Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon says it will buy thousands of Ram ProMaster electric vans a year beginning in 2024.

The folks at Inside EVs noticed something in a press package from CES 2022 that most others missed. It said, “As part of a separate agreement with Stellantis, Amazon will be the first commercial customer for Stellantis’ new Ram ProMaster Battery Electric Vehicle launching in 2023. Stellantis, with input from Amazon, designed the vehicle with unique last mile delivery features and Amazon will deploy the vehicles to routes across the United States. Building on the current relationship and as part of the long-term agreement, Stellantis and Amazon will be putting thousands of BEV ProMasters on the road every year.”

Amazon has bought thousands of delivery vans from Mercedes, Ford, and Stellantis to bring packages to its customers in North America for years. Even though it has a 20% ownership stake in Rivian and expects to purchase 100,000 of its electric delivery vans, its need for such vehicles is so massive that it will continue to buy trucks from traditional manufacturers to get the hundreds of thousands of packages it delivers every day from its warehouses — called fulfillment centers — to its customers.

Continue reading “Amazon Will Buy Thousands Of Ram ProMaster Electric Delivery Vans Every Year” »

UEI “Extreme Low-Power” chip for Bluetooth, voice remote controls with energy-harvesting in order to provide lifetime battery life.

Most people probably don’t mind changing batteries in remote controls every so often, but it contributes to e-waste especially if you’re not using rechargeable batteries, and I always find it’s pain as I don’t usually have stock, or don’t feel like waiting for several hours to recharge the batteries.

Universal Electronics Inc, or UEI for shorts, claims to have a solution with a family of QuickSet-certified chips using “Extreme Low-Power”, energy-harvesting and “high-performance technology” that would provide lifetime battery life to Bluetooth, voice remote controls. The main goal is “to help transition the world towards a more sustainable future, by reducing primary battery waste throughout the life of the product, which in turn reduces the cumulative CO₂ footprint”.

Continue reading “‘Extreme low power’ chip with energy harvesting provides lifetime battery solution for remote controls” »

New York state will spend $500 million building up ports and manufacturing infrastructure for offshore wind farms in a bid to become home base for the nascent industry.

The investments announced Wednesday by Governor Kathy Hochul will focus on building the supply chain for offshore turbines, which can provide clean power to a densely populated coast with little room for onshore wind farms or solar power plants.

“With this investment, New York will lead the nation on offshore wind production, creating green jobs for New Yorkers, and powering our clean energy future,” Hochul said in the statement.

Carbon-based organic micropollutants in water can be removed by treatment with high-intensity pulses of light in a procedure developed and demonstrated by researchers at KAUST.

This photodegradation process was already known to be feasible, but its use was limited by the long treatment times it required. Luca Fortunato, Thomas Anthopoulos and colleagues have demonstrated that this photodegradation treatment can be dramatically accelerated with high-intensity light pulses generated from a xenon flash lamp.

“An interesting aspect of this work is that we combined the expertise and technologies of two different fields,” says Fortunato. He explains that the collaboration between the two different research departments—KAUST’s Solar Center and Water Desalination and Reuse Center—allowed the team to adopt a pulsed light system that was previously used to process semiconductor materials for transistors and solar cells.

The car market is changing, and quickly.
it seems combustion engines are declining quickly in popularity, as electric vehicles, led by @Tesla 0, are taking the market by storm, selling as fast as they can be produced, and outselling all but the very cheapest city cars in most markets.

But are they for you?
Do they have the range and can you afford to make the switch?

Continue reading “Electric vs Petrol Car. Which One For You?” »

Suspended beneath a thick canopy of trees, the sloth inches along with slow strides. Painfully slow. Intentionally slow. Crawling high up among the branches, traipsing along a 100-foot steel cable, the little creature is like a lethargic acrobat. But its goal is not to delight or to put on a show; in fact, just the opposite. This sloth is all about stealth, observation, and collecting as much sunlight as possible.

After all, this is a solar-powered robot.

UK domestic flights could be operated by electric and hydrogen aircraft as early as 2028, a new policy paper by Transport & Environment (T&E) finds.

2022 is a crucial year in climate change policy terms for UK aviation. The UK government will consult and decide on both how to make the UK ETS net-zero compliant; what the specific details of the sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) mandate are; and lay out a final Jet Zero strategy.

In its new policy paper, T&E recommends the path forward to set UK aviation on a net zero trajectory. The recommendations include:

Continue reading “Start UK Rollout Of Zero-Emission Jets This Decade” »

Japanese are increasingly turning to “social robots”, John Deere’s latest self-driving tractor will enable autonomous farming, a new South Australian craft beer has been designed entirely by AI.

The researchers used extrusion printing to manufacture the electrodes, interconnects, encapsulation, and insulation. Active layers were then spray painted on at room temperature. All in all, six layers were 3D printed to build a flexible and fully functioning display.

“OLED displays are usually produced in big, expensive, ultra-clean fabrication facilities,” said Michael McAlpine, senior author of the team’s new study. “We wanted to see if we could basically condense all of that down and print an OLED display on our table-top 3D printer, which was custom built and costs about the same as a Tesla Model S.”