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New power stations are often contentious due to their scale and their environmental and visual impacts. The Government has recently reformed how we plan for nuclear and conventional power stations, renewables, electricity transmission lines and other major infrastructure. This has been one of the most controversial changes to planning in over 60 years and these changes will come into force next week. [...] It’s amusing to reduce the development of next-generation electric- or hydrogen-powered cars to a binary paper-versus-plastic decision, but the companies making these cars and the infrastructure to support them are hoping there will be room for both. Hydrogen cars, in particular, have had a bumpy road thus far–the Obama administration has been at odds with Congress over whether to fund hydrogen fuel-cell research. Meanwhile, the first commercial models are not expected to hit the road until 2015, a few years after their hybrid and all-electric counterparts . [More]
This is an excerpt of a guest column Nick Chambers, editor of Gas 2.0, wrote for Popular Mechanics. You can read the whole column on the Popular Mechanics website. The road trip—driving cross-country for days on end, crammed into a vehicle with your family—is virtually a required rite of passage for most Americans. The lure of the open road is as ingrained in our psyche and culture as the hamburger, football or fishing. So it’s no surprise that proposals for new types of taxes on these seemingly free highways—traditionally paid for by gas taxes and tolls—are causing an uproar. Back in July of this year, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) proposed a bill that allocates funds to research the effectiveness of taxing highway usage by the mile. On the surface, the bill seems to be laying the groundwork for big government to track our driving habits while simultaneously discouraging the driving of more fuel-efficient vehicles. It doesn’t have to be this way.
French energy minister Jean-Louis Borloo will announce a plan on Thursday for the country to invest 1 billion Euros ($1.46 billion US) in the infrastructure needed to encourage the adoption of electric cars. That investment will buy 4.4 million charging stations, upgrade the power grid, purchase a government fleet of electric cars, and provide subsidies to EV buyers and auto manufacturers. France hopes that this amount of investment will be enough to get 2 million electric cars on its roads within 10 years.
Where is Microsoft going with Zune HD and its vaunted three-screen idea? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, where he supported most of our assertions in our latest SHIFT commentary. Thanks for that, Steve. Good timing. He’s talking about computing from tiny, mid-sized and a very big screens — all of them integrated with online connectivity (the cloud) — and he’s calling Microsoft’s computing-everywhere strategy a “fundamental shift in the computing paradigm.” Ballmer talks about a variety of ways to interact with these various devices, including touch, voice, cameras, and gestures, and says Microsoft’s goal is “one integrated computing infrastructure.” Surprisingly, he says that huge interconnected system doesn’t even have to all come from Microsoft. So much for the evil empire? We’ll see about that. On the other hand, if Ballmer’s leveling with us, don’t expect a Microsoft-branded phone or our prediction about Microsoft’s “zPhone” interacting with all those screens to come true anytime soon. He denies Microsoft is in the midst of building its own phone. One thing’s for sure, though: The Zune HD is just the beginning. Via TechCrunch [...]
As much as I love the coming onslaught of electric cars, they use lots of materials that currently have almost no recycling infrastructure — especially when it comes to their batteries. The numbers vary by the type of lithium-ion battery used, but on average, for every 100 miles of pure-electric range, a lithium-ion battery needs to contain about 15 pounds of lithium. Although the developed world has had robust systems in place for a long time to deal with the recycling of lead-acid batteries (in the U.S. more than 95% of battery lead gets recycled), the lithium-ion battery has a long way to go to catch up. Granted, lithium-ion batteries are not nearly as toxic as lead-acid batteries and so the urgency of developing a recycling infrastructure is virtually non-existent. In fact, lithium-ion batteries are classified by the U.S. government as non-toxic and “safe” to throw away in the regular trash.
Bozen, Denmark’s E-Move Charging Station is the work of that country’s entrepreneur, Valentin Runggaldier, and — while those renders make it look like a flight of fancy — it’s actually real and going through a test. The idea is to provide a place for electric vehicles to charge up (in this case, eight of them), giving commuters another option than the outlet at home. It also benefits from the fact that it wouldn’t require a lot of infrastructure to be installed, as a city-wide smart grid would. No word on how much longer it takes to charge a vehicle up at an E-Move power station, but Mr. Runggaldier would like to sell his concept to governments if the tests prove promising. Check out more in the gallery below.
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