Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
Now having to commute by car to get to my new job I can’t wait for having an electric car. But current prices are way to high for me to afford one. Luckily, this might change quite quickly. To AutoBlog Green :
” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu estimates that plug-in vehicle battery costs will have dropped 70 percent between 2008 and 2015 and will fall another 58 percent between 2015 and 2020 “
I have already stressed how electric vehicles are critical in our quest for energy efficiency and more sustainability as they consume five time less energy than their counterparts.
To Ecogeek : ” Paris has introduced plans for a city-wide EV car-sharing network that will operate much like its successful Velib bike-sharing system. The car-sharing program will begin on December 5 with 250 EVs available. “
” The system will allow to pick up and drop off the cars at different locations as long as they’re returned to a designated parking spot. The chosen vehicles, called Bluecars, will (..) let drivers know where those parking spaces are. “
” The Bluecars are tiny, compact EVs (which) will have solid-state lithium metal polymer batteries that Pininfarina claims have a lifespan of 200,000 km and require no maintenance. “
Electric cars are great as they consume much less energy and don’t rely on dirty foreign oil to transport people. They promise to be all the rage in the years and decades to come, but to date, we see very few of them.
But what if we transformed today’s cars into electric ones ? This is the question raised by Andrew Revkin’s article on Dot Earth. This got me thinking and I wanted to document myself on that promising matter.
To Gas 2.0 this has been the case many times over already with various kinds of cars such as a Corvette, a roadster or a VW Beetle to name but a few. Continue »
Is this the car of tomorrow ? Gas 2.0 published an article on an electric car that did more than 1,600 kilometers (a thousand miles) with a single charge. The top speed was less than 50 kilometers per hour. As they note :
” The record for longest drive ever in a battery-powered vehicle (no recharge) was broken last weekend by a new, experimental electric vehicle called “Schluckspecht” (“heavy drinker” in colloquial German). “
Of course, at these speeds and with only one passenger, this could be used for the daily commutes of millions of people in hundreds of cities around the world…
As you surely know now Renault – a French carmaker – plans to sell four different electric cars this year and next. The first model, the Fluenze Z.E. , will be available in September.
To this effect, the company presented today an excellent and hilarious advertisement, that will hopefully stays in everyones’ mind when it comes to THE technology of this decade, electric cars.
I have been thinking for some time now that electric cars have a really revolutionary potential (and I am not the only one to think so). This one-minute video clearly shows why. Continue »
Do you remember Better Place, the great electric car project ? To Ecogeek : “Better Place has entered into an agreement with Chinese utility China Southern Power Grid to bring their battery swap stations to the Asian country.”
“(…) Better Place founder Shai Aggasi sees this partnership leading to a shift in Chinese EV manufacturing to switchable-battery cars for both the Chinese and international markets “
I believe that this will enable the company to truly change scale. Indeed, until now, they were working on small countries like Israel, Portugal or Denmark…
I have been committed since January 2007 to bring you each month a selection of the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change and the world energy sector.
However, I don’t blog as much as I would like to and generally write around 25 posts per month. But many more news are worth reading. This is why I use Twitter to share more news that are worth your time.
I believe it offers a good complement to this website. So if you are on Twitter and like this selection, don’t hesitate to start following me. Continue »
While browsing CleanTechnica I found an interesting article on peak oil. According to a leaked military report from the German Bundeswehr, peak oil will occur this year and the consequences will be dramatic.
Among them are market failures and tremendous risks for democracy itself. As Cleantechnica notes “ it is unlikely that any nation would be unaffected by such crises. “ This is not exactly encouraging news.
Meanwhile, the US Army is also thinking about the risks of peak oil and may stop completely using this energy source by 2040. Continue »
To Ashok Kamal in CleanTechies : ” In many academic, policy and business circles, the term “clean tech” is synonymous with renewable energy.” However under this term we can put among others electric cars and green IT.
And the latter is very important and promising as GreenTech Enterprise notes that it is the biggest green market. In a brilliant article they outline seven reasons why it is the case.
Data centers have we have seen previously consume huge amounts of energy and this is only the beginning as we are using more and more the Internet. Continue »
Thomas L Friedman is one of the op-ed columnist of the New York Times. I really liked the vision he is offering in his latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. I have to admit I feel the same about his latest column, Their Moon Shot and Ours.
There, Mr. Friedman shows how China is going full speed ahead on electric cars and vehicles, a technology he calls ” the next industrial growth engine “. Indeed, they could revolutionize tomorrow’s world.
Cars produced locally powered by electricity also produced locally may indeed bring a complete paradigm shift with peak oil, the worst economic crisis in decades and climate change. Continue »
