A popular sight from Shanghai will be brought to American University on Oct. 21, to present a green alternative to public transportation. The zero-carbon ultracapacitor bus, a vehicle powered completely by batteries capable of charging in minutes, will be unveiled at the event.
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Ye said one of the advantages of the ultracapacitor is it can recharge in five to 20 minutes, compared to the three hours it can take regular buses. The battery can also be reused between 50,000 and 500,000 cycles.
"It can outlast the entire lifetime of the vehicle," Ye said. "Even after the vehicle has retired you can use the system for other applications."

Scott Sklar, president of the Stella Group, Ltd. is working with the project to help add solar charging to the bus stations.
"The technology of the 1800s was great, but this is the 21st century and its time to move on," Sklar said. "I like horse and buggies and it was great technology but not in the Capital Beltway." Sklar said the ground solar panels would face south and resemble bleachers. As passengers boarded the bus, the electronic control equipment would plug in and charge the vehicle.

Sklar said the charging process is great for popular bus stations where it takes several minutes for passengers to get on and off the vehicle. He expects the bus will need five to seven minutes to recharge. "This is good for people who are not exposed to this stuff," Sklar said. "You can come and touch it and see it’s not as scary as it sounds."

Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- California’s push to lead U.S. sales of electric cars may result in higher power rates for consumers in the state, as a growing number of rechargeable vehicles forces utilities to pay for grid upgrades.
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Power companies including Southern California Edison, the state’s largest, have to install new transformers and meters to handle greater demand and prevent blackouts from circuits being overloaded by too many vehicles plugging in. The utilities will boost rates to recover investment costs, said Travis Miller, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. in Chicago.

“If you look at the kind of money that will be needed for a full smart grid and support for electric vehicles, then you are talking about a substantial amount,” Miller said in a phone interview. The spending may total “multiple billions” of dollars over a decade or more, he said.
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A typical Santa Monica circuit, which serves about 10 households, may be overloaded should two or three customers on that circuit charge vehicles simultaneously, even if they do so overnight during off-peak hours, Ted Craver, Edison’s chief executive officer, said in a phone interview on Oct. 20.

While surplus power is available at night at cheaper rates, the grid needs adjustments to handle such charging, Craver said. For example, additional or larger transformers may be needed in neighborhoods with numerous plug-in car owners.

“If all those people do it at off hours, in the middle of the night, a lot of our system is designed so the transformers cool down at night,” Craver said. “That’s part of how they are able to function at full capacity during the day.”

Regarding "Air powered" cars or buses, no such things exist. They are not air powered, they are powered by electricity which is used, inefficiently, to compress air, so ultimately they are powered by whatever creates that electricity. The air motors are much more complicated than an electric motor and the storage density of compressed air tanks is less than lithium batteries, and the efficiency is worse as well. There is also the cost and complexity of a high powered air compressor, and the maintenance thereof. An air motor and air compressor are essentially an ICE without the combustion, so you have 2 motors to care for, and you're traveling around with thousands of psi of compressed air. The whole concept is ridiculous.