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Because you are buying now two appliances, a water heater and air conditioner, “heat pump heaters are twice as expensive” as the old electric water heater If you ask an engineer, he will tell you that CO2 is not a pollutant, and burning fossil fuels has made the Earth greener because their emissions are rapidly assimilated by sunlight. As Dr. Klaus Kaiser had explained, “incomplete combustion can cause air quality problems, not because of CO2 but due to soot particles and nitrogen oxides,” particularly in high density urban areas where the air tends to be stagnant. There is a reason...

Audi is to unveil an electric car to rival Tesla’s forthcoming Model X that the German marque says is capable of traveling at least 310 miles on battery power alone. The Volkswagen-owned carmaker will display the concept, a sport utility vehicle provisionally called the e-tron quattro, at next month’s Frankfurt motor show and plans to put it into production in 2018 as its first mainstream electric car. High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email...

The coal industry is facing its toughest challenge since The Great Depression of 1929. The collapse in coal prices and a growing weight from new regulations has claimed dozens of firms. In just recent months, three major coal producers have filed for bankruptcy. Alpha Natural Resources operates more than fifty underground and surface mines in five states. It is the nation’s largest producer of the type of coal used in steel production. In 2011, Alpha Natural Resources was worth $11 billion in stock value. The firm is now worth less than $7 million. Peabody Energy Corporation, is the largest private-sector...

(Photo: Victory Motorcycles, website) A Minnesota company appears to have beaten Harley-Davidson to the punch by unveiling its first electric street motorcycle. Medina-based Polaris Industries, makers of Indian and Victory motorcycles, has this week revealed its “Empulse TT” high-performance sport bike, which runs without gas and has a top speed of 110mph. The Pioneer Press reports that with the Empulse appearing in Victory dealerships by the end of the year, Polaris has secured a key advantage over competitors Harley, whose Project LiveWire motorcycle won’t be brought to market until battery technology has improved enough to allow for longer driving distances....

Watch #VictoryRacing compete at the infamous Isle of Man TT Zero. Lee Johnston piloted the way to claim the first podium for Victory in 2015.

Communities outside the Denver-metro area are peeved that Gov. John Hickenlooper’s latest appointment to the Colorado Supreme Court wasn’t someone who lives outside the state’s capital city. ... We have seven Supreme Court justices and not even one from outside the governor’s adoptive hometown, where professional cliques decide what’s best for the rest of the state. This isn’t the first time Hick has been slammed for ignoring constituents who live outside Denver. A few years ago, he was accused of launching a war on rural Colorado by passing stricter gun laws and a renewable energy mandate that unfairly targeted rural...

The experimental aircraft, which has a wingspan bigger than a jumbo but weighs little more than a large car, left Nanjing at 02:39 (18:39 GMT). It is likely to take Mr Borschberg five to six days of continuous flight to reach his central Pacific destination. He will try to stay awake for much of that time, taking only short catnaps. His progress will be monitored the entire way from a control room in Monaco. Meteorologists and flight strategists will constantly update him on the best route to follow.

Tesla has just introduced a new entry level car, but before you fire up your laptop to order one, you should know it's even more expensive than Tesla's current starter vehicle. The car it announced on Wednesday is called the Tesla Model S 70D and it'll start at $75,000, although buyers are eligible for a federal tax credit that brings the price down to $67,500. The Model S starts at $70,000.

Though initially heralded by Elon Musk as Tesla’s biggest potential market after the United States, China is shaping up to be an enormous blind spot for the electric car maker. Tesla sold just 120 cars in China last month, according to Reuters -- a dismal figure that has Musk seeing red. He allegedly blasted out an email to managers in China in January threatening to fire and demote executives who were “not on a clear path to positive long-term cash flow.” And so it is. Today, June Jin, Tesla’s vice president of communications in China, has left the company, Bloomberg...

KANSAS CITY, Mo., Jan 26, 2015 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Today, at a kickoff event at its headquarters, Kansas City Power & Light Company (KCP&L), a subsidiary of Great Plains Energy Incorporated GXP, +0.37% announced its plans to install and operate more than 1,000 electric vehicle charging stations, making it the largest electric vehicle charging station installation by an electric utility in the United States. KCP&L’s Clean Charge Network is the next step in the company’s leadership in environmental sustainability. Over the next several months, KCP&L will install more than 1,000 charging stations throughout the Greater Kansas City region. This network...

The CEO for Fiat Chrysler (remember how an Italian company helped save Detroit?) is begging Americans to kill more polar bears, pollute the air, and continue to melt the polar ice caps… Or something. There’s also an outside chance that he’s just being a responsible CEO by trying to keep his company out of bankruptcy. Whatever the reason, Sergio Marchionne is asking consumers to steer clear of the company’s all electric Fiat.Under the direction of Marchionne, Fiat Chrysler is apparently taking a new approach to keeping the company solvent: Sell cars that people actually want to buy. And he is...

<p>ISIS terrorists pose an “imminent” threat to the U.S. electric grid with the capacity to coordinate a devastating assault on our nation’s infrastructure, warned a leading homeland security and terrorism expert in a radio interview Sunday.</p> <p>Dr. Peter Pry, a former CIA officer, is executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards. He also served on the Congressional EMP Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, and the House Armed Services Committee.</p>

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked the IEC not to risk the lives of its employees in trying to restore power. Seventy thousand Gazans from Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah were in the dark Sunday night after a Hamas rocket hit the power line that supplies electricity to those places. It's not clear when Israel Electric Company workers will be able to repair the system, but they are apparently in no rush to do so. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked the IEC not to risk the lives of its employees in trying to restore power to the affected sector...

Seventy thousand Gazans from Khan Younis and Deir el-Balah were in the dark Sunday night after a Hamas rocket hit the power line that supplies electricity to those places. It's not clear when Israel Electric Company workers will be able to repair the system, but they are apparently in no rush to do so. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has asked the IEC not to risk the lives of its employees in trying to restore power to the affected sector in Gaza, an operation that could take hours. As Operation Protective Edge enters its seventh day, many Israelis are demanding that...

Darwin's 'Special Difficulty' Solved? by Nathaniel T. Jeanson, Ph.D. * Darwin's hypothesis of evolution faced enormous scientific challenges from the very outset of its publication. Recently, a group of evolutionists, publishing in the journal Science, claimed to have simplified one of those challenges. Have they? In Darwin's seminal work On the Origin of Species he identified numerous examples of biological structures that, at first pass, seem very difficult to evolve. He even wrote a chapter titled "Difficulties on Theory" which he began with this wry comment: "Long before having arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of difficulties...

Although Tesla reported a profit of $17 million on $713 million in revenue, their financials were reported using non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) figures. Which means that my current checking account, according to non-GAAP figures, is probably somewhere in the high seven figures. Using GAAP numbers, Tesla lost nearly $49.8 million, on revenues of $620 million. Despite the loss, Tesla delivered 6,457 units, and expects to sell 35,000 Model S units this year. Tesla also announced that their Model X SUV will be delayed again, until 2015. But the bad news was interrupted today by a major development for Tesla....

Last week, the Detroit Free Press concluded that the massive giveaway of state tax dollars to electric vehicle battery makers failed to generate the thousands of jobs that were promised. In particular, a March 16 article noted that, "today, Michigan has only a few hundred battery workers in four plants — despite $861 million in Obama administration stimulus grants and $543 million in Michigan tax credits awarded by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s administration in 2009." Readers of Michigan Capitol Confidential are not surprised by this news given that the failures of the electric vehicle battery industry in Michigan have been...

The Texas electric grid operator extended its call for residents and businesses to conserve power until Tuesday morning as a late arctic cold front that barreled as far as South Texas boosted the state's electricity consumption to a monthly record on Monday. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state's primary grid, had issued a public call for conservation on Sunday evening, citing freezing temperatures that would strain available generation capacity. "With the continued cold weather, we expect conditions to remain tight, especially during the early evening tonight and early morning hours tomorrow," said Dan Woodfin, director of system...

SAN JOSE (CBS SF) — The former head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission believes the attack on a PG&E substation in South San Jose last spring was not an act of vandalism, but instead a terrorist attack. In April of last year, someone shot numerous rounds that damaged equipment at the Metcalf Road substation and also severed underground fiber optic cables nearby. In an interview Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, former FERC chief Jon Wellinghoff called the attack ”the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred.” Wellinghoff told the newspaper he’s going...

(CNSNews.com) - Solar power, which President Barack Obama promoted in his State of the Union Address, accounted for 0.2 percent of the U.S. electricity supply in the first nine months of 2013, according to data published by the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration. That is up from the 0.02 percent of the total electricity supply that solar power sources provided in 2008, the last calendar year before Obama took office. “Now, one of the biggest factors in bringing more jobs back is our commitment to American energy,” Obama said in the State of the Union. “The all-of-the-above energy strategy I...