An award known as “the Nobel Prize for water” has been given to an Indian campaigner who has brought water to 1,000 villages.
The judges of the Stockholm Water Prize say his methods have also prevented floods, restored soil and rivers, and brought back wildlife.
The prize-winner, Rajendra Singh, is dubbed “the Water Man of India”.
The judges say his technique is cheap, simple, and that his ideas should be followed worldwide.
Mr Singh uses a modern version of the ancient Indian technique of rainwater harvesting.
It involves building low-level banks of earth to hold back the flow of water in the wet season and allow water to seep into the ground for future use.
He first trained as a medic, but when he took up a post in a rural village in arid Rajasthan he was told the greatest need was not health care but drinking water.
Groundwater had been sucked dry by farmers, and as water disappeared, crops failed, rivers, forests and wildlife disappeared and people left for the towns.
“When we started our work, we were only looking at the drinking water crisis and how to solve that,” Mr Singh said.
“Today our aim is higher. This is the century of exploitation, pollution and encroachment. To stop all this, to convert the war on water into peace, that is my life’s goal.”
The Stockholm International Water Institute, which presented the prize, said his lessons were essential as climate change alters weather patterns round the world.
Its director, Torgny Holmgren, said: “In a world where demand for freshwater is booming, we will face a severe water crisis within decades if we do not learn how to better take care of our water. Mr Singh is a beacon of hope.”
In its citation, the judges say: “Today’s water problems cannot be solved by science or technology alone. They are human problems of governance, policy, leadership, and social resilience.
“Rajendra Singh’s life work has been in building social capacity to solve local water problems through participatory action, empowerment of women, linking indigenous know-how with modern scientific and technical approaches and upending traditional patterns of development and resource use.”
The award was applauded by Katherine Pygott, a leading UK water engineer who has drawn on Mr Singh’s work to help prevent flooding in the UK.
By now, we’re all familiar with the mainstays of renewable energy. They’re the solar panel arrays and massive turbine systems that span great lengths, collecting energy from the sun, wind and water and churning out megawatts of energy. It’s these behemoths that we point to as bellwethers of a future where the world no longer depends on fossil fuels.
But recently, some researchers have started to tinker with more subtle ways to harvest energy. They’re mostly unconventional ideas, such as layering tiny and transparent solar cells onto a phone’s touchscreen or a sound conversion technology that allows it to recharge simply by talking into it.
Though these out-of-box approaches don’t receive nearly as much attention as some of the more elaborate industrial-scale projects, they may well turn out to be game-changers in their own right. As such, here are instances where eeking out even a modest amount of energy may make a real difference:
1. Infrastructure power
Hydroelectric power came about as a way to take advantage of the enormous flow of energy produced from reservoirs. However, the same principle can also work wherever there’s a strong and steady stream of water, whether it be dams or sewage pipes.
Catching on to this fact, the city of Portland is testing a power-generating water turbine system specially suited for municipal drainage systems. The technology, developed by local start-up LucidEnergy, is projected to contribute up to 1,100 megawatts of electricity annually, enough to power approximately 150 homes.
Roadways are also hotspots for untapped energy. In 2011, a research team were able to harvest energy from the vibrations produced by moving cars by coating a section of the road surface along a Dutch highway with energy-absorbing piezoelectric materials. During the course of three months, they found that, on average, net electrical output was sufficient to run the motion sensors on a traffic light.
2. Ambient energy
To ensure coverage over a given area, WiFi hubs blast signals in all directions. Satellite transmission is somewhat similar, scattering signals across a wide region. As a result, a lot of energy is wasted.
But there are ways to recover some of these lost signals. Researchers at Duke University have converted them into electricity. Employing a special microwave-scavenging metamaterial, they were able to build a device capable of generating up to 7.3 volts. The goal is to eventually incorporate the technology into cell phones, which in many instances can use a little extra juice.
While the idea has been kicked around for some time, the challenge has been figuring out how to implement it on a consumer level. RCA, an electronics brand, caused a bit of stir back in 2010, when representatives unveiled an early prototype of a USB dongle they claimed can give laptops a power boost by trapping stray WiFi signals and storing them as converted energy in an internal battery. However, the Airnergy charger was never released.
3. Body energy
Every person is, in some respect, a walking power plant. Even at rest, the human body generates as much energy as a 100 watt light bulb. Much of this dissipates in the form of heat, though a coat with good insulation properties can momentarily trap enough of it for us to stay comfortably warm at times when temperatures are unbearably cold.
With that line of thinking, Jernhusen, a Swedish real estate firm, had an ambitious proposal. In 2008, the group outlined a plan to construct an office building in Stockholm equipped with a unique heating system that so happened to be powered by the excess body heat of 250,000 some commuters that pass though the nearby central train station each day.
The system, in operation today, is made possible through a series of heat exchangers situated inside the train station’s ventilation system. This is where body heat is converted into hot water and piped in to warm the building. In total, costs are reduced by about 25 percent compared to regular heating systems. And closer to home, the Mall of America in Minneapolis recycles body heat from shoppers to more better regulate the indoor climate.
On a smaller scale, scientists are looking into ways to make good use of energy generated by the body’s internal machinations. Engineers in the United States and China have collaborated on a technology that uses the mechanical energy of a beating heart to pump power to pacemakers. In Boston, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is developing a tiny chip that pulls in energy from natural processes that take place within the ear canal as a way to extend the long-term implantation of hearing aids.
4. Kinetic energy
In motion, the human body ramps up to where it’s a sort of de facto energy factory. Case-in-point is the Cadbury House gym near Bristol, England, the first in the world to be powered by nothing but the grunt and sweat of members who frequent the exercise facility.
Power is supplied by a network of treadmills, stationary bikes and step climbers custom-made and sold by Technogym, a manufacturer of high-tech training equipment. When in operation, each machine powers itself and channels surplus energy in the form of electricity. The costs for the equipment come in at about 600,000 euros ($630,000). Similar human-powered gyms can be found in Hong Kong and in the United States.
Systems designed to harvest kinetic energy can also supplement power systems anywhere people take part in activities that collectively add up to lots of high-intensity workouts. In 2007, a pair of MIT students proposed using these ” crowd farms” as a way to extract energy for such things as LED lights. More recently, the concept popped up as an ” eco-nightclub ” in London where energy is amassed using blocks made of piezoelectric material, positioned just beneath the dance floor.
5. Self-powered energy (for gadgets)
While you would be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t pining for a bit more battery life for their mobile devices, keeping pace with the rigorous demands of day-to-day commuting is a whole different story. The “range anxiety” consumers have over a vehicle’s typical per-charge rating is often mentioned as one of their most pressing concerns.
And it’s a problem the industry seems to be looking at from every conceivable angle. For instance, earlier this month, Goodyear unveiled the BH03 concept tire, which feature a combination of piezoelectric materials and black textured thermoelectric patches to absorb energy from vibrations, light and heat. This in turn can be fed to the the battery or sensors. But drivers shouldn’t hold their breath since the company hasn’t detailed how they plan to turn the proof-of-concept into a reality or released any cost estimates.
For those getting around on foot, Pittsburgh-based startup SolePower is in the later stages of finalizing a shoe insert that charges up an external battery as the wearer walks or runs. But unlike other technologies that harvest energy from pressure-induced vibrations, the insoles don’t employ piezoelectric materials. Instead, energy is produced, converted and stored through a series of tiny “mechanical linkages and generators” in the heel, similar to how hand-cranked flashlights work, according to the company’s Web site.
With the insoles, the company claims that an hour of walk time provides about 2.5 hours of talk time on a smartphone.
Authorities in Paris have taken the rare step of making public transport free for three days to reduce severe smog caused by unusually warm weather.
The French capital region and 30 other departments have been on maximum pollution alert for several days.
Landmark buildings like the Eiffel Tower were barely visible after a white fog settled over Paris.
The capital’s air quality has been one of the worst on record, French environmental agencies say.
A lack of wind, combined with cold nights followed by unseasonably warm days, has contributed to the worsening conditions.
The smog has also affected neighbouring Belgium, where officials have reduced the maximum speed limit allowed on main roads. The southern Wallonia region said it had also decided to make buses, trains and underground trains free until the pollution emergency was over.
‘Significant risks’
Experts say levels of smog recorded in Paris this week have been similar to those of Beijing in China, one of the world’s most polluted cities.
As part of the emergency measures, commuters in Paris and neighbouring areas will not have to pay for public transport between Friday and Sunday.
Bike sharing services are also free, as are one-hour sessions for electric car shares, the Associated Press news agency reports.
French authorities appealed to drivers to leave their cars at home.
“I am asking all residents in Paris and neighbouring areas to favour the use of public transport,” said Jean-Paul Huchon, the head of the the capital’s transport authority.
He also warned that current pollution levels represented “significant risks” to people’s health.
The elderly, children, asthmatics and people with heart problems have been advised to stay indoors to avoid potential breathing problems.
Environment minister Philippe Martin said air quality had now become “an emergency and priority for the government”.
The country’s northern and eastern regions have been particularly hit by toxic pollutants.
Several other French cities, including Reims, Rouen and Caen, announced they would follow Paris’s example and make their public transport free over the weekend.
A Swedish scientist claims in a new theory that humanity has exceeded four of the nine limits for keeping the planet hospitable to modern life, while another professor told RT Earth may be seeing an impending human-made extinction of various species.
Environmental science professor Johan Rockstrom, the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, argues that there are nine ” planetary boundaries ” in a new paper published in Science – and human beings have already crossed four of them.
Those nine include carbon dioxide concentrations, maintaining biodiversity at 90 percent, the use of nitrogen and phosphorous, maintaining 75 percent of original forests, aerosol emissions, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, fresh water use and the dumping of pollutants.
” The planet has been our best friend by buffering our actions and showing its resilience,” said Rockstrom. ” But for the first time ever, we might shift the planet from friend to foe.”
Rockstrom’s planetary boundary theory was first conceived in 2007. His new paper reveals that because of climate stability, which began when the Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago, a planetary calm helped our ancestors to cultivate wheat, domesticate animals, and launch industrial and communications revolutions. But those advances have strained the stability of the planet, and Rockstrom says we have broken four boundaries: too much nitrogen has been added to ecosystems, too many forests have been cut down, the climate is changing too quickly and species are going extinct at too great a rate.
Speaking to RT’s Ben Swann, Professor of Ethics Bron Taylor from the University of Florida said that we have accelerated the extinction crisis through deforestation and ocean acidification, a development which is driving species to extinction.
“[Human] beings have increased, even from 1925, from 2 billion – which is considered to be a sustainable population for human beings, according to northern European consumption standards – to 7.2 billion at this point, ” he said.
” What we have also done is increased the number of domestic animals, the ones we eat and the ones that are companion animals. We have 4.3 domestic animals one for every two human beings on the planet. Cultivating the land they need creates species extinction because where they are, other organism are not. Where we cut down forests for cattle, other species are not there.”
” We are losing literally tens of thousands of endemic or native species to these trends.”
Professor Taylor told RT that scientists say we entering the Sixth extinction, but that this an anthropogenic extinction caused by human beings.
” If you don’t have control over something, there is no moral obligation,” said Taylor. ” In this case, we are doing it. So we have to ask the question: If we are doing something that is driving species off the planet, are we in some sense morally culpable?”
“What right do we have to drive [out] other species, who got here in precisely in the same way that we have, who have participated in the long struggle for existence just as we have?”
Meanwhile, Professor Rockstrom is using his planetary boundary theory not as a doomsday message but as analysis to keep the planet “safe” for humanity. He said nations can cut their carbon emissions to almost nothing and pull the Earth back across the climate boundary.
“For the first time,” he said, ” we have a framework for growth, for eradicating poverty and hunger, and for improving health.”
(Bloomberg) — Monsanto Co.’s best-selling weedkiller Roundup probably causes cancer, the World Health Organization said in a report that’s at odds with prior findings.
Roundup is the market name for the chemical glyphosate. A report published by the WHO in the journal Lancet Oncology said Friday there is “limited evidence” that the weedkiller can cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and lung cancer and “convincing evidence” it can cause cancer in lab animals. The report was posted on the website of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, the Lyon, France-based arm of the WHO.
Monsanto, which invented glyphosate in 1974, made its herbicide the world’s most popular with the mid-1990s introduction of crops such as corn and soybeans that are genetically engineered to survive it. The WHO didn’t examine any new data and its findings are inconsistent with assessments from the U.S., European Union and elsewhere, Monsanto said.
“We don’t know how IARC could reach a conclusion that is such a dramatic departure from the conclusion reached by all regulatory agencies around the globe,” Philip Miller, Monsanto vice president for global regulatory affairs, said in a statement.
“The evidence in humans is from studies of exposures, mostly agricultural, in the USA, Canada, and Sweden published since 2001,” the WHO said in the report. “In addition, there is convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals.”
The WHO said exposure by the general population is “generally low.”
German Study
There is no link between glyphosate and an increase in cancer when relevant studies are included in scientific reviews, Miller said. Last year, a German government evaluation conducted for the European Union found “the available data do not show carcinogenic or mutagenic properties of glyphosate nor that glyphosate is toxic to fertility, reproduction or embryonal/fetal development in laboratory animals.”
Monsanto’s $15.9 billion of annual sales are closely tied to glyphosate. Most of the company’s crops are designed to be used in tandem with it.
The stock rose 0.3 percent to $115.75 at the close in New York.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jack Kaskey in Houston at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Simon Casey at [email protected] Robin Saponar, Carlos Caminada
Today is International Day of Forests, a global celebration of the importance of trees in our everyday lives. You’re a techie who spends all day in front of your computer and you haven’t cracked a window recently? Forests still matter, a lot.
This year’s theme, “Forests and Climate Change,” is intended to raise awareness of the key role forests play in tempering Earth’s climate, and how forests can be a part of the solution to anthropogenic climate change in the future. Forests soak up carbon dioxide and release oxygen, keeping our atmosphere cool and breathable. They produce many of the raw materials we depend on, and harbor the lion’s share of Earth’s biodiversity. Also, they’re just generally awesome.
A few fun facts about Earth’s forests:
One in four people depend on a forest for their livelihood
Rainforests cover 2% of the Earth’s surface but are home to 50% of all plants and animals
Forests supply 75 % of our planet’s fresh water
Deforestation accounts for up to 20 % of human greenhouse gas emissions
A soccer field’s worth of forest is lost every second, or a region the size of Panama each year
Revolutions that start in the garage are nothing new. The one-car shed in which David Packard and William Hewlett launched the partnership that would grow into Hewlett-Packard Co. is known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
So Jason Hughes may be on to something.
In a cluttered four-car garage in suburban Deptford, New Jersey, Hughes spent the better part of last year hacking a 1,400-pound battery recovered from a wrecked Tesla Model S and reworking it into a stacked array that can store energy from his solar-power system. His battery tinkering resolves the issue of intermittency since his green power will be available whenever he needs it, night or day, rain or shine.
A day trader by profession, the 31-year-old doesn’t want to save the world. He just wants to get off the grid. He did his homework and concluded that off-the-shelf batteries just don’t yet have the heft he required to achieve that.
The mattress-sized Tesla battery did – it’s elephantine as lithium-ion batteries go – even if it cost him $20,000 and hundreds of hours of tinkering to make it work. “This is going to be my electric company,” he says.
In his battery obsession and ambition, Hughes turns out to be emblematic of something much grander. He is part of an unprecedented worldwide effort – equivalent to a kind of a tech-age version of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb – to amp up, transform and reinvent the humble battery into an element that could profoundly change the global energy paradigm.
Consider the crash effort at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research in suburban Chicago. Within five years, researchers want to create one or more battery types that can “store at least five times more energy than today’s batteries at one-fifth the cost,” according to George Crabtree, an agreeable silver-haired scientist who runs the U.S. Department of Energy-backed battery-research skunkworks.
Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leading-edge technology companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc. and scads of start-ups are getting into the act. Some are seeking to double the capacity and dramatically cut the costs of the lithium-ion battery, the standard in IPhones and electric vehicles. Others are working on mega-scale battery systems using novel chemistries that could cheaply store enough energy to help power entire cities.
Battery entrepreneurs have begun to even talk like revolutionaries. “The ability for a battery company to change the dynamics of the world is what has got us excited,” says Bill Watkins, chief executive officer of Imergy Power Systems Inc., a Fremont, California, startup working on utility-scale batteries. “We can actually make a big difference here. I call it democratizing energy.”
As the former CEO of Seagate Technology PLC, the Silicon Valley digital storage maker, Watkins can speak from experience about tectonic technology shifts. In 1980, a Seagate five-megabyte hard drive that rendered floppy disks obsolete was a $1,500 PC add-on. These days, drives holding two terabytes of data – equivalent to two million megabytes – can be had for a retail price of under $200.
What’s primarily driving the battery revolution is the phenomenal growth of rooftop and other forms of solar energy and an awakening by renewable energy advocates that storage is the lagging piece of the transformative puzzle. Solar now powers the equivalent of 3.5 million American homes and accounted for 34 percent of all newly installed electricity capacity last year. Wind supplies enough electricity for the equivalent of about 14.7 million U.S. homes, about the same as 52 coal-powered generating plants, according to the Wind Energy Foundation.
An exponential breakthrough in battery capacity and cost would bulldoze aside the limitations to adopting renewable energy on a massive scale, be a potent weapon to fight climate change by lowering carbon emissions and potentially bring billions of dollars in profits, never mind fame, to the winners. The knock on renewables is that while fossil fuels keep the power on all the time, solar fades when the sun doesn’t shine and wind power fizzles when the wind doesn’t blow – unless you have a way to store the excess for when you need it.
“What’s holding back solar and wind isn’t their availability but the fact that the technology to generate renewable energy has leapt far ahead of the capacity to store and deploy it round the clock as needed,” says Crabtree of the Joint Center project, which is run out of the federal Argonne National Laboratory.
Prophesies of energy revolutions always come with caveats, of course, and some researchers note that an exponential breakthrough in battery storage and cost has been forecast for more than a decade and still hasn’t arrived. “Of all these other battery technologies people promote, how many of them are real?” says Jeff Dahn, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who continues to plug away at making stronger and cheaper lithium-ion batteries. “All that remains to be seen.”
And while hackers like Hughes capture the excitement around battery potential, their very existence demonstrates that cheap home batteries haven’t yet arrived at Home Depot.
That said, Tesla’s Musk in February announced the company will soon unveil a consumer battery that can be used for homes and businesses. Tesla sees the endeavor as a “multi-billion dollar per year one,” according to a job description for the company’s stationary storage unit posted on Tesla’s website.
Recall, too, that naysayers kept telling Texan George Mitchell, the father of the hydraulic fracturing revolution, that it was impossible to economically squeeze oil and gas out of tight shale formations. Fracking has upended the energy world. Remember also that people seeing the first brief-case-sized cell phones scoffed that such a thing would ever be widely adopted. Now, pretty much every second grader in America has one.
Simply doing the math on the ambitions of the Joint Center project – making batteries with five times the capacity at a fifth of the present cost – lays out the stakes and prospects. Electric vehicles would travel more than 400 miles on a charge instead of an average of 84 as a Nissan Leaf does now – better than many gasoline-powered vehicles.
Cheaper batteries also mean you could drive an EV off the lot for the same price as a bargain-basement gasoline model, making them truly mainstream. And with the option of charging them with solar power, owners will be able to motor past the local Exxon station without ever stopping – or even having to pay their utilities a dime. Who needs the grid, or the oil companies, then?
At the Geneva International Motor Show this month, no less than Aston Martin – the famed luxury British carmaker loved by James Bond – said it asked its engineers to produce what they considered “the future of luxury GT motoring.” What they introduced was an electric-powered DBX Concept car to be powered by lithium-sulfur cells, no gasoline necessary.
Similarly, as Hughes’s Tesla hack is already demonstrating, homes and businesses will be battery frontiers of their own. The rollout of inexpensive, powerful, compact battery arrays could fundamentally change consumers’ relationship with electric utilities. Homeowners and companies linking solar to batteries could self-generate round the clock and, if they choose to, do what Hughes wants to do – fire their power companies.
SolarCity Corp., the Musk-backed rooftop solar installer, has already started offering home rooftop solar systems paired with backup Tesla-made lithium-ion batteries. Solar-battery combinations are poised to become a big business, expected to grow into $1 billion a year in sales by 2018, according to GTM Research.
Forward-looking utilities could even get into the act, building vast battery arrays that would remove barriers to their harvesting of solar and wind energy, since that energy could be stored and deployed at any time. Economics aside, think of the political windfall of utilities going willingly green.
All this may be coming to a head sooner than most people realize. “Electricity markets will be turned upside down within the next 10-20 years, driven by solar and batteries,” says an August 2014 report from investment bank UBS. So might the auto industry and the oil companies.
In the case of Jason Hughes’s Tesla hack, it feels like one of those shape-shifting moments. The fossil-fuel grid has been a marvel but its time has come and technologically savvy people – rapidly becoming the majority of us – are seeking to connect to the new thing. “I’m not going to drill for oil and refine gasoline in my basement,” says Hughes, “but I can hook up solar panels and run my car.”
Hughes has a kindred spirit in Trond Arvid Rosvik, who lives almost 3,800 miles across the Atlantic from New Jersey in Oslo, Norway. They’ve never met, but Rosvik found Hughes through an Internet forum where Tesla owners swap experiences on everything from finding charging stations to do-it-yourself repairs.
That forum is where Hughes documented his tinkering in exhaustive detail, after Rosvik had finished a project of his own. Tesla employees declined to give Hughes advice on his project though they thought it was “pretty cool,” he says.
Electric car sales in Norway are brisk – representing 18 percent of all models sold in January – because the oil-rich country also has some of Europe’s highest fuel prices, the result of steep taxes. Among the biggest perks for electric vehicle owners is the right to zip along in empty bus lanes while fossil-fuel-powered cars sit in gridlock. Electric cars also avoid sales and registration taxes.
Teslas are also popular in Norway but Rosvik ended up with a power plant taken from a Nissan Leaf. It took him a weekend to hack the Leaf battery pack and connect it to a group of panels – allowing him to use solar power 24 hours a day in summer months.
He estimates the whole system, incorporating batteries scavenged from crashed and discarded Leafs, cost him less than 60,000 kronor ($7,732).
Rosvik, like Hughes, isn’t an engineer, even though he has technical training – he’s certified to repair televisions and electronics. He’s nonchalant about the challenges. “I wouldn’t say it’s sophisticated, really,” he says. “I have never worked with lithium batteries but with a little Google it wasn’t that difficult.” Tesla said it will have more information about its storage products in the next few months. Nissan didn’t want to discuss hackers tinkering with its Leaf batteries, but a spokesman said the company has looked into the potential of a second life for those batteries and, in fact, has a solar array tied to Leaf battery packs outside of its Nissan USA office in Franklin, Tennessee.
While it may not be hard, a lot of the hackers’ tinkering falls squarely into the “do not try this at home” category. As the 2013 battery overheating issues aboard Boeing 787 jetliners demonstrated, powerful lithium batteries can be unstable even in the hands of professionals. In worst-case scenarios, high temperatures can lead to a “thermal runaway,” a self-sustaining reaction that can cause violent explosions.
Back in the U.S., Hughes is undaunted. He and his fiancé, Ashley, recently moved to a 4,550-square-foot house in Hickory, North Carolina. He is in the process of installing 36 solar panels on the roof and another 66 in the backyard. With a second Tesla battery, he thinks he can move the house entirely off the grid, with enough juice on tap for a week of backup power even with very little sunlight.
In all, it’s a large-scale, grown-up version of home experiments Hughes conducted with his dad when in the fifth grade, connecting rudimentary solar panels to charge car batteries that would then power their coffee maker, microwave and Sega Genesis video game console.
While neighbors may find the setup odd, Hughes is convinced his thinking will spread as high-performance batteries get cheaper. “I don’t see how it can’t,” he says. “What I’m working on now for myself, 20 years from now is going to be pretty commonplace.”
Or as Crabtree from the Joint Center battery project describes the transformation under way, “Homeowners will begin to say, ‘hey, nothing is stopping me from putting a solar panel on the roof and a battery in the basement.’ And it will kind of get perfected and refined by doing, and it’ll be the citizen innovator that will make it happen.”
In December 2014 Tesla announced the release of an upgrade dubbed the ‘Roadster 3.0′ which included an enhanced battery taking the power from 54kWh up to 70kW, consequently the range was also improved from 211 miles to a far more respectable 400 mile range.
Figures quoted in the image above and this blog post are our best guess calculations based on what we could find on Teslas website and other sites from accross the internet
Tesla was the first car company to use lithium-ion batteries in an electric vehicle and some have suggested that the recent Roadster 3.0 upgraded battery pack included graphene technology although Tesla remains tight lipped on the technology used. Elon Musk CEO did however mention that an upgraded battery for the Model S will be available in the future, just not anytime soon.
Graphene is an amazing new technology first created in Manchester University in 2004 with a Nobel prize being won by it’s creator in 2010. It is said that a sheet of graphene is strong enough to hold the weight of an elephant standing on a pencil! But one of the best attributes that graphine-based batteries have over lithium-ion is that they can be charged within minutes. If the new battery pack upgrade for the Roadster 3.0 was enhanced with graphene it is said it would take just 8 mins to charge.
Unfortunately as yet Tesla have announced that the Model X which is due for release in 2016 shall not be coming with graphene batteries, because as they rightly say graphene remains untested in the real world.
However China is being a little optimistic and has this year begun producing graphene batteries for the mass market, including batteries for electric vehicles. China is currently the largest producer of graphene in the world and with rumours of battery-less electric vehicles powered by supercapacitors circulating around the electric vehicle community, China is well placed to produce some groundbreaking technology in the coming years.
Model S Stats with Graphene?
Based on the official figures released by Tesla on the Roadster 3.0 we calculated what a similar upgrade for the Model S could look like, the results were so astounding that we put them into an infographic for you to share and hopefully Tesla might just get create the upgrade a little sooner
The 85kWh model S with the same style battery upgrade could see range increase by 280 miles, from 310 miles to a whopping 590 mile range! This is very similar to what you would expect from a modern diesel car, but with 80% cheaper fuel costs i.e. approx. 2p per mile.
It is widely speculated that graphene enhanced batteries in electric vehicles could see charge times reduces to just 5-10 mins, although this theory remains unproven in the real world!
It is my personal belief that Tesla have not actually used any graphene in their battery upgrade in the Roadster 3.0 at all based on the distinct lack of any mention of the word graphene in any of their patents. So this could well mean that once we do see this new graphene technology used results could be even more overwhelming than the figures suggested in these infographics.
The End of Electric Vehicle Batteries
In as little as 5 years time we could be seeing electric vehicles being produced that do not even have batteries in them at all! A team of scientists have gotten together to produce a supercapacitor made with graphene that can quickly store the necessary energy to start and run as well as give massive amounts of power when needed for fast acceleration. This collaboration between scientists at Rice University and Queensland University of Technology resulted in two papers, published in Journal of Power Sources and Nanotechnology.
What could this mean for F1 racing? If this type of supercapacitor technology was used in racing instead of fossil fuels it would present a massive advantage as it would eliminate the need to take a pit stop to refuel!
What are your thoughts on this new graphene technology? please share below we would love to get your opinion on this, thanks
About The Author
Ben Gillott
Freelance web developer with passion for helping out in tech start ups and pretty much any kind of cool web project! When not plugged into the web Ben enjoys rock climbing, snowboarding, skiing or just about any other adventurous outdoor activity.
The Cental American country has achieved a major clean energy milestone, meeting 100 percent of its power demand with renewable energy for 75 straight days.
“The year 2015 has been one of electricity totally friendly to the environment for Costa Rica,” the state-owned power supplier Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) said in a press release.
The ICE says the country’s zero-emission milestone was enabled thanks to heavy rainfalls at four hydroelectric power facilities in the first quarter of 2015. These downpours have meant that, for the months of January, February and so far March, there has been no need to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity.
Instead, Costa Rica has been powered primarily by hydro power – both pumped storage and run-of-the-river plants – and a mixture of geothermal, wind, biomass and solar energy.
It’s important to remember that Costa Rica is a small nation. It has a total area of about 51,000 square kilometres, which is about half the size of the US state of Kentucky, and it has a population of only 4.8 million people. Furthermore, its primary industries are tourism and agriculture, rather than heavy, more energy-intensive industries such as mining or manufacturing.
Still, Costa Rica has done an excellent job developing it electricity sector, and supplying affordable, reliable power to its citizens.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Global Competitiveness Index, Costa Rica ranks second in Latin American countries behind only Uruguay with regards to electricty and telecommunications infrastructure.
Reporter Sophie Vorrath from RenewEconomy writes that the country is “providing a household coverage rate of 99.4 percent at some of the region’s lowest prices”.
Costa Rica’s record on renewable generation also stands out. As recently as last year, hydropower accounted for 80 percent of all electricity production, while geothermal energy was reported back in 2010 to account for upwards of 13 percent of the country’s electricity profile.
And new geothermal projects are in the pipeline to help the volcano-rich country capitalise further on this subterranean energy source.
In mid-2014, the Costa Rican government approved a US$958 million geothermal energy project. According to Jake Richardson from CleanTechnica, “the first plants are expected to generate about 55 MW and cost approximately $333 million to build”, and two other 50 MW plants will also be built nearby.
It’s good news that more geothermal will be coming on board, as there are obvious downsides of being too reliant on hydropower, especially run-of-the-river systems, which can be hindered by seasonal changes in water flow. Droughts can also severely impact power supplies. And there are also some environmental downsides to hydroelectric dams more generally, namely the impact on riparian ecosystems and passing fish.
Nevertheless, 100 percent renewable energy generation, for any extended period of time, is an enviable achievement.
For many drivers who commute long distances, the prospect of owning a self-driving car – where a driver takes his hands off the wheel and feet off the gas – has been an elusive dream.
But on Thursday, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, took a big step in that direction when he announced that the maker of high-end electric cars would introduce autonomous technology by this summer. The technology would allow drivers to have their cars take control on what he called “major roads” like highways.
Mr. Musk said that a software update – not a repair performed by a mechanic – would give Tesla ‘s Model S sedans the ability to start driving themselves, at least part of the time, in a hands-free mode that the company refers to as autopilot.
But some industry experts said serious questions remain about whether such autonomous driving is actually legal and are skeptical that Model S owners who try to use autopilot would not run afoul of current regulations.
“There’s a reason other automakers haven’t gone there,” said Karl Brauer, an analyst with Kelley Blue Book. “Best case scenario, it’s unclear. If you’re an individual that starts doing it, you’d better hope nothing goes wrong.”
Mr. Brauer said while a handful of states had passed laws legalizing autonomous vehicles, those laws were written to cover the testing of driverless cars, not their use by consumers.
“It’s not just a philosophical reason why automakers haven’t allowed their vehicles to drive themselves,” he said. “There’s a legal reason, too.”
Alexis Georgeson, a spokesman for Tesla, said that there was “nothing in our autopilot system that is in conflict with current regulations.”
Ms. Georgeson said the system was designed to be used by an alert driver. “We’re not getting rid of the pilot. This is about releasing the driver from tedious tasks so they can focus and provide better input,” she said.
There are cars on the road today from the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Infiniti and Honda that have the capability of driving themselves on the highway. But the automakers have taken steps to prevent actual autonomous driving in such cars, and instead require consumers to keep their hands on the wheel. A few seconds without touching the wheel, for example, and a warning is sounded; the cars then simply come to a stop.
What Mr. Musk said Tesla was planning for this summer, however, would be a revolutionary step, said Jessica Caldwell, an analyst with Edmunds.com.
“Working through the legalities and the legislation continues to be an issue,” she said. “I’m not certain how Tesla would get around that.”
Tesla is not alone in pushing the envelope. Chris Urmson, director of self-driving cars at Google, raised eyebrows at a January event in Detroit when he said Google did not believe there was currently a “regulatory block” that would prohibit self-driving cars, provided the vehicles themselves met crash-test and other safety standards.
A spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration responded at the time that “any autonomous vehicle would need to meet applicable federal motor vehicle safety standards.” and that the agency “will have the appropriate policies and regulations in place to ensure the safety of these types of vehicles.”
Other automakers are in fast pursuit of similar self-driving features. Cadillac, for instance, said last year that it would make a so-called supercruise feature, allowing hands-free highway driving, available in its 2017 model year cars.
But analysts say the industry is banking that new state or federal rules will be in place by that time.
“A couple of years is a couple of years; that’s a lot longer than two to three months,” Mr. Brauer said. “Maybe Musk is hoping that by the summer he can get one state like California to sign off – but even that may be a stretch.”
Mr. Musk said on Thursday that Tesla had been testing its autopilot on a route from San Francisco to Seattle, with company drivers letting the car navigate the West Coast largely unassisted.
After the software update this summer, the cars can also be summoned by the driver via smartphone and can park themselves in a garage or elsewhere, he said. That feature, though, will be allowed only on private property for now, he said.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said the question of liability for autonomous cars would have to be worked out, possibly through court cases, as insurance companies, manufacturers and individuals fight over who is responsible.
“If it’s fully autonomous, who’s responsible if there’s a mistake? The driver or the company who made it?” Mr. Tobias said. “I don’t see how Tesla’s going to clear the hurdles. They may have to go to each state legislative body and convince them, and that takes time.”
Mr. Musk also announced on Thursday that a software update within the next two weeks would give Tesla owners a new set of active safety features, including automatic emergency braking and blind-spot and side-collision warnings – features that are now available on a broad range of cars.
Also to be added are tools to help drivers monitor the status of charging stations and plot routes to ensure the ability to complete a trip without running out of battery power.
“It’s basically impossible to run out, unless you do so intentionally,” Mr. Musk said.
The move is intended to help reduce so-called range anxiety, the fear drivers have that their battery will run out, prompting them to constantly calculate distances and worry about being stranded.
The Model S sedan already has a range that starts at just over 200 miles for the base model. Other automakers have plans to match those numbers in the coming years. Nissan, whose Leaf currently has a range under 100 miles, has announced intentions for a 250-mile-range electric car, and Volkswagen has said that it will build a car that can go 300 miles on a charge by 2020.
General Motors unveiled its effort at a 200-mile range electric car, the Bolt, this year at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, and in February said it would begin building the car in late 2016, with a target price of about $30,000, after zero-emissions tax breaks.
The famous Paris landmark has been fitted with two new wind turbines that generate enough electricity to power the commercial areas of its first floor.
France’s most recognisable landmark, the iron Eiffel Tower erected in 1889, has seen its iconic frame festooned with many different decorations and objects over the years for various celebrations. Its latest addition is a little more subtle — and maybe a little more in keeping with the tower’s original purpose as a monument to human ingenuity and artistry.
UGE
As part of a major renovation and upgrade to the tower’s first floor, the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel will be adding a variety of sustainability features — the first of which is a pair of VisionAIR5 wind turbines designed by renewable energy specialist Urban Green Energy.
The two vertical-axis turbines have been installed on the tower’s second level, about 122 metres (400ft) from the ground — a position that maximises wind capture. The turbines have been specially painted so as to blend in with the tower, and produce virtually no sound. They can also capture wind from any direction, producing, between them, a total of 10,000kWh per year — enough to power the tower’s first floor.
“The Eiffel Tower is arguably the most renowned architectural icon in the world, and we are proud that our advanced technology was chosen as the Tower commits to a more sustainable future,” said UGE CEO Nick Blitterswyk. “When visitors from around the world see the wind turbines, we get one step closer to a world powered by clean and reliable renewable energy.”
There was no environmental benchmark the tower was required to meet; however, the SETE wishes to reduce the tower’s environmental impact by 25 percent as part of the City of Paris Climate Plan. It is funding the entire €30 million cost of the renovation — which includes cosmetic and safety upgrades — itself.
Other sustainable measures to be introduced to the Eiffel Tower include LED lighting, solar panels, a rainwater collection system and high-power heat pumps.
The European Commission’s overhaul of the EU electricity market will target national public support for renewables, while encouraging governments to pay energy companies in other member states for idle power stations.
Capacity mechanisms reward power companies – mainly gas and coal stations – for the amount of power they can produce, rather than by buying the energy they actually generate.
New legislation on capacity markets are part of the executive’s plan to create an EU-wide Energy Union, according to a paper leaked ahead of next week’s official launch of the project.
Supporters claim the model can prevent blackouts, enabling the surplus capacity to be brought online in case of a shortage or to cover consumption at peak time.
Critics counter that paying for surplus, unused power is a public subsidy for high-carbon industries, entrenching polluting fossil fuel stations for years to come.
Opening up capacity mechanisms, already a reality in some member states such as the United Kingdom, to investment from other EU countries, will only exacerbate that, they argue.
The executive will write laws to make it possible for EU governments to buy capacity based in other member states, according to the communication, which is subject to change.
An Energy Union would allow energy to be shared more effectively across the EU, so that a surplus in one country could be used where there is a shortage, be it because of an unreliable supplier or any other reason.
Supply security is one of the central drivers behind the Energy Union. It gained political momentum after 2009, when Russia shut off gas supplies to the EU, causing shortages.
The Commission will legislate to fully open capacity mechanisms to cross-border investment as part of rules to manage the security of electricity supply, according to the draft.
In 2015 to 2016, it will publish an initiative to co-ordinate capacity markets. A review of the directive concerning measures to safeguard electricity supply security will begin in 2016, the paper said.
Serious overhaul
The legislation will be part of a redesign of Europe’s electricity market. “A serious overhaul is needed in relation to state interventions in the market”, the paper said.
“Uncoordinated national policies” on capacity and renewables will be tackled by ambitious legislation, it added.
Member states “all over Europe” were increasingly turning to capacity markets “even when this is neither efficient nor cost-effective,” the draft continued.
“Public support to national renewable electricity producers has often created cost distortions,” the document said. Particular attention would be paid state intervention in pricing mechanisms for energy in the electricity market overhaul.
Governments across Europe cut funding for renewables schemes after the financial crisis. Spain angered investors by making retrospective cuts in their subsidies to renewables.
But public subsidies and other national support has been successful in countries such as Denmark and Ireland.
“Our vision is of the Energy Union as “a sustainable, low carbon and environment-friendly economy,” the draft reads.
Environmentally harmful subsidies will be phased out altogether, the draft said. But capacity mechanisms are viewed by some as just that.
In July 2014, the Commission authorised the UK Capacity Market electricity generation scheme, deciding it was in line with EU state aid rules. It found the market would ensure energy supply security without distorting competition, backing the government intervention.
After the UK’s first capacity auction in December, £293m (nearly €400 million) was earmarked for old coal plants, according to British NGO Sandbag.
Oxfam’s climate policy adviser Kiri Hanks said at the time, “The days of burning dirty coal should be numbered but instead the UK government is giving two-thirds of the UK’s coal plants a public subsidy.”
Brian Ricketts, the Secretary General of the European Association for Coal and Lignite, told EurActiv capacity mechanisms were a rational response to the increase in subsidised, must-run renewables and, if properly designed, should not be considered state aid.
“Fossil generation secures electricity supply when there is no wind or sun. Only if all options to provide reliable capacity are eligible – from new as well as from existing plants, from coal as well as from gas – will consumers get the best deal on security,” he said.
The German government, in contrast to the UK, has refused to pay capacity payments for fossil fuel plants, despite pressure from the country’s coal and gas industry.
Power plant operators are only interested in capacity payments so that they can “conserve surplus capacities at the cost of electricity consumers,” Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy Sigmar Gabriel told Handelsblatt in January.
Reducing the cost for consumers is another goal of the Energy Union set out in the leaked paper.
Efficiency
The Energy Union’s ambition is to turn the EU into the most energy efficient economy in the world, the paper said. The Commission will revise the energy efficiency and performance of buildings directives. It will also push a financing initiative aimed at existing buildings, it said.
While welcome, campaigners warned the energy efficiency initiatives will reduce demand, creating more surplus capacity and idle stations – and potentially more capacity payments.
“The Commission’s idea of an Energy Union looks more like a confused shopping list than a coherent plan. Investors need the right signals,” Tara Connolly, Greenpeace EU energy policy advisor said.
“A clear plan focusing on renewables and phasing out coal would cut carbon emissions, while maintain Europe’s competitiveness, generating jobs, and contributing to energy security.”
EU leaders in October committed by 2030 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40%, and increase energy efficiency and renewables by at least 27%.
The Commission plans to legislate to achieve those gas emissions targets, according to the leaked paper. At the same time as the Energy Union launch, it will publish a strategy paper for December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Paris which aims to set a worldwide legally binding target for global warming.
In 2009, the European Union set mandatory targets for renewable energy use that every member state has to reach by the year 2020. In this post we will analyse the progress of each member state using the latest estimates released by Eurostat.
Shares of renewable energy in 2012
In the figure below we have the shares of gross final renewable energy consumption for each member state and how far the states are from their target: Here we note that Sweden, Estonia and Bulgaria already reached their targets while Malta Luxembourg and the UK have the lowest shares of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption. Also, Norway is the country with the highest share of renewable energy. Netherland, France and the UK are the countries furthest from their targets.
Increase since 2006
In the following chart we compare the increase of shares from 2006 to 2012 of each country: From this chart we note that all the member states increased their share of renewable energy since 2006. Another interesting fact we note here is that the three states with the highest increases are, in order, Malta, the UK and Belgium, which are also some of the countries furthest from the achievement of their targets.
Evolution of the shares from 2004 to 2012
In this figure we compare the trend of the shares of renewable energy among the biggest European countries excluding the Scandinavian ones: We can observe that Italy and the UK had the fastest growth of renewable energy shares, but while the UK share has never been comparable to the ones of the other countries, Italy was able to overtake France and Germany in 2011. We can also see that the German share had the slowest growth and that Spain is the country with the highest share since 2009.
In Indiana, a fight over net metering – basically, whether people with rooftop solar can return their excess power to the grid and thereby lower their utility bills – has drawn out groups ranging from the state chapter of the NAACP to the conservative TUSK (Tell Utilities Solar won’t be Killed) in favor of the practice.
Arrayed on the other side of the issue, meanwhile, are the Indiana Energy Association, a group of utilities, and Republican Rep. Eric Koch, sponsor of a bill that would potentially change how net metering works in the state. The legislation, in its current form, would let utility companies ask the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to include various “tariffs, rates and charges, and credits” for those customers generating their own energy at home.
Net metering advocates charge that this would reduce how much money rooftop solar installers save on their electricity bills. But the bill’s supporters say it will “level the playing field to ensure that all of those who use the electric grid – whether consuming or generating power – are paying for its upkeep,” in the words of the Indiana Energy Association.
Forty-three states and the District of Columbia currently allow net metering – among them, Indiana. The fight is important because the solar industry in the state, and the number of people installing rooftop solar, is expected to grow in coming years – that is, so long as solar remains a good deal financially.
What’s particularly fascinating is how this debate has mobilized the religious community. Solar panels are going up on church rooftops in Indiana, and on Wednesday, the head of the Christian Coalition of America wrote a blog post favoring solar and referring specifically to the Indiana fight (although without getting into the technical details of net metering).
Roberta Combs, president of the group, titled her post “For God and Country, Indiana and America Need Better Energy Policies,” writing,
Indiana’s utilities are interested in keeping us reliant on traditional fuel sources that hurt our national security and weaken our economy. We must allow homes, businesses, public organizations, and churches to create local, American power by installing solar.
As conservatives, we stand up for our country’s national security and the health of our economy. And, as Christians, we recognize the biblical mandate to care for God’s creation and protect our children’s future.
This is not the first time that Combs has come out for an initiative that might be described as “green.” She previously supported efforts by Secretary of State John F. Kerry, former senator Joe Lieberman and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to battle global warming. Her daughter, Michele Combs, is the founder of a group called Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, which stands for “weaning our nation from foreign oil, boosting efficiency, and developing homegrown alternatives from natural gas to biofuels to wind and solar.”
“This whole concept of conservative support for solar has certainly gotten a lot of attention, but this is the most remarkable chapter in the story,” said Bryan Miller, who co-chairs the Alliance for Solar Choice, which advocates in favor of net metering across the country. “We’ve seen a lot of grass-roots activism for sure, but we haven’t seen a major national group, associated with the far right of American politics, coming out on a renewable energy issue.”
The reason this has happened in Indiana, suggests Miller, is that “we’ve had houses of worship who have gone solar, speaking out about this for weeks.” The South Carolina Christian Coalition has also supported solar power in the state.
The Christian Coalition did not immediately return requests for comment.
Energy in the United States is changing so fast, it seems, that politics barely knows how to adapt to it.
When it comes to innovation, businesses often follow the lead of government. Take large-scale renewable power-especially solar. Before the 2009 stimulus package, solar power was nowhere in this country. But the same program that brought us the Solyndra debacle offered loan guarantees for the first efforts to build truly massive, utility-scale projects-ones that could supply massive quantities of energy and theoretically replace plants fired by fossil fuels. Those projects worked. America now is home to the world’s two largest solar plants. California’s Desert Sunlight and Topaz facilities each have a capacity of 550 megawatts. Both were made possible by Energy Department loans.
Once the technologies were proven, and the costs began to come down, investors and operators stepped in. Companies put up plants, and then made deals with utilities to buy the output-often at a price above the cost of electricity created by coal plants. Utilities complied in part because of state requirements that they source a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources.
Now we’re entering a new stage. Companies in sectors such as technology, health care, and consumer products-all big consumers of power-are striking deals to purchase huge amounts of renewable energy from newly constructed plants. This is different than companies putting up a solar array, or buying some carbon offsets, or making token greenness gestures. They are conjuring into existence new infrastructure that can’t help but replace coal.
Take last week’s announcement that Apple will spend $850 million to purchase 130 megawatts of capacity from the First Solar California Flats Solar Project for 25 years. This is a step up for Apple, which had developed much smaller solar power plants in North Carolina and other states to power its data centers. As developer First Solar notes, this is the “industry’s largest commercial power deal.” Armed with an agreement from Apple, First Solar will build a 280 megawatt power plant on a large plot of land in Monterey County. It will sell nearly half the output to Apple and the rest to California utility Pacific Gas & Electric. Apple says the supply will be sufficient to run its stores and other operations in the state, allowing it to achieve carbon neutrality in California.
On Feb. 12, Procter & Gamble announced a somewhat smaller deal with Constellation. The energy company will spend $200 million to build a biomass plant that will supply steam to a P&G plant in Albany, Georgia, that makes Charmin toilet paper and Bounty paper towels. That biomass plant, which creates energy by burning scrap wood, pecan shells, sawdust, and other natural materials, will have a capacity of 50 megawatts, and will supply electricity to both the factory and to a local utility.
The scale of solar and wind has grown to the point where these renewables can compete on or near equal footing with other sources of power.
On Wednesday, Kaiser Permanente, the giant California-based health care company, signed a series of deals that, in aggregate, top Apple’s commitment. It hired NRG Energy to install solar panels on some 170 buildings and hospitals that will have a combined output of 70 megawatts. And it agreed to purchase 110 megawatts of electricity from a giant 485-megawatt solar plant under construction in California, as well as 43 megawatts of wind capacity from the Altamont Pass wind turbine farm. One of the earliest large-scale wind farms in the country, Altamont Pass is currently being refurbished-the owner is taking down several hundred old turbines and replacing them with a smaller number of new ones. Google, which already gets about 35 percent of its power from renewable sources, has also agreed to take 43 megawatts of capacity from the refurbished Altamont Pass plant.
What gives? Yes, companies like to be green. And many executives, who are genuinely concerned about the future of the planet, are taking matters into their own hands. “We know that climate change is real,” as Apple CEO Tim Cook said when announcing the company’s deal. “Our view is that the time for talk has passed, and the time for action is now.” Kaiser Permanente noted in its release that these transactions and other measures it is undertaking would help reduce the company’s annual CO 2 emissions by 23 percent.
But there’s a more practical impulse. Companies have to manage power consumption, and they engage in a bunch of different short-term and long-term strategies to ensure adequate, cheap supplies-they buy power from the power company, purchase it on the spot market, and sometimes make their own. What’s happened in recent years is that the scale of solar and wind has grown to the point where these renewables can compete on or near equal footing with other sources of power-even without big loan guarantees or subsidies. (As large companies well understand, the cost per unit comes down when you produce a lot more units.)
“What you’re seeing is that as energy prices move to the north, the cost of installation is going down and we’re delivering competitive energy,” says Erik Fogelberg, senior vice president of commercial sales at SolarCity, which has installed solar panels on 190 Walmart stores over the past several years, bringing the retailer’s cumulative generating capacity to about 65 megawatts. At corporations, the mentality has shifted from being willing to spend a little more money to use green power to viewing the shift to green power as a way to save money.
In addition, renewable energy-for so long a flaky, small-scale enterprise-has developed into an industrial-strength solution that affords big companies the opportunity to lock in the cost of electricity over a period of 20 to 25 years. There are a lot of variables that may affect the price of power-new regulations might impose higher costs on coal-based energy, a carbon tax may be enacted, and so on. When companies strike long-term deals for solar or wind, they get a guarantee of price stability for a big portion of their supply over a long period of time. “It’s truly a hedge” against factors that can affect their operating costs, Fogelberg says.
As I’ve noted before, when it comes to innovation in energy, procurement policy matters a great deal. Until now, it’s mostly been public entities-municipal governments, regional transportation agencies, the military-that have been helping to foster green technologies through their purchases. Now we’re starting to see private-sector companies do the same. And they’re a much more powerful force. Each of these new, large-scale transactions will displace and obviate the need for power produced from fossil fuels. The Fortune 500is opening up a new front in the war on coal.
The world’s largest public relations firm is ending its lucrative relationship with America’s powerful oil lobby – after more than a decade and at least $327m in billings.
Circumstances of the divorce between Edelman public relations and the American Petroleum Institute (API) were not immediately clear.
Edelman said it would not comment on the report, and there was no immediate response from API.
But ties between the oil lobby and the PR firm ran deep.
The oil lobby paid Edelman $327.4m for lobbying and public relations, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. Those earnings, which include money later spent by Edelman for advertising, cover only a five-year period from 2008-2012.
But there were some very good years. In 2010, the contract with API was worth more than 10% of Edelman’s global revenue, according to the Climate Investigations Center. In that year, Edelman’s global revenue was $532m and the contract with API $63m.
That relationship was by no means exclusive. API paid another PR firm, FleishmanHillard, an additional $51m.
But Edelman had favoured status, according to the Climate Investigations Center, which has tracked the company’s complicated relationship with the fossil fuel industry. In 2008, the oil lobby paid Edelman $75m, more than a third of the $203m in revenues collected in membership dues from ExxonMobil, Chevron and other oil companies.
The lucrative relationship was not without costs. Over the past year, Edelman came under growing public pressure for its ties to fossil fuel companies and industry groups which have promoted misinformation about climate change.
Last year, Edelman was caught out when other major public relations firms announced they would no longer work for climate deniers, in response to a Guardian report.
Edelman later scrambled to catch up with the new industry standard and declared it too would not represent climate deniers.
The company also faced scrutiny for advising TransCanada pipeline company to run a “perpetual campaign” against opponents of a pipeline project across eastern Canada. TransCanada later announced it had dropped Edelman.
Such hardball tactics – and the accusations of climate denial – put Edelman in an uncomfortable position with some of its other clients, according to Kert Davies of the Climate Investigations Center.
API does not explicitly deny climate change, but its website suggests – incorrectly – that there is some doubt whether burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet.
Japan is now home to more electric vehicle (EV) charging points than gas stations – with there now being more 40,000 EV charging points as compared to 34,000 gas stations, according to recent reports. That’s not even including normal electrical sockets, where electric cars can also charge. Of course the comparison does include the EV charging points installed at homes – but still, that’s pretty impressive. And no doubt a comparison that will become more and more lopsided in favor of EV charging stations over the coming years.
The new figures are coming to us via a recent report from one of Japan’s leading EV manufacturers, Nissan – which has, to date, sold more than 160,000 LEAFs since the launch of that model a few years ago.
Despite those global sales numbers, though, sales in Japan have not been quite as high as the company hoped – reportedly in part due to concerns about not finding a charging station when needed and running the battery dry. Hence the rapid buildout over recent years.
“An important element of the continued market growth is the development of the charging infrastructure,” noted Nissan chief financial officer, Joseph G Peter, during a recent conference call with analysts.
RenewEconomy provides some information on growth of infrastructure elsewhere in the world:
In Australia, local fast-charge tech company, Tritium, installed its first public Veefil EV charger in Brisbane at a BMW dealership in Fortitude Valley – the first of a planned “electric super highway” of fast chargers along the east coast.And in the US, BMW and Volkswagen have agreed to join the EV charging network operated by ChargePoint, and to help finance the roll-out of up to 100 fast chargers along the busiest corridors of the US coasts.And just last week, US utility Pacific Gas & Electric filed a proposal for $654 million in ratepayer dollars to build 25,000 electric vehicle charging stations in public places in northern and central California – the leading market for EVs in the US.A month earlier, in January, Kansas utility Great Plains Energy, announced plans to build a network of more than 1,000 charging stations in the region by mid-2015, with charging to be free to the public for the first two years.
Given that there are still some decent incentives in place in Japan for EV infrastructure development, it seems likely that the network there will continue growing relatively rapidly.
James Ayre ‘s background is predominantly in geopolitics and history, but he has an obsessive interest in pretty much everything. After an early life spent in the Imperial Free City of Dortmund, James followed the river Ruhr to Cofbuokheim, where he attended the University of Astnide. And where he also briefly considered entering the coal mining business. He currently writes for a living, on a broad variety of subjects, ranging from science, to politics, to military history, to renewable energy. You can follow his work on Google+.
1. Infrastructure power 
Graphene is an amazing new technology first created in 
It is my personal belief that Tesla have not actually used any graphene in their battery upgrade in the Roadster 3.0 at all based on the distinct lack of any mention of the word graphene in any of their patents. So this could well mean that once we do see this new graphene technology used results could be even more overwhelming than the figures suggested in these infographics. 
