Lifeboat Foundation

“A few months from now, a group of people will come here with something called an electric car. I need to know whether or not you have the right voltage connection for them to plug in their vehicles. Do you understand what I’m asking for?”

Mr. Dev Reddy, manager of a gas station in rural Anantapur district of India’s Andhra Pradesh looked at me as if he understood. It was 2008, and most people in India had never seen an electric car, but without flinching he took me to a shed to reveal a large plug point, which was used to power an electric sugar cane juicing machine. One look at it and I knew that there was sufficient voltage coming through the connection to be able to charge the lithium-ion battery in the REVA electric vehicles my friends and I would be driving 3,500 kilometers across India.

In 2008, it was folly to imagine India creating new technological solutions to address the climate crisis. For decades India had called itself a victim of climate change and thus incapable of acting to reduce emissions; what’s more, 400 million Indians had no access to electricity at all.

Continue reading “India’s Switch from Environmental Victim to Renewable Energy Champ” »

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As advanced and efficient as our solar panels are becoming, they’re still pretty much useless when rain clouds arrive overhead. That could soon change thanks to a hybrid cell that can harvest energy from both sunlight and raindrops.

The key part of the system is a triboelectric nanogenerator or TENG, a device which creates electric charge from the friction of two materials rubbing together, as with static electricity – it’s all about the shifting of electrons.

TENGs can draw power from car tyres hitting the road, clothing materials rubbing up against each other, or in this case the rolling motion of raindrops across a solar panel. The end result revealed by scientists from Soochow University in China is a cell that works come rain or shine.

Continue reading “This New Hybrid Solar Cell Can Harvest Electricity From Actual Raindrops” »

Tesla made a significant change to its electric motor strategy with the introduction of the Model 3, switching from an AC induction motor to a permanent magnet motor.

Now, Tesla’s principal motor designer, Konstantinos Laskaris, explains the logic behind the move.

Continue reading “Tesla motor designer explains Model 3’s transition to permanent magnet motor” »

Food scientists and startups are trying to make meat more ethically appealing by growing it — cell by cell — in a lab instead of on a farm. Even some vegans support so-called “clean” meat. But can lab grown meat overcome the dreaded “yuck factor?”

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We could do this today. A couple ideas i would pitch would be: 1. A series of giant solar arrays in the American SW. 2. Giant wind turbines located in Tornado alley and built to withstand a direct hit from a tornado and try and put them where tornadoes would make direct hits on purpose.

After we get these sites built up enough to power the US, then build them up to power North and South America, eventually expand into Asia.

It would require an infrastructure overhaul costing hundreds of billions—if not trillions—of dollars, but technically speaking, it’s possible.

Continue reading “The US Could Supply 80 Percent of Its Energy with Wind and Solar” »

China has tasked 60,000 soldiers to increase the country’s total forest coverage in an attempt to combat its serious air pollution problem.

Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk took to Twitter this week to decry the slow and costly pace of U.S. infrastructure projects, and thus a challenge — or boast — was born: The Boring Co. could build a tunnel across the San Francisco Bay far cheaper and far faster than current available estimates.

Musk was pointing to a San Francisco Chronicle editorial favoring a new Transbay Tube for public transportation over another cross-bay bridge to alleviate chronic traffic woes and public-transportation overcrowding in the Bay Area. The editorial cited a starting price of $12 billion for the new tunnel.

Probably about a tenth of the cost and a fifth of the time— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 28, 2018

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s latest Boring Co. boast: A San Francisco Bay tunnel at 1/10th the cost” »

A study of the unusual digestive system of an ancient group of insects has provided new insights into future biofuel production.