Archive for the ‘energy infrastructure’ Category

When was the last time you used a pay phone? Like the collect-call industry that fed off them, pay phones have become increasingly irrelevant in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones among both rich and poor. However, pay phones still dot city streets, and even in places where the phones themselves been removed, the booths that housed them often remain. So what to do with all that junk? The Spanish government thinks it has the answer: convert former phone booths to charging stations for electric vehicles.

In many ways, it's a brilliant plan -- reminiscent of Coulomb Technologies' system of tapping into light poles for...

Yesterday, President Obama announced $2.4 billion in technology grants to car companies, battery makers, universities, and research facilities across the U.S. During his speech in Elkhart, Indiana, the president stressed the importance of battery development as a way of reviving America's manufacturing sector and reducing the country's dependence on foreign oil. Vice President Joe Biden and several members of the president's cabinet also unveiled grant awards at various sites around the country.

These announcements have been some time in coming. The grant funds were included in the $787 billion stimulus package created by the federal...

Nissan has made a lot of news on the EV front lately: the company received a $1.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy to develop electric vehicles; it's partnering with Renault to build EV infrastructure at sites around the globe; and it's planning to drop its own EV into showrooms by 2012. Now, Nissan says it has developed a plug-free way to charge EV batteries via inductive technology (in much the same way that the 2010 Toyota Prius backpack we gave away charges cell phones). No gas lines, no plugs? Consider us amped. [GuardianUK via BusinessInsider]