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Category: sustainability

Amazon says it will buy thousands of Ram ProMaster electric vans a year beginning in 2024.

The folks at Inside EVs noticed something in a press package from CES 2022 that most others missed. It said, “As part of a separate agreement with Stellantis, Amazon will be the first commercial customer for Stellantis’ new Ram ProMaster Battery Electric Vehicle launching in 2023. Stellantis, with input from Amazon, designed the vehicle with unique last mile delivery features and Amazon will deploy the vehicles to routes across the United States. Building on the current relationship and as part of the long-term agreement, Stellantis and Amazon will be putting thousands of BEV ProMasters on the road every year.”

Amazon has bought thousands of delivery vans from Mercedes, Ford, and Stellantis to bring packages to its customers in North America for years. Even though it has a 20% ownership stake in Rivian and expects to purchase 100,000 of its electric delivery vans, its need for such vehicles is so massive that it will continue to buy trucks from traditional manufacturers to get the hundreds of thousands of packages it delivers every day from its warehouses — called fulfillment centers — to its customers.

The upcoming battery-powered Ram ProMaster will be the brand’s first ever all-electric model when it debuts in the second half of 2023 as a rival for Ford’s E-Transit and Rivian’s EDV. Stellantis hasn’t yet revealed any details about its electric delivery van, Inside EVs says, but it’s expected to be based on the updated 2022 Ram ProMaster unveiled last August.

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UEI “Extreme Low-Power” chip for Bluetooth, voice remote controls with energy-harvesting in order to provide lifetime battery life.

Most people probably don’t mind changing batteries in remote controls every so often, but it contributes to e-waste especially if you’re not using rechargeable batteries, and I always find it’s pain as I don’t usually have stock, or don’t feel like waiting for several hours to recharge the batteries.

Universal Electronics Inc, or UEI for shorts, claims to have a solution with a family of QuickSet-certified chips using “Extreme Low-Power”, energy-harvesting and “high-performance technology” that would provide lifetime battery life to Bluetooth, voice remote controls. The main goal is “to help transition the world towards a more sustainable future, by reducing primary battery waste throughout the life of the product, which in turn reduces the cumulative CO2 footprint”.

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New York state will spend $500 million building up ports and manufacturing infrastructure for offshore wind farms in a bid to become home base for the nascent industry.

The investments announced Wednesday by Governor Kathy Hochul will focus on building the supply chain for offshore turbines, which can provide clean power to a densely populated coast with little room for onshore wind farms or solar power plants.

“With this investment, New York will lead the nation on offshore wind production, creating green jobs for New Yorkers, and powering our clean energy future,” Hochul said in the statement.

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Carbon-based organic micropollutants in water can be removed by treatment with high-intensity pulses of light in a procedure developed and demonstrated by researchers at KAUST.

This photodegradation process was already known to be feasible, but its use was limited by the long times it required. Luca Fortunato, Thomas Anthopoulos and colleagues have demonstrated that this photodegradation treatment can be dramatically accelerated with high-intensity pulses generated from a xenon flash lamp.

“An interesting aspect of this work is that we combined the expertise and technologies of two different fields,” says Fortunato. He explains that the collaboration between the two different research departments—KAUST’s Solar Center and Water Desalination and Reuse Center—allowed the team to adopt a pulsed light system that was previously used to process semiconductor materials for transistors and solar cells.

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The car market is changing, and quickly.
it seems combustion engines are declining quickly in popularity, as electric vehicles, led by @Tesla 0, are taking the market by storm, selling as fast as they can be produced, and outselling all but the very cheapest city cars in most markets.

But are they for you?
Do they have the range and can you afford to make the switch?

Well in this video I take the most important factors and line the two up, head to head, to give you the answers you need.

So sit back and enjoy the ride, because the future is coming, faster than anyone predicted.

If you want to know more about how autonomous vehicles will totally change the way we use transport then try this video next, where I go into depth on the whole subject.

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Suspended beneath a thick canopy of trees, the sloth inches along with slow strides. Painfully slow. Intentionally slow. Crawling high up among the branches, traipsing along a 100-foot steel cable, the little creature is like a lethargic acrobat. But its goal is not to delight or to put on a show; in fact, just the opposite. This sloth is all about stealth, observation, and collecting as much sunlight as possible.

After all, this is a solar-powered robot.

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UK domestic flights could be operated by electric and hydrogen aircraft as early as 2028, a new policy paper by Transport & Environment (T&E) finds.

2022 is a crucial year in climate change policy terms for UK aviation. The UK government will consult and decide on both how to make the UK ETS net-zero compliant; what the specific details of the sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) mandate are; and lay out a final Jet Zero strategy.

In its new policy paper, T&E recommends the path forward to set UK aviation on a net zero trajectory. The recommendations include:

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The researchers used extrusion printing to manufacture the electrodes, interconnects, encapsulation, and insulation. Active layers were then spray painted on at room temperature. All in all, six layers were 3D printed to build a flexible and fully functioning display.

“OLED displays are usually produced in big, expensive, ultra-clean fabrication facilities,” said Michael McAlpine, senior author of the team’s new study. “We wanted to see if we could basically condense all of that down and print an OLED display on our table-top 3D printer, which was custom built and costs about the same as a Tesla Model S.”

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An editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post wrote a screed attacking electric cars this week. His heavily slanted piece was filled with misinformation. Here’s the truth about driving an electric car in winter.

Last week, hundreds of motorists on I-95 in Virginia were stuck for hours when a blizzard closed the highway south of Washington, DC. Highway crews couldn’t spread ice-melting chemicals before the storm arrived because the rain that preceded it would have washed them away. But when temperatures dropped, the rain quickly turned to ice. Then the snow came and made the ice treacherously slippery. Tractor trailers trying to get off the highway lost control, blocking many exit ramps. Senator Tim Kaine was trapped in the tangled mess of stalled cars for 27 hours.

Afterwards, Charles Lane, an editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a blistering opinion piece entitled, “Imagine Virginia’s Icy Traffic Catastrophe — But With Only Electric Vehicles.” In it, he wails about the Tesla driver who banged on the door of a tractor trailer, begging for help because he was afraid his family might freeze to death if his battery ran out of power. “If everyone had been driving electric vehicles, this mess could well have been worse,” Lane writes.

He goes on to say even Tesla warns on its website the cold temperatures can reduce range. Charging a cold battery takes longer, and besides, he says, there aren’t that many charging stations anyway. And what happens if the power goes out? What then? Lane, a graduate of Yale law school, apparently lacks the mental capacity to realize that when the power goes out, gas pumps stop working as well.

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