alternative fuel

Last Updated: March 04, 2024, 17:11 ISTTata Motors Rolls Out Next-Gen Green Fleet for Tata Steel. (Photo: Tata Motors)Tata Motors has supplied over 2,000 electric buses across various Indian cities, covering more than 12 crore kilometers with an impressive uptime of over 95%Tata Motors, the largest maker of commercial vehicles in India, launched its latest environmentally friendly fleet for Tata Steel.The new vehicles, including Prima tractors, tippers, and the Ultra EV bus, run on clean fuels like Liquefied Natural Gas…

But figuring out what to do with a ship’s reactor is far from the only hurdle. People need to be convinced of the safety of nuclear energy and technology, says Alves de Andrade. Despite excellent safety records at many nuclear sites around the world, public perceptions remain understandably dominated by the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, as well as by concerns around what to do with radioactive waste.And while there are lots of nuclear reactors operating at sea right now, they tend to be on vessels with some of the…

There are limitations, such as choke points like the Suez and Panama canals: “Neither of them allows vessels to operate under sail. The Panama Canal also has a bridge over it, with a height limitation of around 50 meters,” De Beukelaer says. And of course, not all ships adapt well to sails. Container ships, for example, have little space on deck to mount them, in contrast to car carriers or bulk carriers, which tuck away their load in the cargo hold—leaving plenty of available surface—and don’t require cranes for…

If you live in the US, the stuff you buy—that new dining room table, bag of rice, or pair of pants heading to your home right now—may experience the all-electric future of global transportation before you do.Tens of millions of tons of goods move through California’s ports each year, proceeding from ship to port and beyond on hulking semitrucks. Forty percent of the nation’s containerized imports move through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach alone, vital links in a global chain of commerce connecting factories all…

But perhaps hydrogen’s greatest potential lies in its ability to store energy for rainy days. While fossil fuels are stores of energy from prehistoric sunlight, hydrogen can be used to store the solar energy of the previous 12 hours. “You need green hydrogen to continue to increase the amount of renewable power,” says Mowill. Once an electricity grid gets to a critical mass of renewable inputs from sources such as wind and solar, something has to step in to stabilize and smooth out those peaks and troughs of supply and…

Automakers have made plenty of promises about electric vehicles. General Motors, Ford, and Volvo—some of the more ambitious—have pledged to sell only zero-emission cars by at least 2035. That’s quite a commitment, as only 14 percent of new cars sold globally last year were electric, with the share in the US being half that.But a new proposal released by the US Environmental Protection Agency today threatens to hold automakers to their electric big talk—and to up the ante. The agency suggested tighter emissions standards…

“It’s not a question I get very often,” says Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies, when asked about the economics of his company’s tokamak design. People are more likely to query how he plans to get plasma in his reactor heated to 1 billion degrees Celsius, up from the 75 million the company has demonstrated so far. But the questions are intertwined, he says.That extreme temperature is required because TAE uses boron as fuel, alongside hydrogen, which Binderbauer thinks will ultimately simplify the fusion reactor…

More than is typical even for technology entrepreneurs, Neha Palmer is in the business of predicting the future. TeraWatt Infrastructure, a startup unicorn based in San Francisco, is a bet on the idea that some future day, companies from taxicab operators to e-retailers will have large fleets of electric trucks, cars, and vans—and need somewhere to charge them. Palmer's strategy is to figure out where to start building chargers now, a process that can take years, to serve that future demand. That there will be plenty of…

Juneau gets most of its electricity from lakes that offer a clean hydropower resource. This means that it is particularly ecofriendly to install electrified heating systems in the city.But, to be fair, Juneau lies at the warmer end of the state and doesn’t tend to experience the same blisteringly cold winter weather that can afflict places farther north like Anchorage or Fairbanks, where using heat pumps could be less cost-effective.In the village of Eklutna, not far from Anchorage, electrician Derek Lampert has found a…

Electric vehicles have never been more popular. Just about every automaker is in the midst of an electrification effort, spurred on by impending government regulations around the world aimed at reducing our dependency on fossil fuels. But is the movement having an effect? Here in the US, plug-in vehicles are selling better than ever, despite supply chain shortages and frequent hefty dealership markups.According to Argonne National Lab, between 2010 and the end of 2021, more than 2.1 million plug-in vehicles were sold in…