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Gravity Batteries, Green Hydrogen, and a Thorium Reactor for China

Cars That Think

2021 was a big year for energy-related news, what with the ongoing hunt for new forms of energy storage and cleaner if not carbon-free electricity and events and research that spotlighted the weak links in our power grid. No battery is perfect, however, so engineers keep pushing for new and improved ways to store those electrons.

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NSF awards $20 million to two new testbeds to support cloud computing applications and experiments

Green Car Congress

Cloud computing refers to the practice of using a network of remote servers to store, manage and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. —Kate Keahey, a scientist at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago and principal investigator for Chameleon.

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This Nigerian Startup’s Minigrid Began as a School Project

Cars That Think

After he graduated from the Federal University of Technology in Owerri, Nigeria, his plan was to get a high-paying job at one of the multinational oil and gas companies based in the country. The support from IEEE gave us validation, and that helped us to believe in ourselves and the ideas we came up with,” Orajaka says.

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False Starts: The Story of Vehicle-to-Grid Power

Cars That Think

It occurred in the wake of the California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001, when mismanaged deregulation, market manipulation, and environmental catastrophe combined to unhinge the power grid. Electricity is a commodity that is bought and sold, and yet unlike most other commodities, it cannot easily be stored.

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Lean Software, Power Electronics, and the Return of Optical Storage

Cars That Think

It’s very similar to the infrastructure for electric cars because the idea, ultimately, for electric cars is that you also are revamping your grid to facilitate, whatchamacallit, intermittent renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, because having an electric car that runs off a coal-fired power plant is defeating the purpose, essentially.

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Practical Power Beaming Gets Real

Cars That Think

To some, the whole notion of wireless power transmission evokes images of Nikola Tesla with high-voltage coils spewing miniature bolts of lightning. Tesla had indeed pursued the idea of somehow using the ground and atmosphere as a conduit for long-distance power transmission, a plan that went nowhere. Lighthouse Dev in 2012.

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CalCars and PHEVs Frequently Asked Questions

Tony Karrer Delicious EVdriven

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) estimates that the current power grid could handle many tens of millions of cars plugging in at off-peak hours before wed have any capacity issues [See EPRI article PDF ]. Whats Vehicle-to-Grid and why would I like it? I love the idea of powering my car from solar power.

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