Anti-fracking protests are continuing in Pungesti, Romania, despite government efforts to squash the protests so that Chevron can go about its desired business. This may be the mechanism by which the presence of oil companies in a country causes governments to become draconian. The local people don’t want the ick…
At the risk of some he-said-she-said reporting let me return to the story of Kaveh Kamooneh, and his supposed “theft” of a little bit of electricity. He has returned to the media to tell his side of the story, after the Police told their side of the story, after his…
Nearly two years ago, Envia Systems wow’d the electric car world claiming to have developed lithium-ion battery technology that would slash battery pack costs, while giving a huge boost in energy density. Ever since, GM’s CEO Dan Akerson talked about how GM would be building a 200+ mile range affordable…
Is the ocean too big to boil? We look at the oceans, covering 3/4ths of the planets surface, and they look too vast for humans to have any permanent impact on them. Yet the oceans are filling up with plastic trash, with radiation from Fukushima, there are growing dead zones…
Somehow the ZENN/EEStor story is continuing along after several years. A few years ago EEStor claimed it had developed supercapacitor technology that would revolutionize electric vehicles with its magical energy density and storage. The story was so amazing that ZENN, then a maker of low speed electric vehicles, switched their…
US Senator Max Baucus (D-MONT) wants to kill the federal tax credit for electric cars (section 30D) in favor of a system for “technology-neutral” tax credits for “clean fuels”. The proposal is part of a larger package of energy tax code reforms that Baucus thinks will simplify the tax code,…
Is Silicon Valley’s mass transit system underfunded because the population density is too low, or because rich people don’t take mass transit? Last week I posted a couple items about the Google Buses – generally speaking, the privately operated bus systems run by several Tech Companies in the SF Bay…
Tesla Motors is getting ready to nearly double its production capacity. The company is buying new manufacturing equipment worth up to $415 million, for its factory in Fremont, that will bump capacity from 21,000 cars a year to 35,000 cars a year. Tesla is expanding sales to Europe, China, Japan…
An intense anti-hydraulic fracturing protest is underway in a remote tiny Romanian village, Pungesti, where the Jandarmeria (military style police from the central government) were deployed to brutally put down protesters, and ensure that Chevron can go ahead with plans to begin fracking and drilling for natural gas. As I…
The other day I wrote about Romanians in a tiny village fighting off Chevron’s plan to tap Shale Gas reserves, deploy hydraulic fracturing, while facing police violence because the Government is doing Chevron’s bidding. The story is an encapsulation of the whole globalized search for fossil fuel resources, and the…
According to a Bloomberg News piece diving deep into how Mary Barra came to replace Dan Akerson as CEO of General Motors, we learn that GM is planning to introduce a 200+ mile range plug-in hybrid electric car (electric car with range extender) by 2016, that will cost about $30,000. …
In the largely unknown village of Pungesti, Romania, a battle is being waged between locals fighting off an illegal encroachment by Chevron seeking to deploy hydraulic fracturing for drilling in shale reserves. According to reports I’ve found, the local council voted to deny Chevron access to the site, but the…
The San Francisco Bay Area has a transportation problem/crisis on its hands. Every day some corridors turn into miles of gridlock, while the region is saddled with a pathetically fragmented mass transit system. The other day I wrote about how Google (and other Tech companies) are building privately owned mass…
Tesla Motors is the poster child for the whole project of electric car adoption. They make what may be the best car ever, the Tesla Model S, whose sales are growing to the point where it has a significant market share in luxury car sales. But if Tesla were to…
Here in Silicon Valley a growing phenomena is “The Google Bus” which is actually practiced by many of the Tech Companies here, not just Google. The simple implementation is a shuttle bus operated by the company that drives employees between the mass transit station and the campus. But the new…
