Brilliant… and everything about Tesla Model S sounds better when the narrator sounds like Jason Statham (or is it Jason himself narrating it?). A bit of research showed that it is a part of NatGeo (UK)’s Megafactories Show, which has a ton of more such awesome things.. Check out the program’s website.
Slowly but steadily coast-to-coast travel in an electric vehicle is inching closer to reality. Though not as ubiquitous as the gas stations on the highways and arterial, the growing number of charging stations indicate a big shift coming our way. An interesting data nugget – more than half of the nation’s 8,051 electric-vehicle charging stations have opened since 2012.
Data Source: Alternative Fuels Data Center, U.S. Department of Energy; Image Courtesy: Popular Science
Legend:
Union of Concerned Scientists (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the leading science-based organization at the center of today’s most exciting and important policy debates, seeks an individual to work with a top-notch, multi-disciplinary team in our Clean Vehicles Program to advance sound transportation policy to cut oil use and protect public health. UCS is seeking a senior engineer/scientist to conduct research and analysis and serve as a lead spokesperson focused on solutions that save oil and reduce climate emissions, fuel economy, electric vehicles, and related technology and policy issues. Candidates must have a strong background in vehicle and fuel technology and transportation policy and excellent written and oral communication skills.
Responsibilities
The Senior Engineer/Scientist will help lead UCS efforts to evaluate potential transportation sector policy and technology solutions to cut projected US oil use in half within twenty years and significantly reduce transportation related pollution.
The person in this position will
Desired Skills & Experience
Qualifications and experience
This position requires five to seven years of related experience for candidates with masters or equivalent experience, including background in research and policy development and analysis. Candidate must have experience communicating technical issues to a non-technical audience through written products and presentations. Candidate should have knowledge of the transportation field, including vehicle and fuel technology, infrastructure, and industries. Candidate should have familiarity with current oil and transportation issues and their political/social/environmental/economic ramifications. Position requires an understanding of public policy aspects of transportation and related climate and oil issues and the role of technical analyses and advocacy in shaping public opinion and policy debates.
Applicants must have strong quantitative and research skills; strong writing and verbal skills; proficiency with spreadsheet and word processing software; ability to write well for scientific and general audiences; familiarity with economics and public policy; and a team orientation. Experience with project management, policymakers and the media a plus.
At UCS, comparable training and/or experience can be substituted for degrees when appropriate.
The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969, UCS is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also has offices in Berkeley, Chicago and Washington, D.C. For more information, go to www.ucsusa.org.
Compensation, Hours and Location: This is a full time position based in either UCS’s Washington, DC or Berkeley, CA office. For candidates who meet all position requirements, the salary is in the high $70,000s. UCS offers excellent benefits and is an equal opportunity employer continually seeking to diversify its staff. Information about UCS is available at http://www.ucsusa.org
To Apply: Please submit a cover letter, a technical writing sample and a general audience writing sample, salary requirements, how you learned about the position and resume via email to jobs@ucsusa.org and include “Senior Engineer/Scientist” in the subject line. Email materials in Word or PDF format only. No phone calls please. Deadline: December 14, 2012 or until filled.
Posted: November 28, 2012
(Source: Good)
Houston, Texas, may end up being the first American city with a great electric car charging infrastructure. NRG Energy is rolling out what is supposedly the world’s first privately funded comprehensive electric vehicle ecosystem. Here are some interesting nuggets:
Washington, DC’s first public curbside 240V Level II Coulomb ChargePoint station is now located at the Franklin D. Reeves Center, 2000 14th Street, in northwest DC. There are two spaces available for charging vehicles on the west side of 14th Street adjacent to the Reeves Center. The installation of the ChargePoint station was done by PEPCO and Coulomb distributor NovaCharge, LLC.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty today, along with the Department of Energy Undersecretary Cathy Zoi, District Department of Transportation Director Gabe Klein and other officials unveiled the first curbside electric car charging station in the District.
Image Courtesy: DDOT (via Flickr) - Click image to access more pics from the event
“This is yet another fantastic way the District is at the forefront of providing alternative and environmentally friendly transportation options for District residents and visitors,” said Mayor Fenty. “We are excited to make this technology available and easily accessible to everybody.”
Click here to read the full story.
Related articles
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center has released a report that evaluates value-added propositions for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) that might help overcome the initial price premium related to comparable internal combustion engine and hybrid electric vehicles. The report also assesses other non-monetary benefits and barriers related to an emerging PHEV fleet, including environmental, societal, and electric grid impacts.
Image Courtesy: Dept of Energy - Click image to access the entire report
Here is a quick peek into the study’s background, objectives, results and conclusions as shown in the fact sheet:
Results:
Study results indicate that a single PHEV-30 on the road in 2030 will:
Image Courtesy: Dept of Energy - Click image to access the entire report
Conclusions:
PHEVs and other plug-in vehicles on the road in 2030 may offer many valuable benefits to utilities, business owners, individual consumers, and society as a whole by:
PHEVs and other plug-in vehicles still face barriers to commercial acceptance:
Note: The Acronym PHEV-30 stands for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle with an All Electric Range (AER) equivalent of 30 miles.
Click here to download/access the entire report (PDF – 218 pages long).
(Source: via Transportation Research Board Weekly E-Newsletter)
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has released a report that explores the components of plug-in electric vehicle infrastructure, challenges and opportunities related to the design and deployment of the infrastructure, and the potential benefits.
(Source: Ars Technica; CNET)
At Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week, MIT professor Joel Schindall told the audience at a panel on energy storage why ultracapacitors may have a significant role to play in our transportation future. The good properties of these devices—fast charge/discharge cycles and an essentially unlimited number of cycles—make them a compelling choice for powering an electric vehicle. Schindall also explained why their downside, a far lower charge density than batteries, might not be as much of a problem as it might appear at first glance.
Schindall, who had spent some time away from academics, explained that during his first stint at MIT, a capacitor that could hold 350 Farads would have filled the whole stage. Before he returned, someone working on fuel cells had accidentally produced the first ultracapacitor. Now, with refinements, he was able to walk on stage with a 350 Farad ultracapacitor that was about the size of a D battery. The current generation of devices use activated carbon to hold charges, as its highly complex topology creates a lot of surface area across which charge differences can build up.
Although the improvements have been dramatic, Schindall said that ultracapacitors still badly lag batteries in terms of the storage density, holding only about five percent of the charge per volume of lithium batteris. Which is unfortunate, because they have some properties that would make them excellent for a variety of applications, including very rapid charging and the ability to withstand many more charge cycles than a battery. Schindall claimed they could be recharged indefinitely, since “greater than a million times, to me, is indefinite.”
Schindall’s research group has focused on replacing the disordered structure of activated carbon with a more ordered one that can increase the packing: carbon nanotubes. His research group has developed a vapor deposition process that can grow densely packed, vertically oriented clusters of carbon nanotubes on conducting surfaces. Current industrial processes for the production of carbon nanotubes tend to produce a variety of diameters and lengths, but Schindall told Ars that the process his group has developed keeps everything very regular—he was actually surprised by how even the lengths were.
In the U.S., early-stage companies designing the materials and electrolytes for ultracapacitors include Graphene Energy,EnerG2, and Ioxus. Much hyped EEStor, backed by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has signed asupply deal with electric vehicle company Zenn, although its products are still not commercially available.
Compared to batteries, ultracapacitors can’t store a lot of energy, so they wouldn’t typically be used alone to run plug-in electric vehicles. On the other hand, ultracapacitors are “power dense,” which means that they can discharge the energy they do have quickly. Conversely, they can be recharged quickly–in seconds or minutes, and with almost no degradation in performance over time, say backers.
Schindall projects that ultracapacitors eventually will be able to store as much as 25 percent of the energy of batteries, a jump he said would be “disruptive.” Right now, nanostructures developed by MIT researchers can hold twice as much energy as activated carbon. In the coming months, his team expects to show it can hold five times the energy as activated carbon, he said.
Click here to read the entire article.
