transmission

The Obama administration and Congress are determined to ratchet up the production of green energy in the United States, but that goal is being undermined by "radical environmental activism," the business community is trying to convince Washington.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Thursday stepped up its campaign for congressional action to streamline the production of clean-energy infrastructure by launching the Web site ProjectNoProject.com.

Too many infrastructure projects, including electric transmission lines and solar farms, the chamber says, are held up by what it refers to as "green tape": lengthy permitting processes, litigation from … Read more

A fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan--or so the saying goes, according to T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oilman turned clean-energy advocate.

To provide a plan to boost the nation's use of clean energy, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced Monday he will introduce major legislation this week to reform electric transmission line development. Reid made the announcement at a Washington conference where he, Pickens, former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, and others met to discuss guiding principles to reform the United States' energy policy. The forum was titled the "National Clean Energy Project: Building the New Economy."

The Obama administration has said it would like 25 percent of the nation's energy to come from renewable sources by 2025, and the billions of dollars provided in the recently signed stimulus package offer the means to get there, Reid said. His bill, he said, will provide more guidance for that funding to be used appropriately.

The deployment of renewable energy across the country has faced setbacks because of the challenges facing the construction of electric transmission lines, such as who will fund them and where to site the lines. The bill aims to give the federal government more authority over those questions.

It's a proposal that has been met with some resistance, Reid said at the conference, hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

"If this is going to succeed, we're going to have to accept that's how we've always done things," he said, citing the federal government's central role in developing railroads and a national highway system. "Everyone should get off the kick this program won't work if the government's involved in it."

The legislation will call for the president to designate renewable energy zones with significant clean-energy-generating potential. Once that occurs, the bill will call for massive planning efforts to site transmission lines around those zones--a process that the federal government will take over if it stalls. … Read more

WASHINGTON--Now that the federal government has authorized spending billions of dollars for transmission line construction and renewable-energy efforts, it may expand its authority over how interstate transmission lines are built.

President Obama on Tuesday signed the so-called stimulus bill into law, providing what Obama's climate czar Carol Browner called on Tuesday "an amazing down payment" on smart grid technology, renewable-energy production, and other efforts to create energy efficiency.

Questions remain, however, as to whether the Energy Department and other government agencies will be able to overcome a complex regulatory maze to spend the funds quickly and appropriately, … Read more

Ford Motor Co. announced that it will be joining the ranks of automakers offering dual-clutch transmissions. The new six-speed automated manual transmission has been dubbed PowerShift, and will debut in North America in 2010 for the small-car segment, which means Ford Focus and the upcoming Fiesta. In a world populated with DCTs, SSTs, PDKs, and DSGs, we're just happy that we don't have to learn another acronym.

Ford is marketing the PowerShift as a fuel-saver, which means you won't be seeing this transmission under the hood of the Shelby GT500 anytime soon. The automaker cites the fuel … Read more

By coordinating the movement of spinning balls, start-up Fallbrook Technologies says it has made a more efficient transmission system suitable for a wide range of mechanical devices.

The San Diego, Calif., company on Monday said that it has raised $25.4 million in a round of funding led by venture capital firm NGEN and the investment arm of Dutch bank Rabobank to expand production of its transmission.

Rather than use gears, Fallbrook's NuVinci transmission relies mainly on a series of balls, which rotate and tilt, to transfer mechanical power. There are other "continuously variable planetary" drive technologies, … Read more

Wired keyboards, like those found on desktop PCs, emit electromagnetic waves that can be read remotely, according two Swiss researchers.

Researchers Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini of the Swiss Security and Cryptography Laboratory at LASEC/EPFL, were able to recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters (about 65 feet), even through walls, simply by reading the electromagnetic emanations of the peripheral device. The experiments focused on wired keyboards attached to a computer either by PS/2 or USB connections.

In two videos, Vuagnoux demonstrates the attacks.

In the first video, he shows how only the … Read more

It seems like every automaker with a claim to high performance and high technology has an automated-manual transmission today. Ferrari was the first, with the CambioCorsa, followed by BMW's SMG, and then Volkswagen Group's DSG. Mitsubishi has its TC-SST. What took Porsche so long to develop the PDK?

The real question is "what took everybody else so long?" The Porsche-Doppelkupplungsgetriebe name dates from 1983, when the first experimental version was developed and used in a 956 Series-produced endurance race car. A 956 with the experimental gearbox won a German national championship race, and a couple of … Read more

Once upon a time, Mac users got the short end of the stick when it came to BitTorrent clients. Those days are gone, thankfully--and Transmission is a perfect example of that. This excellent open-source client is one of the very best choices for a BT client on the Mac, being both extremely lightweight (some users even manage to run the Ubuntu version on their cell phones) and fairly feature-packed.

Transmission's interface is easy to use--and easy on the eyes. The layout should be familiar, even to PC users, with torrent controls like stop and pause on the top, and … Read more

Stephan Tr?by is a theoretician, curator, and architect, and his new book "Exit-Architecture -- Design between War and Peace" is essentially a pamphlet that condenses his preceding writing. He rehashes the key theses of his previous publication, the anthology "5 Codes -- Architecture, Paranoia and Risk in Times of Terror," and substantiates them in his own words and with more contemporary examples.

"Exit-Architecture" maintains Tr?by's obsession with "anti-panic design" and examines how paranoia, as a cultural force, shapes architecture and ultimately entire societies. In a time when war and … Read more