- TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) unveils their Electric Mini Car prototype. With specs such as, “A 346V battery pack powers the 40kW drive motor, and can recharge to 80% capacity in 15 minutes. The manganese Li-ion cells use lithium manganese oxide spinel (LiMn2O4) as the cathode active material, making the battery resistant to overcharging and providing high thermal stability.”
- Kusnetz’s Mac Prius. Looks mostly for entertainment purposed right now, no mad unix scripts pulling in data from the prius sensors to make charts or tweak performance. Hey, I’ve got an old mini kicking around somewhere at home…
- What did you do this weekend? Over at Random Foo he researched energy and power generation and came to the conclusion that the government could do a massive incandescent to fluorescent light bulb swap (at an estimate cost of $100M-$200M). This would save around 4 billion in energy over the lifetime of the incandescent bulbs (4.4yrs), almost a billion bucks a year.
- Speaking of which, the EETimes reports that Cree has produced a white LED with the efficiency of 131 lumens per watt. Your typical incandescent checks in with a measly 10-20 lumens/watt while fluorescent ups that to 50-60 lumens/watt. (of course LEDs are still on the expensive side).
- You convert your car to electric, replace the heavy factory seats with lightweight performance ones, and now you have a couple of extra car seats. What to do?
