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Category: sustainability – Page 236

Rivian delivers first electric vans to Amazon in Europe

Amazon has begun rolling out its custom electric delivery vans from Rivian in Europe, the e-commerce giant said Monday. This will be Rivian’s first commercial shipment of vans outside the United States.

The first tranche of 300 vans will be seen on streets in Munich, Berlin and Dusseldorf in the coming weeks. Amazon already has a fleet of thousands of electric vans operating in Europe, including more than 1,000 e-vans in Germany, the company said. Amazon last year said it plans invest more than €1 billion to electrify its European transportation network.

“Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040, and reducing our delivery-related emissions is a critical part of this goal,” said Rocco Bräuniger, country manager for Amazon, in a statement. “Last year we delivered more than 45 million packages in Germany with electric vans and e-cargo bikes, and these new additions from Rivian will help us deliver packages more sustainably and to more customers.”

Tesla extends blistering rally after quarterly deliveries beat

July 3 (Reuters) — Tesla (TSLA.O) shares jumped about 7% on Monday after better-than-expected quarterly deliveries showed that Chief Executive Elon Musk’s plan of boosting volumes through discounts was working.

The day’s gains lifted the top U.S. electric-vehicle manufacturer’s market capitalization by around $57 billion to $887 billion.

At $277, the stock has already more than doubled in value this year and risen far above price targets set by analysts, prompting caution from some brokerages that margins will suffer because of the aggressive discounting spree.

Robotic ‘Light Bender’ on the moon could help Artemis astronauts keep the lights on

“Part of what we’re doing is conceptually simple, reflecting sunlight to a solar panel located in the dark,” said Maxar Chief Robotics Architect and lead for Light Bender Sean Dougherty in a Maxar statement. “Where it gets complex is doing that without humans involved. We’re leveraging investments in autonomy to study how NASA can use robots to assemble and deploy a set of reflectors that keep sunlight focused on a solar panel operating in the shadows. It’s never been done before.”

Light Bender works by hoisting two 33-foot (10-meter) reflectors up a 65-foot (20-meter) telescoping mast. One mirror autonomously tracks the sun and reflects that light to the second mirror, which then reflects those rays towards the intended solar panels.

The Light Bender project is a collaboration between Maxar and NASA’s Langley Research Center, and is scheduled for its first terrestrial demonstration in 2025. The company was awarded the contract in May 2023, under NASA’s Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity Program. For their part, NASA’s team is responsible for Light Bender’s structural design, and Maxar is taking the lead on the robotics — an aptitude for which the company has demonstrated in the past.

Swiss Firm RigiTech Enables Drone Delivery—Without a Landing or Takeoff

Wind turbine maintenance is an important yet unheralded task. But drones have arrived to spice things up.

RigiTech is a Swiss drone manufacturer and operator boasting some of the most extensive beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight authorizations in the industry. And it just completed a landmark test of its Eiger delivery system, flying spare parts to the Anholt Offshore Wind Farm, located 20 sm (17 nm) off the coast of Denmark. But there’s a catch—the drones didn’t need to land.

The tests marked the rollout of RigiTech’s prototype precision dropping system, which autonomously releases cargo from a few feet in the air when it detects the drone has reached its destination. That’s a game-changer in the case of offshore wind turbines, which typically do not have landing pads.

What does a solarpunk future look like?

If you want to know what the best possible future could look like — and how we can make it happen — talk to someone involved in the solarpunk movement.

“If cyberpunk was ‘here is this future that we see coming and we don’t like it’, and steampunk is ‘here’s yesterday’s future that we wish we had,’ then might be ‘here’s a future that we can want and we might actually be able to get,’” Adam Flynn, an early member of the movement, explained in 2015.

This community is focused on not only imagining a future where we’ve overcome the problems inspiring today’s dystopian sci-fi (climate change, income inequality, descrimination, etc.), but also making that future a reality.

Combining nuclear and solar tech could make a powerful pair

In energy policy debates, nuclear energy and renewable energy technologies are sometimes viewed as competitors.

In reality, they could be better, together.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ben Lindley, an assistant professor of engineering physics and an expert on nuclear reactors, and Mike Wagner, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a solar energy expert, are studying the feasibility and benefits of such a coupling.

Elon Musk Announces 5 NEW Teslas For 2023

Elon Musk Announces 5 NEW Teslas For 2023:- Tesla company has achieved remarkable growth in recent years with just four vehicles in its lineup: the Model S midsize sedan, Model X midsize crossover, Model 3 compact sedan and Model Y compact crossover.

Combined, those four nameplates now dominate the U.S. luxury car segment and top the EV charts. Tesla is the second-best-selling brand after Toyota in California, which often sets future-product trends for the nation. But Tesla fans are clamoring for more. And financial analysts watching Tesla stock warn of growing competition.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising new models for years 2023. Musk, who is known for missing product deadlines, is now hailing 2023 as the start of a new product cycle. He said that the missed deadlines have come, in part, from the need to first scale up production of the company’s current models.

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