A wind farm will power a Honda car manufacturing facility in Brazil. Honda has a car assembly plant in Sumare, Sao Paulo. According to Wikipedia, Honda Civics and Fits are assembled there. The wind farm that will soon power this facility is located in the most southern part in Xangri-la, hundreds of miles away, and has nine 3 MW turbines.
The technologies of diesel-electric and fully-electric propulsion systems are continuing to develop in Norway, according to recent reports, thereby allowing for cuts in shipping costs and the reduction of noise produced by ship propulsion systems. This could potentially result in ships nearly as silent as modern submarines. Amongst those in the Northern European country working on such technologies is the
BYD will be expanding its EV leasing deal with the London-based private-car service Thriev, according to recent reports. The Chinese car manufacturer will now be delivering a further 200 of its e6 electric cars to Thriev by April 2015. The agreement marks what is now the largest overseas rental agreement for the automaker. BYD has already provided Thriev with 32
The Nissan e-NV200 — the company’s new electric business/delivery van — is now available in Japan, but the US release has been delayed a bit, according to recent reports. The reason for the delay of the US release is due, reportedly, to the fact that Nissan wants to improve the range by integrating “better” batteries before releasing it to the
Until full colour flexible OLED screens can be manufactured with acceptable yields, it looks like the only rugged and shatter-proof alternative to power-hungry LCDs. So much so that despite competing in the smart watch arena with “traditional” TFT LCD-based designs such as the SmartWatch 3 it launched last September, Sony is also developing watch bracelets based on E-ink, albeit without
The YotaPhone 2’s five-inch touchscreen front display features a crisp high-definition 1080p AMOLED screen typically associated with a premium smartphone but the device’s back features an ultra-low power always-on greyscale e-ink touchscreen display which is similar to a Kindle’s screen. The e-ink display has a refresh rate of 0.012 seconds. The YotaPhone 2 can be controlled from either side as
Q. Hyundai released a zero-emission fuel cell vehicle (FCV) this year, and Toyota is slated to release one in 2015. The last time Grist wrote about FCVs was back in 2009, and the prognosis wasn’t optimistic. Has anything changed? Is the cost and greenhouse gas output of producing hydrogen more detrimental than having a zero-emissions car? (I do live in
India is planning to attract $100 billion of investment in its renewable energy sector over the next five years. Japan’s Softbank could make a significant contribution towards the achievement of that goal. The state of Andhra Pradesh in India may attract investment worth billions of dollars from Softbank to fund its ambitious solar energy plans. The state government hopes to
Forget the annual war on Christmas, things are really cooking up over the war on wind energy. The fight over wind energy has become something of a new American holiday ritual around this time of year, and now the stakes are higher than ever. In the latest twist, a coalition of US Governors has waded into the fray with a
DRS Technologies, a Finmeccanica Company, has expanded its role in the military and commercial energy storage business. DRS Power and Control Technologies has signed a memorandum of agreement with Lithiumstart LLC, a supplier of scalable, lithium ion and super capacitor-based energy storage systems (ESS), to integrate technologies into high-power military and commercial energy storage applications. DRS Power Electronic Modules (PEM),