Tesla rather famously has chosen not to use LIDAR as one of the sensors on its cars to assist with its autonomous features, at least so far. Google uses LIDAR as one of its dominant sensors and insists it’s necessary. With the recent fatality in a Tesla that was operating under Autopilot, Tesla’s choice is under attack. Assessing … [continued]
Tesla reps have publicly stated that the company expects fully autonomous driving to be only ~2 years off, but how close the company actually is to achieving this goal/expectation is something of an unknown. With that thought in mind, it seems worth discussing here a post that I saw on the … [continued]
RenewEconomy Last year, in an interview with Stanford University’s Tony Seba, we foreshadowed the remarkable conclusions of his new book: that energy and transportation as we know it will be history by 2030. That book, the Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation, is now published, and it has even more dramatic prognosis: Silicon Valley … [continued]
Originally published on Energy & Policy Institute. Today the very big technical news for me is dual-doppler meteorology radar applied to create very high precision wind maps of operational wind farms. Brian Hirth of the Texas Tech University and his team have applied technology typically used for high-accuracy real time imaging … [continued]
Originally published on Energy & Policy Institute. Las Vegas isn’t exactly a familiar haunt for me, but I’ve been here several times for conferences (and one wedding). I had seen the wine angel in the Mandalay Bay floating up in her harness beside the several story wine cellar a few … [continued]
Let’s say you’re out on your weekly grocery run when your car peers around a pile of rubble in the road, spots a crowd of zombies, and threads you into a quick u-turn without slamming into the cars coming up behind you. Yes, when the zombie apocalypse is finally upon … [continued]
Fasten your seat belts because yesterday Ford Motor Company officially rolled out its Fusion hybrid automated research vehicle featuring a rooftop LiDAR system that sees and maps the world in real time 3-D, including people and other bodies in motion. Remember that cool scene in Predator when you finally got … [continued]
Intermittency may be the Achilles Heel of solar energy. Since the Sun doesn’t always shine and utility-scale energy storage isn’t available yet, grid operators have to rely on dispatchable generation like natural gas or when clouds cover up solar farms. But that may be about to change in a big way…
Wind power has great potential as a form of renewable energy, but in order to really efficiently produce it, turbines need to be optimally positioned and dimensioned. A newly designed 200-meter high wind measuring mast that delivers precise data will be able to help with that, by very accurately forecasting energy yields […]
Europe’s UpWind project is delivering on its promise of developing a 20 MW (megawatt) wind turbine, using only current technology and materials. The largest wind turbines in use today are only about
