Lifeboat Foundation

It was the second day of a three-day-long tech demonstration at the David Taylor Model Basin at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where attendees had gathered to stand around in the dark to look at something they mostly couldn’t see.

It was a long-range, free-space power beaming system — the first of its kind. Attendees that day, May 23, could see the system itself—the two 13-foot-high towers, one a 2-kilowatt laser transmitter, the other a receiver of specially designed photovoltaics. But the important part, the laser that was beaming 400 watts of power across 325 meters, from the transmitter to the receiver, was invisible to the naked eye.

In what is believed to be a transit industry first in the United States, TriMet’s all-electric buses will be powered by 100 percent wind energy. TriMet and project partner Portland General Electric made the historic announcement on Tuesday, April 16, 2019. As Oregon’s largest transit provider, TriMet has committed to a non-diesel bus fleet by 2040. The initial journey toward a non-diesel fleet now begins with battery-electric buses that will be powered by PGE’s Clean Wind℠ renewable energy program.

“Today, we are riding the winds of change. TriMet’s commitment to a zero-emissions bus fleet by 2040 and support of wind power put the agency and our region at the forefront of a cleaner future.”

Continue reading “A US transit industry first: TriMet’s new electric buses powered entirely by wind” »

Coupled with a high enough battery capacity to keep a vehicle running during darker hours, solar-powered cars have the potential to completely outdo other new types of tech that are currently in the pipeline — from hybrid vehicles to hydrogen-powered cars.

• Toyota, Sharp, and NEDO have teamed up to manufacture a unique car that could “run forever”, according to Bloomberg.
• There have been promising advances in developing thin enough solar panels for curved surfaces, as well as in tech for charging vehicles while they’re in motion.
• The solar cells the companies are working on attaching to the car are only 0.03 mm thick, so they can be attached to curved areas on cars like the roof, the hood, or the hatchback.
• By pairing more efficient solar cells with high-capacity batteries to keep vehicles running at night, solar cars have the potential to outperform hybrid vehicles and hydrogen-powered cars.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

A solar-powered electric car that runs without needing charging may sound impossible, but Toyota, Sharp, and NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan) have joined forces to hopefully make it a reality.

By pairing together the best solar panels on the market with the most efficient batteries available — not to mention years worth of experience with car-manufacturing — the companies are hoping, theoretically, to produce a vehicle that might run forever.

The idea is simple: Send kites or tethered drones hundreds of meters up in the sky to generate electricity from the persistent winds aloft. With such technologies, it might even be possible to produce wind energy around the clock. However, the engineering required to realize this vision is still very much a work in progress.

Dozens of companies and researchers devoted to developing technologies that produce wind power while adrift high in the sky gathered at a conference in Glasgow, Scotland last week. They presented studies, experiments, field tests, and simulations describing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of various technologies collectively described as airborne wind energy (AWE).

Continue reading “Alphabet’s Makani Tests Wind Energy Kites In The North Sea IEEE Spectrum” »

Though evolutionary mergers between cells, some algae have developed the ability to convert a wider spectrum of light energy into sugars.

LONDON (Reuters) — Four in five coal plants in the European Union are unprofitable and utilities could face losses of nearly 6.6 billion euros ($7.3 billion) this year, a report by think tank the Carbon Tracker Initiative said on Thursday.

WiTricity, a wireless power transfer specialist, announced licensing and technology transfer agreements with Green Power, which gears up for wireless charging of electric vehicles in South Korea.

Green Power is already engaged in wireless charging systems of vehicles from 1 to 300 kW, but not yet in electric cars, which might be possible using 11 kW WiTricity DRIVE 11 system.

As we can see in the image above, WiTricity’s wireless charging was already demonstrated in South Korea with Hyundai Kona Electric, but it’s probably still too early to judge that such an option is coming.

A bit old news.

As the fast charging infrastructure progresses towards 150–350 kW power levels (for passenger cars and beyond in case of bigger vehicles), also plug/connector suppliers try to keep pace with change.

Here we see one of the ITT Cannon DC fast charging plugs, presented at the eMove360° fairs in Munich, Germany.

Continue reading “ITT Cannon Presents Liquid-Cooled HPC Plug For 500A At 1,000V” »

A new study out of the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands details the type of diet that was found to fuel the growth of healthy gut bacteria, particularly strains that have anti-inflammatory effects in the body. The results aren’t terribly surprising — that is to say, you’ll have to eat a healthy diet if you want a healthy gut. Among other things, the study found that high amounts of sugar and meat make things worse.