energy infrastructure
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What can you do in three minutes? Boil a egg? Buy a Coffee? Check your Mail? Visit the bathroom? Thanks to Japanese based JFE Engineering, you can now add half-charging your EV to the list, courtesy of its ultra-fast charge station. Designed to comply with the CHAdeMo standard developed by Tokyo Electric Power Company, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Subaru and Toyota, the system is capable of charging a 2011 Mistubishi i-Miev from empty to 50% full in just three minutes. Even just three minutes plugged into the fast-charge station was enough to enable a standard 2011 Mitsubishi i-Miev to travel a...
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Could Passing Cars Power Wind-Turbine Highway Lights?And now, for today's great green concept, we present: Overhead highway lights powered by wind turbines, which are spun by the air turbulence generated as cars and trucks whiz past at speed. Like many such concepts, this one's conceptually brilliant: Use all that wasted wind to do useful work, in...
John Voelcker -
Early EVs Won't Need Many Public Charge Points, Says NYC
New York City often startles people, and it stayed true to form in a recent analysis done by McKinsey & Company for the city's PlaNYC planning group, "Exploring Electric Vehicle Adoption in New York City." In particular, one of the report's conclusions may come as a shock to many...
John Voelcker -
Jay Leno Debuts New 2012 Ford Focus EV Racer, Conferees Drive Old One
Attendees excitedly swarmed around a prototype of the all-electric 2012 Ford Focus EV at an October conference held on Microsoft's Redmond campus, outside Seattle, Washington. But a newer, nice, cooler, and much flashier prototype of the 2012 Focus EV made its debut a few weeks earlier in rather...
John Voelcker -
Flex-Fuel Future: Cars Are Coming, But Where's the Fuel?
We don't hear so much about ethanol these days, now that gasoline is back down to $2.50 a gallon. But we still get e-mails, so here's a post to answer the question: What's going on with flex-fuel cars? Short answer: Manufacturers are slowly increasing the number of vehicles they build that can...
John Voelcker -
House: $150 Million for R&D, Natural-Gas Hybrids--But No Tax Credits
Less than two weeks after a bipartisan bill was introduced in the Senate to provide tax credits for buyers of natural-gas vehicles, or NGVs, the House has passed an entirely different bill that funds research and development of NGVs. Unlike the tax credits in Senate bill S.1408, which would...
John Voelcker -
We do a mix of articles here at GreenCarReports, writing both about cars--green, and occasionally not so green--and some of the broader automotive issues that affect our environment. We were struck by an article last week from The Hill, which covers DC politics as obsessively as we cover high-mileage, low-emissions cars and trucks. Its topic was the always controversial, always loaded, perennial hot button of energy politics: a gasoline tax. It suggested that Representative Jim Oberstar (D-MN), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, was making Democratic leaders...
