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Category: energy

Segway-Ninebot has rather sensationally announced that it’s building a hydrogen fuel cell sportsbike – and boy does this thing look like it glitched its way out of Cyberpunk 2077, complete with a highly improbable steering design and an amazing price.

Here’s what we know so far: Segway has been playing with performance bikes a little bit lately to go with its lineup of cheap electric scooters, mainly sold in China. The Apex was announced in 2019, a slightly gawky looking battery-electric “super scooter” capable of 125 mph (200 km/h), with full sportsbike fairings.

Now, there’s an Apex H2 coming, which will run a hydrogen-electric hybrid powertrain – gaseous hydrogen stored in tanks will be converted into electrical energy through a fuel cell and fed into a buffer battery, which will power an electric motor that drives the rear wheel in some way or another – we can’t see whether there’s a chain drive or a hub motor or what indeed is going on in these renders. Yes, that’s an exhaust port in front of the rear wheel, but all that’ll be coming out of it is water vapor.

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30 Pieces of silver for the masses.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) just published a report titled Fossil Fuel Foolery, which identified 10 tactics that the fossil fuel industry used as excuses for not accepting accountability for its impacts on the environment and human health. DesmogBlog noted that the industry used a long list of deceptive tactics that concealed environmental destruction harming Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as well as low-income communities. Not surprising — the fossil fuel industry only cares about money, and if the planet and human health stand in the way of that, so be it.

The article gave a snapshot of the report findings, and one of the most disturbing things I took notice of was the common tactic that the NAACP described as “co-opt community leaders and organizations and misrepresent the interests and opinions of communities,” sometimes with financial support, to “neutralize or weaken public opposition.”

In short, fossil fuel companies and utilities pour donations on churches, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations to pretty much secure the local community buy-in on projects that generate pollution. The article said it plainly: “to stifle the push towards renewable energy.” And that also includes misrepresenting the community through one or two hired hands.

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Access to clean water is a huge issue across the globe. Even in areas with water resources, a lack of infrastructure or reliable energy means purifying that water is sometimes extremely difficult.

That’s why a vapor designed by University at Buffalo and University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers could be revolutionary. Unlike other radiative vapor condensers which can only operate at night, the new design works in direct sunlight and requires no energy input.

“We have worked on solar-driven water evaporation technologies in the past years,” says Qiaoqiang Gan, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering at UB and a leading corresponding author. “We are now addressing the second half of the water cycle, condensation.”

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Researchers have made unparalleled ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors through temperature and timing, just like baking bread.

Alloying, the process of mixing metals in different ratios, has been a known method for creating materials with enhanced properties for thousands of years, ever since copper and tin were combined to form the much harder bronze. Despite its age, this technology remains at the heart of modern electronics and optics industries. Semiconducting alloys, for instance, can be engineered to optimize a device’s electrical, mechanical and optical properties.

Alloys of oxygen with group III elements, such as aluminum, gallium, and indium, are important semiconductor materials with vast applications in high-power electronics, solar-blind photodetectors and transparent devices. The defining property of a semiconductor is its bandgap, a barrier over which only electrons with the required energy can pass. Beta-phase aluminum gallium oxides are notable because of their relatively large bandgap, but most III-O alloys are expensive to make and of unsatisfactory quality.

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“Last year’s stimulus was about keeping the economy going, but these companies didn’t use these resources to retain their workers. These are companies that are polluting the environment, increasing the deadliness of the pandemic and letting go of their workers.”

Figures show 77 companies received $8.2bn under tax changes related to Covid relief and yet almost every one let workers go.

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This is the only solely ion propelled series of aircrafts that can lift their power supplies against earth’s gravity. These prototypes were patented specifically for lifting their onboard power supplies and the widely published patent has been in effect since 2014.

While the craft wasn’t working at full power for this test footage since their was a power loss, the safety tether still went completely loose when the craft was energized, and it is also shown flying outdoors. There is an indoor flight that lasted for almost 2 minutes continually when it was flying at its best. There is a video of that and other sustained flights on this YouTube channel.

Previously all heavier than air ion propelled aircrafts had to be connected through thin wires to large heavy power supplies that remained fixed to the ground.

This series of prototypes have been independently verified to fly with onboard power since 2006. It was necessary to increase the EAD thrust to weight ratio by several orders of magnitude as well as other upgrades to get it operational.

Here is a link to a broadcast about the craft with the host of NPR Jeff Saint Clair. His article and radio program certifies fist hand, that this ion propelled aircraft US Patent number 10119, 527, lifts its power supply:

https://radio.wosu.org/post/exploradio-oberlin-inventor-pushes-limits-ion-powered-flight#stream/0

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The renewable energy experts at Jackery are up to their usual tricks and announced a new line of solar generator products on Jackery Day that open up a completely new range of possibilities.

They sent us their Solar Generator 1500 with two of their slick 100 watt folding Solar Saga panels to run through the paces. On paper, the new Jackery Explorer 1500 Portable Power Station battery was impressive, with its massive 1.5kWh capacity and increased power output capabilities.

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Global battery recycling industries are a new beginning for old energy storage.

When your kid looks at you with those big, innocent eyeballs and asks, “Where do lithium ion electric car batteries go when they die?” Without hesitation—because kids that age still believe you know everything—you read them this article:

Mighty Volkswagen—the carmaker that certainly looks like it is going to lead the world in the production of electric cars someday—now looks like it might lead the world in recycling electric car batteries, with the announcement that it has opened its first battery recycling plant in Salzgitter, Germany. OK, at a projected 3600 batteries recycled a year, maybe it won’t lead the world, but it will certainly lead battery recycling in Lower Saxony, between Hildesheim and Braunschweig. Globally speaking, all this battery recycling stuff is still being sorted out.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

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California, it seems, is leading the world here: the report counts at least 35 Californian cities with such a ban at the end of 2020.

In a cool and rare moment for the U.S., it’s a leader in something that may actually do some good for the planet. A new report shows that the U.S. currently has the most cities in the world that have enacted some sort of ban on fossil fuels at the local level.

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