The Volvo V60: all-electric, hybrid, and diesel all-in-one! | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

We just posted some great videos highlighting green cars from the Washington DC Auto Show (Watch SobukaTV), and we found one more cool car worth mentioning, the amazing Volvo V60! Most car manufacturers pick a specific efficient technology and design the car around it, but the engineers at Volvo decided to merge three different technologies into one!

Scheduled to be revealed at the Geneva Auto Show on March 1st 2011, the Volvo V60 Plug-In Hybrid is designed to operate as an all-electric, as a hybrid, or as a diesel, at the switch of a button. This gives consumers the choice of changing their driving style depending on the situation. If you have a simple commute of driving back and forth between work and home, you can put it in Pure mode and drive it as an all-electric, with a range of up to 30 miles. Not enough? switch it to a hybrid and stop worrying about the distance, because in Hybrid mode it can cover up-to 745 miles (125 mpg equivalent) on a single tank of diesel! That’s like driving from Washington D.C. to Chicago, IL or Jacksonville, FL on a single tank of gas! Obviously if you’re stuck in traffic, etc. this may change some, but it’s still amazing! And if you pull up next to some ego-tripping “lemme race you and leave you in the dust” type, switch to Power mode and let them taste the 285 horsepower from the combined diesel and electric motors, with 0-62mph in 6.9 seconds and 472 foot-pounds of torque. They’ll have second thoughts of ridiculing your Volvo “family” wagon.

The V60′s front wheels are are powered by the five-cylinder 2.4 liter D5 turbo-diesel engine (215 horsepower and 320 foot-pounds of torque). The rear wheels are powered by a 70 horsepower electric motor that gets its juice from a 12 kilo-watt-hour lithium ion battery pack. The car comes with a six-speed automatic transmission. Volvo estimates the car will be in European showrooms by 2012, and it seems like it will be a while until we get it here in the US. With Europe’s diesel prices at approximately $7.80/gallon compared to the $3.80/gallon in the US, you can’t be mad at them for that… but we need such cars here too! (viaTreehugger, wired, and volvo)

Tags: electric, green cars, green tech, hybrid, plug-in, V60, volvo

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 26th, 2011 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Magic Hat: a brewery that runs on beer | Sobuka Blog | Clean Energy and Green Tech News & Events | Solar Installations | Wind Energy RECs | Energy Audits | Green Remodeling | Green Financing

Magic Hat: a brewery that runs on beer

Posted on March 11th, 2011 by Daniel

If you’re like most folks at happy hour, you probably never think about what it took to make that beer in your hand… some could care less about the quantity they consume, but that’s another topic… anyway, did you know that one of the best breweries out there is running its operations on beer? No, they’re not getting drunk off their own supply, instead they’re running their facility by turning their excess beer and other organic waste into natural gas.

A typical brewery produces plenty of organic waste during the brewing process by using large quantities of hops, barley, yeast, etc.. Some of the spent grain is usually sold or given away to farmers as cattle feed, and some of it may end up as wastewater in the watershed, after being treated on site. But thanks to Purpose Energy‘s biphase orbicular bioreactor (or B.O.B.), the brewery’s organic waste can be turned into biogas, which can then be used to power the facility.

The man behind Purpose Energy and B.O.B. is Eric Fitch, a 37 year-old mechanical engineer by training, and home brewing extraordinaire (he once clogged up the pipes of his Cambridge, MA, apartment building when he dumped the oatmeal looking organic waste from his brew into his garbage dispenser). Fitch initially tested out his invention by taking away the waste from Yuengling’s brewery in Tampla, FL, to a local farm, where he dumped it into a 400-gallon methane digester. With his refined B.O.B, he went back to New England to approach several breweries for a pilot project, and Magic Hat agreed.

Magic Hat’s 42-foot tall silo structure is what houses Purpose Energy’s B.O.B. system. The B.O.B. has a 50-foot diameter, can hold 490,000 gallons of waste slurry, and produces about 200 cubic feet of biogas per minute to power the brewery’s operations. The whole thing cost about $4 million to build, and just 100 feet away from the main Magic Hat facility, it’s like having your own power plant in your backyard. The system can save up to $2 per barrel of beer, and with Magic Hat’s medium-sized operations delivering 154,000 barrels of beer per year, they save approximately $25,000 every month!

Like its company slogan says, Purpose Energy is “saving the earth, one beer at a time.” And we say cheers to that! (via boston.com, treehugger.com)

Tags: biogas, green brewery, Magic Hat, Purpose Energy

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2011 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Business, biofuels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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