Toyota Motor Corp officials have recently announced that the company plans to introduce two new versions of its Prius Hybrid into the auto market. The vehicles will be unveiled at the Detroit Auto Show, scheduled for Jan 2011. This way, Toyota hopes to bolster their dominance of the electric and hybrid vehicle market in the U.S.
Ultracapacitors are currently being used in applications that need high amounts of electricity in short times. Unlike conventional batteries, which can store much more energy but release it slower, ultracapacitors (or sometimes called supercapacitors) can survive for longer, because they don't use the same chemical processes.
Solar panels are usually mounted in series, to sum up their voltages, and the resulting power is sent to a large inverter, which transforms the DC voltage into AC. One big issue with this scheme is that if shade falls on one panel, or it gets dirty, the inverter lowers the current of all the other panels, and causing power losses through inefficiency.
Florian Bailly, a French cyclist, completed a 12 countries and two continents tour on a custom-made solar bike this week. The 10,000-kilometer journey, from France to Tokyo, lasted two-thirds less than it would have taken on a normal bike.
West Virginia has recently discovered, though a project funded by Google, that it is lying on top of a major resource: geothermal power. The finding is even more significant taking in consideration the state's high dependence on fossil fuels.
Ceatec Japan 2010 hosted Rohm's new dye-sensitized solar cells that we were talking about a few months ago. Now, the Japanese company applied their plans to TV remotes, mice and sensors.
The drive range of an electric vehicle, namely Nissan Leaf, could be affected by the use of air conditioning whether to heat or cool the interior, said Mitsuhiko Yamashita, executive vice president of Nissan Motor Co Ltd at Ceatec Japan 2010.
The U.S. military had been tinkering with renewable energy for some time. Now, seeing that one in 24 fuel convoys carried in Afghanistan gets at least a civilian and a soldier killed, the Pentagon set a firm standard for the army to use 50 percent of their energy from renewable resources by 2020.
Lockheed Martin and Rice University scientists have recently discovered how to use the all-abundant silicon to make battery electrodes that could hold up to 10 times more lithium and enhance the battery's overall capacity from 300 mAh/gram to more than 3,000 mAh/gram. This could lead to an unprecedented rise in storage capacities for electric car batteries, in a crucial moment for their development.
Politicians lie, husbands lie, wives lie, even your local grocer lies about something, sometimes, to get his merchandise sold. If everybody lies, why shouldn't GM? The fact is, if you haven't already heard, that GM promised for years that they'll have an electric car coming with the Chevy Volt.
