Both acts would, of course, slow progress and delay the arrival of cheap solar power and electric cars.
Investors who want to bet on solar power or electric cars do not want to be saddled with rice cookers or restaurants.
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and CEO of SpaceX, held court on space travel, solar power and electric cars at South By Southwest Saturday.
Kempton realized that most of the power available from electric cars' large batteries was being wasted, because the cars sit parked 95% of the time.
Ryan McGee, who works on analytics for the power train in electric cars at Ford, is using the analytics inside his designs, hoping to look at things like weather, traffic, time of day and local regulations to build choices.
For ten years he's been trying to convince utilities and automakers that electric cars could draw power at night, when power is cheaper, and then discharge some of that juice back into the grid during the day to balance supply and demand for electricity.
One of the big problems with electric cars is providing enough power to help a car accelerate up to a decent speed, while at the same time having enough capacity for a decent range.
They are about to grow rapidly, thanks to new environmental rules (solar power, LED lights and electric cars) or exploding demand in emerging markets (medical devices and drugs).
"Moreover, in places that do generate electricity from renewable sources, it would be more cost-effective to use that electricity to power electric or plug-in hybrid cars than high-speed rail, " O'Toole said.
Still, the Exxon Mobil chief, who is regarded as one of the most frank and open oil executives, was hopeful that natural gas would be widely used by utility plants in the U.S. to create power for the coming revolution in electric cars.
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It will let wind and solar power be transmitted to the cities, and smooth out peaks and troughs in demand for example by feeding power to the batteries of parked electric cars at night, and sucking it out of them during the day, if their owners agree.
It involves using cars to supply a reserve of electric power that can smooth out minute-to-minute shortages in the transmission grid.
Supercapacitors have a big internal surface-area that allows a large amount of energy to be delivered rapidly and are used in some electric cars to provide a short burst of power for rapid acceleration and in hybrids to recover energy during braking.
Nuclear power, renewables, and a shift to electric cars will be most helpful.
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It will also be able to power cars indirectly, as an electricity source for electric vehicles starting to arrive in showrooms.
To the extent that electrified transport offers an alternative to oil, such as subways, trolleys, and trains actually do today, and electric cars might hypothetically do tomorrow, taxing their motive power can only make the situation worse.
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As battery range (i.e. the distance your battery fully charged will get you) becomes more of a consumer focus, increasingly compact power will become tantamount to battery choice for hybrids and electric cars.
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The rest comes from Regals gears, gearboxes and other power transmission equipment for cars, trains, boats and irrigation systems, plus electric motors and generators.
The benchmark study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), found that plug-in hybrids are cleaner than regular cars in each of nine scenarios.
These are the batteries that go into electric cars, or the batteries that are ending up helping to make sure that if you get solar power or wind power, that it can be transmitted in an efficient way.
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