In case you missed them, here are some highlights from Breaking Energy this week. First things first… There’s a solar-powered boat! And a solar-powered plane! And they’re coming to NYC! We’re giddy. So are the guys on the boat. The multi-year downturn in natural gas drilling, caused by at times astonishingly low prices, may be… Keep reading →
The United Nations Climate Change conference in Durban, South Africa this year will shuttle its delegates to and from the conference in electric vehicles.
“We’re here to demonstrate that zero-emission vehicles are a real and affordable solution for reducing CO2 emissions,” Mia Nelson, of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, says in this video. “These cars are also extremely easy to use and extremely easy to recharge. In fact, with an EV you will never need to go to a gasoline station ever again. You can simply recharge from the comfort of your own home.” Keep reading →
Energy nerds may be calculating emissions every time they turn on their cars, but they may not realize that some motors are burning far more energy, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Industrial motor systems burn far more energy and emit much more CO2 than the average person realizes, several GE executives told Breaking Energy in a recent phone conversation (in total these systems account for roughly 25-30% of the United States’ total energy consumption.) They said that if industrial facility operators in the US adopted high-efficiency motors like the ones GE sells, those industries could save $3-5 billion annually in electric bills and could reduce CO2 emissions by 15-26 million metric tons per year, about the same as taking 3-5 million passenger vehicles off the road. Keep reading →
Northeast and mid-Atlantic grid operator PJM Interconnect on Monday welcomed a new project to promote technology that can use battery power from electric vehicles to smooth peaks and troughs in grid demand.
Vehicle to grid technology, or V2G, has been developed over more than a decade by University of Delaware professor Willett Kempton, and has been shown through several prototype electric cars to be an effective way of providing a significant untapped source of energy to the national grid. Keep reading →
Jared Anderson
Conway Irwin
Peter Gardett