Twice this year it is reported that Romania nearly suffered a complete electrical power outage. Grid operators in Romania say the cause is that the country is that “no investments were made in the power plants”, and that therefore electrical generation capacity is not enough. The grid operators are planning…
In another sign of the shift to electric vehicles, both Maserati and Bently have announced new models with either hybrid or plug-in hybrid drive trains. While that’s a bit of a yawn since both types of vehicles still depend on fossil fuels, it is two more auto manufacturers changing their…
In the wake of the Trump administration aiming to destroy California’s clean car standards, we have seen other states join the fight. Various US States and environmental organizations have joined the lawsuit against the EPA. But an even stronger step is one like Minnesota took the other day, to adopt…
Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility (HHM) announced today a partnership with H2 Energy, Alpiq, and Linde, to promote a “green hydrogen” infrastructure in Switzerland. To support this, the companies have built a 2 MW electrolysis plant at the Gösgen hydropower plant for producing hydrogen, and Hyundai intends to supply over 1,600 fuel…
In what may become a common occurrence, a gasoline station in Takoma Park Maryland has shut down its gasoline pumps and has switched to 100% electric vehicle charging. Instead of the gas pumps, the station will have four charging units capable of as high as a 200 kW charging rate…
It was reported today that a Tesla Model S patrol car owned by the Fremont, CA police department ran out of power during a pursuit. The reporting does not say what happens when a gasoline powered patrol car runs out of gasoline. Instead it calls out the Tesla patrol car,…
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…
