Today the California Fuel Cell Partnership newsletter announced the opening of a hydrogen refueling station in Oakland. It is described as the tenth hydrogen refueling station in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is a True Zero station operated by First Element. However a perusal of the hydrogen station status…
The Biden/Ukraine story is back in the news, and this time it looks like a doozy. This story has nothing to do with clean energy or electric vehicles or anything The Long Tail Pipe normally examines. But this story has been on our pages before, and I’ve reluctantly talked myself…
In the 1880’s Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler, who was co-founder of the Daimler Motor Group, parent company of several important automotive brands like Mercedes-Benz and Smart, developed several engine designs. The company he founded is now one of largest automakers in the world, and its reputation rests soundly on high quality…
During a fund-raising trip to California, President Trump issued a series of Tweets announcing the Trump Administration is “revoking California’s Federal Waiver on emissions”. He promised this will decrease car prices, make cars much safer, and increase JOBS for auto-workers. To do this his Administration is flouting over 50 years…
When introduced to the world the 2011 Leaf had a 72 mile driving range thanks to a 24 kiloWatt-hour battery pack (equating to 115 kilometers). While this was good enough for typical daily driving, humans of course want more driving range on our electric cars. Today it’s relatively easy to…
The announcement came in the wake of an obtuse tweet noting that the flags of Romania and Chad are amazingly similar. The blue is a slightly different shade – you do see that don’t you? While of course the most important thing is that Tesla is finally coming to Romania,…
You might have heard that artificial intelligence a.k.a. machine learning is a big thing in the tech industry. Look for a computer programming job and it seems all the openings are either in machine learning or blockchain (which is a story for another day). Anyone interested in the future of…
During August 2019, President Trump floated another of his insane-seeming ideas – namely that the USA wants to buy Greenland. It’s the 2000’s and the World Powers don’t go buying territories from each other any longer, do they? We started to dismiss this as another of the crazy ideas that…
Most or all the automakers are exploring self-driving car technology, and have plans to launch Transportation-As-A-Service services. Under such a service, we would not own cars any longer, but instead use a smart phone app to request a self-driving car to bring itself to us. It would be like Uber…
According to a Reuters report, a small pilot study of electric car charging behavior concluded that users quickly adopt to “slow charging”. The problem with this is that the participants were given Renault Zoe’s and a 22 kiloWatt wallbox for use at home. For most intents and purposes 22 kiloWatt…
Cluj-Napoca, the second largest city in Romania, just announced a plan to require all new Taxi Licenses to be for electric taxi’s. The plan does not affect the current taxi licenses in Cluj, but new Taxi licenses that are planned to be granted during 2020. Currently there are 2469 taxi…
Hydrogen for fuel cell aircraft can be produced locally from renewable energy. That message is buried in today’s press release from ZeroAvia, a new company that emerged from stealth mode to demonstrate a fuel cell drive train for medium sized airplanes. Pictured here is ZeroAvia’s test mule, a Piper M-Class…
The fossil fuel companies have given us an abundance of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuel products, that after 100+ years our society is rather confused. We think these fuels are endless, and there’s no obvious direct impact (other than slightly stinky exhaust). Therefore we…
A few days ago Timisoara, a city in Western Romania, announced a plan to buy new “tramvaie” cars (light rail cars) that will carry battery packs giving 64 kilometers of autonomy in case of a power outage. While it is commendable that Timisoara hopes to keep their light rail system…
A couple weeks ago a NY Times reporter specializing in alternative energy issues drove a Chevy Bolt from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and wrote an article claiming it was a horrible experience. According to that writer the trip required 5 hours of charging time. But any level-headed assessment of…
