projects should see the company turn cash flow positive in 2011, he adds.

The company has had a 150KW turbine installed and connected to the grid in Australia since 2006 and is hoping to build up its generation capacity there, but it is also actively looking for several other sites both in Asia and Europe where it can set up trail arrays. It is currently evaluating potential installation opportunities in the Pentland Firth off Northern Scotland, in the Bay of Fundy and in British Columbia off the east and west costs of North America and off the coast of South Korea.

China also has the potential to become a “huge” market, according to Cornelius, since the company’s Nereus turbine that is suitable for shallow-water can be deployed not just in tidal oceans, but in rivers too – and that is a resource that China has a plenty of. Atlantis also has a second type of turbine, the Solon, which is a deep-water turbine that can be installed in some of the fastest flowing currents in the world.

“China will be a key market. South Korea has some of the best tidal resources in the world, Japan has tidal resources as well and the Philippines has fantastic tidal flow. So, Asia is a hugely exciting place for us, because there is so much resource and so much need for clean power.”