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In an event flanked with all the electric cars that have recently come to market, and a handful of those that are poised for sale later this year, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa flipped the switch May 13 on the 500th electric-vehicle charging station installed by Coulomb Technologies as part of its ChargePoint America network.

While an upcoming Electric Vehicle Grand Prix may reflect a growing popularity of electric vehicles, their widespread adoption will require innovations to the power grid, say researchers at Purdue University.

Following months of preliminary work on computer simulations, the first completed prototype of the new electric concept car from Technische Universitaet Muenchen showed in its first driving tests that it possesses excellent driving properties -- not only in theory, but also in practice. Technische Universitaet Muenchen will be presenting its new electric vehicle concept "MUTE" at the international motor show in Frankfurt from Sept. 15-25, 2011.

UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.   The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current

Researchers are testing different ways of improving rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles and nanotechnology plays an important role in the development. The aim is to offer batteries that have fast charge and discharge rates as well as high stored energy per mass. This can make electric vehicles a competitive alternative to petrol-powered vehicles.

A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make "refueling" such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car.

Electric cars are an excellent choice for everyday use, in particular for daily trips in the city. This conclusion is the result of user analyses in two projects in which Siemens plays a decisive role: the internal 4-Sustainelectromobility (4-S) project involving 20 moveE cars and the external "Electromobility Model RegionMunich - Drive eCharged" project involving 40 BMW MINI E cars. The latter is a joint project with BMW Group and Stadtwerke München, Munich's municipal utility.

It has all the appearances of a breakthrough in battery technology, except that it's not a battery. Researchers at Nanotek Instruments, Inc., and its subsidiary Angstron Materials, Inc., in Dayton, Ohio, have developed a new paradigm for designing energy storage devices that is based on rapidly shuttling large numbers of lithium ions between electrodes with massive graphene surfaces. The energy storage device could prove extremely useful for electric vehicles, where it could reduce the recharge time from hours to less than a minute. Other applications could include renewable energy storage (for example, storing solar and wind energy) and smart grids.

After six years of intensive effort, scientists are reporting development of the first commercially viable nanogenerator, a flexible chip that can use body movements - a finger pinch now en route to a pulse beat in the future - to generate electricity. Speaking here today at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, they described boosting the device's power output by thousands times and its voltage by 150 times to finally move it out of the lab and toward everyday life.

Researchers in America have shown that ozone -- a known pollutant at low levels in the earth's atmosphere, causing harmful effects on the respiratory system and sensitive plants -- can be reduced, on average, when electric vehicle charging is done at night time.

The punishment your car endures on a cold winter commute pales in comparison to the veritable torture that researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are inflicting on two electric utility research vehicles - all in the name of science. 

EADS is looking to release an entirely electricity powered plane by the year 2035. The plane, which has been dubbed the VoltAir, was shown off at the Paris Air Show, which took place last week. The Paris Air Show is one of the largest aviation shows in the world.

In a bit of technical wizardry, students from the University of Adelaide, Australia, have devised and built an electric diwheel, that with modification, could possibly solve inner city transportation problems. The team, comprised of 14 mechanical engineering students, has taken the idea of a diwheel and quite literally, turned it on its head, and in the process have created a vehicle that could be used to safely transport people around; all with a minimum amount of energy.

A curtain of flame halts firefighters trying to rescue a family inside a burning home. One with a special backpack steps to the front, points a wand at the flame, and shoots a beam of electricity that opens a path through the flame for the others to pass and lead the family to safety.

High-performance nanotech materials arrayed on a flat panel platform demonstrated seven to eight times higher efficiency than previous solar thermoelectric generators, opening up solar-thermal electric power conversion to a broad range of residential and industrial uses, a team of researchers from Boston College and MIT report in the journal Nature Materials.

Technology for making an "artificial leaf" holds the potential for opening an era of "fast-food energy," in which people generate their own electricity at home with low-cost equipment perfect for the 3 billion people living in developing countries and even home-owners in the United States. That's among the prospects emerging from research on a new genre of "electrofuels" described in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, the American Chemical Society's weekly newsmagazine.

Approximately 75 percent of electricity used in the United States is produced by coal-burning power plants that spew carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. To reduce this effect, many researchers are searching for porous materials to filter out the CO2 generated by these plants before it reaches the atmosphere, a process commonly known as carbon capture. But identifying these materials is easier said than done

Natural gas is important in many sectors of the economy: for generating electricity, as a heat source for industry and buildings, and in chemical feedstock. Given the abundance of natural gas available through large global resources and the recent emergence of substantial unconventional supplies in the United States, worldwide usage of the fuel is likely to continue to grow considerably and contribute to significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come, according to a comprehensive, multidisciplinary study carried out over the last three years by MIT researchers.

While roofs across the world sport photovoltaic solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity, a Duke University engineer believes a novel hybrid system can wring even more useful energy out of the sun's rays.

Japan relies on nuclear power for about 30% of its electricity. It has few natural resources and imports large quantities of coal, gas and oil at an ever increasing cost. Some Japanese people are not in favor of nuclear power, but when the dust settles the nation might not have any real choice, writes Professor George Dracoulis.