batteries
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How electric vehicles can give a boost to local clean energy
A plug for plug-ins.This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. The Northwest could get an additional 12 percent of its electricity from local wind power if one in eight of the region’s cars used batteries. That’s the conclusion of a study [PDF] from […]
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Cool energy-storage projects popping up; expect a lot more
Tracking the politics of clean energy can be a surreal and dispiriting experience. D.C. is so swamped in fossil-fuel money, fossil-fuel lobbyists, and fossil-fuel-owned pols that the conventional wisdom is absurdly pessimistic about clean energy: It’s unreliable, it costs too much, it can never work, blah blah. Meanwhile, out in the real world, costs are […]
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Charge your EV in 10 minutes flat
Pretty much no one wants to wait around for their theoretical EV to charge, which is one reason why people aren't buying them in droves yet. But in the near future, charging won't take more than 10 minutes, thanks to Nissan.
Along with a Japanese university, the car company developed an EV charger that takes a fraction of the time of current chargers without compromising battery life. Right now, charging an EV generally takes about eight hours, or 48 times as long as this new charger will need.
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Does energy storage compensate for water-thirsty concentrating solar thermal power?
This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Concentrating solar thermal power has promised big additions to renewable energy production with the additional benefit of energy storage. But with significant water consumption in desert locations, is the energy storage benefit of concentrating solar enough […]
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The Political and Technical Advantages of Distributed Renewable Power
A serialized version of ILSR‘s new report, Democratizing the Electricity System, Part 3 of 5. Click for Part 1 or Part 2. The Political and Technical Advantages of Distributed Generation While technology has helped change the economics of electricity production (in favor of renewables and distributed generation), this new dynamic can as easily be controlled […]
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Record-breaking electric car gets 1,000 miles to the charge
What's that? Could it be the whip-crack of range anxiety being dragged out back and shot?
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The top 12 women of cleantech
While the clean-energy sector is very much a boy's club, women are starting to break down the clubhouse door. Here's a list of top women in cleantech.
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Flow batteries store electricity in giant tanks of goop
Even if we do manage to set up a shiny futuristic renewable smart grid made of glitter and staffed by zebra unicorns, there are still going to be times when it poops out. Maybe the wind isn’t blowing; maybe a mean old cloud got in the way. And when that happens, there aren't enough boat batteries in the world to store all the electricity we're going to need to keep everything running.
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World's first hybrid-electric plane is aeronautical equivalent of flying pig
Siemens just unveiled the world's first hybrid-electric aircraft, the DA36 E-Star. It uses an unique power train to do the seemingly impossible: take off and land on nothing but batteries.