Tesla Motors
announced today that it has already received 520 orders for its
recently unveiled Model S sedan, an all-electric vehicle capable of
carrying seven passengers. Unlike the company’s flashier and more
expensive roadster, the car is designed to fit the needs of
middle-class families.
Reservations for the Model S started pouring in after its Los Angeles debut last week.
Eventually, Tesla plans to offer its vehicles through its own retail
stores slated to open in Chicago, London, New York, Miami, Seattle,
Washington D.C. and Munich. But consumers will have to wait till 2011
for production to begin in earnest, and that’s only if the company
receives the $350 million loan it applied for from the Department of
Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program. It will use the money to construct an assembly plant in California devoted solely to Model S production.
We've been keeping track of BYD for many months now (see our previous articles on the BYD E6 electric car, and BYD F3DM and BYD F6DM
plug-in hybrids), and we're not alone. Warren Buffet's MidAmerican
Energy Holdings has bought a 10% stake in the Chinese firm for $230
million.
Plug-in Hybrid Car for $21.9k
What's most impressive is that BYD didn't even make cars a few years
ago. Until recently, it was only a battery maker (the biggest in
China), yet it's F3DM plug-in hybrid is going on sale in China right
now, at least 2 years before the GM Volt, another series hybrid. Read on for more details about the BYD F3DM plug-in hybrid.
This is why Shawn-Yu Lin of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute thinks he can change the solar power game:
To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power
into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every
single photon of light, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky.
Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.
Most of us live in the suburbs, in single-family homes surrounded
by a little bit of land. Most suburbs are located on the finest
agricultural land on earth, and yet very little food is actually grown
there. Most of our food is produced on distant, impersonal mega-farms
and delivered to us using large amounts of fossil fuels. Many people
are concerned that this fragile and unsustainable system does a lot of
environmental damage and could easily collapse for any number of
reasons. We have a wonderful opportunity to bring food production back
home, literally, by cooperating with our neighbors to grow our own food
on our own land. This is especially easy here in Santa Barbara where
our growing season is year-round and the climate is suitable for a wide
range of crops. Think of your neighborhood as a potential
"noshosphere," a place to create yummy abundance from the ground up.
What's a foodshed?
The Wisconsin Foodshed Project says, "The term 'foodshed,' borrowed
from the concept of a watershed, was coined as early as 1929 to
describe the flow of food from the area where it is grown into the
place where it is consumed. Recently, the term has been revived as a
way of looking at and thinking about local, sustainable food systems."
Another excellent article from the folks over at TreeHugger.com
about various resources being depleted around the world and some of the
root causes. Here's a brief summary of these scarcities. Be sure to
visit this page and the additional :More links for each to get more details about each
Peak Resource.
Peak Corn
Blame Earl Butz. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford's Secretary of
Agriculture brought in the Farm Bill that dramatically increased the
amount of corn produced in America. He encouraged farmers to "get big
or get out," and to plant crops like corn "from fence row to fence
row." Further billions in subsidies to farmers encouraged production,
and soon America was awash in cheap grain, and with it cheap meat. Food
costs as a portion of the American diet dropped to the lowest level in
history; we became corn. Michael Pollan writes: "If you eat
industrially, you are made of corn. It holds together your McNuggets,
it sweetens your soda pop, it fattens your meat, it is everywhere. It
is fed to us in many forms, because it is cheap- a dollar buys you 875
calories in soda pop but only 170 in fruit juice. A McDonalds meal was
analyzed as almost entirely corn."
Peak Oil
In 1956, American geophysicist M. King Hubbert calculated that the
rate of production of fossil fuels would peak in the United States in
about 1970 and then start declining. He was laughed out of the
conference room. However, ultimately he was proven correct; now we are
probably at the worldwide Hubbert's Peak. A hundred years ago you just
stuck a pipe in the ground and the oil rushed out; now it is not so
easy, and America's oil comes from deep under the ocean, is cooked out
of rocks in Alberta, or is purchased from nations with security issues.
Now the United States, Canada, Norway, and the United Kingdom are well
past their peak, while Saudi Arabia and Russia are approaching it. Oil
is still being found (there was a recent big hit in Brazil, and there
are thought to be big reserves in the Arctic.) but it harder to get at
and a lot more expensive.
Another excellent article from the folks over at 
