Lifeboat Foundation

As the spread of electric vehicles continues to gain speed across the globe, the electric charging network needs to keep pace with the growing demand. Tesla, the global leader in electric vehicles, has spent millions to expand its supercharging network and the company currently has more than 25,000 supercharging stations across the planet. The EV manufacturer is looking to democratize its superchargers, and in certain regions, you can charge your Porsche Taycan right next to regular Tesla offerings such as the Model 3 and Model S, but some have been experiencing an unpleasant trend in recent times: internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are blocking charging stations. This act is known as “ICEing”, and it has become such an issue in China that Tesla has banded with its customers to come up with an interesting solution.

We talk a lot about electric cars, and it’s evident that engineers are working toward fossil fuel alternatives for our land-based travel. But what about airplanes? In 2019, 18.27 billion gallons of fuel were used by planes. That’s far from carbon-neutral.

Soon though, we could feel less guilty about flying. A team of researchers has created a prototype jet engine that’s able to propel itself forward using only electricity. Their study was published in AIP Advances in May 2020.

Engineers have made bendable solar cells from ultra thin semiconductors—which for all their elasticity still boast a power-per-weight ratio on par with established thin-film solar cells.

What’s needed instead is something more like the engineering that goes into a race car, where the initial design is as perfect as the engineers know how to make it upfront, but every few laps during a race, they fine-tune it further for the specific conditions on the track that day, Venne said. His inspiration for a solution that is less labor-intensive than car racing also comes from the world of automobiles — specifically self-driving cars.

In addition to knowing the basic rules of the road, a self-driving car needs to be able to adapt to the unexpected, such as swerving to avoid hitting the squirrel crossing the road ahead, Venne said. “It occurred to me that if we’re doing this with cars, we should be able to do the same with the technology that drives the mechanical side of the building.”

BrainBox AI focuses primarily on controlling the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems within a building, which accounts for the majority of the energy consumption in most buildings, Venne said. A next-level goal is to get multiple neighboring buildings in a city working in tandem to produce better results, like helping utilities balance the consumption of electricity during periods of peak demand. A pilot project based on that concept won a Tech for Our Planet challenge at the recently concluded COP26 United Nations conference on controlling climate change.

A new computational simulator can help predict whether changes to materials or design will improve performance in new photovoltaic cells.

In the ongoing race to develop ever-better materials and configurations for solar cells, there are many variables that can be adjusted to try to improve performance, including material type, thickness, and geometric arrangement. Developing new solar cells has generally been a tedious process of making small changes to one of these parameters at a time. While computational simulators have made it possible to evaluate such changes without having to actually build each new variation for testing, the process remains slow.

Now, researchers at MIT and Google Brain have developed a system that makes it possible not just to evaluate one proposed design at a time, but to provide information about which changes will provide the desired improvements. This could greatly increase the rate for the discovery of new, improved configurations.

Learn more about the importance of sustainable buildings: http://ow.ly/BotF50GB5bi

We have so many types of green energy available to us, so why the hell do we still rely on fossil fuels when tidal plants like this do the same job without any emissions? Swansea Bay Lagoon has a breakwater approximate lifecycle of at least 120 years, meaning it will last twice as long as a nuclear facility and 5X longer than offshore wind turbines. It’s a no-brainer 🧠 This is how you fight climate change!

📹 Preconstruct via Vimeo / TidalLagoonSwanseaBay / ℹ️ Good News Network.