I just discovered this clean energy podcast by Tom Raftery of Spain. At about 11 minutes, in Tom makes some comments on my hydrogen article. He mostly supports my debunking of the hydrogen economy, although he does give a good example of how hydrogen creation can be useful in certain situations, such as storing excess power generation from wind production.
Today, TriplePundit is reporting a potential major breakthrough in Lithium-Ion battery technology, which was published by “Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Professor Gerbrand Ceder and graduate student Byoungwoo Kang”. The technology breakthrough, if true, would represent a huge benefit to electronics manufacturers, especially electronic vehicle producers.
According to the article:
“lithium ions can only pass through tunnels to the active electrode material when they’re perfectly positioned. In the absence of a few good traffic cops, it’s pandemonium. The solution, Ceder discovered, is to engineer the material with a so-called beltway system that guides the ions towards the tunnel entrances at an ideal angle.”
Hybrid Technologies, known for their Smart Car and sponsoring UC Berkeley’s sophisticated Cal Sol Project, announced today that their all-electric, Lithium-Ion powered BMW AG Mini Cooper has moved into production. The car is reported to have a range of 120+ miles on a single charge, speeds up to 80 miles per hour, and acceleration of 0-60 in 6.0 seconds. According to the press release, “The Mini Cooper Frame is produced by Mini Cooper in Oxford England, and the conversion to all-lithium currently takes place in North Carolina at Hybrid’s Mooresville plant.”
In the book ” Collapse“, Jared Diamond outlines 12 major problems which threaten human civilization: destruction of natural habitats, depletion of wild foods (fish, etc), loss of genetic diversity, soil erosion, fossil fuel depletion, shortage of fresh water, the photosynthetic ceiling (100% use of the sun’s energy for human purposes), pollution from toxic chemicals, species transfer, global warming due to human activity, population growth and the rising per-capita impact of population. He goes on to state that “our world society is on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability…would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years.” No one problem stands out as greater than all of the rest. “If we solved 11 of the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble, whichever was the problem that remained unsolved. We have to solve them all.”
Steve Puma is a sustainability and strategy consultant, technologist and writer. He lives with his wife Cori and pug dog Miles in Northern California. More...
In the book ” 
