Planetary Gear

Porsche CEO Wendelin Wiedeking and financial director Holger P. Haerter have resigned from their positions "with immediate effect."

Wiedeking will receive 50 million euros ($71 million) in compensation, while Haerter will receive 12.5 million euros.

The German luxury automaker announced the shake-up after a meeting of its supervisory board that went on late into Wednesday night.

"The ultimate goal is to lay the foundations for creating an integrated car manufacturing company from Porsche SE and Volkswagen AG," Porsche Automobil Holding said in Wednesday's statement.

The news comes as Porsche and Volkswagen have been locked in a public power struggle concerning competing visions for a merger or possible takeover of one company over the other.

Wiedeking made no secret of his ambition to have Porsche increase its stake in VW, take over the company, and build it into a rival to Toyota in terms of global sales.

But there's been speculation that in an ironic twist of fate VW may in fact end up taking over Porsche, which has been financially struggling for the last year.

Porsche is estimated to be between 9 billion and 10 billion euros in debt from both a global decline in sales over the last year due to the recession and from its expenditures on VW stock over the years.

Wiedeking was appointed Porsche CEO in 1992 and turned the company around from a struggling entity into one of the most profitable car manufacturers in the world. Then in 2005, Wiedeking directed Porsche to buy a 20 percent stake in VW and continued having the company buy VW common stock with the intent of gaining a controlling interest.

By 2007, Porsche had overcome legal obstacles regarding its VW takeover ambition and Wiedeking joined VW's supervisory board. He also became chairman of the holding company, Porsche Automobil Holding, which currently owns both Porsche and a 50.76 percent stake in VW.

In Wednesday's meeting, Porsche Automobil Holding's board also approved Porsche management to finalize negotiations with Qatar to invest in Porsche. But financial analysts predict that the approved cash injection from Qatar will not be enough to help Porsche out of its financial problems.

Wiedeking's and Haerter's resignations are widely believed to be the first step in a planned VW takeover to save Porsche.

Michael Macht, a Porsche board member in charge of production and logistics, will replace Wiedeking as CEO. Thomas Edig, a Porsche board member in charge of human resources, will become Macht's second in command, according to Porsche Automobil Holding's latest statement.

Sacramento County plans to install a smart grid.

(Credit: Sacramento Municipal Utility District)

Sacramento County's community-owned electric utility has signed a deal for Silver Spring Networks to provide a smart grid for roughly 600,000 homes and businesses.

Installation is to begin in July with an expected completion date tentatively set for March 2011.

So what will residents be getting?

The smart grid will include the installation of two-way electricity meters and home area networks that will provide real-time usage information, rate information, and the ability to control a building's energy usage. This will allow users to monitor their electricity consumption, enabling them to adjust some of their energy usage habits (if they want to) from peak to off-peak hours. They would also be able to communicate with the kind of "smart appliances" under development by companies like GE.

Perhaps more importantly, the meters and smart grid will give the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), the sixth largest community-owned electric utility in the U.S., the ability to immediately monitor usage and determine usage trends across its entire service area.

The new system will reduce operating costs for SMUD and enable it to improve its reliability, while providing customers with more information about their energy usage, according to SMUD's 2008 annual report (PDF).

"The new technologies will allow customers to make energy choices based on cost, comfort and convenience. Imagine a future where your appliances, electronic devices and programmable thermostat communicate with your electric meter, or where you can call up your energy profile on a laptop or a cell phone from any location," said the report.

The new deal coincides with what many experts have been saying: smart grids may be the next green-tech bubble.

Artist's rendering of Orange's solar concept tent.

(Credit: Orange)

Telecom giant Orange unveiled a concept solar tent in conjunction with the opening of this year's Glastonbury music festival in the U.K.

Inspired by the new flexible photovoltaics in development, the tent--if produced for consumers--would be covered in a semi-photovoltaic fabric woven with both coated solar threads and conventional threads to form a solar shell that could be adjusted to face optimum sun throughout the day.

The solar energy would then be channeled into four main power uses: heating, lighting, communications, and recharging.

The goal of Kaleidoscope, the design firm working in conjunction with Orange, was to create a tent that would help attendees of Glastonbury, the U.K.'s famous open-field music festival, which is sponsored in part by Orange, to keep their bearings and to keep in touch with friends while on site.

Most interesting is the idea of a wireless charging pouch. Instead of plugging in, people would drop their phone or other portable device into a pouch inside the tent. A coil in the pouch would carry an electric current that generates a magnetic field to produce a charge, which would then serve to power the device's battery.

In addition, some of the captured solar energy would be channeled toward radiant floor heating--something that would be much appreciated by anyone sleeping on the commonly damp British ground.

Artist's rendering of solar tent emitting glow at night.

(Credit: Orange)

And how many times have you been to a field festival only to spend an eternity trying to find your way back to your camp? The development team for the tent noticed that this wandering was a common problem at Glastonbury each year.

For that reason, the tent would be equipped with "Glo-cation" technology that would allow users to find their tents by sending an SMS message or using an automatic RFID tag similar to the ones used in London's Underground Oyster subway cards. The tent would then glow in response.

The tent would also serve to broadcast a Wi-Fi signal, though it's unclear whether it would have a Wi-Fi booster for a central area hub or act as an independent Wi-Fi router.

While this week England happens to be pretty bright and sunny, I'm not so sure a solar tent is the way to go in the land of perpetual, mild drizzling. But I could certainly see this being a favorite at Burning Man.

Researchers from Korea claim to have produced the world's first purely white LED (light-emitting diode).

Soo-Young Park, a professor of organic materials for photonics at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in Korea, led the group, which includes researchers from the University of Valencia in Spain.

LEDs are much more energy-efficient than incandescent or compact fluorescent lightng (CFL), but the quality of light they can give a room is up for debate.

Soo-Young Park, professor at Seoul National University.

(Credit: Seoul National University)

Because LEDs do not naturally produce white light, getting them to look like they do adds to their production cost, making them much more expensive than your average incandescent or CFL. Many companies have been trying to come up with different LED recipes and components to produce a nice white light, while keeping the consumer cost down.

Park and his group claim to have engineered a molecule with one orange and one blue light-emitting material that produces a white light in the visible light spectrum when put together.

In other words, they say they've invented a white-light-emitting diode.

Repeated laboratory tests apparently showed that the new form of LED molecule is efficient, color stable, and able to be reproduced again and again, making it a legitimate candidate for use in LED lighting.

A detailed explanation of the group's molecular work can be found in the current issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"An ideal material for a white-light source should be cost-effective, stable, robust, emit over the whole visible spectrum, not suffer from self-absorption, and its pure color should be easily reproducible. With this goal in mind, we have successfully synthesized and characterized, for the first time, a white-light-emitting single molecule dyad, consisting of two noninteracting chromophores showing excited-state intramolecular proton transfer," Park and his group said in their paper.

Artist's rendering of the Universal Freight System loading a standard shipping container on to a train.

(Credit: Texas Transportation Institute)

A group of Texas researchers would like to resurrect the train as chief freight mover in the U.S.

The Universal Freight Shuttle is the brainchild of Stephen Roop, assistant director Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), a branch of Texas A&M University's system chain.

The automated train, which is designed to accommodate standard shipping containers and trailers, would move forward along a track by linear induction motors powered with electricity.

Roop and others at TTI have been working on the concept and design for eight years, keeping in mind not just the technology, but how such an infrastructure would impact federal and state transportation departments, freight companies, shippers, and border security.

In addition to providing a cleaner option for shipping freight, the UFS includes a conveyor-like system to screen standard shipping containers at ports and borders while they're in motion, and automatically divert suspect containers to an area for further human inspection.

"It's moving into a commercial phase with prototyping and proposals for application in both Texas and California. This system is designed to offer an alternative to over-the-road trucking for heavily congested corridors. It is of course an electric, zero-emission solution," Roop said in an e-mail.

University researchers in England and the Ukraine have built a laser that emits high-frequency sound waves instead of light beams.

Called simply the "saser," the acoustic laser uses packets of sonic vibrations called "phonons" much like a regular laser uses photons.

Specifically, the acoustic laser device consists of a sonic beam traveling through a "superlattice" constructed of 50 sheets of material each only atoms thick that are alternately made of gallium arsenide and aluminium arsenide, two materials found in semiconductors.

Sasers could have "significant and useful applications in the worlds of computing, imaging, and even anti-terrorist security screening," according to the researchers.

Anthony Kent, a professor in the University of Nottingham's School of Physics and Astronomy, led the U.K. group that worked in collaboration with Borys Glavin of the Lashkarev Institute of Semiconductor Physics in the Ukraine.

Professor Anthony Kent of the University of Nottingham.

(Credit: University of Nottingham)

The saser theory has been around for years, and several labs around the world have been working on variations of the device. But Kent's group said it has built the "first device to emit sound waves in the terahertz frequency range." The beam of "coherent acoustic waves" that it creates has nanometer wavelengths, according to the group's abstract.

The breakthrough is being published in the prestigious Physical Review journal. The researchers are also receiving a grant for just over $1 million (636,000 pounds) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the U.K..

"While our work on sasers is driven mostly by pure scientific curiosity, we feel that the technology has the potential to transform the area of acoustics, much as the laser has transformed optics in the 50 years since its invention," Kent said Wednesday in a statement.

A UPS medium-duty truck containing Eaton's hybrid hydraulic system parked near the Capitol for 'Hybrid on the Hill Day.'

(Credit: Eaton Corp.)

We often fret over our own gas mileage and that of our neighbors' cars, but how often do we stop to think about the commercial trucking industry's impact on the environment?

FedEx Express announced in November 2008 a plan to purchase vehicles that combine Azure Dynamics' hybrid system with a Ford gasoline engine and chassis. The company now claims to be one of the first to use gasoline hybrid-electric delivery trucks for commercial use.

Peterbilt began offering four hybrid models of commercial trucks in 2008.

UPS has begun using hybrid trucks containing Eaton's energy-saving Series Hybrid Hydraulic System technology.

But those changes barely made news outside of their industry despite the fact that commercial trucking is thought to be a significant contributor to carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.

Perhaps that's why the Hybrid Truck Users Forum (HTUF) Incentive Working Group and Calstart saw fit to sponsor an event on the topic this Thursday.

And that is why Capitol Hill on Thursday is getting an upfront seat to the latest available in terms of hybrid commercial trucks at the "Hybrid on the Hill Day."

FedEx Express already has hybrid medium-duty trucks in its city fleets.

(Credit: FedEx Express)

Unlike other Washington, D.C., events that have highlighted hybrid cars and SUVs, Thursday's event features 17 medium and heavy-duty commercial hybrid trucks with participants from companies in the HTUF group that include Mack, Peterbilt, Freightliner, Kenworth, and FedEx Express.

The event taking place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. EDT at the Capitol Reflecting Pool includes speakers discussing the benefits of hybrids in reducing emissions and cutting fuel use for the commercial trucking industry versus the initial cost layout of investing in new fleets during a tough economy, according to Calstart.

Duke University is also scheduled to unveil a report on the growth of the hybrid truck sector and what effects it may have on the commercial trucking industry.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has teamed up with Google on an architecture contest celebrating both the museum's 50th anniversary and the search giant's latest 3D-modeling tool.

The two iconic organizations are asking the public to submit plans for a 100-square-foot shelter using Google Sketchup, choosing a location for the shelter via Google Earth, and using Google 3D Warehouse to upload the design and submit to the official Guggenheim contest Web site.

Once a design is submitted, it will be showcased on the Guggenheim's "Design It: Shelter Competition" contest Web site using a Google Earth plug-in for all the public to view.

The submissions period began Monday and will run through August 23.

Students of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture who will narrow the submissions down to 10 finalists. Once the finalists are announced, the public will be able to vote between October 10 and 21 on a favorite design.

The winner of that popular vote will be awarded the "People's Prize," while a winner chosen by a panel of experts that includes Victor Sidy, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will be awarded the "Juried Prize."

Besides providing an opportunity to remind people of the Guggenheim's roots, the contest also presents a chance for Google to show what can be done with Google Sketchup, its 3D-modeling tool.

The winners, whose prize includes a VIP trip for two to New York, will be announced on October 21--the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, which was, of course, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright himself.

The Juried Prize winner will also receive a $1,000 cash award. But that seems to be as far as the winner will be rewarded. While the contest rules allow submissions to include photos of a built shelter, in addition to the Sketchup piece, it makes no mention of building or giving resources for the winners to make their model a reality.

Mayor Gavin Newsom unveiling San Francisco's new bus shelters.

(Credit: Office of the Mayor of San Francisco)

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) have unveiled new energy-efficient bus shelters for the city.

The first of these bus shelters has been put up on the corner of Geary Boulevard and Arguello Boulevard with plans for four more to be rolled out in the coming weeks. The city plans to evaluate the five bus shelters throughout the summer to see what, if any, changes need to be made to the existing design.

Following the evaluation, SFMTA plans to replace a minimum of 1,100 existing bus shelters throughout San Francisco beginning this year, with plans to have them all in place by 2013.

The pilot bus shelters, which were designed by Lundberg Design, incorporate a bright red plastic wavy roof containing photovoltaic panels, two maps, LED lighting, Wi-Fi, space for two advertisements, and a NextMuni display that informs users of impending arrivals.

Many will power lights and info systems via organic dye-based photovoltaic solar film that's free of heavy metals and be encapsulated in bright red plastic made of 40 percent recycled content. The bus shelter structure itself is made from steel consisting of 60-70 percent recycled material.

The LED lights being used in the new bus shelters use about 74.4 watts, making them four and half times more efficient that than fluorescent lighting in the old shelters, which uses about 336 watts, according to the Mayor's office.

The new shelters will be installed and maintained by billboard advertising giant Clear Channel Outdoor.

While the San Francisco bus shelters are progress in terms of energy efficiency, they're arguably not as high-tech as the EyeStop bus shelters recently unveiled in Florence, Italy.

The EyeStop bus shelters designed by Carlo Ratti include touch-screen computers offering real-time mapping of buses, mobile alerts for bus schedule changes, Web access, and tall beacons that brighten as buses near to alert approaching pedestrians in the distance. All the Florence, Italy, bus shelter computers can also be accessed in several languages to accommodate tourists.