Tag: new energy news

Researchers at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are turning to extremely tiny tubes and rods to boost power and durability in Li-ion batteries. If successful, the batteries will last longer and perform better, leading to a cost advantage for electric vehicles. Transportation and communication around the world increasingly rely on Li-ion batteries, with cell phones ubiquitous on

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Production of the Kia Soul EV  begun at Kia’s factory in Gwangju, Korea this week, with the first Kia Soul EV available for sale in North America in the second half of 2014. While Kia has previously offered electric cars – the Venga EV and the Ray EV – to its domestic customers, this will be the first time Kia

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The Swiss Mitsubishi importer has demonstrated that a plug-in hybrid Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV can travel 830 km (518 miles) on a single tank of petrol.   Mitsubishi Motors claims the plug-in hybrid Outlander PHEV has a range of 824 kilometers (512 Miles) in the combined hybrid mode. The Swiss Mitsubishi importer wanted to know whether this is feasible in practice

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One of the largest manufacturers of industrial batteries in the world, Saft, recently announced that it would now be offering an extended warranty of up to 15 years for its Li-ion batteries.   The move makes Saft the first Li-ion battery manufacturer in the world to offer such a long warranty.   The confidence isn’t all that surprising considering that

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In what could be a game changer for the solar energy industry, a house in suburban Sydney, Australia has installed the world’s first building integrated solar system that generates electricity and heat. The rooftop array combines thin-film solar photovoltaic (PV) panels with a solar thermal duct system that warms and cools the air. The top layer produces electricity from the

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One of the fundamental challenges of battery technology is that lithium-ion batteries — by far the best general option for energy storage currently in wide commercial use — are intrinsically bulky and heavy. A new research team at the University of Central Florida believes they can challenge that problem by turning copper wires into supercapacitors, then embedding those wires into

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There’s one business Sony 6758.TO -0.67% has clung to despite pressure to do otherwise: its lithium-ion battery unit. Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai emphasized in early February that the company sees its battery business as essential to growth of smartphones and other mobile devices.  But now, it looks like the company has another incentive.   On Wednesday, Sony indicated it’s also

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SynQor, Inc. announced the release of its military Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) EXA Series of isolated and fully-regulated dc-dc converters. This new EXA Series offers up to 300W of power in a quarter-brick package. These highly efficient (95% at full load), high power density dc-dc converters have a 28V nominal input voltage (16-40Vin range with a 50V transient for 1 second). They

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Analog Devices has added the ADSP-BF70x to the Blackfin processor family. The new offerings incorporate the new Blackfin+ core. It can handle 2 by 16-bit, 32-bit and complex math operations in a single cycle. It is backwards compatible and delivers 800 MMACS for 16-bit operations and half that for 32-bit operations. Versions are available with up to 1 Mbyte of

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Researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) have recently introduced the highest performing III-V metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) field-effect transistors (FETs) at the 2014 Symposium on VLSI Technology. The UCSB research promises to help deliver higher semiconductor performance at lower power consumption levels for next-generation, high-performance servers. The research is supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world’s

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