Edwin Black The Truth About Our Oil Addiction Part 1

Uploaded by Mindsi2 on Jan 1, 2012

In this hour long speech at Binghamton University author/journalist Edwin Black gives us an insight into the 65,000 year history of petroleum development. With a close look at the last hundred years with the growth and development of the oil monopoly. He gives the fascinating story about Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s attempt to develop an electric model T. And explains how General Motors illegally conspired to destroy the electric trolleys. He also discusses various existing alternatives to the internal combustion engine.

 

How electric cars could become a giant battery for renewable energy

A renewable energy revolution is going on around us. While politicians hide their heads in the sand and debate the existence of global warming while protecting the status quo change is occurring and a new reality is growing.

Dave Levitan for Yale Environment 360, guardian.co.uk, Friday 15 October 2010 12.20 BST

“The United States now has more than 35GW of installed wind energy, enough to power close to 10 million homes. Close on the heels of this ongoing renewable energy revolution is another green technology: By next year tens of thousands of Nissan LEAFs, Chevy Volts, and other electric vehicles will start rolling off assembly lines.

The electricity generation and transportation sectors may seem like two disparate pieces of a puzzle, but in fact they may end up being intimately related. The connection comes in the form of the vehicle-to-grid concept, in which a large electric vehicle (EV) fleet — essentially a group of rechargeable batteries that spend most of their time sitting in driveways and garages — might be used to store excess power when demand is low and feed it back to the grid when demand is high. Utilities and electricity wholesalers would pay the EV owners for providing that power.

Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, is not a new idea. In fact, it’s been floating around environmental and green tech circles for a decade at least. But it has always had the tough-to-shed image of a utopian technology. Now, though, V2G — as well as simpler schemes based on smart-timed charging of the vehicles — is slowly becoming reality, evolving in quiet synergy with the worldwide push for renewable energy.”

Read the rest of the article from the Guardian UK here.