A $1 billion solar farm in Nevada has been approved by the US government; the majority of British want weekly car-free days in towns and cities.
Category: sustainability – Page 472
(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is seeking almost $656,000 in new funding from California in the midst of the billionaire’s battle over whether Tesla Inc. should be reopening its plant in the state.
SpaceX’s request for funds to train existing workers and hire new ones will go before the state’s Employment Training Panel on May 15, one week after the county that’s home to Tesla’s factory sought to block the facility from resuming operations. The company sued the next day, and its chief executive officer threatened to move Tesla’s headquarters, future programs and potentially its manufacturing out of the state.
Musk, 48, appears to be prevailing in the stand-off. He tweeted Monday that Tesla was restarting production in spite of Alameda County’s order and said that if anyone is arrested, he wanted to be the only one.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Monday that the company’s factory in Fremont, California is open and has restarted production despite a stay-at-home order issued by Alameda County.
Musk said in tweet Monday afternoon that he will “be on the line,” a reference to the assembly line at the factory where Tesla makes the Model X, Model S, Model 3 and Model Y. He added “if anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”
Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.
The battery in the Lexus UX 300e electric car is air-cooled, but Lexus is backing it up with one of the best warranties yet.
The China Electricity Council (CEC) ratified and published a set of national standards for electric vehicle wireless charging, which will be based on the magnetic resonance technology developed and patented by WiTricity, a wireless power transfer specialist based in Massachusetts.
Lack of standardization was always a major obstacle for the popularization of the wireless charging, but it seems that in the near future the industry will finally introduce a general solution for all EVs — not only in China, but also globally.
“For the past four years, WiTricity has been actively involved in the Chinese EV wireless charging standardization process through its work with China Electric Power Research Institute (CEPRI), China Automotive Technology and Research Center (CATARC) and the CEC. With a global IP portfolio of over 1400 issued and pending patents, WiTricity has declared twenty Chinese patents as ” standards essential” to systems implementing the GB standard.
Form Energy, which is developing what it calls ultra-low-cost, long-duration energy storage for the grid, has signed a contract with the Minnesota-based Great River Energy to develop a 1 megawatt, 150 megawatt hour pilot project.
The second-largest electric utility in the Minnesota, Great River Energy’s installation in Cambridge, Minn. will be the first commercial deployment of the venture-backed battery technology developer’s long-duration energy storage technology.
From Energy’s battery system is significant for its ability to deliver 1 megawatt of power for 150 hours — a huge leap over the lithium ion batteries currently in use for most grid-scale storage projects. Those battery systems can last for two- to four-hours.
Tesla has patented a new battery cell with a tabless electrode that Elon Musk hypes as “way more important than it sounds.”
In the new patent application published today, Tesla explains constraints with current battery cells:
Current cells use a jelly-roll design in which the cathode, anode, and separators are rolled together and have a cathode tab and an anode tab to connect to the positive and negative terminals of the cell can. The path of the current necessarily travels through these tabs to connectors on the outside of the battery cell. However, ohmic resistance is increased with distance when current must travel all the way along the cathode or anode to the tab and out of the cell. Furthermore, because the tabs are additional components, they increase costs and present manufacturing challenges.
Wireless charging is already a thing (in smartphones, for example), but scientists are working on the next level of this technology that could deliver power over greater distances and to moving objects, such as cars.
Imagine cruising down the road while your electric vehicle gets charged, or having a robot that doesn’t lose battery life while it moves around a factory floor. That’s the sort of potential behind the newly developed technology from a team at Stanford University.
If you’re a long-time ScienceAlert reader, you may remember the same researchers first debuted the technology back in 2017. Now it’s been made more efficient, more powerful, and more practical – so it can hopefully soon be moved out of the lab.
The creation of a fully artificial living cell would signify progress in both understanding current life and the development of synthetic organisms. A crucial component of any living organism is energy generation: the means to power its internal machinery. Because of their relative simplicity, catabolic reactions are the classical means for providing carbon and energy to synthetic cells, and much work has been done in optimizing which energy substrates work best for particular reactions ([ 1 ][1]). Despite robust success using small-molecule energy sources, the possibility of designing anabolic mechanisms that can harvest virtually limitless energy from light is very alluring yet remains unrealized.