Word: edisonizing
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...really very simple," says John Reeves, research manager at Southern California Edison, which is putting up half of the money (the rest is coming from the Los Angeles department of water and power). When electrical power passes through a wire, it creates a magnetic field. A metal plate moving through that field can, by a process known as induction, convert the magnetic force back into electricity. When such a metal plate is suspended from the bottom of a battery-run car, the vehicle can pick up power simply by moving down an electrified road. For maximum performance the plate needs...
...Angeles' limited experiment is successful, the technology will not necessarily be widely used. "This is real futuristic stuff," says Sean McAlinden, a researcher with the University of Michigan's Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation. "It's sort of a Star Wars fantasy." Even Southern California Edison officials concede it would take billions of dollars and decades of public works to electrify the streets of Los Angeles. There may never be electric roads in the snowbound Midwest or in Eastern cities subject to the freeze-and-thaw cycles that turn the best-made highways into roller coasters of bumps...
Electrifying even a few short stretches of roadway could increase the range and effectiveness of such voltswagens dramatically. Developers in Playa Vista hope to wire the subdivision's two-mile main artery and service the neighborhood with all-electric trucks and vans. Edison's Reeves dreams of extending the network until it crisscrosses the state. Electrifying one or two lanes of a freeway, he says, might be enough to keep fleets of buses and cars charged up. People wedded to gas-gulping cars could still drive on electrified highways, but they might get dirty looks from the new breed...
...Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute: "The technology exists today to save 75% of the electricity and 80% of the oil used in the U.S. without lowering our standard of living at all." Several electric utilities are leading the way in making companies more conservation-conscious. Southern California Edison runs 50 different energy-management programs, which helped hold the growth in demand for the utility's electricity to 2.1% over the past decade, in contrast to 4.1% from...
Wise, 41, may be poised to become as important an inventor and entrepreneur as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. His red contact lenses are already on 100,000 chickens nation-wide, and his company, Animalens Inc., is growing...