Tag: news

Modern buildings contain a lot of devices — fans, pumps, lights, motors — that can slow down or speed up, dim or brighten, or otherwise alter their electricity consumption on the fly. Utilities and grid operators are eager for fast-responding energy assets that can shave power usage within minutes or alter second-by-second consumption to help keep the grid humming at

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Panasonic Corp wants to be the exclusive producer of lithium-ion battery cells at U.S. electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc’s planned multibillion-dollar battery factory, a senior executive of the Japanese company said on Friday. Yoshio Ito, senior managing executive officer and president of the Japanese firm’s automotive and industrial division, said that Panasonic had no timeframe for deciding on investing

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Electric skateboards are certainly building up some momentum as a form of urban transport, and they seem to just keep getting lighter and lighter. Florida-based start-up Marbel is the latest to set its wheels in motion, this week launching a crowdfunding campaign for what it claims to be the world’s lightest electric vehicle – the 9.9 lb (4.5 kg) Marbel.

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Last week, the story broke of an extremely hopeful “Ryden dual carbon battery” developed by Power Japan Plus (PJP), and responses have ranged from optimistic, to pessimistic reminders that unfulfilled battery “breakthroughs” have been touted before. If you’re just hearing of this prototype chemistry now being proof tested by an undisclosed “famous” go-cart race team and with results expected in

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Segway made a name for itself with self-balancing, two-wheeled scooters that could quickly get pedestrians around town with a minimal footprint. Despite the hype leading up its launch, it did not, as it turned out, “change the way we think of cities”. It did, however, change the way we think of mall cops – but the Segway’s success in the

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Consolidated Edison is one of the distribution utilities that will be acutely affected if New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision, or REV, proposal becomes a reality in the coming years. The utility is not necessarily fighting the changes happening at the grid edge. It already has a “utility of the future” group, explained Andrew Reid, a senior engineer at Consolidated

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Elon Musk has probably been given a lot of advice during his time at Tesla–some good, and some bad. Bond manager Jeffrey Gundlach is the latest to offer his own take on the business to Musk though–and it isn’t what you might be expecting. According to Bloomberg, Gundlach has suggested the Tesla Motors [NSDQ:TSLA] CEO get out of the car-making

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Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a novel nanometer scale ruthenium oxide anchored nanocarbon graphene foam architecture that improves the performance of supercapacitors, a development that could mean faster acceleration in electric vehicles and longer battery life in portable electronics. The researchers found that supercapacitors, an energy storage device like batteries and fuel cells, based on transition

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Interference-free charging is a major prerequisite for the economically efficient use of electric vehicles. After about 120,000 km driven electrically, the RheinMobil project has proved that a combination of quick and conventional charging is ideal for the battery performance: The controlled mix ensures a high utilization rate of the vehicles and protects the battery. RheinMobil is a joint project of

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Researchers around the world have been working to harness the unusual properties of graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms. But graphene lacks one important characteristic that would make it even more useful: a property called a bandgap, which is essential for making devices such as computer chips and solar cells. Now, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and

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