Electric Vehicles Rev Up

Seems to me that this year has been a turning point for electric vehicles - cars and motorcycles.  They really seem to be becoming an acceptable (although still expensive) mode of city transport.

All charged up and ready to go, electric vehicles rev up globally

It’s not that they’re the next evolution in automotive technology, nor the fact they’re better for the environment. The main reason tech entrepreneur and investor Simon Hackett loves electric cars is because they’re just so much fun to drive.

For Hackett it all started with a Blade Electron, an electric vehicle conversion built in Victoria based on a small Hyundai Getz. It sparked Hackett’s imagination, and there was no turning back. In 2009 he became the first Australian to buy a Tesla Roadster, and today he’s participating in a project to build electric racecars.

“The thing that changes your perspective on driving electric cars the most is the act of actually driving them, because they’re just better cars to drive,” says Hackett. “The more the community has opportunities to drive them, the more their adoption will accelerate.”

Electric car sales are booming. Over the past 12 months, global sales of plug-in, pure electric cars grew by an impressive 125 per cent. Japan accounted for most of the sales, followed by the US, China, France and then Norway.

In Australia, there are just 1,000 all-electric vehicles on the road, but demand for sparky supercars is growing in line with other countries.

The future of the Australian automotive industry is likely in the technological shift to electric vehicles. What will cars look like in 2050? 

The number of electric vehicles registered in Australia has grown by roughly 100 per cent per annum for the last five years, and as the number of vehicles increases, so do the number charge stations.  

However, these numbers pale in comparison to more than 172,000 plug-in electric vehicles on the road in the US, 75,000 in Japan, and 38,000 in China. Following this enormous growth in demand, the push is on to roll out extensive charge station infrastructure to ensure these cars can travel on our roads.

There are now more than 200 ChargePoint electric vehicle charging stations available in traditional service stations, hotels, council carparks and residential developments.

“The idea with electric vehicles is that parking is synonymous with charging; meaning we are targeting locations where drivers are known to park for a period of time,” says ChargePoint’s National Manager, James Brown. “This will give electric vehicle owners the ability to extend out their battery range, while going about their daily routines.”

ChargePoint offers two types of charging station; Level 2, which delivers 7 kW of electricity and is designed to fully recharge car batteries over a matter of hours, and  Level 3 which delivers 25 kW and are capable of recharging a car battery from 30 to 80 percent in approximately 25 minutes.

Around the world there are a number of different approaches being trialed, from battery swap stations, to refuelling technologies to technologies akin to ChargePoint, which make it easy to rapidly recharge. GE, for example, has two charging solutions; the WattStation, which offers a rapid recharge, and the DuraStation, where vehicles can be plugged in for extended periods.  

Regardless of which refuelling solution wins out, Hackett believes electric cars will ultimately become a standard offering in Australia.

“We are right at the cusp of a roughly 10-year period in which I believe we'll go from electric vehicles being unusual to electric vehicles being a routine component of the vehicle fleet,” Hackett says. “It’s not a question of total displacement – the car dealer will simply move from a question of ‘Petrol or Diesel’' to ‘Petrol, Diesel or Electric?’’’

http://gereports.com.au/post/14-05-2014/all-charged-up-and-ready-to-go-electric-vehicles-rev-up-globally?utm_source=outbrain_organic

Power comes in waves

The awesome power of ocean waves is often associated with destructive forces.

Perth’s Bombora Wave Power thinks differently. The ocean is actually a vast, untapped source of renewable energy.

The company is developing a V-shaped device that combines a unique membrane with a pneumatic air pump to spin turbines and generate energy.  

Each wave energy convertor is designed to produce 1.5MWe (megawatt electrical) of energy, enough to power 500 homes and cut annual carbon emissions by 3300 tonnes. The device can be configured for low and high wave environments.

Image credit: offshoreWIND.biz

It’s the product of clever thinking by Ryan brothers Glenn and Shawn, who are the venture’s driving force. Glenn, for his part, is a seasoned expert on ocean currents and wave science.

One of the key challenges he’s working on is an efficient wave capture device capable of withstanding extreme weather conditions. It must also operate without any significant maintenance due to the cost and complexity of working in the ocean.

Bombora Wave Power hopes to have full commercial prototypes operating within 3-4 years and believes it will appeal in industries that have a heavy reliance on diesel power, particularly island economies in the Pacific.

Interest in wave capture technology is continuing to grow across the globe as people look for new ways to harness the power of renewable water-based energy. It’s being considered at a variety of locations including hydro stations and tidal energy projects such as one proposed for Britain’s Severn Estuary.

Bombora’s wave power system received the GE ecomagination ANZ Challenge 2013 award and is a semi finalist in the Australian Clean Technology Competition 2013. Winners will be announced 2nd October 2013.

Bombora is also a finalist in the Mitsubishi Corporation Emerging Innovation Category at the 2013 WA Innovator of the Year Awards, with winners to be announced 13th November 2013.

http://gereports.com.au/video/19-09-2013/power-comes-in-waves

As renewable energy becomes cheaper, dirty coal power could soon be extinct

Australia is unlikely to build new baseload power stations burning coal because of tumbling prices for renewable energy and the rising cost of finance for emission-intensive fuels, according to research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Even without a carbon price, wind energy is now 14 per cent cheaper than a new baseload coal-fired power station and 18 per cent cheaper than a new gas one, BNEF said in a new report.

"Nobody in their right mind would be building coal-fired power plants now"

The gap widens further when the carbon tax is added. Wind farms can now generate electricity at $80 per megawatt-hour, compared with $143 for a new coal power station and $116 for a new baseload gas power station.
An Western Australia,large-scale photovoltaic (PV) power stations are already cheaper than new coal-fired generating capacity, coming in at $157 per MWh compared with $190, BNEF said.

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“It's very unlikely that new coal (power stations) would be built in Australia,” Kobad Bhavnagri, head of clean energy research for BNEF in Australia, said.
Aside from the carbon tax – which the Coalition has vowed to scrap if elected at the September 14 election - reputational and other risks associated with coal means developers will struggle to obtain low-cost funds for any new venture. The research included a survey of the country's big-four banks.
“Financing for coal would be made very expensive because of all the risks involved,” Mr Bhavnagri said.
“A bank would be quite conscious of financing a highly polluting asset,” he said. “That would likely make them susceptible to environmental activism.”
Demand sinks
Demand for electricity, meanwhile, continues to trend lower. Usage in NSW is at 10-year lows and Victoria at eight-year lows according to data for the December-January period, said Mike Sandiford, director of the Melbourne Energy Institute.
Electricity demand in the National Electricity Market is running about 16 per cent short of the amount regulators in the middle of the last decade expected current levels to be.

‘‘Nobody in their right mind would be building coal-fired power plants now,’’ Professor Sandiford said.
Rising electricity prices, a slump in manufacturing output and the spread of solar PV on residential roof tops are combining to sap power demand, he said.
"The signal is most clear in South Australia," Professor Sandiford said, with the number of houses in the state now approaching one in four residences.
Extending the state's trend of solar PV take-up over the past five years for another five years could see midday demand for power from the national grid drop to the low levels seen during early morning hours, he said.
"You've got 20 per cent coming from wind, and a high-level of PV now driving a big chunk of demand out of the middle of the day," Professor Sandiford said. "South Australia is a fascinating experiment."
Falling costs
BNEF estimates that the cost of wind generation has fallen by 10 per cent and the cost of solar PV by 29 per cent since 2011, and further technology advances will drive prices lower.
By 2020, wind power's cost per megawatt-hour will drop to $70 and then to $66 by 2030. The cost of large-scale solar PVs will drop to $97 for an equivalent amount of electricity and then to $87 10 years later, Mr Bhavnagri said.
The presumed advantage of gas, including its relatively low carbon emissions compared with coal, have been largely nullified by the liquid natural gas export boom which will force prices for the fuel higher.
“The perception that fossil fuels are cheap and renewables are expensive is now out of date”, said Michael Liebreich, chief executive of BNEF.
“The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world's best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head.”
While renewables are falling in price, they can't compete with Australia's existing coal-fired power stations built by state governments in the 1970s and 1980s, and whose construction costs have now been depreciated, BNEF said.
“New wind is cheaper than building new coal and gas, but cannot compete with old assets that have already been paid off,” Mr Bhavnagri said.
“For that reason policy support is still needed to put megawatts in the ground today and build up the skills and experience to de-carbonise the energy system in the long-term.”
The Climate Change Authority completed its review of the Renewable Energy Target scheme late last year and recommended retaining the key element - leaving unchanged the target for large-scale generators unchanged at 41,000 gigawatt hours of renewable energy per year by 2020.
The government has six months to respond.

Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/carbon-economy/rising-risk-prices-out-new-coalfired-plants-report-20130207-2e0s4.html#ixzz2KCUHqaWJ

Population Target - Can there be too many Australians?

PEOPLE are overwhelmingly against a bigger Australia, almost three-quarters of us hoping the population does not hit the 40 million mark projected by 2050.
In a Galaxy poll of 1000 people for News Limited, the majority of respondents nominated 30 million people as the preferred mark.
There are currently 23 million people living in Australia.

One quarter of people said they wanted things to stay the same while 8 per cent wanted the population to shrink.
Only 13 per cent voted for 40 million citizens - the mark likely to be hit by 2050 - and 70 per cent hoped that wouldn't happen. Less than five per cent hoped for 50 million countrymen.

But former Treasurer Peter Costello, who famously urged parents to have a child for Australia, said people weren't considering the makeup of the growing population.
"When I encouraged families to have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country, what I was drawing attention to was the fact that we are an ageing population," he said.
"To me one question is whether it should be a big Australia or a small Australia.
"A more important question is should it be a young Australia or an old Australia."
He said having a high percentage of retirees meant fewer taxpayers paying crippling tax rates.
The country would not be able to afford all its services like healthcare and welfare and economic growth and living standards would decline, he said.
"Whether the population is 20, 30, 50 or 100 million, what we need to do is we need to get a higher proportion of younger people," he said.
"We've got to keep our birthrates up if we want to have a balanced population of young and old people."
Mr Costello said the problem had been on the Howard Government's agenda but had been forgotten by Labor.
A spokeswoman for Population and Communities Minister Tony Burke said the Gillard Government did not have a population target but was working toward a "sustainable Australia".
"Population change is not only about the growth and overall size of the Australian population," she said.
"It is also about the needs and skills of our population, how we live, and importantly, where we live."
The right mix of services, jobs and education opportunities, affordable housing, amenities in cities, outer suburbs and regional areas were all an important part of that, she said.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/can-there-be-too-many-australians/story-fncyva0b-1226560486122

Oculus Rift's Virtual Reality Headset Is Freaking Amazing

Virtual reality sounds almost quaint in these days of OLEDs and 4K and the Kinect and glasses-free 3D and all the other amazing ways we have now to experience and interact with games. But it's back in a very, very big way with the Oculus Rift, which I tested out today here at CES in Las Vegas.

Oculus started out as a hobbyist project from one Palmer Luckey - just a guy with an idea, taking apart smartphones and making what turned out to be a predecessor to the Oculus Rift. Luckey posted about his project on a forum, where it was found by gaming legend John Carmack, creator of Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and more. Carmack asked Luckey for a test unit, loved it, and became its biggest cheerleader, bringing it out on stage at the E3 gaming convention and even assisting with the development process. Then it landed on Kickstarter, where it made boatloads of money, and now it's here.
The unit I tested was a prototype; the screen, notably, was not the final screen that'll be used, and the team is working very hard to eliminate the (very minor) latency I experienced. The design, too, is a bit different. But what was so surprising and impressive about the Oculus Rift is that the thing actually works.


The Rift looks like a pair of ski goggles, more than anything else. Inside are two lenses, one for each eye, pointing at a single LCD display. (The final screen will be a 7-incher; the one I tested was 5.6 inches.) The screen delivers two separate images, one to each eye, so you get stereoscopic 3-D. Here's where it gets amazing: there are sensors in the goggles - accelerometer, gyroscope, that kind of thing - that are keyed into PC games. You turn your head and your vision moves just about perfectly with it - 360 degrees around, plus all the way up and all the way down. It is, by far, the most immersive interactive experience I have ever seen.
The Rift works (and will work) like a peripheral: you'll plug it into your computer and play PC games with it. It requires a pretty beefy gaming PC at the moment, but it's still a little ways off, so by the time it's released, its requirements will be less pricey. And the Oculus team is very concerned with creating a product that everyone can use, not just the folks with $3,000 liquid-cooled gaming PCs.
I played a game in which I was walking around a kind of medieval castle scene. I used an Xbox controller to move forward and backward - you stay seated while using the Rift - and turned by turning my head. It's impossible to really get across how world-shifting the Rift is; it's exactly like we'd dreamed virtual reality would be. You put on these goggles and you slip into a completely new world, in which your body movements respond pretty much the way they would in the real world. It's comfortable, too, and not particularly heavy, which I was worried about. Feels mostly like ski goggles.
The only problem I found was a tendency to move the rest of my body and not just the headset. If you lean to see around a corner, for example, which I did instinctively several times, the headset can't translate that into in-game movement. (The Oculus team noted that they're aware of this and plan on tackling it, though they wouldn't say quite how.) Then there's the issue of motion sickness, which is not a term Oculus uses - they prefer "disorientation" - but is real all the same. It's a little hard to tell if my nausea was caused by the Rift or by the fact that I was up until 3:30 AM playing poker, but the human body's interaction with such a complete perception replacement is not something to be taken lightly, I think. I suspect some people will react more poorly than others.


The distribution of games is also kind of a question mark, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Rift isn't a new kind of gamepad; it's an entirely new medium, a new way to experience games, and though ports are sort of possible and will definitely be released, that's not really what the Rift is made for. Sure, Call of Duty would be fun, but it's going to take a lot of development work to get new games out that really take advantage of this amazing hardware, not unlike what happened with the Microsoft Kinect. But John Carmack's involvement will help with that, and I think pretty much any developer that sees this thing will want to create amazing new stuff for it. Development kits are going out in March, so that work should start pretty soon, and the company is hoping to have consumer products out in the near future - like, this isn't a pie in the sky thing, this could well see release in 2014. Oculus tells me they're aiming for around a $300 price point, which is fair.
The Rift is certainly one of the most amazing things I've seen at CES this year - hell, in any year. It's not really possible to describe what it's like to use it, but as soon as I put the goggles on and turned my head, I think my mouth dropped. It's flat-out awesome.

 

http://www.popsci.com.au/gadgets/ces-2013-oculus-rift-s-virtual-reality-headset-is-freaking-amazing

Solar flare could swallow the Earth

By Michelle Starr   |   September 6, 2012   

 

Click for full size.
(Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO)

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has captured a gorgeous image of a massive eruption that could engulf the Earth several times over.
On the night of 31 August, NASA reported, a filament of solar material, which had been in the Sun's atmosphere, erupted at a speed of roughly 1450 kilometres per second.
And, although it didn't erupt directly towards the Earth, it did have an effect. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, came into contact with the Earth's magnetosphere, causing an aurora borealis phenomenon to appear over Canada.
Below, you can see the size of the CME compared to the size of the Earth. You can watch a video of the eruption and see a picture of the aurora here. Spectacular.

(Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO)

http://www.cnet.com.au/solar-flare-could-swallow-the-earth-339341452.htm

Brain damaged patient uses mind to tell neurologists he's not in pain

By Liat Clark

13 November 12

A man thought to be in a permanent vegetative state for the past 12 years has communicated that he is not in any pain using only his brain, causing his neurologist to say the medical textbooks need to be rewritten.
Thirty-nine-year-old Canadian Scott Routley had been completely unresponsive following a car accident and, despite his parents insisting he communicated with them by lifting his thumb or moving his eyes, neurologists said routine physical assessments demonstrated he had a total lack of awareness.
However, using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique developed in 2010 by the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council, the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge and the University of Liege, a team of neuroscientists was able to ask Routley a series of questions with yes or no answers, and receive reliable and accurate responses.
"Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind," said Adrian Owen, who co-authored the original study and led a team investigating Routley's case at the Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario. "We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is."
Patients in a vegetative state appear "awake" and exhibit involuntary reflexes such as opening their eyes, but unlike coma patients their non-communicativeness is down to severe brain damage. Owen's research proves this does not necessarily mean they do not have the ability to understand.
Owen's technique involves asking a patient a series of questions while scanning their brain using an fMRI machine, which picks up and tracks the flow of oxygen-rich blood around the brain. By watching this flow in real time, the team could track distinct changes and use this information to formulate a code -- two test scenarios were put to the patients that would eventually be used to represent "yes" or "no". For instance, when asked to imagine playing tennis healthy volunteers would exhibit activity in their premotor cortex (which relates to movement planning), and in their parahippocampal gyrus (which relates to the encoding and retrieval of memories) when asked to imagine walking around their home. If individuals are told to use the first scenario to represent "yes" and the second to represent "no", they can purposefully alter their brain activity to have something of a conversation.
When the technique was first developed, Owen and his team would put the scenarios to patients in a vegetative state to see if their brain activity would change accordingly, and then ask factual questions to see if that brain function was responsive rather than passive. As part of the corresponding study it was shown that one in five of the vegetative patients investigated could use brain function to communicate and, at one hospital, the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability in London, 43 percent of the 60 patients tested had the capacity to communicate.
Two years on, Owen and his team are finally putting this research to its best use: engaging their subjects in a meaningful way. They chose Routley because he responded so clearly to the tennis and walking test scenarios.
"Asking a patient something important to them has been our aim for many years," commented Owen. "In future we could ask what we could do to improve their quality of life. It could be simple things like the entertainment we provide or the times of day they are washed and fed." This is the first time a severely brain damaged patient has ever been able to communicate anything about their medical state. Since his physical condition has not changed however -- he is still unresponsive by technical medical standards -- the medical position on vegetative states will have to be rewritten to include Owen's technique, said his neurologist of ten years, Bryan Young.
"I was impressed and amazed that he was able to show these cognitive responses. He had the clinical picture of a typical vegetative patient and showed no spontaneous movements that looked meaningful."
Steven Graham, another patient involved in the research, proved he had made new memories by responding to say "yes", when questioned if his sister had had a daughter -- Graham's sister gave birth five years after his injury.
Although Routley's responsiveness represents the first time a severely brain damaged patient has ever been able to comment on their own feelings, Owen has so far not gone so far as to ask patients involved if they have had thoughts of ending their lives. Being able to communicate changes in care would certainly present these individuals with a great improvement in their quality of life, but it is difficult to conceive what state of mind a person would be in after being unable to communicate -- despite having the mental faculties to understand -- for over a decade. Watching Routley's response to the question, "are you in pain?" in the BBC programme, however, it is evident how incredibly emotional the outcome is for everyone in involved -- so, similarly, we cannot know what it means to Routley to be able to express this, and to let his family know.
BBC's Panorma has been following Owen and his team, as well as patients at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in Putney, for more than a year as part of a programme airing 13 November at 10.35pm on BBC One, The Mind Reader: Unlocking My Voice.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/13/vegetative-man-communicates-with-mind