EV

German Summit On Electric Mobility

SAN DIEGO –  The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and General Motors Co. (GM) today crowned The Ohio State University this year’s winner of the EcoCAR 3 – Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition during an awards ceremony at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. This is the second stage of an ongoing 4-year competition that… Keep reading →

Tesla Motors Continues To Report Quarterly Losses, While Interest In Their Batteries Grow

With more than 350,000 sold, plug-in electric vehicles — also called electric cars or EVs — are increasingly common on our nation’s roadways. If you’re one of the many people who purchased your EV after hearing about their economic and environmental benefits from a co-worker, family member, friend or neighbor, we want to hear from… Keep reading →

Car Makers From Around The World Exhibit At Los Angeles Auto Show

As part of the Obama Administration’s strategy to increase energy productivity, reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil and cut harmful emissions the Energy Department today announced an investment of nearly $55 million for 24 projects to develop and deploy cutting-edge vehicle technologies that will strengthen the U.S. clean energy economy. These technologies will play a… Keep reading →

car

Numbers remain low   It may not come as a complete surprise, but the U.S. Energy Information Administration has confirmed that California leads the country in electric vehicle adoption. However, all-electric (EV) and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) vehicles still represent a small percentage of new vehicle sales. There were roughly 174,000 EVs and PHEVs on the… Keep reading →

Detroit Hosts Flagship North American International Auto Show

Records are meant to be broken, no doubt about that. This includes electric vehicle records, and word out of Japan is the world record for distance traveled by an electric vehicle on a single charge may now have been broken (though there’s a little confusion on this at first glance – see below), courtesy of a team… Keep reading →

Solar Boat

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 →