The Green Optimistic

Engineers and scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, led by Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor and physical chemist, have created a one-atom thick layer of carbon, called “graphene”, and they put it to use in electrical storage systems, such as ultracapacitors, a viable way to clean and efficient energy storage.

It’s not breaking news anymore, but some scientists from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and others, led by Stuart Licht, discovered a battery that could kick out fossil fuels at the chapter of energy storage capacity.

Plug-In Supply, Inc has just unveiled the “PbA10″ Conversion System last week at the Plug-in 2008 conference in San Jose. Their system is based on the CalCars’Open Source design, and it turns a standard 2004-2008 Toyota Prius into a Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) with an all-electric range of 10-15 miles and improved average mileage of up to 100 miles per gallon (plus 1 cent/mile of electricity).

Here’s a method of producing a battery out of some Cola, salt, aluminum and copper coins. It lights a LED and it can be an interesting source of free energy!

Modern cars need a lot of battery power due to the high electricity consumption by those electronic gadgets people have in them. Often, the car sales personnel confronts with the issue of a dead battery when they are trying to sell a vehicle that has been standing parked for a long time.

Smart Fortwo Micro Hybrid Drive (MHD) has been available for quite a while on Europe’s car markets. It’s Smart’s way of saying “I am cleaner than the cleanest”, and a quite impressive innovation that brings some kind of a “hybrid” system into play by using a start-stop mechanism of the engine. It uses regenerative brakes, like all hybrids do, to recharge the battery, and it stops the engine when you halt at a stop light (in fact, when your speed drops below 8km/h).

Did you know that Israel has 90% of the population heating their water from the sun? This has happened because of the 1950 energy crisis, fact that led them into buying solar water heaters. In 1983, about 60% of the Israelis had solar water heating.

Chrysalix Energy invested several million dollars in a Dutch-based maker of ultrafast battery chargers that aim the market of electric cars and plug-in hybrids. Epyon B.V.,produced a “supercharge” technology that reduces the charge time of lithium-ion batteries 20 times below the times reached by current chargers.