Fshhead's WunderBlog

Yea Snowboy, that is the thing that really bothers me. Like I have said THIS country needs to be at the front of this battle! Like it or not, the rest of the world is starting to get going on these projects. If we do not join in, like I always say we are going to be left behind because of our ignorance!

Tesla Motors to sell batteries in $43 million deal with Think
SAN CARLOS START-UP EYES RISING MARKET
By Matt Nauman
Mercury News
Article Launched: 05/22/2007 01:51:44 AM PDT


Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric car start-up, intends to announce today that it has created a new division to sell batteries, and that it has taken a $43 million order.

Think, a Norwegian maker of electric cars, will buy lithium-ion battery packs from the Tesla Energy Group. The deal will bring Tesla $3 million this year and $40 million in 2008, said Darryl Siry, a spokesman for the San Carlos company.

While the new division's primary focus is to develop and make battery packs for Tesla's vehicles - a two-seat roadster that goes into production this fall and a four-door sedan due later this decade - "the (battery) market is huge and growing," Siry said. "The question is, what share of that market can we get?"

Tesla said Bernard Tse will head its Energy Group. Tse founded and was chief executive of Wyse Technology, and is a former Tesla board member.

In a blog scheduled to go live today, Tesla Chief Executive Martin Eberhard describes how his company went through seven generations of design to produce its Energy Storage Systems, or "large lithium-ion battery packs made from small, commodity cells." Word got out that Tesla's battery packs are "pretty darned good," Eberhard writes, and the company was approached by Jan-Olaf Willums, president of Think.

Think will introduce the second generation of its Think city, a small electric vehicle, later this year. Think was owned by Ford Motor from 1999 to 2003, which brought hundreds of the tiny cars to the United States for testing. Think later went bankrupt, but has been revived by Norwegian investors who head that country's Renewable Energy Corp., which makes solar panels. Think has not announced plans to bring its vehicles to the United States.
Contact Matt Nauman at mnauman@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5701.
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Well I guess this answers all the questions on if the Tesla battery systems are any good. Martin Eberhard did say that they would probably move in this direction also. Like I have said a thousand times lol, these guys have the right vision for the right time in history!!!!!

Posted By: crucilandia at 9:59 PM GMT on May 23, 2007.

Lithium is a component for thermonuclear weapons (so called "hydrogen bombs") and applications of lithium for this purpose in the nuclear weapons industry is pursued in developing nuclear powers

I think tesla will open doors for the bad guys.

I have to agree with LowerCal on this one for sure! Ahhh kinda reachin' here are you not??
I just love how you try to blame it on Tesla??
Like Tesla are the ones who invented Lithium-ion batteries?? I don't hear you saying that they opened the door for terrorists!

LOL yea Cal, I did see that & for the reasons you listed, I did not post it. It is false info.

Posted By: crucilandia at 10:00 PM GMT on May 25, 2007. (hide)
cyclo you may like this

Hansen et al. finish his paper with this:

In summary, the warming in the model in recent decades is due to the assumed forcings, and we have presented evidence in this paper that the magnitude of the model’s response to forcings is realistic on time scales from single volcanic eruptions to mutidecadal GHG increases. The period 1970-2005 under discussion with regard to hurricanes is the time when forcings are known most accurately, and during that period anthropogenic GHGs were the dominant forcing. Although unforced fluctuations undoubtedly contribute to Atlantic Ocean temperature change, the expected GHG warming is comparable in magnitude to observed warming and is likely a significant contributor.We conclude that the definitive assertion of Gray [2005] and Mayfield [2005], that human-made GHGs play no role in the Atlantic Ocean temperature changes that they assume to drive hurricane intensification, is untenable. Specifically, the assertions that (1) hurricane intensification of the past decade is due to changes in SSTs in the Atlantic Ocean, and (2) global warming cannot have had a significant role in the hurricane intensification of the past decade, are mutually inconsistent. On the contrary, although natural cycles play a role in changing Atlantic SSTs, our model results indicate that, to the degree that hurricane intensification of the past decade is a product of increasing SSTs in Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, human-made GHGs probably are a substantial contributor.

LOL, good thing I went to look at the end of Ricky's previous blog! So if I read it correctly, they are shooting down Dr. Gray's theory, are they not??LOL
Hmmmm seems like there is your forcing!!

Crucilandia the false info from that article is
1. the reason LowerCal gave, ahhhh everything coming from China now so we just moved all our pollution & **** over there. So of course the reading would be lower.
2. Well woop de doo, so it goes down a little here(so they say) who's to say the testing is valid & who knows maybe some other atmospheric condition lowered it slightly over us for a little while.
One thing is for sure & no one here can deny it, the worldwide Co2 levels are rising!!So THOSE are the reasons I chose not to post the info. Makes everyone think that we are on the right path, when in reality we chose the wrong path almost 35 years ago or so!!

Zaphod, well said my friend!

Ethanol is about to have it's BIG test today. The Indianapolis "500" is to be run today on 100% ethanol. 500 miles, speeds in excess of 200 mph! Like I posted before if this race is ran with no fuel issues then it will definitely work for normal public usage.

The famous Indy 500 auto racing circuit continues to require methanol as the only fuel that can be used at Indy races.

Crucilandia now we are going in the direction that I know ALOT about. Ahhh think you saw my posts earlier on that the IRL uses 100% straight ethanol now!!! This is the 1st time in history that the Indy "500" will be run on ethanol. So like I said if there are no fuel issues(which I expect none) there is no reason why we as the public cannot use it.

Sullivan, yea I agree the ethanol is not my 1st choice of which technology we should be heading towards BUT, hey ANYTHING to start breaking us of the oil consumption is good with me.

Zaphod, you bring up some key points there! The motor does need some minor modifications. One would be higher compression ratios. I talked to many of the drivers & crews at our IRL race here in Homestead. Funny cause I always heard that ethanol less efficient. Not true, in fact when the compression ratios are raised you actually get better efficiency. So much so that the IRL is going to go to smaller fuel tanks cause of the increased mileage. My biggest gripe with the ethanol is that you still got a version of an internal combustion engine. This means the parts companys,oil change centers, muffler shops etc. will still be used. With an ELECTRIC car all this goes by the wayside. No wonder the auto companies are pushing for ethanol. As far as the Co2 comparision, I am not really sure on that one.
HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY EVERYONE!!!!!!!!!!!

Article talking about global warming & hurricanes....
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Tesla Motors Receives Research and Development Grant from the California Air Resources Board and California Energy Commission
California Air Resources Board and California Energy Commission jointly recognize pioneering technology advanced by Tesla Motors


SAN CARLOS, Calif. -- (May 25, 2007) -- Tesla Motors, a manufacturer of high-performance production electric cars, received $561,000 for the development of a UL approved 16 kw public charging station.

According to the 2007 CARB (California Air Resources Board) Alternative Fuel Incentive Program (AFIP) Proposal Solicitation: “Electric fuel vehicles have the largest potential to reduce climate change emissions and petroleum dependency relative to any other alternative fuel vehicle under consideration.”

Under the grant, the charging station technology developed by Tesla could be used to power up electric vehicles throughout the state of California. Other grant recipients include the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Davis and the Electric Power Research Institute.

“California has a long history of supporting green technology and encouraging automobile manufacturers to meet increasingly stringent vehicle emissions requirements,” said Diarmuid O’Connell, Director of Corporate Development at Tesla Motors, “This sizeable grant offered jointly by the California Air Resources Board and the California Energy Commission is a significant vote of confidence for Tesla Motors and acknowledges the pioneering work Tesla Motors is doing in the development of zero-emissions electric vehicles and charging station technology.”

About Tesla Motors
Tesla Motors develops and manufactures vehicles that exemplify “Design, Performance, and Efficiency” while conforming to all U.S. safety, environmental and durability standards. The company has taken over 400 reservations for its first car, the Tesla Roadster, a stylish, high performance sports car that accelerates to 60 mph in about 4 seconds with extreme energy efficiency. Tesla expects to start shipping Tesla Roadsters to customers in the fall. Tesla Motors was founded in July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning to create efficient electric cars for people who love to drive. Tesla Motors currently employs more than 200 people, including teams in California, Michigan, the U.K. and Taiwan. For more information, visit www.teslamotors.com.

Hmmm more interesting Tesla news!!!!!! Hopefully when they see it works with their own eyes they will receive more money. I keep saying it, Tesla has the right idea for the right time!!
BTW.. How are the gas prices where you all live? lol Our average was around $3.15 BUT, looks like we are going up....

Oh Man, that was tooooo funny! Simon THANX so much for the laughs!!!! That kid has him down BIGTIME!!

Ouch!!! $3.37???? Wow, that Tesla sounding better & better!

Can climate change get worse? It has
Source: Copyright 2007, Age
Date: May 22, 2007
Byline: Liz Minchin
Original URL

The world is now on track to experience more catastrophic damages from climate change than in the worst-case scenario forecast by international experts, scientists have warned.
The research, published in a prestigious US science journal, shows that between 2000 and 2004 the rate of increase in global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels was three times greater than in the 1990s.
That is faster than even the worst-case scenario modelled by the world's leading scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, published over recent months, because the updated emissions figures were not available in time to be included.The climbing emissions mean that average global temperatures are now on track to rise by more than four degrees this century - enough to thaw vast areas of arctic permafrost and leave about 3 billion people suffering from water shortages, including in Australia.

And Australia's emissions from fossil fuels are increasing faster than the global average, growing at nearly twice the rate of the United States.
Senior CSIRO scientist Michael Raupach, who led the international research on accelerating global emissions, told The Age that the findings were "dreadful".
Emissions are increasing faster than we thought, which means the impacts of climate change will also happen even sooner than expected, said Dr Raupach, a co-chairman of the Global Carbon Project, based at the CSIRO in Canberra.

"What this really highlights is the urgency of cutting emissions. It won't be easy, but we know that we have solutions available to us now to do that and that it can be done at a relatively small cost to the economy."

The jump in emissions since 2000 has been driven by increasing populations, growing global wealth, and greater than expected use of fossil fuels.

The paper found that none of the world's major rich or developing regions are "decarbonising" their energy supplies, by reducing demand or switching to less polluting energy, which spells trouble for international efforts to curb global greenhouse emissions.

The research is being published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In assessing the same data for Australia, Dr Raupach found Australia's carbon emissions have grown at about twice the global average over the past 25 years, including about double the rate of emissions growth in the United States and Japan.
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Hmmmm, I think the clock started ticking a little faster!!!! Certainly NOT good news

Will Warming Lead to a Rise in Hurricanes?
Source: Copyright 2007, New York Times
Date: May 29, 2007
Original URL

When people worry about the effects of global warming, they worry more about hurricanes than anything else. In surveys, almost three-quarters of Americans say there will be more and stronger hurricanes in a warming world. By contrast, fewer than one-quarter worry about increased coastal flooding.

But as far as the scientific consensus is concerned, people have things just about backward.

There is no doubt that as the world warms, seas will rise, increasing the flood risk, simply because warmer water occupies more space. (And if the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets melt, the rise will be far greater.)

It seems similarly logical that as the world warms, hurricanes will be more frequent or more powerful or both. After all, they draw their strength from warm ocean waters. But while many scientists hold this view, there is far less consensus, in part because of new findings on other factors that may work against stronger, more frequent storms.

“Global warming is as real as it gets,” Richard A. Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, said last month at a weather conference in the Bahamas, where most of the conversation focused on hurricanes. But as for its link to hurricanes, Mr. Anthes said, “I don’t think it’s been proved conclusively.”

In a consensus statement issued last year, the World Meteorological Organization said it was likely that there would be some increase in hurricane wind speeds in a warmer world. But the organization, which is the United Nations weather agency, noted that decades-long periods of high and low hurricane activity, unconnected to any climate change, had been recorded before. (Climate experts say a period of high activity began in 1995.)

Also, measurement techniques have greatly improved in recent decades, making it difficult to compare data and detect trends.

So as the annual hurricane season begins on June 1, scientists are pressing on a number of fronts to learn how hurricanes form and move, what factors limit or expand their lethal potential and how to tell with greater precision when and where they will strike.

Perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that warming and hurricanes may be connected is Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His conclusion that the total power released in Atlantic and western Pacific hurricanes had increased perhaps by half in recent decades, reported in 2005 in the journal Nature, is one of the most discussed ideas in the debate.

He is not alone. Last year, researchers led by Carlos D. Hoyos of the Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms, the most powerful, and concluded that their increased frequency since 1970 was “directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature,” which is increasing. They reported their findings in the journal Science.

Other experts challenge the idea that a warmer world means more and stronger storms.

For example, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Miami have been studying how vertical wind shear — the differences in wind direction or speed at different altitudes — can inhibit hurricane formation.

In work reported last month in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said that in a warming world, wind shear in the Atlantic would increase, possibly enough to cancel out the hurricane-forcing effects of warmer water.

Last week, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts reported in the journal Nature that periods of frequent storminess had occurred in the past, even though things were cooler than they are now. They also concluded that wind currents were a crucial factor.

But even these researchers call the question open. “This doesn’t settle the issue,” said Gabriel Vecchi, the lead author of the wind shear study and a research scientist at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, N.J.

In February, researchers led by James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, recalibrated recent and early satellite data on hurricanes using information from the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA archive in Asheville, N.C. They concluded that hurricane frequency had increased, but only in the Atlantic, possibly because temperatures there are chronically just about warm enough for storms; so even modest warming makes hurricanes more likely.

But when Christopher W. Landsea analyzed historical records of hurricane activity, he concluded that satellite observations and other new techniques had increased scientists’ ability to detect major storms, skewing the frequency data. Dr. Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, reported this conclusion this month in EOS, an electronic publication of the American Geophysical Union.

This kind of he-said-he-said debate often leads people to dismiss a subject as one about which nothing will ever be known with confidence. In fact, the give and take is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others’ findings until a consensus takes shape.

In the current debate over global warming and hurricanes, the problem is relatively new and the data are hard to obtain and analyze.

For example, atmospheric researchers are wrestling with an enormous amount of new data as they study factors that contribute to the formation and maintenance of the hurricane’s characteristic eye and the bands of wind and rain that howl around it.

They hope to use the data to better predict how strong hurricanes will be when they strike land. But the effort is complicated by the way storms gain or lose strength as they move over warm or cool water, and by the way their structures evolve.

The researchers studied the movement of air, moisture and heat energy as a hurricane’s inner eyewall degrades, and the way an outer band can move in to replace it. Baseing their conclusions on aircraft, satellite and ground observations during Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia and Rita in 2005, the researcher, led by Robert A. Houze Jr. of the University of Washington, reported their eyewall findings in the journal Science in March.

Forecasting storm tracks is easier, because they are generally determined by large-scale wind patterns that are relatively easy to observe by satellite and aircraft. But the ease of prediction is relative. Forecasters still worry, many of them obsessively, about the difficulty of providing landfall forecasts with few false alarms, in time for escape from threatened areas.

One question meteorologists and climate experts can answer quickly is an obvious one: What happened to the hurricane season of 2006? Viewed from the perspective of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, it was a bust (or a boon). Not a single hurricane struck the United States.

But last year a persistent Bermuda high, sitting unusually far out in the Atlantic, and air currents from an unexpected and quick-forming El Niño system, which developed in the Pacific in August, diminished the storms’ potential to strike the United States. As a result, it felt like a year with no storms, even though there were only slightly fewer named storms than average (9 instead of 11), about as many became hurricanes as on average (5 instead of 6) and, as in an ordinary year, 2 hurricanes with winds of more than 111 miles per hour, the standard for Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. This year, we will probably not be so lucky, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said at a news conference last week. They said they expected 13 to 17 named storms this season, 7 to 10 of them hurricanes and 3 to 5 of them major storms. The first of the named storms, Andrea, formed off the southeast coast in mid-May, more than three weeks before the season’s official start. No matter what happens this year, and no matter how the debate over global warming and hurricanes is resolved, there is wide agreement that residents of the East and Gulf Coasts can expect harsh treatment from storms, possibly for decades.


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High CARB Diet
by Martin Eberhard
CEO TESLA MOTORS

published Tuesday, May 29th, 2007


Last Thursday I participated in a panel at the Future in Review (FiRE) conference in San Diego, Calif. Very cool – I got to meet one of my heroes: iRobot founder Helen Greiner. (My own Master’s thesis at the University of Illinois was in robotics.) Helen took a ride in the Tesla Roadster and came away with a big smile.

But fun as it was, I decided to cut out early and hustle across town to testify at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) hearings on the future of the Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. Members of the public (including execs from all the big car companies as well as individuals with relevant opinions) were each given strictly-enforced 3-minute slots for testimony.


The whole hearing was “Back to the Future,” with both CARB and all the large car companies once again urging continued research into hydrogen fuel cells, but with the dates moved further out and the number of required fuel cell cars on the road reduced by an order of magnitude. Hey, forget fuel cells, how about researching a Mister Fusion instead?

The most amusing testimony for me was from Ballard Power Systems. Unlike the car companies, the Ballard spokesman urged CARB to increase the number of fuel cell cars required, transparently increasing the demand for their own fuel cells…

Also entertaining was when both a CARB board member and the BMW spokesman recommended changing the definition of a large-volume car manufacturer so that BMW would not be forced into a fuel cell program as their California sales surpass 60,000 cars. They were followed by the Honda spokesman who specifically requested that BMW be required to join the fuel cell brotherhood.

I did not originally plan to be at the hearing because of the FiRE conference. I wrote my testimony at the last minute on the back of a copy of Chris Paine’s prepared testimony, with overflow on the back of Alec Brook’s testimony. It’s always risky to use sarcasm in public speaking, but I could not resist. Here is what I said in my 3 minutes:

Good afternoon, Members of the Board.

I am Martin Eberhard, cofounder and CEO of Tesla Motors, based here in California.

Tesla Motors will begin shipping highly-desirable, DOT-compliant electrical cars with well over 200 miles range later this year – perhaps you saw one of our prototypes outside. We have already pre-sold more than 400 cars; 2008 production will easily exceed 1,000 cars, exceeding the worldwide fleet of fuel cell cars.

Additionally, we will deliver Tesla-built battery systems for the newly revived TH!INK City Car this year, with a standing order for many thousand batteries per year.

The Air Resources Board continues to show a bias toward hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and against the less expensive and more efficient battery electric vehicles. This bias is clearly seen in the ARB Independent Expert Panel Report. Tesla Motors believes this bias is not justified by science or the evidence of actual vehicles and infrastructure.

However, we are actually delighted by the way this bias finds implementation in the ZEV mandate. For the results of this mandate is that all of our potential EV competitors – all the big car companies – remain mired in non-productive, deeply-expensive fuel cell programs, keeping them out of the EV marketplace, and indeed out of the serious ZEV marketplace entirely.

Every year spent on fuel cell programs by GM, Ford, Honda, and the rest is another year we at Tesla Motors can build our technological and market lead in the obvious winning technology: battery electric vehicles. We therefore sarcastically and enthusiastically encourage you to maintain the hydrogen bias and keep our competitors in the quagmire.

Meanwhile, we are on schedule to place 15,000 battery electric Tesla vehicles on the road by the end of 2010.

Sarcasm aside, wouldn’t it be nice for our environment if we had a few competitors?
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Like I keep saying the right vision for the right time!!!!! Go Tesla!!!!

Cal, let me say this, hydrogen is a pipe dream for now!! It is very far off in the future. Yes, me thinks likewise lol

I am pro SOLAR!!!!!!! lol

Hmmmmm deceiving comment there!!! Yes solar energy comes from fusion but, I think the energy coming out of the sun's fusion just a little more safer than if we actually did it here.

As tides ebb and rise, South Korea prepares to snare them
The Business of Green
By Choe Sang-Hun Published: May 31, 2007

ANSAN, South Korea: In a tidal flat where crabs used to crawl and herons used to feed on clams, hard-hatted men and their trucks toil on the gray rock bottom of a rectangular hole the size of a dozen football fields and going 26 meters below the sea level.

When their work here is done by 2009, South Korea will have a new monument: the world's largest tidal power plant.

With a capacity of 254 megawatts, enough to power the nearby city of Ansan, which has half a million people, the Sihwa Lake Tidal Power Plant would serve as a major emblem for a clean-energy movement in South Korea, the world's 10th-largest emitter of global warming gases, according to the government.

But energy experts say that the building under way on the embankment of this lake, 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, southwest of Seoul, also represents a larger trend: coastal nations around the world are looking more seriously at tidal waves off their shores as a source of renewable energy.

The world's current largest tidal power plant, known as the Rance barrage, has a capacity of 240 megawatts. Situated in northwestern France, it was built 40 years ago. Since then, no major tidal power project had been undertaken until South Korean engineers began digging here in 2005.

But already, engineers here think that their new plant will not hold the No. 1 title for long. From Canada and Britain to India and Russia, policy makers are contemplating gigantic projects to harness tidal power, which they see as clean, inexhaustible and as reliable as the rotation of the Earth.

About 50 kilometers north of here, South Korean engineers plan to connect four islets with a seawall and build a tidal power plant three times as big as Sihwa by 2014. And about 50 kilometers south of Sihwa Lake, the authorities are conducting a feasibility study for one twice as big as Sihwa, although fishermen there complain that it would ruin their rich clam fields.

"If our nation has no oil or natural gas reserves, it is endowed with tidal power," said Yu Yeong Sun, an engineer with the Korea Water Resources Corp., which is financed by the government and owns the Sihwa project. "This plant will generate electricity twice, for a total 10 hours, a day - as long as the sea doesn't forget to rise and fall."

Along the coast here, the sea rises up to nine meters, or 30 feet, from low to high tide. The Sihwa plant would generate electricity by using the movement of water between the sea and the lake, which was created when engineers built a 12.7-kilometer embankment to close a bay.

When the sea is on the rise, the water level on the sea side of the barrier gets meters higher than the water level on the lake side. Then suddenly the plant's 10 turbines, to be installed in the middle of the seawall, will open. The water will rush into the lake with such tremendous force that it will spin the turbines, which drive generators.

When the sea retreats, the plant's eight sluice gates will open to empty out the lake. This process will occur twice a day, as the sea rises and falls twice a day. The plant is 500 meters long.

Sihwa's turbines, made by the Austrian company VA Tech Hydro, would together generate one-fourth of the electricity produced by a typical nuclear power plant, and would save South Korea 862,000 barrels of oil and 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year.

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Hmmm I like the sound of this. Sounds like it is proven technology that never was seriously implemented.