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Exciting news from the auto-world. General Motors has just awarded contracts to Compact Power and Continental Automotive Systems to create the battery systems for a new line of high-efficiency vehicles. One of those vehicles is the (potentially) awesome Chevy Volt that they announced earlier this year.

These two companies will be producing battery control systems, especially focusing on longevity and safety. GM hopes to get at least 10 years, the expected life of a car. They also are working on ways to measure battery cell charge, as overcharging sometimes causes batteries to fail. Even though it is early, GM is confident that they will have working batteries by June next year.

Every move GM makes puts the Chevy Volt closer to our hands. Hopefully the follow through will continue and we will finally see a sexy, mass produced Detroit car…with a plug sticking out the back.

Via AutoBlogGreen and GM Fastlane

From time to time we like crossing over to the wonderful world of two-wheels. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to stumble upon really weird creations like the 3wheeler Mercedes SLK or the Alfa bike you’re seeing here that attempt to mix characteristics from both worlds -cars and motorcycles. Not always with the same success apparently. While there’s no info on the heavily modified bike, it seems to be wearing a 4cylinder Alfa Romeo boxer motor combined with some parts that look to have come from a BMW motorcycle boxer engine. -More pictures after the jump

Via: Autoblog.it

This is exactly what we needed now; OPEC warning – threatening (take your pick) through its secretary-general, Abdalla El-Badri, that if the West continues to develop bio-fuels as an alternative energy source to combat climate change, the price of oil could go “through the roof” as the cartel’s members will start cutting investment in new oil production.

OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) which controls about 40 per cent of world oil production, plans to spend about $130bn until 2012 to raise oil output. Iraq production apart, the petrol cartel forecasts a capacity of 39.7m barrels of crude oil per day in 2010, up from today’s 35.7m b/d. El-Badri told FTP that OPEC also plans to invest another $500bn in production development during the period 2013 to 2020. However, always according to El-Badri, that could change depending on the biofuels outlook.

And to think that world production of biofuels were equal to a mere 1 per cent of all road transport fuel in 2005! To make a long story short, what those democratic and anthropocentric fellas at OPEC are telling is, stop trying to find alternative fuels or we’re going to shove a raise so deep up your rass that it’ll take your economies years to recover.

Source: FTP , Via: Edmunds Straightline

They pretty much have to, thanks to coal-state congressman Nick Rahall
(R-West Virginia) who, concerned that the occasional deadly intersection
between birds and wind turbines constitutes "a violation of the Migratory
Bird Act and the Endangered Species Act," and so is pushing legislation that
would seriously curtail the generation of wind energy in the United States.
(Never mind that Audubon Society president John Flicker has given the wind
industry his blessing, saying that while we can measure how many birds are
killed in wind turbines every year the number killed by coal-fired power plants
is almost impossible to count.)

In any case, having attended the American Wind Energy Association’s annual
conference this year, it seemed clear that the industry was taking the issue
seriously (despite the fact that house cats kill more birds each year than
wind turbines — a few hundred million more).

The first thing they did was
admit responsibility: when they built a wind farm in Northern California’s
Altamont Pass, says congressman and wind advocate Jerry McNerney, "we had no
idea that birds would fly into those windmills. We figured they could see
better than us!" To address the problem, AWEA president Randall Swisher has
pledged to create a "wind wildlife institute" which will study the impact of
wind technology on birds and bats, and work to find technological solutions
to the problem.

But there was evidence on WINDPOWER 2007’s exhibit floor
that such innovations were already taking place: several companies were
marketing new, extra-tall wind turbine towers that not only put rotor blades
above the flight path of most birds, but take better advantage of
high-altitude, higher-velocity windspeeds. Hopefully the industry won’t be
playing defense on these kinds of issues (or non-issues, as the case may be)
for much longer.

No…I’m serious. Gasoline is now so coveted in America, that folks are swapping one life-giving, all-powerful fluid for another. Yep, if you donate blood to the American Red Cross in Pennsylvania or New Jersey this summer, you’ll get a chance to win $3,500 in gas!

I guess it would be creepier if it were a direct swap (thanks for the blood, will that be regular or premium.) So I guess there’s nothing wrong with a little incentive..we’re all for blood donations. We just wish people didn’t want / need gasoline quite this bad.
Via AutoBlogGreen

Oh Google, how you amuse me. This isn’t much use in my tiny town, but for those big-city dwellers out there, your mass-transit life just got much easier. Just go to google.com/transit and type in your location and destination, and Google will tell you how to get to your location using mass transit. Google even works out walking times to bus stations and subway stops.

You’ll get a brief overview of your trip, along with cute little arrows indicating where you have to walk to. Plus, Google will tell you exactly how much your trip will cost you for bus / subway fairs, compare that with how much it would cost to drive your own car at current gas prices!

If that’s not cool enough, it’ll even give you several different routes to choose from, including what time you should leave your house to get to the bus-stop on time. MARVELOUS!

Now, if it was just available in more cities…we could really give Google a gold star.

Via AutoBlogGreen

Green skyscrapers offer so much for the average EcoGeek to drool over. Each one can contain hundreds of innovations that make the world a cleaner place, they build up, rather than out, and many of them are frikkin gorgeous.

Lucky for us, more and more eco-towers are popping up all the time. In fact, a symposium about greenscrapers called Mixed Greens: An International Survey of State-of-the-Art Sustainable Skyscraper Design just wrapped up last month in NYC.

Lucky for us, Jon Schroeder is on the case, and is bringing us the top ten green skyscrapers.

The majority of wasted energy in the world is wasted as heat. In your car engine, in your macbook, your fluorescent light bulbs, your computer’s power supply. Heat leaks from electrical and mechanical devices and there is no way to stop it.

Or is there. We at EcoGeek have already reported on Petier devices, which extract electricity from hot surfaces. Unfortunately they’re currently either too inefficient or too expensive to be practical.

But Oresk Symko, a physicist at the University of Utah has created a heat-to-electricity device that operates on a completely different principle. By converting the heat to sound waves, and then the sound waves to electricity using piezoelectric substances, Symko says that he can convert heat to electricity very efficiently.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t tell us how efficiently, at least, not anywhere I could find. However, I do know that piezo-electric materials are very expensive, so I worry about the cost-effectiveness of the project.

But, if he can make it work, and cheaply, then his devices will likely be showing up everywhere from solar arrays to electric vehicle batteries.

Hat tip to David.  Via LiveScience