Tag: plant
The Wall Street Journal: Abbott facing criminal investigation over baby-formula plant operations
PJM power plant owners could owe $2B in penalties from winter storm failures
Georgia Power to delay nuclear plant startup one month due to vibrating pipe
Tesla Will Reportedly Slow Down Production at Shanghai Plant
The most prolific electric vehicle brand in the world, headed by one of the world’s most prolific tweeters, has a new year’s resolution for 2023. According to a report based on leaked internal schedules, Tesla wants to cut back a bit on its vehicle production for January out of its main China production plant. It will…
: Tesla suspends production at Shanghai plant for planned break
Tesla’s new virtual power plant lets Texans sell electricity back to the grid
Tesla launched a new power utility provider service in Texas this week that lets select locals with home Powerwall backup batteries sell excess energy back to the grid. To qualify, residents must live in areas that allow for retail choice — Tesla’s site mentions the Dallas and Houston metro areas specifically — and, for now, will need to wait for an invitation to join through the Tesla app.
Those who join the new Tesla Electric service will become part of an automated system that sells energy from owners’ Powerwalls to the grid and vice-versa when most viable. And when pulling from the grid, Tesla provides offsets from renewable energy sources.
This…
South Carolina EV battery recycling plant could salvage parts for a million cars a year
The push to recycle electric vehicle batteries just gained some momentum. Redwood Materials has unveiled plans to build an EV battery recycling plant on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina. The roughly 600-acre facility (previewed in a render above) will break “end-of-life” batteries down to their raw metals and rebuild them as the anodes and cathodes that are crucial to EVs. The parts should support up to 1 million EVs per year. That could not only reduce waste, but reduce the costs and risks associated with importing those components from overseas.
The plant will reportedly amount to a $3.5 billion investment that includes 1,500 jobs. Like Redwood’s Nevada campus, the Charleston hub will rely solely on clean energy and all-electric operations. The company claims its approach lowers CO2 emissions for producing the battery components by about 80 percent compared to the output from the usual Asian supply chain.
Construction should start for the South Carolina plant in the first quarter of 2023. The first recycling process should be ready by the end of that year, Redwood says. The company plans to scale afterward.
The locale choice is strategic. Redwood says South Carolina is part of a growing “Battery Belt” where EV cell manufacturing will ramp up to “hundreds” of gigawatt-hours of production capacity by 2030. Its seaside port helps, too. The state further hosts factories for car manufacturers that include BMW and Redwood partner Volvo, so a brand could quickly repurpose spent batteries for vehicles rolling off the line.
More importantly, Redwood appears to have broader support from the auto industry. On top of Volvo, it has partners like Ford, Toyota and battery makers that include Panasonic and Envision AESC. Large-scale battery recycling facilities are still relatively rare in the US — Li-Cycle’s new Alabama plant can process batteries for about 20,000 EVs per year. This expansion could make recycling far more commonplace, and make a better case for electric cars as the environmentally conscious options.
Plant Prefab nabs $42M to crank out ‘extremely sustainable’ custom homes
Prefabricated homes always seem to be on the cusp of something big — solving housing shortages, tackling systemic waste or just generally ushering in the “very up-to-date.” But in the U.S., new prefab housing still represents a small fraction of the market (around 2% of single-family homes built in 2021, for example). By now it’s clear […]
Plant Prefab nabs $42M to crank out ‘extremely sustainable’ custom homes by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
Cocaine Synthesized In a Tobacco Plant
In studying the coca plant, the researchers discovered that the cocaine that winds up in its leaves is not produced by elements in the plant converting 4-(1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinyl)-3-oxobutanoic acid to hyoscyamine, as has been thought. They found that it is instead produced by the two enzymes, EnMT4 and EnCYP81AN15. To prove their discovery, the group genetically engineered a tobacco plant to produce the two enzymes in its leaves, which resulted in the production of small amounts of cocaine (with assistance from a substance also produced in the plant called ornithine, which is similar to the precursor in the coca plant). […] Not mentioned in the paper is the possibility of synthesizing the two enzymes produced by both the coca and engineered tobacco plant as a more direct way to synthesize cocaine.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.