Showing posts with label electric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label electric. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Smart Meters, Electric Monopolies and The Quest To Go Analog
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Smart Meters, Electric Monopolies and The Quest To Go Analog
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Nissan lifts U.S. output of electric Leaf as sales rise
Nissan lifts U.S. output of electric Leaf as sales rise
http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20140114&t=2&i=829469881&w=580&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&r=CBREA0D1ID300
DETROIT
A Nissan Motor logo is seen at the company’s global headquarters in Yokohama, south of Tokyo April 7, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Issei Kato
DETROIT (Reuters) – Nissan Motor Co Ltd (7201.T) has lifted U.S. production of its all-electric Leaf by about 50 percent to 3,000 units a month to meet growing demand for the car, the head of the Japanese automaker’s North American operations said on Tuesday.
Jose Munoz said the Leaf logged record sales of 2,500 units in December and was now the best-selling car in some dealerships in Atlanta, where the government is helping promote the technology, outpacing the Altima sedan.
“This car somehow some years ago was not so appealing in terms of the business for the dealers,” Munoz told a group of reporters at the Detroit auto show. “Now the dealers are very positive, they are making business, they are selling cars.”
The pickup in sales was driven in large part by Nissan’s decision to cut its price by more than $ 6,000 to $ 29,650 at the beginning of last year after a shift in production of the model to the United States allowed it to lower manufacturing costs.
Demand for electric vehicles has generally failed to live up to expectations set when models like the Leaf and General Motors Co’s (GM.N) gasoline-electric hybrid Volt were being developed.
Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan and its French partner Renault SA (RENA.PA), recently pushed back by two to three years an initial target to sell a combined 1.5 million vehicles by March 2017.
While volumes are still at relatively low levels for a production car — sales more than doubled last year to above 22,000 in the U.S. market — Munoz said momentum was building.
One factor is the increase in charging stations in Atlanta and cities such as Seattle and San Francisco on the West Coast. There are currently 554 quick-charging stations, and more than 15,000 slower “level 2″ public charging stations across the U.S., Nissan estimates.
“In those areas where we have been able to work together with the government to develop the infrastructure is where we are seeing that the vehicle is really selling well,” Munoz said.
The Leaf’s customer base is also evolving. While at first most Leaf buyers were green enthusiasts, increasingly customers focused on the potential cost benefits of owning an electric car are showing up at its dealerships, Munoz said.
As a result, it has recently increased prices on some versions of the Leaf, Munoz said.
Nissan produces the Leaf at its Smyrna, Tennessee plant.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne; editing by Andrew Hay)
Read more about Nissan lifts U.S. output of electric Leaf as sales rise and other interesting subjects concerning Business at TheDailyNewsReport.com
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Bees learn the electric buzz of flowers
Floral electric fields could join color and fragrance as cues to pollinators
By Susan Milius
Web edition: February 21, 2013
Enlarge
ELECTRIC SIDE
On the right-hand halves of flowers, a dusting of electrically charged particles (color in adjacent rectangle) reveals natural patterns. Bees can sense at least simple patterns in floral electrical charges, new research says.
Credit: D. Clarke et al./Science 2013
Slight electric fields that form around flowers may lure pollinators much as floral colors and fragrances do.
In lab setups, bumblebees learned to distinguish fake flowers by their electrical fields, says sensory biologist Daniel Robert at the University of Bristol in England. Combining an electrical charge with a color helped the bees learn faster, Robert and his colleagues report online February 21 in Science.
Plants, a bit like lightning rods, tend to conduct electrical charges to the ground, Robert says. And bees pick up a positive charge from the atmosphere’s invisible rain of charged particles.
“Anything flying through the air, whether it’s a baseball, 767 jumbo jet, or a bee, acquires a strong positive electrostatic charge due to interaction with air molecules,” says Stephen Buchmann of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Robert and his colleagues checked whether bees could choose flowers based solely on the electric fields the plants produce. Purple metal disks (encased in plastic so as not to shock bees) stood in for flowers. Half of them, wired for 30 volts, held sips of sugar water. The unwired ones offered a bitter quinine solution that bees don’t like.
Enlarge
MODEL FLOWER
A computer model predicts the electric potential of a typical flower blooming 30 centimeters above the ground (left: dark blue, 0 volts; dark red, 35 volts) and its electric field (right; dark blue, 0 volts per meter; dark red 2,000 volts per meter).
Credit: D. Clarke et al./Science 2013
Bombus terrestris bumblebees learned to chose sweet, wired disks more than 80 percent of the time. When researchers unplugged the wired disks, the bees bumbled, scoring sugar only by chance.
“The big question is how bees do this,” says Lars Chittka of Queen Mary University of London. Bees bristle with hairs, and he speculates that a charged insect nearing an oppositely charged flower feels the hairs bend.
Electric charges of bees and flowers do interact, Robert confirmed after studying bees visiting real petunias. When a bee landed, and sometimes even before, flower stems registered an electrical surge that didn’t fade until after the bee had buzzed onward.
This surge in electric potential might tip off another passing bee that the flower had just lost nectar to a different visitor, a change that scent or color would not reveal. Roberts says, channeling a petunia: “I’m still pretty and smell nice, but my potential tells you to come back later.”
Variations within a flower’s electric field may even hold clues to where bees should probe for nectar, Robert speculates. Researchers found striking electrical patterns when they wafted positively charged colored aerosol particles over blooms.
“I am blown away,” said Anne Leonard of the University of Nevada, Reno. “I imagine that we’ll all be desperate to spray our flowers down with the aerosol they describe.”
Bumblebees can distinguish at least between simple electrical patterns, Robert says. They learned to fly to disks with a negatively charged bulls-eye ringed with a positive charge instead of to disks producing a uniform field.
Charge patterns can also reinforce other flower advertisements, the researchers found. Bees challenged to learn to distinguish two slightly different shades of green learned faster when researchers paired each shade with a distinctive electric charge.
In the real world, bees face a marketing barrage of combined scents, colors and other cues from flowers. “One open question in behavior is when are such cues used, and when are they ignored,” says Robert Raguso of Cornell University. Pollinators need to find their next meal before they run out of fuel, and if a cue such as humidity or electrical charge can let them make snap judgments to save resources, he predicts bees would pay attention.
Suggested Reading
A.S. Leonard and D.R. Papaj. ‘X’ marks the spot: The possible benefits of nectar guides to bees and plants. Functional Ecology. Vol. 25, 2011, p. 1293. doi: 10.1242/jeb.047407.
M. von Arx et al. Floral humidity as a reliable sensory cue for profitability assessment by nectar-foraging hawkmoths. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 109, June 12, 2012, p. 9471. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1121624109 [Go to]
R. Ehrenberg. Jiminy Cricket! Pollinator caught in the act. Science News Online. Posted Jan.18, 2010. [Go to]
S. Milius. Big study—Selective pollinators are declining. Science News. Vol. 170, July 22, 2006, p. 51. [Go to]
Bees learn the electric buzz of flowers
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