Justin C.

kateoplis:

Solar Impulse attempts its first intercontinental flight from Switzerland to Morocco without a drop of fuel | MSNBC

unknownskywalker:

AUDI e-bike wörthersee

The lithium-ion bike features a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer frame and 26-inch wheels. Located at the lowest point on the frame, the electric motor generates a record-breaking maximum output of 2.3kw. The rider can choose from among five cycling modes: human-powered only (‘pure’), the electric motor alone (‘egrip’), or pedaling supported by the electric motor (‘pedelec’).

For trick cycling, the bike’s seat can be lowered to run flush with the frame, returnable to normal riding position with the touch of a button. A multimode electronic control system also supports the rider when performing backwheeling, wheelies, and other tricks.

futurescope:

BMW, Daimler partner on ultra-light Visio.M city EV

If you like the idea of German electric vehicles like the BMW i3 and i8, but you’re worried they may be more than you really need when they arrive next year, you’ll be glad to know that a more to-the-point EV auf Deutsch is on the way. Along with Munich’s Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), BMW, Daimler and14 others are jointly developing the Visio.M urban runabout. While it should only muster the equivalent of 20 horsepower, it should be about 45 percent lighter than a Smart Fortwo — important when you want to use a small battery to keep the cost down. The project is also tackling safety and other chronic problems with tiny electric cars. TUM’s MUTE prototype (pictured here) is serving as the testbed for the technology being rolled into the Visio.M, although the €10.8 million ($14.2 million) in funding from Germany’s Federal Ministry for Education and Research is expected to produce something more original when the EV project reaches its eventual close.

[via] [more & image credit: BMWBLOG] [BMBF Project]

alexanderpf:

The Combined Charging System is the result of collaborative efforts between Audi, BMW, Chrysler, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Porsche and Volkswagen. Read More at motorward.com.

The article headline “Global Car Makers Announce 15-Minute EV Charging Standard” really annoys me. The interface is standardized, but the charging time a going to depend not only on your vehicle, but more importantly on whether you’re hooked up to 1 phase AC, 3 phase AC, or industrial DC. The fact that a common interface exists is the big story here.

I wonder what Toyota and Nissan have to say about this…

emergentfutures:

Massive offshore wind turbines to float in waters over a thousand feet deep

The US and UK last week announced plans to develop enormous floating offshore wind turbines that can be deployed in much deeper waters and further out to sea.

Full Story: ArsTechnica

This Stunning Electric Bike Is Like a Jet Fighter On Two Wheels

This is the ZecOO, an electric motorbike that can reach 75mph with a range that goes from 55 to 85 miles. No bad. But what I really like is its weird, anime jet fighter aesthetic, from its retro-futuristic profile to the extruded gauges to its front suspension.

It only takes four to six hours to charge, using its retractable power cord. That’s pretty good.

The bike was created by Kota Nezu of Znug Design and, apparently, the Japanese press is raving about it. I don’t blame them.

The company is going to start a limited edition production run. They will be available at $70,000 a pop. [Zecco via Bikeexif]

gizmodo

emergentfutures:

Global Clean Energy Investment a Record $263 Billion in 2011

“Clean energy investment, excluding research and development, has grown by 600 percent since 2004, on the basis of effective national policies that create market certainty,” saidPhyllis Cuttino, director of Pew’s Clean Energy Program. “This increase was due in part to the number of countries that have implemented effective national policies to support the clean energy market. In the United States, which attracted $48 billion last year, investors took advantage of the country’s stimulus programs before they expired at the end of 2011, as well as the production tax credit for electricity from renewable energy, which is to end this December.”

Full Story: Pew

unexpectedtech:

“The major breakthrough is simply the approach,” Marc Fenigstein, CEO of motorcycle startup BRD writes. “BRD doesn’t assume that anyone needs electric. Gas bikes kick ass, and none of us would trade our gas bikes for anything that is slower, uglier, or less fun. We set out to build a bike that was prettier, faster, and more fun than what was in our garages.”

By using gas performance as their design standard rather than some arbitrary engineering metric, BRD created a bike that was 100lbs (or 30%) lighter than competing electrics in their class and a bike that one-ups gas competition by putting out peak horsepower at will and requiring no shifting. It’s also just a beautiful vehicle to look at, with a surprisingly unique, almost anime color scheme in a field filled with eye-punishing chroma.

“The motorcycle market has very strong brand associations for the primary and secondary colors (Red = Honda and Ducati, Green = Kawasaki, Yellow = Yamaha and Suzuki, Blue = Yamaha, Orange = KTM) so we had to find something off the beaten path,” Fenigstein writes. “We drew from some of our favorite racing liveries and played around until we found something that stood out for its subtlety, rather than competing for ‘OMG LOOK AT ME AAAAAAHHHH.’”

I’m not sure that you can call anything about the RedShift subtle, but it is a gorgeous bike that’s hiding at least one awesome feature that your eyes can’t see: It sounds like a Star Wars podracer in action.

8bitfuture:

New solar cell technique could more than double efficiency.

A joint Australian/German research team have developed a way to boost efficiency of solar cells up to a record breaking 40% efficiency. Current panels have around 12-17% efficiency.

Called photochemical upconversion, the process captures energy that is normally lost in solar cells.

“We are able to boost efficiency by forcing two energy-poor red photons in the cell to join and make one energy-rich yellow photon that can capture light, which is then turned into electricity,” Associate Professor Schmidt said.

“We now have a benchmark for the performance of an upconverting solar cell. We need to improve this several times, but the pathway is now clear.”

IBM creates breathing, high-density, light-weight lithium-air battery

As part of its Battery 500 project — an initiative started by IBM in 2009 to produce a battery capable of powering a car for 500 miles — Big Blue has successfully demonstrated a light-weight, ultra-high-density, lithium-air battery.

In IBM’s lithium-air battery, oxygen is reacted with lithium to create lithium peroxide and electrical energy (pictured above). When the battery is recharged, the process is reversed and oxygen is released — in the words of IBM, this is an “air-breathing” battery. While conventional batteries are completely self-contained, the oxygen used in an lithium-air battery obviously comes from the atmosphere, so the battery itself can be much lighter.

The main thing, though, is that lithium-air energy density is a lot higher than conventional lithium-ionbatteries: The max energy density of lithium-air batteries is theorized to be around 12 kWh/kg, some 15 times greater than li-ion — and more importantly, comparable to gasoline.

Therein lies the crux of IBM’s Battery 500 project: Current battery tech simply cannot come close to gasoline, which is why we’re surrounded by electric cars that are lumbered down by massive batteries that can only go 100 miles — and why gas still rules supreme. Eventually (in another 10 years or so), li-ion batteries could be replaced with li-air batteries that are a tenth of the size and weight, and yet last just as long — or, of course, li-air could replace gasoline.

Lithium-air batteries aren’t a new idea: They’ve been mooted since the 1970s, but the necessary tech was well beyond the capabilities of then-contemporary material science. Today, with grapheneand carbon nanotubes and fancy membranes coming out of our ears, it seems IBM — with assistance from partners Asahi Kasei and Central Glass — now has the materials required to build a lithium-air battery. There is a video embedded below that details the electrochemical process of an li-air battery.

Supercomputers also played a big part in this breakthrough; IBM isn’t a battery-making company, after all. IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputers at IBM Research in Zurich and Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago were used to model and optimize the li-air chemistry. The battery prototypes themselves are being built at IBM Research Almaden, California.

Read more at the IBM Battery 500 Project

ExtremeTech

unexpectedtech:

Ford is preparing for an era when choosing whether a new car is powered by gas, electricity, or both is as simple as choosing its color is.

All future models from the automaker will be designed so that they can be produced with gas, electric, or hybrid drivetrains, a strategy embodied by the Ford Focus Electric, made available for the first press test drives last week. While GM and Nissan designed their first all-electric mass production cars from scratch, Ford is essentially using a 2010 design with the gas guts switched for electric ones.

That made strolling up to a Ford Focus in San Francisco last week slightly underwhelming: from the outside, the car looks familiar (unless you’re looking for the tailpipe). From the inside, though, in the driver’s seat, the Focus Electric is distinctive. I found it well-suited to San Francisco traffic, a game of real-life Frogger that rewards those who can quickly zip between lanes and enter gaps that open and close in an eyeblink. The eager response of the electric motor when I put my foot down was a big help, and all the more distinctive due to the near-silence, which also allowed me to hear more of what was happening around me.

The Focus Electric’s zip is something all-electric cars can offer. Electric motors can provide their full torque instantly, from any speed, while gas cars must rev up their engines before delivering extra torque to the wheels.

The most critical questions about any electric vehicle cannot be answered by a test drive or a glance at its price, though. Ford—like others before it—faces the challenge of convincing people that a car able to travel 76 miles on a single charge (slightly better than the 73 miles offered by its nearest competitor, the Nissan Leaf) can meet their driving needs, and that the car is worth the higher upfront cost.

Ford claims that a person’s driving habits and the car’s ability to reclaim energy during braking mean that a battery should actually last 100 miles per charge. It has also designed software for the car, and for a companion mobile app, to train drivers to squeeze the most out of their batteries.

A “brake coach” display next to the speedometer attempts to train drivers to recover as much energy as possible by braking early and smoothly. It provides clear feedback designed to encourage a driver’s competitive spirit. For example, when I pulled out into the stop-start traffic of downtown San Francisco (ideal conditions for recovering power), the dashboard told me I had 75 miles left in the battery. When my five-mile trip was over, it still said I had 75 miles left, since I had recovered 99 percent of the energy expended.

The associated smart-phone app, MyFord Mobile, tracks a car’s performance and can be used to share efficiency figures online, enabling drivers to compete against other Focus Electric owners and win (virtual) prizes.

Ford’s most significant innovation in the war against what is known as “range anxiety” will likely be the fact that it can charge fully in just under four hours (half the time it takes a Nissan Leaf to charge), thanks to high-power charging circuitry on board the car. However, getting that rapid charging requires a 240-volt connection in your home and paying $1,499 for the necessary “smart charger.” Those will be available from Best Buy, hinting at a future where electronics retailers are as important to your car as auto parts stores.

Toshiba electric buses will charge in just five minutes

Toshiba has announced plans to develop electric buses that can perform a charge in just 5 minutes, which the company says is roughly a quarter of the time that similar lithium-ion cells take. There’s a catch, though: to achieve these speedy recharges, the buses cannot drop below 50 percent charge, meaning that their range is limited to just 12 kilometers (or about 7.5 miles) before the buses will need to return to their garages and top up on juice.

The buses are being worked on in partnership with Tokyo’s Minato Ward, with Toshiba retrofitting the technology into existing vehicles. It says that the cost will be kept low by using similar cells to the ones found in electric cars, and that the batteries should last longer than most devices despite how frequently they’re charged and discharged. Because of the 12-kilometer range, the buses are set to run residential routes around Minato Ward, but this should help make for cleaner air around the city. Toshiba’s planning to trial the buses within the next year, with a full fleet rolling out in 2013.

The Verge

futurescope:

 “Blackest” Solar Cell Ever Designed Absorbs 99.7 Percent of All Light

Natcore Technology scientists have created a black silicon solar cell with an average reflectance of 0.3%, making it the “blackest” solar cell ever designed. Compared to the most efficient solar cells currently on the market, Natcore’s development offers a tenfold decrease in reflectance over the solar spectrum. The result is an increase in energy efficiency that could help solar power compete even more effectively with traditional fossil fuels. […]

[read more] [Natcore]

MIT scientists explain when we’ll have fusion power

Back in March, we posted about how this could be the year where the National Ignition Facility breaks even with laser fusion, reaching the point where as much power is generated as is input. This doesn’t mean we’ve got a fusion power plant around the corner, though, and researchers have come clean about what the hold-up is.

Fusion power is what you get when you take two lightweight atomic nuclei and fuse them together into one heavier atomic nucleus, releasing energy in the process. It’s far cleaner and far more efficient than fission power, and the only reason that we’re not taking advantage of it right now is that it requires temperatures and pressures on the order of what you’d experience at the center of the sun to get it to work.

At MIT, they’ve been working on getting fusion to happen inside a Tokamak (called the Alcator C-Mod, pictured above), which is a piece of equipment that uses intense magnetic fields to confine and heat plasma to the point that fusion can be initiated, which is something on the order of tens to hundreds of million of degrees.

Slashdot readers had the chance to ask a group of MIT fusion power experts questions about the futuristic power source, and while a lot of the info was way, way, way beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, we went through and pulled out a bunch of the most interesting (and understandable) info.

The Q&A below is a condensed version of some of Slashdot readers’ questions along with group answers from the MIT scientists, and if you’re looking for more detail, in most cases you can find it in the full-length answers here.

When will fusion power my house (or vehicle)?

This is obviously an impossible question to answer, but we can give some thoughts about when it might happen, and why. First, the current official plan is that ITER will demonstrate net fusion gain (Q = 10, that is, ten times more fusion power out than heating power put in) in about 2028 or 2029. (Construction will be done by about 2022 but there’s a six-year shakedown process of steadily increasing the power and learning how to run the machine before the full-power fusion shots.)

At that point, designs can begin for a “DEMO”, which is the fusion community’s term for a demonstration power plant. That would come online around 2040 (and would putt watts on the grid, although probably at an economic loss at first), and would be followed by (profitable, economic) commercial plants around 2050.

The talk is always about reaching break-even with fusion. What about capturing the power? Are we generating heat that will drive steam turbines? What schemes exist for capture and harnessing the power generated by fusion?

In a magnetic fusion reactor, each deuterium-tritium fusion produces a 3.5 MeV (mega- electronvolt) alpha particle (helium nucleus) which deposits its energy in the plasma (this self-heating is how you can have an ‘ignited’ plasma which doesn’t require much or any external heating), and a 14.1 MeV neutron, which deposits its energy in a thick lithium blanket surrounding the toroidal reaction chamber.

It all comes out as heat, which is used to heat a working fluid, which turns a turbine, producing electricity. This is not expected to be a technological problem - the challenge is in getting a confined thermonuclear plasma to produce the fusion energy in the first place!

How do you explain the safety/benefits of fusion to a generation of people terrified of nuclear anything?

This is where fusion really shines. The two big problems (at least, perceived problems) of fission reactors are the risk of a meltdown, and what you do with the high-level radioactive waste. Fusion has neither of these issues!

Regarding the first, the reason why a worst-case accident in a fission reactor can be so devastating is because there is a lot of fuel in the reactor at any one time. In a fusion reactor, it’s a completely different story. There will be less than a gram of fuel in a reactor at any one time—fresh deuterium-tritium fuel is continually added as it is burned—and so a runaway reaction is simply not possible.

As for the second benefit of fusion (waste), the reaction is completely different from that in a fission reactor. In fusion, the reaction is simple, deuterium + tritium = helium + neutron. So there is no “waste” from the unburned fuel - any tritium that isn’t burned gets pumped out of the chamber and recirculated back in.

What happens when the magnetic fields that hold the 90,000,000 degrees Celsius plasma in place fail?

Holding a hot plasma stationary using magnetic fields without it ever touching material surfaces is very difficult - Richard Feynman once compared it to trying to “hold Jello with rubber bands.” To understand what happens, you have to realize that the plasma is very, very light. In the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, it has a mass of only about 0.001 grams - about one- fiftieth as much as the smallest drop of water you can get from an eyedropper.

We do two things to make sure that the walls can survive these disruption events. The first is making them out of materials that can take a blast of heat, like tungsten, or else materials that ablate away rather than melting, like carbon fiber composites. The second is to develop “disruption mitigation” systems which can cause the plasma to radiate all its energy evenly over the entire wall surface, spreading the heat out and lessening the chance of causing localized melting.

But I want to stress again - disruptions are an operational problem, meaning they might cause a power plant to be offline for a while, but they’re not a safety problem. There is no chance of a runaway reaction or meltdown in a fusion reactor.

Do you think a program the size of the Apollo program could kickstart fusion to general availability?

We think that we’re roughly $80-billion away from a reactor. At current levels of funding (worldwide), that’s about 40 years. Even given access to huge amounts of money, it’s unlikely that a working reactor could be built in less than a decade - there are just too many facilities to build between current devices and a full-scale reactor in order to ensure success. But we could certainly do it faster than 40 years!

We can say this: an increase in funding would allow for different paths to be tried in parallel, like stellarators, tokamaks (ITER), spherical tokamaks, etc. Plus, we could build a facility in the United States to study the problem of plasma-wall interactions, which is a very important topic that has not been adequately studied up to this point (see our answer above about what steps are needed to get to a reactor).

Perhaps the most heartening thing about all this is the following:

We know exactly what we need to do. Not everything has a solution yet - that’s why it’s still a research project! But we generally know what the big challenges are to get to a working magnetic fusion reactor. The point is that it’s not a money pit. There are unsolved challenges, but we know what they are, and with adequate support, these challenges will be overcome.

Fusion power is cheap, it’s clean, it’s safe, but most importantly, it’s realistic. We just have to get there. It may take a while, or with some concerted effort, it may take less of a while, but once we have operational power plants (by 2050 or earlier) churning out unlimited amounts of electricity, it’ll be the beginning of the end for fossil fuels and the beginning of the beginning (we can only hope) forclimate recovery.

MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, via Slashdot

DVICE

The Tokyo Institute of Technology’s New Innovation Building Is Entirely Covered in Solar Panels

The Tokyo Institute of Technology, largely considered Japan’s most prestigious university, has unveiled on its campus an impressive new building that is almost self-sustaining in its power use. The Environment and Energy Innovation Building in Meguro Ward features solar panels all along its exterior facade and on its roof––4,500 panels in all, with a total capacity of 650 kilowatts, plus another 100 kilowatts of fuel cells!

But what does this mean, you ask? What it means is, the seven-story tall structure (which has an additional two basement levels below ground) uses half the power of a “normal”, non-green building of the same size.

So, as soon as we outfit the all rest of Earth’s structures similarly, we’ll be good to go! [The Asahi Shimbun via Far East Gizmos]

gizmodo

Solar Panel-In-a-Tube Generates Power and Hot Water At the Same Time

Solar photovoltaic cells and solar thermal collectors both capture the sun’s rays. The first one turns the light into electricity, while the other turns it into hot water for heating. They usually battle for rooftop real estate, but Naked Energy has found a way to merge them both into a single solar solution.

The British company’s Virtu tubes gain efficiency by operating in tandem—it’s teamwork, just like you learned as a kid. Inside each vacuum-sealed tube is a power-producing photovoltaic wafer. Sunlight hitting the wafer generates extra heat, which then transfers to the tube’s solar thermal collector using the company’s patented thermosyphon technology.

The transfer keeps the photovoltaic cells close to their optimal operating temperature, with the shared benefit of a hot water supply that can be used to help heat a building on the cheap. In other words, the hybrid design makes a Virtu up to 46 percent more efficient at turning sunlight into energy than traditional solar panels.

At the moment, Naked Energy is still refining and improving the product’s design. Developers are working with professors at the Imperial College in London to further increase their efficiency. The company intends to create a commercially available product once it’s happy with the solar cell’s performance. [Naked Energy via PhysOrg]

gizmodo

unexpectedtech:

(Cold calculation: Components of a data center arrive by ship to Iceland, a country with abundant and inexpensive electricity. (Verne Global))

Iceland’s main exports are aluminum and fish. Now the isolated nation is hoping to offer the world a new commodity: a cheap, guiltless way to store its data.

In February, a startup called Verne Global opened a large server farm on an old NATO base near Iceland’s main airport and began offering “100% renewable” computing services to the rest of the world. It’s one of three data centers in Iceland and part of what Iceland’s government hopes will be a new local industry.

Iceland produces more electricity per capita than any other country in the world. Nearly all its power is renewable, coming from either glacier-fed rivers or steaming geothermal vents. And it’s cheap, too. At 4.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, electrons on the island cost around half the average retail rate in the United States.

About four-fifths of Iceland’s electricity is currently used to smelt aluminum. Big companies like Alcoa have set up facilities to take advantage of cheap power; they then export the metal. According to the government’s master plan for hydropower and geothermal resources, Iceland could double its power generation. But environmentalists oppose expansion of the aluminum industry.

generalelectric:

A #GE #wind turbine in Salzbergen, Germany. #technology #windturbine (Taken with instagram)

good:

Transportation counts for 28 percent of America’s total energy use, and the average car only travels 22.5 miles per gallon. Twenty percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States come from transportation. And one gallon of gasoline takes nearly 13 gallons of water to produce, so you may be inadvertently using more than 500 gallons of water every time you fill up. 

But there are things you can do to clean up your car’s gas usage…

thisistheverge:

Electric DeLorean makes auto show appearance: 0 to 60 in under 6 seconds for $95,000

2013 can’t get here soon enough