Continued concerns about global warming have boosted work on alternative fuel sources that reduce emissions. Hydrogen is an appealing, clean-burning fuel. Currently, most hydrogen comes from the processing of fossil fuels, which produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct. However, the electrolysis of water produces hydrogen without the release of greenhouse gases—provided the electricity used in the process comes from renewable energy.
As more public charging stations are built, electric-car drivers have access to increasingly-large areas of the U.S.
Owners of the Tesla Model S plug-in car largely rely on the company's Supercharger network, which can now facilitate a cross-country trip on one route, with more to come. But what does it actually take to build a Supercharger station? A lot of digging, apparently.
Whenever winter rolls around, it's hard not to think of home energy use -- insulation doesn't seem to quite work, power bills go up, and it still feels cold.
It appears energy is also on Google's mind. According to The Information, the company reportedly has been testing Internet-connected thermostats aimed at making the energy grid more efficient and helping users control their power use. The trial program is said to be called EnergySense.
In the US, solar power remains one of the pricier options. Without tax breaks and renewable energy mandates, we'd probably see only a fraction of the installations that we currently do. And without much in the way of on-grid storage, solar is mostly useful for cutting into the peak demand that tends to hit mid-day.
Maybe we should call them e-craft.
At the Paris Air Show here, a handful of companies tried out their own version of a change sweeping the automotive industry: electric power. There are abundant challenges to the approach, but some believe that the technology will catch on at least in some circumstances.
L33tdawg: Ofer's slides along with all other presentation materials can be downloaded from http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2013ams/materials/
Hackers could use vulnerable charging stations to prevent the charging of electric vehicles in a certain area, or possibly even use the vulnerabilities to cripple parts of the electricity grid, a security researcher said during the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam on Thursday.
Apple's solution to shaving thickness from the Retina MacBook Pro—gluing its lithium polymer battery cells directly to the aluminum unibody shell—continues to spark debate among proponents of sustainable electronics. Apple submitted the device to the Green Electronics Council for an EPEAT Gold rating last week, prompting critics to argue that the glued-in battery should disqualify it from any rating at all. But it turns out that some recyclers disagree, saying it isn't dramatically more difficult to safely remove the battery than in other modern devices.
Researchers from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have found a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.
The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.
Google yesterday pulled the plug on an ambitious green-technology initiative, a casualty of the Internet giant's strategy to shed peripheral projects.
In a company blog, Google's senior vice president of operations and Google Fellow Urs Holzle listed "Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal" as one of seven projects that were being shut down because they didn't catch on as hoped.
