Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: energy – Page 258

The phrase “too much of a good thing” may sound like a contradiction, but it encapsulates one of the key hurdles preventing the expansion of renewable energy generation. Too much of a service or commodity makes it harder for companies to sell them, so they curtail production.

Usually that works out fine: The market reaches equilibrium and economists are happy. But external factors are bottlenecking renewable electricity despite the widespread desire to increase its capacity.

UC Santa Barbara’s Sangwon Suh is all too familiar with this issue. The professor of industrial ecology has focused on it and related challenges for at least the past two years at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “Curtailment is the biggest problem of renewable we are facing,” said Suh, who noted it will only escalate as renewable energy capacity increases.

Read more | >

During a Twitter conversation about the future of space travel, the SpaceX CEO confirmed that the Starship vehicle and the Super Heavy booster used to lift it away from Earth will “will mostly launch from ocean spaceports long-term.” Musk later clarified that “occasional flights from land are ok, but frequent (daily) flights probably need ~30km / 18 miles clear area for noise.”

The comments illuminate SpaceX’s thinking around the Starship, which is designed to transport up to 150 tons, or 100 people, into space at a time. The reusable ship measures some 400 feet when paired with its booster. It is expected to take on missions currently completed by the existing Falcon 9 satellite launches, and to enable more ambitious missions, like crewed trips to the Moon and Mars. Its use of liquid oxygen and methane fuel means a crew could feasibly visit Mars, harvest resources from the planet to refuel, and either return home or perhaps venture even furthe.

SpaceX is planning to put its Starship launch pads somewhere in the ocean, far away from city centers.

Read more | >

Circa 2011

This gorgeous, stainless steel and bronze toy car is simply named Toy Car, which seems an appropriately stripped-down name for such a minimalist vehicle. Without a body, or even a cover over the engine, you can see exactly how the car works.

It’s essentially a fancy version of the pull-back-and-go cars found in cereal boxes and kids’ fast-food “meals” everywhere. Pull the car backwards while pushing down and the motion of the turning wheels is stored as energy in a coiled spring inside the big central toothed wheel. Let go and it unwinds, propelling the machine forward. When the spring has fully sprung, a clutch disengages and lets the car roll free.

You’ve read your last complimentary article this month. To read the full article, SUBSCRIBE NOW. If you’re already a subscriber, please sign in and and verify your subscription.

Read more | >

“We will not have an active exoskeleton with servomotors tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow. That’s science fiction,” Sergei Smagluk, of the EO-1 design team told Russian newspaper RIA Novosti. He adds that as soon as a suitable power source is available, it will create a boom in exoskeleton development, one which his company is well-placed to lead.

While America’s ambitious attempts to build Iron Man-style powered armor are making little progress, Russia is already fielding modest but effective unpowered military exoskeletons.

Read more | >

A historic French brand is set to return with one of the most extreme hypercar designs ever. The new holders of the Delage brand are squarely focused on the Nurburgring lap record with the monstrous D12 and its 7.6-liter, naturally aspirated V12.

Miami-based French entrepreneur Laurent Tapie has leased the rights to the Delage name, with an option to buy, and is building the first Delage car in some 64 years. And how! With backing from “four deeply invested billionaires” according to an interview with Robb Report, he’s fulfilling his dream of an F1 car for the street.

The D12 is a wasp-waisted monster whose dart-shaped cabin is so separated from the front wheels that it might as well be an open-wheeler. Its colossal mid-mounted V12, developed in-house, will put power down through an eight-speed single-clutch transmission with an electric motor built in to form a hybrid system.

Read more | >

Fleet operator SES on Aug. 20 said it selected SpaceX to launch four recently ordered O3b mPower broadband satellites.

SES’s four-satellite expansion order, announced Aug. 7, further increased its launch needs.

SES has now grouped the satellites into trios for the first three Falcon 9 launches, scheduled for the third quarter of 2021, the first quarter of 2022, and the second half of 2022. The last two satellites are projected to launch in the second half of 2024. Each mission will take place from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The O3b mPower constellation is designed as a multi-terabit global network capable of aiming gigabits of Ka-band capacity at customers in aviation, government, energy and other sectors. The constellation builds off of SES’s current O3b fleet of 20 satellites built by Thales Alenia Space.

WASHINGTON — Fleet operator SES on Aug. 20 said it selected SpaceX to launch four recently ordered O3b mPower broadband satellites.

The agreement means SpaceX will launch all 11 of SES’s O3b mPower satellites to medium Earth orbit across four Falcon 9 launches. Boeing is building all 11 mPower satellites.

Continue reading “SES taps SpaceX for two additional Falcon 9 launches” | >

The only slight hitch is it costs as much as a brand new Rolls-Royce Phantom, so it’s for millionaires.

We wrote earlier this year that because the demand for electrified classics was on the rise, Lunaz, U.K.-based company that specializes in EV conversions had doubled its workforce to keep up with demand. The company’s first product was a pure-electric 1953 Jaguar XK120, but if that was not opulent enough, it now offers a car that makes a lot of sense on paper: an electric 1961 Rolls-Royce Phantom V.

In fact, an old electric Roller is about as fitting as an EV converted classic could get, simply because no internal combustion engine can match the blend of smoothness, quietness and power provided by an electric motor. To top it all off, the guys from Lunaz equip their electric Phantom with a really big 120 kWh battery pack that is said to provide enough juice for a range of 300+ miles (480+ km).

Read more | >