Personal Electric Mobility ~ Market Size & Share

Very interesting to see adoption of personal electric vehicles in Europe and Asia. Curious how much of the advantages are State subsidy and tax relief? Norway, for example, offers substantial tax benefits, the right to drive in carpool lanes solo, and free charging, which kind of distorts market action. Also, China has endless ways of State subsidies for both personal and mass transit electrification. Which all may make environmental sense. In any case, here's share and size info from Statista...

Power Barges ~ Flexible Floating Infrastructure

Thanks to gCaptain for spotting an improved Power Barge system...

"A new modular medium speed engine power barge design [...] This radiator-cooled modular power barge design permits the same hull to be utilized with a range of power outputs from 80 MW to 180 MW. [...] The new design is presently being modified for dual fuel and natural gas operations to suit combined operations with LNG […] and combined cycle systems for specific market opportunities."

Power barges are the fastest way to ramp up electricity (and cogen + water desal) infrastructure in coastal or navigable river areas. By floating in and being modular, they can be incrementally added to (with more barges) or floated out and moved to new or better location (and/or refurbished). See also my previous posts on this topic!

Powering US ~ Electricity Generation Sources...

WashPo shares Map of how the US generates electricity...

RocketSkates ~ Smart Wearable Electric Mobility!

RocketSkates, Kickin' the World's First Smart Wearable Mobility! Thanks to Paul at GeekPress for spotting!

Onewheel ~ Self-Balancing Electric Skateboard

Check out Onewheel, the Self-Balancing Electric Skateboard...

Faraday ~ Working-Class Scientist-Inventor!

One of my favorite Barron's columns is The Long View by historian and author John Steele Gordon. This week he spotlights Michael Faraday: Working-Class Hero...

"Faraday would be the first great man of science to have a working-class background. Because the family had little money, Faraday received only the most rudimentary formal education. Indeed, he never mastered mathematics beyond simple algebra, an astonishing fact for someone who would become one of the world's greatest physicists. But if he had little formal education, he was a voracious autodidact. [The Danish scientist] Ørsted discovered that an electric current running through a wire induces a magnetic field around the wire. This was the first indication that electricity and magnetism, long thought to be completely different forces, must have a connection. [To explore this, Faraday] hung a copper wire, able to rotate freely, from a metal support. The wire reached into a vessel below containing a magnet in a pool of mercury. When he attached a battery to the support, the copper wire began to rotate around the magnet, following the lines of the magnetic field (a term Faraday coined) in the mercury. Faraday had converted electrical energy into mechanical, work-doing energy. In other words, he had invented an electric motor [...] One of the attributes of great scientists is a knack for asking the right question. And Faraday wondered, since an electric current could induce a magnetic field, whether a magnetic field could induce an electric current. [...] in 1829, Faraday found the answer to his question. He wrapped two copper coils on opposite sides of an iron ring. He found that when he attached a battery to one coil, there was a momentary electric current generated in the other coil. And when he disconnected the battery, there was a second momentary current. He soon found that it was changes in the magnetic field that induced the current. By simply keeping the magnetic field in continuous motion, he was able to generate a steady current. Faraday had invented the generator, a device that turns mechanical energy into electrical energy -- the opposite of the electric motor. It was the means of providing a bottomless supply of electric power, and the modern world could be born."

Truly one of the heroes of progress and civilization! See more in this Great Moments in Science and Technology video...

Carrington-class CME ~ Near-Miss Solar Storm...

A Carrington-class CME -- Coronal Mass Ejection or plasma burst -- narrowly missed Earth two years ago reports the Guardian's Maev Kennedy...

"The date of 23 July 2012 could have been the day the lights went out, along with suddenly not-so-smart phones, computers, satellite transmissions, GPS navigation systems, televisions, radio broadcasts, hospital equipment, electric pumps and water supplies. On that day an "extreme solar storm" did its best to end life on Earth as we know it. The sun forced out one of the biggest plasma clouds ever detected at a speed of 3,000km per second, more than four times faster than a typical solar eruption. Fortunately it missed. "If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," said Daniel Baker, of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado."

Here's NASA's ScienceCast

Sexy Sustainability ~ Sandra Richter @ TEDxU...

MIT Media Lab colleague Sandra Richter on Sexy Sustainability and our urban future at TEDxUtrecht, my favorite Dutch city!-)

Electrostatic Discharge ~ An Instructional Video;-)

Thanks to MissC for spotting Don't Worry, it's Just ESD!

Rimac Concept One ~ Croatian Electric Supercar

Nice wheels! CNN spots Rimac Concept One...