Free Republic

Humvee manufacturer AM General paid $3 million at auction to purchase the U.S. Department of Energy‘s loan to Vehicle Production Group, a defunct maker of wheelchair-accessible vans that struggled to meet performance targets and shut down earlier this year. Together with $5 million seized from the company’s accounts in April, that means the DOE recovered just $8 million of the $50 million it loaned VPG back in March 2011 under a government program designed to promote advanced technology vehicles. VPG’s plan was to sell handicapped vans that run on compressed natural gas. Taxpayers also took a loss on the collapse...

Don’t get rid of that clothesline. It could be the wave of the future, as envisioned by a roomful of people who turned out Wednesday at the Senior Center for the city’s first Community Energy Forum. Some 90 people showed up for the forum, according to Northampton’s Energy and Sustainability officer Chris Mason. They threw out ideas about conserving energy and going green that ranged from cutting down on gasoline use to reducing greenhouse gases to using the city’s landfill for solar energy. ”It was a smashing success,” said Mason. City Councilor Jesse Adams, who was in attendance, said the...

Algae suit generates food to feed your constant hunger When we think of futuristic fashion, our minds often lean toward the minimalist designs of Star Trek or Tron. But maybe what we wear in the future will have more to do with what we eat than what we want to look like. That's the premise behind the algaculture symbiosis suit designed by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta. The symbiosis suit is designed to make food for you as you go about your daily routine. A number of tubes, placed in front of your mouth, harness the CO2 you breathe and...

The U.S. Department of Energy will put up for auction this week a $50 million loan awarded to the now-closed Vehicle Production Group LLC, an unusual move by the DOE that may give U.S. taxpayers a chance to recoup a portion of their investment. The auction may also mark a path for the government to offload non-performing loans made to other troubled, taxpayer-backed companies, including hybrid sports car maker Fisker Automotive, which owes the DOE $192 million and has so far failed to secure a buyer. "I just don't see a great argument for making the bid and resurrecting either...

The Ecotality case wasn’t the biggest payoff, but it was particularly outrageous because it got stimulus money when it was already under SEC investigation.The company received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission in October of 2010.The president of Ecotality North America Don Karner was sent an additional subpoena in December of 2011, which specifically asks for any and all documentation surrounding the public announcement of the first Department of Energy grant to the company for $99.8 million on August 5, 2009.Ecotality was awarded $99 million in 2009 and an additional $26 million in October 2011. Since the beginning...

Reminds me of an old press conference with Coach Dennis Green... (video)

A firm funding the car company founded by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe has claimed on its website for months that its MyCar electric vehicle had been approved by the Defense Department “for U.S. military installations worldwide” — but government officials say they have no record of such an approval. The Washington Times searched a database of companies and contractors with business before the federal government and found no mentions of GreenTech Automotive or its MyCar two-seat vehicle. Government officials, too, found no evidence that GreenTech had been approved by the Defense Department to be a listed supplier for military...

The Dual-Fluid Reactor, a MSR (Molten Salt Reactor) was entered into the Greentec contest by Berlin’s Institute for Solid-State Nuclear Physics. MSRs and other advanced nuclear designs auger a CO2-free energy future and represent clear improvements in nuclear safety, efficiency, and waste management when compared to conventional nuclear. The Dual-Fluid Reactor (DFR) can also be used as a source of industrial process heat to make hydrogen and synthetic fuels.

There is a bit of a hubbub in the interwebs about an interview conducted by Lauren Green, religion correspondent for Fox News Channel, with Reza Aslan, author of a new book on Jesus titled Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Our friend Joe Carter, over at GetReligion, has the basic story. Green launched the interview (available here in full) with a question about why a Muslim should want to write a book about Jesus. A reasonable question, and not a hostile one on its face–but by the end of the interview Green has returned to it in...

I know it’s hard to keep up with a regime an administration that has more “focus shifts” than Lindsay Lohan has DUIs, butt you have to remember that Obamacare 1.0 was never really the “final solution” anyway. That honor has been reserved for Obamacare 2.0; and the unplanned fiasco engulfing Obamacare 1.0 just means we’ll be able to migrate to  the new Obamacare platform (bigger and better!) sooner than anyone around here ever dreamed. 2.0: we’ll need to requisition a few more computers; and data centers Big Guy’s pretty happy about this, as he was for single payer healthcare: “I...

Environmental activists constantly pressure government agencies to intervene in the lives of others, whether it is telling them how to run their businesses, where they can build their homes, or what types of food they can and cannot eat, among countless other examples. Another area activists are increasingly focusing on is forest management, telling tree farmers how they should manage their land. Common sense would tell you that a one-size-fits-all system of land management would not fit the diverse landscapes of the U.S., in terms of climate, elevation, and many other variables. Unfortunately, common sense is not that common among...

A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site, the Department of Energy told The Associated Press. After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet below the shallower areas that supply drinking water, geologist Richard Hammack said... The DOE team will start to publish full results of the tests over the next few months, said Hammack, who called the...

Electric car battery maker A123 Systems was offered as much as $350 million in state and federal incentives in 2009 to help create jobs and make Michigan the regional leader in battery production. Four years later, it's difficult to tell just how many jobs were created for the now bankrupt company. For example, the Michigan Economic Development Corp. gave a report to state legislators in April that claims the company had 844 full-time employees at the Livonia battery plant as of Sept. 30, 2012. That was just 16 days before A123 Systems filed for bankruptcy. The company now goes by...

MADISON – Gov. Scott Walker delivered a sternly worded statement Friday, demanding that environmental “extremists” disrupting preliminary work at a proposed northern Wisconsin mine site and destroying private property be held responsible for their actions. “These extremists – who are disrupting work and causing harm to law-abiding employees – should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Walker said of incidents last month. No More: Gov. Scott Walker on Friday said he wants protesters who disrupted and threatened workers at a proposed mine site to be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” The governor, who is...

This stuff could very well revolutionize nuclear power. Thorium-MOX can be formed into rods and used in current generation (Gen II) nuclear reactor with minimal retrofitting. Thor Energy is currently testing the new technology on the small scale. A prototype reactor will power a paper mill in the town of Halden, Norway for the next five years. If the fuel proves to be commercially viable during that test, we could see a sea change in nuclear power by the end of the decade.

In a sense, Michigan's utilities and state officials brought recent renewable energy issues upon themselves. When a federal judge this month declared part of Michigan's renewable energy mandate to be unconstitutional, he wasn't offering an unsolicited observation. He was rejecting a specific argument that attorneys representing Michigan's utilities and electric regulators were making on a different topic. The case at issue was, "Illinois Commerce Commission v. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission." It was over a cost-spreading mechanism developed by the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO). The purpose of the cost-spreading is to encourage expansion of high-voltage transmission facilities. In the...

EL PASO, Texas — The endless desert that makes up Fort Bliss looks a lot like places where the United States fought its recent wars or where it might fight its next one. Tanks are manned by soldiers whose faces are wrapped against the blowing sand. Dust devils rise, stagger and fall to the desert floor. The Army’s 1st Armored Division, based at Fort Bliss, served in Iraq and Afghanistan. For Maj. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, the division’s past — and the scenarios for its future — have pushed him to change Fort Bliss in ways that, at first, seem...

Last summer, California highway police pulled over pop star Justin Bieber as he sped through Los Angeles in an attempt to shake the paparazzi. He was driving a hybrid electric car—not just any hybrid, mind you, but a chrome-plated Fisker Karma, a US $100 000 plug-in hybrid sports sedan he’d received as an 18th-birthday gift from his manager, Scooter Braun, and fellow singer Usher. During an on-camera surprise presentation, Braun remarked, “We wanted to make sure, since you love cars, that when you are on the road you are always looking environmentally friendly, and we decided to get you a...

BERKELEY, Calif., July 1 (UPI) — Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests. Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and "most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life...

Obama: Planet Will ‘Boil Over' If Africans Are Allowed Cars and Air-Conditioning July 1, 2013 - 4:22 PM By Ryan Kierman (CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama said at a town hall event in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Saturday that unless we find new way of producing energy "the planet will boil over" if people in Africa are allowed to attain air conditioning, automobiles and big houses. “Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got...