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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

My first stop on my trip north (San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver) last week was to EV start-up Saba Motors. I had met CEO Simon Saba a few weeks earlier when he approached me after the talk I gave at the EV Summit in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

I knew Simon had something interesting to offer the world when he handed me a brick of a substance that was perfectly rigid, but so close to weightless it was eerie. “Wow,” I said, “What is this?”

“Check this out,” he smiled, deliberately ignoring my question, as he built a small bridge out of the bricks, and proceeded to jump up and down on it. “Do you notice that my weight, about 170 pounds, hardly deforms the bridge?”

Simon showed me a sheet of this stuff that weighs 0.2 grams per square centimeter; it’s ridiculously light, yet  super-strong.  Of course, the implications for electric transportation are obvious, since every hundred pounds removed from a design means significantly better range, and Saba Motors is poised to take advantage of it; at 1750 pounds, their sports car will perform like a little rocket.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

What’s this image, you ask?  (Click on it view larger image.) It’s a screenshot from Amazon.com, showing that Renewable Energy — Facts and Fantasies had quickly risen to #1 in the “energy” category — thanks to you.  (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

One of the lessons we learn as we go through life is how much tougher things actually are than they initially appear.  I was a reasonably athletic person as a young man, and I thought surfing might come easy.  Wrong.  Designing electric transportation might be an example of a subject that would certainly be a piece of cake.  What’s so hard?  You have a battery pack and an electric motor.  It has one moving part. Well…., no.

As you check out this electric bicycle, the Pi Cycle by Pi Mobility, think about a few of the design ideas that went into it.  While you’re doing that, think about all the ways this could be done wrong; i.e., the thousands of different ways that E-bikes can be made too heavy, too expensive, uncomfortable, dorky-looking, prone to failure, requiring constant upkeep, hard or pricey to repair, requiring hard-to-source parts, easy for thieves to disassemble and steal, quick to discharge, slow to charge, dangerous, dirty, counter-intuitive, or unergonomic.

That’s the beauty of the Pi-Cycle.  Nothing’s wrong!  It’s the perfect design.  When I met these folks at this year’s Clean Business Investment Summit, I knew I had a winner on my hands.  And when I had lunch with CEO Marcus Hays at his factory in Sausilito (Northern California) last week, I knew I was in the presence of one of the true greats in this exciting niche space.  He’s been hard at work creating the perfect e-bike design for over a decade.  And it shows.

 

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Solar Thermal

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ZbWSSBoIE]
Here’s a few minutes of video on a business plan I really love. It’s a breakthrough in concentrated solar power, or CSP, aka solar thermal energy, made by a guy I’ve met and come to know and trust. And I like the “walk before you run” approach; the plan contemplates the development of two small (1 – 2 megawatt) pilot plants, using this breakthrough technology.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5Q1ZxQw-AQ&w=500&h=405]I was pleased to have EMCycle CEO Michael Scholey on the 2GreenEnergy Report recently discussing electric bicycles with me. I believe that he’ll have considerable success with his own unique product in this exciting market space, and I thought he did a fantastic job of presenting it here.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Are you developing a new technology?

Preparing to launch a new business model?

Looking for ways to expand your market reach?

Here’s an idea that might help, articulated in this video, and in the text beneath. 

(more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

In many respects, the Pacific Northwest isn’t like the rest of the US. The good people of Seattle, for instance, have a great deal of attention on “living green,” but they’re certainly not uptight about it. The whole region carries with it a light-hearted atmosphere that one might expect to find in New Orleans.

Check out Seattle’s Bang Office Interiors. It’s an entire floor of the greenest possible concepts in the design of the modern workspace.  But wait a second. What’s that gorgeous room in the northeastern corner, occupying about 500 square feet? It’s a bar. And I’m talking about a complete set of bottled and draft beers, an assortment of fine wines, and the ingredients to make the complete repertoire of drinks.

It’s clear that the company’s president, Chad Smed, enjoys his time here on Earth. Bless his heart.  But he also knows a ton about his subject, including the complete lifecycle analysis on a frighteningly large number of the products in his showroom.

I asked him about bamboo, thinking I’d get the normal rave reviews from a sustainability perspective. “Sure, it’s a weed; there’s very little ecological cost to harvesting it, but unfortunately, there’s more to it than that. It’s doesn’t take stain well, it mars easily, and it’s extremely hard to work with, since it keeps growing after it’s cut. And that extra work is expensive – both literally and ecologically.”

“So where should we go with this,” I asked?

“What we need is kind of like the ’tilapia of building products’ — easy to farm raise, low-impact on the environment.”

Chad’s a man of metaphors, and in this case, a pretty good one, I’d say.  Cheers!

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Energy Storage

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44EaTcV_-4o]

Here’s an interview with Steve Hellman, president of Eos Energy Storage, in which Steve claims that zinc-air batteries can finally provide a low-cost answer for utilities and electric vehicle manufacturers. But is it true? We’ve certainly seen stories about zinc-air before. I’ll let you come to your own conclusion.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXd-xk-rCRU&w=445&h=364]

Do you have a clean energy story that you’d like to tell the world?

One day each month, I shoot a series of short television shows called the “2GreenEnergy Video Report” in which I interview folks with interesting stories to tell at a television studio. The shows air throughout the month on a local channel here in Southern California — but, perhaps more important, we host the videos on YouTube and this website where they get some really good, longer-term exposure.

If you’re interested in being a part of this process, please check out the sample below, and let me know if you’d like to participate. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Pesin of the local power utility up here in Northwestern Washington State: Seattle City Light, at the launch of my client EV4’s new product, the “Energy Transfer Merchant.”  I thought this conversation was a good opportunity to straighten out an issue that’s been bugging me: are electric vehicles really green?  In the final analysis, are they charged largely with coal?  Even here in the Pacific Northwest, with their abundance of clean (hydroelectric) power, won’t electric vehicles mean less clean power that can be sold  to places whose electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels?

Here’s what Pesin told me:

We’re under mandate to have 15% of our electricity coming from renewables – not hydro, but solar and wind — by 2020.  We’ll meet that goal, and we’d like to go beyond it.  But without electric vehicles – or other ways of taking significant amounts of energy off the grid at opportune moments, e.g., wind energy at night, it simply can’t be done.  EVs make it possible for us to deploy renewable energy.

Fairly clear, I think.

 

 

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