Tag: news

What’s the best car of 2014? According to Top Gear, it’s the BMW i8, a plug-in hybrid electric car with a slick look, great acceleration, and the ability to conveniently charge up at home. This is no small deal. Top Gear is a humungous show with a big worldwide following… and it doesn’t have a history of taking a liking

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Wind power is one of our favorite topics. It’s often the cheapest option for new electricity generation, and it may well be the greenest. It is comparable to solar on greenhouse gas emissions, and uses even less water than solar (0.001 gallons per kWh vs 0.030 gallons per kWh), and hundreds of times less than fossil fuel and nuclear power

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Yet another scientific study has undermined one of the shoutiest claims of the anti-wind movement – that inaudible sound waves (or infrasound) emitted by operating wind turbines causes people living close by to wind farms to get sick, with a litany of symptoms ranging from anxiety, to nausea to migraine, heart disease, sleep deprivation and tinnitus. The study by the

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A new large-scale battery energy storage system was recently unveiled at the Alt Daber solar power plant in Germany by the companies Belectric and Vattenfall, via a ribbon-cutting ceremony. This new energy storage facility — the first large-scale battery storage system to be installed at a large PV farm in Europe — was designed with the intention of putting the

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Utility-scale energy storage is often discussed like it’s the flying car of renewable energy, but unlike the flying car, there is an immediate need and an eventual trillion-dollar global market to go along with it. After speaking with EnerVault’s new CEO, Ron Mosso; Temporal Power’s President and CTO, Jeff Veltri; and Bic Stevens, who is a former venture capitalist and

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IBM researchers in India have discovered that 70% of discarded laptop batteries have enough capacity to power an LED light bulb for 4 hours per day for a year. This is due to the fact that laptops lose their portability long before their batteries are completely dead (or their battery life becomes unacceptably short), so they are discarded early. Conventional

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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