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Category: sustainability – Page 291

Fred Closter doesn’t like Florida Power & Light.

When the Boynton Beach retiree spent $24,000 to install on the roof of his Boynton Beach home a year ago, he decided not to rely on the utility to power his home when the panels weren’t generating electricity at night and when it rains.

So he dropped another $16,000 on two large lithium ion batteries made by Tesla that can power the home for up to a day and a half if his panels aren’t producing. If a hurricane or other severe storm with the potential to create power outages approaches, the Closters’ solar provider, SunPower, will remotely direct the system to charge their batteries so their power won’t be interrupted.

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Mobileye is an an Israeli subsidiary of chipmaker Intel (who knew?) that develops self-driving cars and advanced driver-assistance systems. This week at CES the company announced a new chip called EyeQ Ultra, part of its system-on-a-chip line, saying the chip will be able to do 176 trillion operations per second and is purpose-built for autonomous driving.

Geely, meanwhile, is a carmaker based in Hangzhou, China. Founded in 1997, the company’s full name is Zhejiang Geely Holding Group; they’re the largest private automaker in China, and reportedly sold over 1.3 million cars in 2020. Among Geely’s holdings is Swedish carmaker Volvo, as well as an electric vehicle brand called Zeekr that was launched in March of 2021.

The new self-driving car will be a collaboration between Geely and Mobileye, and will be produced under the Zeekr brand. To be clear, the car still won’t quite approach the put-your-feet-up driverless vision. There are five levels of automation in driving, with Level 5 being full autonomy, in which the vehicle can drive itself anywhere (around cities, on highways, on rural roads, etc.) in any conditions (rain, sun, fog, etc.) without human intervention. The Zeekr car will supposedly be Level 4, which means it will be able to operate without a safety driver under certain conditions (namely, good weather), and will still have a steering wheel.

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What is a smart factory? It is a shop floor that adopts smart manufacturing, manufacturing that uses technologies and solutions—like AI and IoT—arising from Industry 4.0 to optimize the production process…

Industrial revolutions then, and now

To fully grasp what smart factory is and where it’s headed, we must first understand the history of manufacturing.

It all began with the First Industrial Revolution, which introduced machines to factories and farms in the mid-18th century. In the past 250 or so years, manufacturing has evolved from handwork to machines like the spinning jenny, from the rise of machines to automobiles which were first introduced to the general public by Henry Ford in 1908, and from new inventions to digital technologies that made semiconductors, computers and the Internet possible.

Continue reading “Smart Factory: What It Is and the Vital Solutions You Need to Build One” | >

Airships might seem like a technology from a bygone era, but a startup says their new design could become a crucial cog in the green hydrogen supply chain.

While transitioning away from fossil fuels will prove crucial in our efforts to combat climate change, it’s easier said than done for some industries. While road and rail transport are rapidly electrifying, in aviation, batteries are a long way from being able to provide the weight-to-power ratio required for aviation. And even the largest batteries are still not big enough to power a container ship on long-distance crossings.

Hydrogen is increasingly being seen as a promising alternative for these hard to decarbonize sectors. It has a higher energy density than natural gas and can either be burned in internal combustion engines or combined with oxygen in a fuel cell to create electricity.

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Whether you live in an apartment downtown or in a detached house in the suburbs, if your mailbox is not built into your home you’ll have to go outside to see if anything’s there. But how do you prevent that dreadful feeling of disappointment when you find your mailbox empty? Well, we’re living in 2022, so today your mailbox is just another Thing to connect to the Internet of Things. And that’s exactly what [fhuable] did when he made a solar powered IoT mailbox.

The basic idea was to equip a mailbox with a camera and have it send over pictures of its contents. An ESP32-Cam module could do just that: with a 1,600 × 1,200 camera sensor, a 160 MHz CPU and an integrated WiFi adapter, [fhuable] just needed to write an Arduino sketch to have it take a picture every few hours and upload it to an FTP server.

But since running a long cable all the way from the house was not an attractive option, the whole module had to be completely wireless. [fhuable] decided to power it using a single 18,650 lithium ion cell, which gets topped up continuously thanks to a 1.5 W solar panel mounted on the roof of the mailbox. The other parts are housed in a 3D-printed enclosure that’s completely sealed to keep out moisture.

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A new report claims that Tesla is starting work on building a new factory adjacent to Gigafactory Shanghai in order to double production capacity to two million cars annually.

Tesla currently operates two main factories, Tesla Fremont and Gigafactory Shanghai, and it has Gigafactory Texas and Gigafactory Berlin slowly starting to ramp up production.

Those four projects alone should push Tesla’s production capacity beyond three million vehicles annually by the end of next year, but the automaker has much greater ambitions for this decade that will require several more factories. The company recently confirmed that it plans to announce a new location for a factory by the end of this year.

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Fully organic rechargeable household batteries are an ideal alternative to traditional metal-based batteries, in particular for reducing pollution to landfill and the environment.

Now researchers at Flinders University, with Australian and Chinese collaborators, are developing an all-organic polymer battery that can deliver a cell voltage of 2.8V—a big leap in improving the energy storage capability of organic batteries.

“While starting with small household batteries, we already know organic redox-active materials are typical electroactive alternatives due to their inherently safe, lightweight and structure-tunable features and, most importantly, their sustainable and environmentally friendly,” says senior lecturer in chemistry Dr. Zhongfan Jia, a research leader at Flinders University’s Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

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