What is Section 45Q? And How Can its Increase Affect Carbon Capture and Storage?

Is Carbon Capture and Storage the Future of Climate Change Mitigation?

When Congress passed a budget bill in February, you may have missed something significant: It includes new incentives to support carbon capture and storage, or CCS. If you've heard of CCS before, you've probably heard that it's expensive, risky, and unnecessary in light of the recent progress of wind and solar energy.

 From article, (When Congress passed a budget bill in February, you may have missed something significant: It includes new incentives to support carbon capture and storage, or CCS.
For all the progress that renewables have made in recent years, wind and solar still supply less than 5 percent of the world's energy, according to the International Energy Agency. Fossil fuels supply more than 80 percent—a share that has barely fallen in decades—and global carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing.

Technologies already exist that can capture carbon emissions from all of these processes, and ongoing projects have shown carbon dioxide can be safely and securely stored in geological formations deep underground. The issue has not been capability—it has been cost and a lack of financial incentives.

The fact that CCS allows for fossil fuel use while reducing carbon dioxide emissions enabled the practically unthinkable event of a Republican-controlled Congress passing strong climate legislation. A broad coalition, including Democratic climate hawks and Republicans from oil- and gas-producing states, backed the legislation that significantly increases the "Section 45Q" tax credits for geologic storage of carbon dioxide. In the near future, this will trigger new projects that capture carbon dioxide and supply it for use in enhanced oil recovery. That's a process in which carbon dioxide is injected into depleted oil fields to increase oil production while trapping the carbon dioxide deep underground. This is a win-win: increased American oil production, decreased dependence on oil imports, and more American jobs, all while reducing emissions.

The legislative development coincides with a potential technological breakthrough in carbon capture. Existing carbon capture approaches for power plants have a critical, and costly, challenge: separating low-concentration carbon dioxide from the mixture of exhaust gases. Enter Net Power, a start-up with a new carbon-capturing natural gas-fired electricity generation technology. Net Power's novel "Allam cycle" technology fundamentally redesigns how fossil-fuel electricity generators have traditionally worked in order to avoid the separation challenge and produce an easily separable exhaust of pure carbon dioxide and water. The result should be a power plant that can generate electricity as efficiently as the leading existing gas-fired electricity generators, all while capturing 100 percent of its emissions at zero additional cost. Net Power is currently commissioning its pilot plant near Houston. If it performs as advertised, this technology could smash the idea we need to pay more for clean energy.

Net Power, like all large-scale and complex technologies, will have additional costs for initial projects, but they will go down as the developers learn from each successive project. The tax credits will provide the extra support needed to enable the first full-scale commercial plant to be built and to accelerate subsequent deployment.

Future projects could also target emissions from industrial sources—like ethanol, petrochemicals, and fertilizer production. Potential new capture technologies that may be deployed include membrane separation systems, which are essentially carbon dioxide filters and use less energy than traditional solvent methods, and fuel cells that generate additional electricity while capturing carbon dioxide. Much like the incentives that have been successful in promoting renewable energy, the 45Q credits will spur deployment of new technologies and lead to innovation that will further decrease CCS costs.

This is poised to be a pivotal year for the development of CCS in the United States. But we will have to scale up CCS much more to reach our daunting emissions-reductions goals, and there will be challenges. For instance, pipelines to transport carbon dioxide from sources to storage sites will have to be built. 

The White House and Congress can also help maximize the impact of the 45Q credits by supporting carbon dioxide pipeline infrastructure and enacting complementary measures to enable cheaper finance for carbon-capture projects.)

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A Blood Test For Lung Cancer? Yes.

Australian researchers may have discovered an early lung cancer test

Australian researchers have identified unique molecular characteristics of an aggressive, hard-to-treat type of lung cancer known as adenocarcinoma that could help identify patients most likely to respond to immunotherapies. The researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne also identified a possible blood biomarker produced by the deadly disease, raising hope of an early detection test.

From article, (Australian researchers have identified unique molecular characteristics of an aggressive, hard-to-treat type of lung cancer known as adenocarcinoma that could help identify patients most likely to respond to immunotherapies.

The researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne also identified a possible blood biomarker produced by the deadly disease, raising hope of an early detection test.

Adenocarcinoma accounts for around 40 per cent of lung cancers and is often associated with a history of smoking, but is also the most commonly diagnosed lung cancer in non-smokers.

It occurs more frequently in females and in young people than other types of lung cancer.

"These cancers are very aggressive, are resistant to standard therapies and have a poor prognosis, so new therapies are urgently needed," said Dr Sarah Best at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

Working with colleagues at Metabolomics Australia, Dr Best and Dr Kate Sutherland focused on the role of two cell signalling pathways - KEAP1/NRF2 and PI3K - which are known to be involved in adenocarcinomas.

The study, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, found more than one in five lung adenocarcinomas had specific alterations in the KEAP1/NRF2 pathway, which provided an environment that allowed the cancer to thrive and grow.

"This is a quite significant proportion of these tumours," said Dr Sutherland.

Importantly, the researchers showed in mouse models these tumours responded to anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4 immunotherapies.

"When we used these therapies in our pre-clinical models we were able to show that the tumours did regress following treatment," said Dr Sutherland.

The research also showed these cancers make a "metabolic by-product" that was detected in the blood.

"We believe this offers great hope for being able to provide a simple blood test that could be used to detect these tumours at an early stage but also to possibly detect the patients that may respond to immunotherapy," explained Dr Sutherland.)

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What is Vaterite? Why is it Rare on Earth and mostly found in Outer Space? How is it important in Drug Therapies? And, How can it be produced by of all things, Alpine Plants?

Incredible find at Cambridge Botanic Garden could help cancer victims

A rare mineral that could help in treating cancer victims has been found growing for the first time on plants - in Cambridge's Botanic Garden. The mineral, called vaterite, hardly exists anywhere on Earth, and so far it has only been found in a few sea creatures, rocks and meteorites from outer space.

  From article, (A Botanic Garden spokeswoman said: "Vaterite is a potentially superior carrier for medications due to its high loading capacity, high uptake by cells and its solubility properties that enable it to deliver a sustained and targeted release of therapeutic medicines to patients.

vaterite nanoparticles loaded with anti-cancer drugs appear to offload the drug slowly only at sites of cancers, and therefore limit the negative side effects of the drug.”

"Naturally occurring vaterite is rarely found on Earth. Small amounts of vaterite crystals have been found in some sea and freshwater crustaceans, bird eggs, the inner ears of salmon, meteorites and rocks.

[Dr Wightman] said: "Vaterite is not very stable in the Earth’s humid atmosphere as it often reverts to more common forms of calcium carbonate, such as calcite. This makes it even more remarkable that we have found vaterite in such large quantities on the surface of plant leaves.”

"This is the first time that the rare and unstable mineral has been found in such a large quantity, and the first time it has been found to be associated with plants."


The mineral is part of a protective silvery-white crust that forms on the leaves of a number of the garden's alpines.

Scientists at the Sainsbury Laboratory made the discovery alongside experts from the Botanic Garden, as part of a research project that is probing the inner workings of the garden's plants using powerful new microscopes.

Dr Raymond Wightman, the lab’s microscopy core facility manager, said: "Biochemists are working to synthetically manufacture vaterite as it has potential for use in drug delivery, but it is not easy to make.

"Other potential uses of vaterite include improving the cements used in orthopaedic surgery, and as an industrial application improving the quality of papers for inkjet printing by reducing the lateral spread of ink."

Dr Wightman said vaterite was often associated with outer space and had been detected in planetary objects in the Solar System and meteorites.)

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What (New) Electric Motor Drives a Model 3 Tesla, and Semi Tesla? (Speculation)

Tesla Model 3 Motor - Everything I've Been Able To Learn About It (Welcome To The Machine)

Any Tesla enthusiast knows full well that the name originally chosen for what was then Tesla Motors was based on a motor design credited to Nikola Tesla, who lived in the 19th century. Virtually every car that Tesla has produced, from the Roadster to the Model S to the Model X, has been powered by a version of that veritable 3-phase AC induction motor.

 From article, (With the breakthrough in reluctance machine design these past few years, we may be witnessing a sea change with regards to the powertrain for the electric vehicle market. Given reports about the performance of the Model 3, the reported jump in miles per kWh that owners are reporting over prior Tesla models, along with our 5 easy puzzle pieces, it’s a reasonable bet that Tesla has perfected the reluctance machine and in doing so has pulled an engineering rabbit out of its hat.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you were assigned the job of designing a new motor for the Model 3. Elon Musk has specified that your design must cost less than the Model S motor. You have also been instructed that the motor must not compromise on performance, yet it must be lighter and more efficient than its sibling. What would you do?

You’d think about applying for a job at the McDonald’s down the road from the Fremont factory. No, no — after that. Here’s a hint: You would examine all the different electric motor architectures that exist. In doing so, you would come across a design that’s actually older than Nikola Tesla’s 1892 invention. More than 50 years earlier, the reluctance machine had been invented in 1838. And it’s a surprisingly sweet design. The reluctance machine is simple, it’s efficient, it’s compact in size. And, it’s inexpensive to produce. Yet the reluctance motor sat on the shelf for over a century, suffering from a debilitating disease called Torque Ripple (due to the reluctance machine’s propensity to incur a phenomena know as cogging). Torque ripple simply means that the power output of the reluctance motor fluctuates up and down. Certainly not good for an EV. When you put the pedal to the metal, you want a nice smooth acceleration ramp.

The reluctance machine was partially rescued by the same technology that made it possible to put the induction motor into an electric car — power electronics from Silicon Valley. The reluctance motor is notoriously difficult to control (RPM, determination of rotor position, etc.), but modern inverters and control systems helped overcome that foible. Still, the torque ripple issue remained a challenge even as the 21st century approached. But in poking around, you start to notice some research on the topic taking place in the first decade of this century. You come across a 2011 research paper claiming that the torque ripple issue has been addressed. The researcher had embedded some small rare-earth magnets in the stator of a reluctance motor right along with the existing electromagnets. In doing so, the torque curve had smoothed out. As a bonus, the paper claimed to achieve a 30% boost in power output with the inclusion of the rare-earths. Now there’s some first principles thinking. Whoever first thought of lacing the stator with rare-earths has apparently come up with the greatest marriage since someone thought to sink a chocolate bar into a jar of peanut butter, producing the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Your thoughts coalesce. With two of the major issues of the reluctance machine having been addressed, you take the plunge and start working with this design. The first thing you are able to do is discard that expensive copper rotor in the legacy motor and replace it with a far cheaper ferrous metal rotor. Probably steel. And probably silicon steel. You just saved a ton of money. Next, although the rare-earths are expensive, they are going into the stator, not on the rotor as with a traditional permanent magnet motor, so you’re going to be augmenting the electromagnets with relatively smallish permanent magnets. Your chosen design has some issues with acoustic noise, but you feel that it’s worthwhile to pursue this design because it’s the simplest and least expensive motor to build, yet highly efficient and powerful (especially with those rare-earths). Good job!

So, the first puzzle piece in the theory that Tesla has put a switched reluctance motor in the Model 3 is the magnets. We know they’re in there, and now we know that one of the latest breakthroughs in motor design is the inclusion of rare-earths in the stator of the reluctance machine. This is huge. It has brought the reluctance machine out of mothballs!

Another clue that the Model 3 motor is not using those rare-earths in a conventional permanent-magnet  motor design is that the car does not do regen all the way down to 0 miles per hour. For example, the Bolt has a conventional 3-phase PM motor which allows it to do regen to 0 MPH. I saw this for myself last year when I test drove a Bolt — you can stop without applying the brakes. We’re calling this puzzle piece #2.

Here’s another one: The “dealer” sticker on the Model 3 in the showrooms indicate a “Three phase, six pole, internal permanent magnet motor.” The Tesla induction motor is a 4 pole design, as are many EV motors. Why then a six pole motor? This is a reference to the way the coils on the stator are wired to work with the 3-phase power (three separate power legs). The closer the spacing of the poles, the less time there may be for torque to fall off. It may be Tesla’s way to further smooth torque ripple. That’s puzzle piece #3.

Puzzle piece #4 is that various engineering/motor design publications are starting to talk up the reluctance machine (see article links below). And we are starting to see the reluctance design appear in EVs, such as the Prius. Furthermore, UPS has announced that a switched reluctance machine will be used in a program to convert their fleet to electric power. The company is claiming its implementation of the reluctance motor over other designs will reduce charging times and increase energy efficiency by up to 20% (the company is distancing itself from the use of rare-earth magnets, though). And, in general, industry applications for updated reluctance motor designs are starting to pop. For example, in a recent CleanTechnica article, Software Motor Company (SMC) is declaring that its new reluctant machine design — with what they are calling its own version of “secret sauce” — will save 50% on energy costs over the current induction motors in use at Walmart for HVAC, etc.

Finally, the motor in the Model 3 is indeed smaller than the Model S motor. In a recent Jack Rickard EVTV video examining the Model 3, Jack asserted that the Model 3 motor is actually smaller than even the smaller front motor on the Model S. Yet performance has not been overly compromised. Some owners have reported 0–60 times as quick as 4.8 seconds in their Model 3. That of course is due in part to the 1,000 lb of less weight than the S, but still let’s tentatively call this puzzle piece #5.

Regardless of the exact motor design, Tesla has clearly hit it out of the park with the Model 3’s powertrain. They gave their motor designer team, if not a blank check, a blank whiteboard, and the team came up with a design suitable not only for an affordable electric car, but for the upcoming Tesla Semi as well.)

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The Ghostbusters May have Been on to Something with a Proton Pack, Except Here, We are Talking about a Proton Battery.

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All power to the proton: Researchers make battery breakthrough: Working prototype could eventually replace lithum ion batteries

Researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have demonstrated for the first time a working rechargeable "proton battery" that could re-wire how we power our homes, vehicles and devices. The rechargeable battery is environmentally friendly, and has the potential, with further development, to store more energy than currently-available lithium ion batteries.

From article, (Researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have demonstrated for the first time a working rechargeable "proton battery" that could re-wire how we power our homes, vehicles and devices.

The rechargeable battery is environmentally friendly, and has the potential, with further development, to store more energy than currently-available lithium ion batteries.

Potential applications for the proton battery include household storage of electricity from solar photovoltaic panels, as done currently by the Tesla 'Power wall' using lithium ion batteries.

With some modifications and scaling up, proton battery technology may also be used for medium-scale storage on electricity grids -- -- like the giant lithium battery in South Australia -- as well as powering electric vehicles.

It's the carbon electrode plus protons from water that give the proton battery it's environmental, energy and potential economic edge, says lead researcher Professor John Andrews.

"Our latest advance is a crucial step towards cheap, sustainable proton batteries that can help meet our future energy needs without further damaging our already fragile environment," Andrews said.

"As the world moves towards inherently-variable renewable energy to reduce greenhouse emissions and tackle climate change, requirements for electrical energy storage will be gargantuan.

"The proton battery is one among many potential contributors towards meeting this enormous demand for energy storage. Powering batteries with protons has the potential to be more economical than using lithium ions, which are made from scare resources.)

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What's a proton battery? Three things you need to know.

Most of your everyday electronics run off of lithium batteries - you know, the ones that you can never seem to find in your drawer when the remote is dead? Yet the days of the double-A may be ending. Researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have created a prototype of an alternative battery that runs on carbon and water.

 From article, (The planet’s supply of lithium is concentrated in just a few countries, and the other rare earth metals that go into lithium batteries are an increasingly scarce, expensive resource. In contrast, the proton battery has an electrode made of carbon, one of the most abundant materials on our planet, and is charged by splitting water molecules.

“The advantage is we’re going to be storing protons in a carbon-based material, which is abundant, and we are getting protons from water which is readily available,” said the project’s lead researcher, John Andrews, to The Guardian.

The RMIT battery can be plugged into a charging port just like any other rechargeable battery. What happens next is remarkably simple: the electricity from the power supply splits water molecules, generating protons, which bond with carbon in the battery’s electrode. The protons are then released again to pass through the fuel cell, where they interact with air to form water and generate power.

According to an RMIT press release, experiments showed that the tiny battery — with an active surface area of only 5.5 square centimeters (0.85 square inches) could store as much energy per unit as commercially available lithium-ion batteries.

Mining traditional batteries’ lithium and other rare earth metals can have a host of environmental consequences, including dumping chemicals into ecosystems and clearing land of vegetation. In addition to the carbon footprint of mining, processing the conductive materials requires significant energy, which still most often means electricity that comes from fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, producing the carbon and water needed for this new battery have pretty much zero environmental impact; currently, the main emissions footprint of the battery would be the source of the electricity used to charge it.)

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NJ Gov Will Fix NJ Transit.

NJ Transit could be a big winner in Murphy's first budget

NJ Transit, -- plagued by a drop in ridership, faced with the need to hire more workers, and under threat of a potential fare hike to keep the buses and trains on schedule -- could be a big winner in Gov. Phil Murphy's first state budget.

From article, (The [NJ] governor has referred to NJ Transit a "national disgrace" and vowed to make over the troubled agency. He signed an executive order in January that called for an audit the organization.

"We're making a major statement about funding NJ Transit," Murphy said Monday on NJ 101.5 radio, a day before he unveils his first proposed budget.

Murphy didn't elaborate on his pending announcement. The governor's office is being tightlipped on the budget before he unveils it at the Statehouse in Trenton at 2 p.m. Tuesday.

 Last year, then-candidate Murphy proposed what he called "multi-hundred-million-dollar proposal" to fix NJ Transit. At that time, he didn't rule out instituting a new tax as a dedicated funding source for the agency to put the brakes on fare increases.

In January, NJ Transit's executive director told lawmakers the agency needs to hire more rail, safety and maintenance employees and boost non-union employees's salaries to keep them from taking other jobs. The call for added expenses for new hires came months after NJ Transit took a $25 million hit from a cut in ridership tied to construction at Penn Station.

The squeeze has sparked speculation of a spike in fares, which would no doubt prompt fierce opposition from riders who already pay the highest fares in the nation.)

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Me, "At least NJ Gov. Murphy sees there is a problem with NJ Transit, and wants to fix it!"

At the Edge of the Solar System, A Space Telescope?

Newer Horizons: Scientist Pitch Pluto Probe as a Unique Deep-Space Telescope

A maverick group of astronomers is proposing to radically reshape one of NASA's most successful missions in the modern era, the New Horizons probe that flew by Pluto in 2015 and is now continuing its voyage into the depths of the outer solar system.

From article, ([A] plan calls for utilizing the [New Horizons,] Pluto probe’s eight-inch telescope, called the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), to peer at distant, dim objects beyond the solar system’s boundaries. LORRI, the group says, could be used to support NASA’s upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a planet-hunting space telescope launching in April.

Co-author Diana Dragomir, an MIT planetary scientist who works on TESS, says this mission will need all the backup help it can get. That is because it is set to find tens of thousands of candidate planets—many of which will require time-consuming independent confirmation using other telescopes.

Beyond boosting exoplanet research, New Horizons could also use its ultraviolet and infrared sensors to study the early universe. Whereas the cosmic microwave background, an information-packed afterglow of the big bang, is perhaps the most well known, there are also ultraviolet and infrared backgrounds that come from stars and active galaxies lighting up cosmic dust in a faint, universe-spanning glow. This could provide insights into how the early universe came together. “The further you get out of the solar system, the more you can do these kind of observations,” says Michele Bannister, a planetary scientist at Queen's University Belfast who was not involved in the study. She points out one NASA spacecraft—Deep Impact, which studied Comet Tempel 1 in 2005—was later retooled into a new mission dubbed “EPOXI” in order to assist with exoplanet hunts.

[But...]

New Horizon’s extended mission after Pluto involves flying by an ancient remnant from the solar system’s birth, a chunk of rock and ice known as 2014 MU69. After that encounter, the craft will transmit its data to Earth—which, due to the immense distances, will take about two years to completely trickle back home.

After MU69 the craft will be low on propellant—less than a quarter of a tank. That could be enough to pursue a third flyby target during a second mission extension, as many senior New Horizons team members would prefer. But that encounter—plus keeping the spacecraft pointed at Earth for the subsequent data transmission—would probably use most if not all of the remaining fuel.

Those preexisting plans—plus the fundamental impracticalities of efficiently controlling and getting data from a telescope at the edge of the solar system—could crowd out Zemcov and company’s proposal. “These types of proposals are generated by the dozens, if not hundreds, so it’s not uncommon to see them come up and then go nowhere,” says Jason Callahan, a space policy advisor at The Planetary Society.

There is some precedent for thinking outside of these budgetary boxes—EPOXI, for instance, although a planetary science mission like New Horizons, performed its astrophysics observations during an otherwise inactive cruise phase.

So how realistic is the group’s proposal?

“It’s really an issue of logistics and timing, and making sure the resources are available and we’re doing nothing to put the mission at risk,” Zemcov says. Convincing others there’s no risk involved may be a tall order, however.

 In the end, the push to make New Horizons the first truly far-out space telescope, like many extended mission concepts, may never see the light of day—or the pitch-black cosmic vista of the outer solar system. “This idea has been around in the community for years and years but the problem is opportunity,” Zemcov says. For now, as New Horizons continues its journey beyond Pluto, that opportunity is slipping further out of reach.)

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Find Your Own Exoplanet. (Not kidding!!)

You Can Hunt for Alien Planets in Kepler Data Using Newly Released Google Code

You can try your hand at advanced exoplanet hunting, thanks to some newly released code. In December, a pair of researchers announced that they'd discovered two alien planets in the archival data gathered by NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, using Google machine-learning techniques based on the network of neurons in the human brain.

 From article, (You can try your hand at advanced exoplanet hunting, thanks to some newly released code.

In December, a pair of researchers announced that they'd discovered two alien planets in the archival data gathered by NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, using Google machine-learning techniques based on the network of neurons in the human brain.

Those techniques are now available to the public. [Images: Discovery of 8th Planet in Kepler-90 System with Google AI]

"Today, we're excited to release our code for processing the Kepler data, training our neural network model and making predictions about new candidate signals," Google senior software engineer Chris Shallue, the lead author of that December discovery study, wrote in a blog post Thursday (March 8).

"We hope this release will prove a useful starting point for developing similar models for other NASA missions, like K2 (Kepler's second mission) and the upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission," Shallue added.

You can find the code, as well as instructions about how to use it, on GitHub.

"It's possible that some potentially habitable planets like Earth, which are relatively small and orbit around relatively dim stars, might be hiding just below the traditional detection threshold — there might be hidden gems still undiscovered in the Kepler data!" Shallue wrote in the blog post.

And there has been a lot of opportunity for planets to slip between the cracks. Shallue and Vanderburg spotted the two newly discovered exoplanets after analyzing Kepler observations of just 670 stars. The spacecraft studied about 150,000 stars during its primary mission, from 2009 through 2013, and has looked at thousands more during the K2 phase. (The primary mission ended when the second of Kepler's orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed. K2 involves planet hunting on a more limited basis, as well as observations of a variety of cosmic objects and phenomena.)

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New Creative Ways to Reduce to Cost of Electric Buses for City Mass Transit Systems.

Here's what would drive even more electric buses into U.S. cities

The ski resort community that's home to the Sundance Film Festival - Park City, Utah - is also the birthplace of something far geekier: a new business model for selling electric buses. The tourist destination was the first community in the U.S.

From article, (The ski resort community that’s home to the Sundance Film Festival — Park City, Utah — is also the birthplace of something far geekier: a new business model for selling electric buses.

The tourist destination was the first community in the U.S. to buy a fleet of electric buses by leasing the batteries that power the buses from Silicon Valley startup Proterra. The city leases the buses’ batteries out of its operational funds in the same way that it would have bought fuel for diesel buses. Diesel buses are the standard type of bus that most cities use for moving residents around.

The funding innovation is important because it lowered the upfront cost that Park City paid for its new fleet, bringing it closer, or even below, what it would have paid for diesel buses. At the same time, the leasing model also allowed the city to lower its risk around the batteries, which over the past few years have gotten both dramatically lower in cost and somewhat higher in energy density.  

Alternative financing has helped other energy technologies break out and it could do so for electric buses, too. The business model of paying for solar power as a service helped solar panels morph from being a niche energy source to becoming a mainstream form of power generation for home owners (although in recent years the trend has shifted back to loans).

 Park City isn’t the only city experimenting with alternative ways to pay for electric buses. In recent months, New York’s MTA — which operates the largest bus fleet in the U.S. — decided to lease five of Proterra’s electric buses (both the batteries and the buses) over a three-year period. The Big Apple is looking to experiment with the technology through a pilot program, which could help it make decisions for a larger investment down the road.)

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