Automotive New reports:
BMW will launch a new class of environmentally friendly vehicles under its own brand, signaling that even premium automakers are ready to embrace electric vehicles as a mainstream product.
Without new concepts and technologies, certain carmakers “may no longer be in the market” soon after the advent of a raft of tax penalties and incentives designed to force the auto industry to go green, CEO Norbert Reithofer said.
BMW’s board decided to create a new sub-brand — similar to its “M” label for its high-performance cars — to label a new range of sustainable vehicles, Reithofer said on a conference call on Tuesday.
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Filed under: Automotive, Innovation, Marketing , Automotive, Cars, Clients, Energy, Innovation
From Automobile Magazine:
Bill Reinert, Toyota’s in-house energy guru and resident contrarian, looks like he’s just taken a whiff of a long-expired container of milk.
Reinert is serving on a future-of-the-car panel at a high-powered green-think conference sponsored by Fortune magazine and featuring heavyweights such as President Bill Clinton and Bill Ford. Although the symposium is being held in a button-down bastion of Orange County, the ambience is totally Silicon Valley, all iPhones and Aeron chairs, with lots of clever but undercapitalized tech entrepreneurs sniffing around for angel investors. At the moment, Shai Agassi, the charismatic founder of Better Place, is making a dynamic pitch for creating vast networks of battery-charging stations to support electric vehicles that will, he claims, be cheaper than the equivalent gasoline-powered cars. While executives from Ford, BMW, and Fisker Automotive listen with polite smiles, Reinert squirms in his seat, crosses and recrosses his legs, and generally behaves like a schoolkid who can’t wait for the bell to ring so he can escape for recess.
When it’s his turn to speak, Reinert bites his tongue. He mildly questions the viability of Agassi’s wildly improbable plan to create battery-swapping stations for the coming wave of EVs. He lobs a few gentle barbs in the direction of the ethanol lobby, which he privately regards with unalloyed scorn. He outlines his genuinely radical vision of a future where publicly owned and shared cars are used to complete urban mass-transit systems. But by and large, he’s on his best behavior, showing the benevolent public face of the world’s greenest car company. Until the mics are turned off.
“That’s the first law of Disney at work–wishing will make it so,” he mutters shortly after bolting out of the conference room and yanking off his tie. “Using ethanol for fuel is like electing the dumbest kid in school as class president. As for plug-in electrics, they’re just not plausible right now. Lithium-ion batteries are too expensive by at least an order of magnitude. They’re not energy-dense enough. And we generate a lot of our electricity from coal. I don’t think Shai is being disingenuous. I think he really believes what he’s saying. I see it all the time from those Palo Alto types. They think the whole world is like a computer company, and they’re always trying to recreate the dot-com economy. You see exactly the same mind-set with Tesla. It’s all going to work out. It worked out with eBay. It worked out with SAP. But transportation is a different world. I mean, Shai’s bragging about driving an electric RAV4 with a seventy-mile range. How many of your friends are going to buy that car?”
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Filed under: Automotive , Automotive, Cars, Consumer, Energy, Future, Gasoline, Innovation, Technology
A new way of printing organic electronics is more reliable and yields higher performance.
It’s possible to print large, flexible arrays of cheap, plastic transistors to drive displays. But the performance of these organic electronics is still not consistent enough for commercial devices.
A new method for printing a wide variety of semiconducting organic compounds such as polymers is much more reliable–and on top of that, it improves the performance of a wide variety of these materials by a few orders of magnitude.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Gadgets, Innovation, Science, Technology
First Sharp announced the development of the world’s first waterproof solar-powered cell phone, and now the company has done the world one better by developing the thinnest solar module for mobile devices ever. The LROCGO2 Solar Module measures just 0.8 mm thick–the width of eight human hairs.
The Solar Module’s polycrystalline solar cells only provides 300 mW of power, so the device won’t replace traditional batteries any time soon. But it can act as a supplement for emergency situations or any time when a traditional cell phone charger is MIA. And since the module is fitted onto cell phones in the manufacturing process,it eliminates the need to carry around extra emergency solar chargers.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Energy, Innovation, iphone, Research, Science, Technology
From Popsci:
No matter whether you felt that Earth Hour was a terrific conservation tactic or an overhyped PR stunt, energy on our planet is in peril. Our daily juice (be it electric, gasoline combustion, atomic, or carbon-based), has become a precious commodity with at least one guaranteed effect: to elicit an instantaneous hot-button opinion from just about everybody.
What can you do about it? Well, one great proactive demonstration would be to stop your regular consumption of dry-cell batteries. Yes, there are numerous substitutes, ranging from rechargeable varieties to alternative energy replacements, but each of these substitutions has a debit that few of us are willing to pay. You know, “costs” like always hunting for an outlet to power a battery recharging station, or getting rid of a clean, slim-line AA battery for a gargantuan solar-driven bat-winged monstrosity.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Innovation, Science, Technology
From Popular Mechanics:
A long-sought solar milestone was eclipsed last week, when Tempe, Ariz.–based First Solar Inc. announced that the manufacturing costs for its thin-film photovoltaic panels had dipped below $1 per watt for the first time. With comparable costs for standard silicon panels still hovering in the $3 range, it’s tempting to conclude that First Solar’s cadmium telluride (CdTe) technology has won the race.
But if we’re concerned about the big picture (scaling up solar until it’s a cheap and ubiquitous antidote to global warming and foreign oil) a forthcoming study from the University of California–Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that neither material has what it takes compared to lesser-known alternatives such as—we’re not kidding—fool’s gold.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Science, Solar, Technology
December 30, 2008 • 8:27 am
2008 has been an incredible year for green transportation as the world’s automakers made strident efforts to green their production lines, cities decided that it’s time to give our car-centric lifestyle a much needed rethink, and some incredible new vehicles proved once and for all that green transportation can be sexier and perform just as well as any other method of transportation.
From Inhabitat
Filed under: Automotive, Innovation, Science , Automotive, Cars, Energy, Innovation, Technology, Traffic
December 4, 2008 • 11:24 am
This gets us excited:
The race is officially on for a U.S. $15-million-dollar prize for harnessing the power of the oceans. The winning marine renewable-energy innovation would provide a serious energy alternative to burning fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming. The award will go to the team that “successfully demonstrates—in Scottish waters—the best commercially viable wave or tidal technology capable of providing electricity to thousands of homes.” The winning team must supply this electricity using only the power of the sea for a continuous two-year period. [Full article]
Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Marine, Ocean
October 6, 2008 • 8:56 am
Investors may be hypersensitive to market bubbles after the debacles of the Internet crash in 2000 and the current housing crisis. While some industry watchers have suggested a similar situation could occur in the clean energy movement, venture capitalists do not see trouble on the 2009 horizon.
Over 9/10’s of venture capitalists and other experts expect to see at least 10% investment increases in this sector. The optimists are looking for investment increases of 20%. Investments will be spread among the following sectors: Energy storage (fuel cells and batteries), Clean coal, Wind energy, Alternative fuels, and Solar
By region, investment in this industry will vary: West Coast 60%, Southwest 14%, Midwest 13%, Northeast 9%, and the Southeast 4%.
From [kpmg]
Filed under: Information, Innovation , Energy, Innovation, Investment, VC
