FDK Corporation in collaboration with Takayanagi Co Ltd has developed a new single-seater electric vehicle. The electric car is also equipped with a lithium ion capacitor that, according to the two companies, is able to charge it in under a minute. This could be the reason why the car has a range of just 5 km per charge.
Special planes equipped with a special laser system called Lidar flew over New York last year and scanned all the potential rooftops out of more than one million on which solar panels could be installed to properly produce power, NYTimes reports.
A team of researchers from the Universities of Warwick and British Columbia have discovered an enzyme in a soil-living bacterium called Rhodococcus jostii which can break down lignin, a component of the woody parts of plants. Their aim is to develop methods to process biomass that doesn't compete with food crops and that also offer cheap biofuels.
Fuel cells usually need hydrogen to function, or at least a compound containing hydrogen. The rule is the same for the new direct formic acid fuel cells, developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which can use formic acid to power virtually anything from phones to cars.
Everyone knows that today's lead acid, lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride batteries are much more efficient than they had been ten years ago. The bad part of these batteries is that they are expensive, heavy and there's the risk of a short circuit and catching fire. Now, a team of scientists at the University of Leichester found a way to solve these issues.
According to a recent report made by tue World Bank, over one million homes from Bangladesh are powered by solar energy, being the fastest expansion of solar use in the world.
Q: What do human poop, fuel cells, clean energy and Bill Gates have in common? A: a $1.5 million grant to Columbia University professor Kartik Chandran. He is to develop a "Next-Generation Urban Sanitation Facility" in Accra, Ghana along with Waste Enterprisers and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. The project will turn fecal sludge into biodiesel and methane. Gross, isn't it?
SolarCity, the company founded by Elon Musk (who also created Tesla Motors, Paypal) has just received $280 million from Google. The investment is one of the largest in solar power worldwide, and aims to help 7,000 to 9,000 homeowners in the 10 states where SolarCity operates install solar panels onto their rooftops.
EVs are not so common these days, but if they make enough financial sense, we'll see them flooding cities soon enough. As Denmark is currently the country which profits the most from wind power, Nuvve, the U.S.-based company that created the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system, has announced that it will start using Denmark's electric vehicles as buffers for stabilizing the grid frequency, Cleantechnica reports.
Swiss automaker GreenGT has recently unveiled an all-electric race car dubbed GreenGT LMPH2, that is planned to take part of an experimental race class of the upcoming 2012 LeMans.
