What if you could buy a home solar energy extracting pump from a car manufacturer to run their products?!!
In the latest round of who’s greener, General Motors announced that they will be selling a domestic hydrogen refueling unit by 2011. The unit will create hydrogen, a carrier of energy, by processing water using house current or solar powered electric cells.
The Tom's convenience store at the intersection of Route 124 and Route 24 is selling ethanol blend, E85. The blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline is not suited as a replacement for gasoline in every vehicle.
Sony pictures recently released a documentary, "Who Killed The Electric Car". The basic point of the movie was that General Motors designed an all-electric car, the EV1, and an infrastructure to recharge it because they were required to meet a certain emission standard in Califonia. When those standards were relaxed, the car was killed.
The Internal Revenue Service announced yesterday that Toyota has submitted quarterly reports indicating that its cumulative sales of qualified vehicles to retail dealers has reached the 60,000-vehicle limit during the calendar quarter ending June 30, 2006.
The price of gas has suddenly declined more than 50 cents a gallon in the past month. After a few years of terrorism, bad weather and the resulting supply shortage fears, everything seems to be OK for now. Trying to understand why, I came up with some possible reasons.
Vote below – Or provide us with some other possible reasons.
1. Large oil companies feel bad about cutting into the food budgets of minimum-wage earners.
2. Commodity traders have decided to calm inflation fears by selling off and taking a hit.
3. Suddenly, the dwindling supply of global oil has reversed. There is now a surplus!
4. SUV drivers are secretly pushing their guzzlers off a cliff at night, collecting the insurance, and buying hybrids.
5. The Chinese economy is shrinking and they don’t need as much oil.
Honda and its partner, Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE) said today that they have discovered a new method that allows large volumes of ethanol to be produced from widely available waste wood, leaves and other soft biomass.
Fifteen years ago, the Amtrak railroad line between Harrisburg and Philadelphia was almost dead. I recall talk of shutting it down. Govenment funds had been infused into Amtrak for years with the hope that there might be a use for rail transport again in the future.
The former Pennsylvania Railroad track has been in operation in one form or another since 1834 and until recently has gone 70 years without a major overhaul. At one time,
The PRR was the largest railroad by traffic and revenue in the US throughout its 20th century history ... For a long time the PRR called itself the Standard Railroad of the World, meaning that it was the standard to which all other railroads aspired, the "gold standard"...For a long time that was literally true; the railroad had an impressive lists of firsts, greatests, biggests, and longests.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad
Surinder Kang, general manager of Empress Taxi in Victoria, B.C. His company has 39 Priuses on the road, the oldest having traveled 300,000 km (186,411.miles) so far."Gas savings, coupled with a new vehicle with less repairs and less down time, are the driving factors for choosing Priuses over other vehicles," he responded in an e-mail.
Not one Empress taxi has required a new battery, thanks to the hybrid system's obsession with maintaining ideal charge conditions for optimal battery performance.
An owner with 325,000 km (201,946 miles) on his original battery reported replacing the oxygen sensor, water pump and catalytic converter to date. His '01 Prius recently stopped running due to a failed inverter, the main electric controller. That magic box costs $5,500 (U.S.) to replace.
Generally, a used Prius will likely endure for a long time, based on experiences collected in other countries. More common mechanical hiccups include short-lived tires, frequent alignments and faulty rack-and-pinion steering. www.thestar.com
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A UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for your home computer is a low voltage battery system (usually 6-12 volts) that inverts power to house current (110 volts) over a short period of time providing your computer with an uninterrupted supply of power during a power failure. If your house current fails, switches in the UPS transfer power over from the power grid to the battery without interruption until the power comes back on or the battery is drained.
A Toyota Prius is basically a big generator and a 230-volt battery pack. The engine can turn on by itself if the battery drains below a certain level.
Yesterday, Bernd Pischetsrieder, chief executive of Volkswagen, attacked biofuels made from food crops as unsustainable, setting the German carmaker at odds with President Bush and U.S. auto makers. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14722804
Why does a German automotive CEO think this way while US manufactures love E85?
Plug-In Partners is a national grass-roots initiative to demonstrate to automakers that a market for flexible-fuel Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) exists today.Gas: Optional
PHEVs are outfitted with a battery pack sufficient to power the vehicle from 20 to 60 miles on battery charge alone. Considering that half the cars on America’s roads are driven 25 miles a day or less, a plug-in with a 25-mile range battery could eliminate gasoline use in the daily commute of millions of Americans.
The cost of an equivalent electric gallon of gas is estimated to be less than $1.00.
http://www.pluginpartners.org/plugInHybrids/
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. wants its 5.1 million customers in California to pressure car manufacturers to mass-produce electric vehicles that can be plugged right into a standard home socket. They are asking their customers to sign the pluginpartners.org petition.in their monthly bill.
Biological powered: A pear-shaped microbe, a millionth of a meter long glides over a distance equivalent to a 6-foot-tall runner moving at 20 mph. Researchers built circular pathways coated with sugary proteins and yoked the genetically modified microscopic critter with vitamin B7 to a cog of a rotor.
The Rotor, a fifth the diameter of a hair, is powered by the bacteria; 20,000 rotors can fit on one silicon chip. The rotors can spin at 1.5 to 2.6 revolutions per minute.
Here is where it gets a little weirder.
