07-31-2016, 02:07 AM
Last week, the U.S. government pledged to push the electric-vehicle industry toward charging a car in less than 10 minutes. Now, that sounds like a long time. In Switzerland, a new line of buses can be topped off in a few seconds and fully charged in minutes. ABB received a commercial order from transit bus operator Tosa for its 15-second, 600-kilowatt flash charge technology, which will be installed along the bus route 23, between suburban Geneva and the airport. The project has been in pilots for the past few years.
ABB Sells First Order for 15-Second Bus Charging | Greentech Media
Demand for lithium—the hottest commodity on the planet and the only commodity to show positive price movement in 2015—is poised to continue on its upward trajectory, becoming the world’s new gasoline and earning the moniker of ‘’White Petroleum’’. And the battle for market share in and around this commodity has everyone from major tech players to trend-setting investor gurus vying for a foothold. Driven by the rise of battery gigafactories and game-changing Powerwall and energy storage businesses, the world now finds itself at the beginning of a lithium super cycle that is all about securing new supply, much of which is poised to come from lithium superstar Argentina.
Tesla And Other Tech Giants Scramble For Lithium As Prices Double | OilPrice.com
It's a new technology for storing energy, an important part of enabling more wind and solar power on the grid. It's from a company called ARES. Here's how it works: The train carries big rocks uphill, consuming electricity. Then the train carries big rocks downhill, generating electricity. That's it. The energy stored by going uphill is released by going downhill. Pretty neat. The details are fun too — it's a clever, low-tech solution to some important high-tech problems... The company claims the process, end to end, is 86 percent efficient, i.e., 86 percent of the energy that's put into storage can be gotten back out. It hopes to improve that number as it dials in the technology.
The train goes up, the train goes down: a simple new way to store energy - Vox