The Power 1000 (13kg or 29 pounds) has a 1,024 Wh capacity and can output up to 2,200W — enough to run a home microwave oven for about 1.3 hours and a car refrigerator for 19 hours, or charge a drone up to 12 times. The Power 500 (7.3 kg or 16.3 pounds) delivers 512 Wh of capacity and 1,000W of output for half the price.

The larger version supports 1200W fast recharge or 600W standard recharging (540W and 270W for the smaller version). Both can be fast-charged in 70 minutes for a 100 percent battery or 50 minutes to an 80 percent charge. Along with standard AC plugs, both have a pair of USB-C PD output ports that support 140W/100W charging for the Power 1000/Power 500 — enough for most laptops.

The market is fairly saturated with such devices (Jackery, Bluetti, Anker, others), but DJI is pitching this as an ideal way to charge its drones and other products. Released in China in December, it was already available in the US at Amazon and elsewhere via the grey market.

The Power 1000 is now on sale for $1,000 at DJI’s store, while the Power 500 costs $500. You can add a 120W Zignes solar panel for $299. For the latter, you’ll need DJI’s Power Solar Panel Adapter Module or DJI Power Car Power Outlet to SDC Power Cable.

DJI Power 500

$499 at DJI

DJI Power 1000

$999 at DJI

The post DJI's new backup battery can power small appliances, charge your drone appeared first on Best News.

Before today, Apple’s online support documents quoted iPhone batteries as maintaining 80 percent of their original full charge after 500 cycles. But after the company retested long-term battery health in its 2023 smartphones — iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max — it found they can retain 80 percent capacity after at least 1,000 cycles. The company said its support documents will be updated on Tuesday to reflect the new estimate.

Apple says its testing involved charging and draining the batteries 1,000 times under specific conditions and a suite of tests reflecting common uses. As for how the estimate doubled without any physical or software changes, the company attributes the upgrade to continual improvements to its battery components and iOS power management.

For older (pre-2023) iPhones, the original estimate of retaining 80 percent capacity after 500 charge cycles still stands — at least for now. Apple said it’s looking into whether older models’ estimates need to be updated.

Starting in June 2025, smartphone and tablet manufacturers doing business in the EU will be assigned a grade (A to G) indicating their energy efficiency, battery longevity, protection from dust and water and resistance to accidental drops. The battery longevity portion of the grade requires at least 800 charging cycles while retaining at least 80 percent of their original capacity, helping explain why Apple began retesting its devices’ long-term health.

For ideal battery longevity, Apple recommends keeping your phone in temperatures between 62 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit when possible. You’ll also want to avoid charging or leaving your handset in hot environments (95 degrees or warmer) while trying to avoid much direct sun exposure. In addition, if you’re storing an old iPhone long-term, it’s best to leave it half-charged.

In addition, Apple will soon move one of your phone’s most essential battery metrics to a different part of iOS settings. Beginning in iOS 17.4, currently in beta, the battery cycle count will move from Settings > General > About to a more logical home under Battery Health (under Settings > Battery). Apple introduced the battery cycle count to its mobile software in iOS 17, which was launched last fall.

The post Apple says the iPhone 15’s battery has double the promised lifespan appeared first on Best News.

"GM is announcing a compensation program for 2020-22 Bolt EV/EUV owners upon installation of the final advanced diagnostic software as part of the original battery recall," a spokesperson wrote in a statement. "Owners are eligible to receive a $1,400 Visa eReward card upon installation. This applies to Bolt EV/EUV owners in the US only. We’re grateful to our customers for their patience and understanding."

Owners must install a "software final remedy" by December 31, 2023 and sign a legal release — those who decline will have to wait for the class action lawsuit to play out. If the settlement ends up being more than $1,400, those who accept the payment will still receive the difference.

It seems like Chevy's Bolt EVs (and larger EUVs that came along in 2021) have never not had problems with their batteries. The 2017-2019 models had serious defects that could cause fires, forcing GM to recall them and install special software, reducing maximum charge levels to 90 percent.

The 2020-2022 models affected by the lawsuit used new battery chemistry with a different issue that could also cause a fire when the car was fully, or nearly fully charged. GM issued a recall for those models as well, installing diagnostic software that would reduce maximum charging levels to 80 percent (cutting range from about 259 miles to 207 miles). The software will eventually either warn customers that their battery pack needs to be replaced, or automatically return the maximum charge to 100 percent.

The problem is, the vehicles needed to reach 6,200 miles of use before the final assessment. That could be years for some buyers, and GM mandated that owners complete the diagnostic by March 2025 in order to qualify for an extended warranty or replacement battery, if needed.

GM announced earlier this year that it was discontinuing the Bolt EV amid the company's shift to the Ultium platform, possibly because it felt the name had been sullied by the battery issues. Following an outcry, though, it backtracked and said that a next-gen Bolt was in the works — showing that people still liked what the Bolt stood for (a practical, cheap EV with decent range) despite the recalls.

Presumably, any potential settlement would cover owners who effectively lost the full and expected use of their vehicle during the period. If you're part of the recall, you should receive a letter soon with more information and a unique PIN to access their site — more information is available here.

The post Chevy offers $1,400 to Bolt EV owners who endured lower charging levels appeared first on Best News.

The issue is affecting multiple models including older ones like Watch SE and Watch Series 5, up to brand new versions like Apple Watch Ultra 2, according to Reddit, Apple's Support Community, X and other sources. The issue appears to be fairly serious, with one user noting that "watchOS 10.1 is killing the battery on my Apple Watch," draining it from 100 to 50 percent in less than 60 minutes.

Apple appeared to address the issue partly with its iOS 17.1 update, noting that it resolved a problem involving "increased power consumption" when a Watch running watchOS 10.1 is paired with an iPhone using iOS 17, as MacRumors noted. That doesn't seem to have fully resolved the issue, though.

Apple said in the memo that the issue will be fixed in a watchOS update "coming soon," without providing a more specific date, specific models affected and reason for the problem. Given the nature of it, however, we'd hope it's a high-priority item. Apple is reportedly set to release iOS 17.1.1 for iPhone, and will hopefully also release watchOS 10.1.1 with a fix.

The post Apple Watch battery drain issues to be fixed in upcoming watchOS update appeared first on Best News.

The test was run in relatively cool temperatures (between 28 – 54 F) and livestreamed. Driving was done mainly in semi-autonomous (or Navigate-on-Pilot+, as Nio calls it), and speed-limited to 90 km/h (56 MPH). The average speed was 83.9 km/h (a respectable 52.4 MPH), with a travel time of 12.4 hours excluding stops.

"The completion of this endurance challenge proves the product power of the 150kWh ultra-long endurance battery pack," said Li in a Weibo post (Google translation). "More importantly, all models on sale can be flexibly upgraded to 150kWh batteries through the Nio battery swap system."

In fact, the ET7's 150kWh battery will only be available on a lease separate from the car, much as we've seen with some cars sold in Europe. Previously, the company said that the battery alone would cost as much as an entire car (the company's entry-level ET5 EV), or around $42,000.

Manufactured by WeLion New Energy Technology, the battery has a single-cell energy density of 360 Wh/kg or 260 Wh/kg for the entire pack (Tesla's latest cells are under 300 Wh/kg). Semi-solid state batteries use gel, clay or resin electrolytes, offering greater energy density and fire-resistance than current batteries. However, they're still far from the promised land of full solid-state batteries, which could feasibly double energy density.

We likely won't see the 150kWh battery pack stateside, though. With the Biden administration's latest rules, some US cars like Tesla's Model 3 Long Range that use specific Chinese battery components will no longer receive the full $7,500 tax credit.

Nio is a luxury EV manufacturer in China that offers vehicles without a battery, letting you sign up to a battery-as-a-service (BAAS) monthly subscription. That service also allows you to swap out your battery at any time for a larger one.

The post A Chinese EV squeezed 650 miles of range from its 150 kWh battery appeared first on Best News.

Trump’s first strike on Huawei was the declaration of a national emergency in May 2019, which saw the Commerce Department add the company to its Entity List, citing surveillance concerns and links to the Chinese state security. As such, Google could no longer provide Android support to Huawei, thus causing the Mate 30 series and later models to miss out on Google apps (they would eventually adopt Huawei’s Android replacement, HarmonyOS, two years later).

In November 2019, the FCC banned carriers from buying Huawei and ZTE networking gear with government subsidies.The following March, Trump signed a bill that would reimburse the replacement of Chinese gear — even if it meant spending an estimated $1.8 billion. Huawei attempted to sue the FCC over these restrictions, but the court sided with the regulator.

The tech war heated up rapidly in May 2020, when the US further restricted Huawei’s access to American equipment and software. This meant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s leading fab, would have to stop producing HiSilicon chips for Huawei — its then second-largest customer, after Apple. Likewise, Samsung and SK Hynix had to stop selling chips to the Chinese brand by the September 15, 2020 deadline. As Bloomberg’s teardown of the latest Huawei smartphones revealed, the company didn’t have a problem stockpiling these Korean memory chips.

For processors, Huawei had no choice but to rely more on local chip makers, namely Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and Shanghai IC R&D Center. That meant a significant downgrade, though: SMIC had just started mass-producing 14nm chips for Huawei then, whereas TSMC reached 5nm later that year and supplied Kirin 9000 processors for Huawei’s Mate 40. That would be the final “high-end” Kirin chip, Huawei’s mobile boss Richard Yu said at the time.

Qualcomm was eventually allowed to supply 4G chips to Huawei as of November 2020, but that’s four G, and market share figures don’t lie. The once-leading brand in China dropped to just 16 percent locally in January 2021 (and then down to a mere 6 percent in Q2 2022), as noted by Counterpoint. Huawei’s global market share has been negligible since 2021. According to both Counterpoint and Statista, though, since Huawei sold the Honor brand in November 2020, the spin-off has been able to claim one of the top China quarterly chart positions all this time.

China’s chip investment finally paid off when SMIC made a 7nm breakthrough in August 2022 — a leap from 14nm in just two years — faster than it took TSMC or Samsung, according to TechInsights. What’s more, this achievement was apparently done without using the most advanced lithography equipment, which were largely exclusive to the likes of ASML and Nikon. It wasn’t until earlier this year that the US convinced the Netherlands and Japan to restrict China’s access to advanced chipmaking machinery.

As Bloomberg would later find out in a lengthy investigation, this might have been the fruition of a Shenzhen city government investment fund from 2019 that helped Huawei build “a self-sufficient chip network.” Through a network of enterprises, Huawei could stealthily gain access to lithography tech while exchanging experts to work on each others’ turfs, without raising any flags. Huawei apparently even managed to hire several former ASML employees, which was likely key to reaching the 7nm node process for its latest processor (the 5G-capable HiSilicon Kirin 9000S, fabricated by SMIC). Benchmarks indicate that this chip’s performance is on par with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 from late 2020, thus suggesting that it’s around two generations behind the leading competition.

Huawei then took a rather unusual approach to launch its Kirin 9000S smartphones at the beginning of September this year. Without any launch event or teaser, the company simply announced on Weibo that the Mate 60 and Mate 60 Pro were immediately available. This surprise stunt coincided with the US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s visit to China, which led many to believe that Huawei received special orders from certain authorities to hastily launch these 5G devices ahead of schedule. This was quickly followed by the China’s announcement of a $40 billion fund to further boost its chip industry, as well as the launch of two more phones, the Mate 60 Pro+ and the Mate X5 foldable, a week later.

While this may seem a temporary win for China, the country actually saw 10,900 chip-related companies close down in 2023 (as of December 11) — a staggering 90-percent year-on-year increase, which is a sign of a bad economy, according to TMTPost. On the flip side, 65,700 new chip-related companies registered in the same period, which is a 9.5 percent increase year-on-year. The report added that the China-made RAM chips and processors on Huawei’s Mate 60 series are an indication of the growing reliance on the local supply chain, which will continue to drive the long-term development of the Chinese semiconductor industry.

As much as the US government wants to limit China’s access to high-end tech, the truth is western companies still want to tap into the big market in the east. NVIDIA is a prime example, as it’s still in talks with the authorities on the specifications of AI chips that it can sell to China, without breaching US export rules. “What we cannot allow them to ship is the most sophisticated, highest-processing power AI chips, which would enable China to train their frontier models,” Raimondo told Reuters. Of course, failing that, China may eventually come up with an AI chip that’s just as impressive, if not more — like its recent claim of a light-based chip that is apparently 3,000 times faster than NVIDIA’s A100.

The US-China tech war isn’t just limited to chips, either. The Biden administration is proposing to cut tax credits on electric vehicles that contain Chinese components — especially batteries, as an attempt to wean local car brands off Chinese components. The trade-off here is always the cost savings (as is the idea behind Ford and CATL’s Michigan battery plant), as well as the US market missing out on potential breakthroughs on power density or output, namely the upcoming 150kWh battery demoed in Chinese EV manufacturer Nio’s ET7, which reached a range of around 650 miles. Who knows, maybe someday Huawei may want to sell its Aito or Luxeed electric cars in the US, too — if it’s allowed to enter at all.

This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.

The post How China's chip production boomed in 2023 despite sanctions appeared first on Best News.

For the final installment of Hitting the Books for 2023, we’re bringing you an excerpt from the fantastic Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. A finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year award, Material World walks readers through the seismic impacts these six substances have had on human civilization throughout history, using a masterful mix of narrative storytelling and clear-eyed technical explanation. In the excerpt below, Conway discusses how the lithium ion battery technology that is currently powering the EV revolution came into existence.

Thanks very much for reading Hitting the Books this year, we’ll be back with more of the best excerpts from new and upcoming technology titles in post-CES January, 2024!

Excerpted from Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. Published by Knopf. Copyright © 2023 by Ed Conway. All rights reserved.

A Better Battery

The first engineer to use lithium in a battery was none other than Thomas Edison. Having mastered the manufacture of concrete by focusing religiously on improving the recipe and systematising its production, he sought to do much the same thing with batteries. The use of these devices to store energy was not especially new even when he began working on them at the dawn of the twentieth century. Indeed, the very earliest days of the electrical era were powered almost exclusively by batteries. Back before the invention of the dynamos and generators that produce most of our electricity today, the telegraphs and earliest electric lights ran on primitive batteries.

Their chemistry went back to Alessandro Volta, an Italian who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, had discovered that by stacking layers of zinc and copper discs separated by cardboard soaked in brine, he could generate an electric current, flowing from one electrode (in this case the metallic discs) to the other. His pile of electrodes was the world’s first battery — a voltaic cell — or as it’s still sometimes called, a pile (since a pile is precisely what it was). That brings us to the prickly question of what to call these things. Purists would argue that a single one of these units, whether it was Volta’s first effort or the thing you find in your smartphone, should be called a cell. A battery, they say, is a word only to be used about an array of multiple cells. But these days most people (including this author) use the words interchangeably.

Half a century later the French physicist Gaston Planté came up with the first rechargeable battery using a spiral of lead electrodes bathed in acid, housed in a glass container. Lead-acid batteries, versions of which are still used to help start car engines today, could provide quick bursts of power, but their relatively low energy density meant they were not especially good at storing power.

In an effort to improve on the chemistry, Edison began to experiment his way through the periodic table. Out went lead and sulphuric acid and in came a host of other ingredients: copper, cobalt and cadmium to name just a few of the Cs. There were many false starts and one major patent battle along the way but eventually, after a decade of experimentation, Edison landed upon a complex mixture of nickel and iron, bathed in a potassium hydroxide solution and packed into the best Swedish steel.

“The only Storage Battery that has iron and steel in its construction and elements,” read the advertising.

Edison’s experiments underlined at least one thing. While battery chemistry was difficult, it was certainly possible to improve on Planté’s lead–acid formula. After all, as Edison once said, “If Nature had intended to use lead in batteries for powering vehicles she would not have made it so heavy.” And if lead was a heavy metal then there was no doubt about the lightest metal of all — the optimal element to go into batteries. It was there at the opposite end of the periodic table, all the way across from lead, just beneath hydrogen and helium: lithium. Edison added a sprinkling of lithium hydroxide to the electrolyte solution in his battery, the so-called A cell, and, alongside the potassium in the liquid and the nickel and iron electrodes, it had encouraging results. The lithium lifted the battery’s capacity by 10 per cent — though no one could pin down the chemistry going on beneath the surface.

In the following years, scientists followed in Edison’s footsteps and developed other battery chemistries, including nickel–cadmium and nickel–metal hydride, which are the basis for most consumer rechargeable batteries such as the AA ones you might have at home. However, they struggled to incorporate the most promising element of all. Decade after decade, scientific paper after paper pointed out that the ultimate battery would be based on a lithium chemistry. But up until the 1970s no one was able to tame this volatile substance enough to put it to use in a battery. Batteries are a form of fuel — albeit electrochemical rather than fossil. What occurs inside a battery is a controlled chemical reaction, an effort to channel the explosive energy contained in these materials and turn that into an electric current. And no ingredient was more explosive than lithium.

The first breakthrough came in the 1970s at, of all places, Exxon-Mobil, or as it was then known, Esso. In the face of the oil price shock, for a period the oil giant had one of the best-funded battery units anywhere, staffed by some of the world’s most talented chemists trying to map out the company’s future in a world without hydrocarbons. Among them was a softly spoken Englishman called Stan Whittingham. Soon enough Whittingham had one of those Eureka moments that changed the battery world forever.

Up until then, one of the main problems facing battery makers was that every time they charged or discharged their batteries it could change the chemical structure of their electrodes irreversibly. Edison had spent years attempting to surmount this phenomenon, whose practical consequence was that batteries simply didn’t last all that long. Whittingham worked out how to overcome this, shuttling lithium atoms from one electrode to the other without causing much damage.

At the risk of causing any battery chemists reading this to wince, here is one helpful way of visualising this. Think of batteries as containing a set of two skyscrapers, one of which is an office block and the other is an apartment block. These towers represent the anode and cathode — the negative and positive electrodes. When a rechargeable smartphone or electric car battery is empty, what that means in electrochemical terms is that there are a lot of lithium atoms sitting in the cathode — in the apartment block — doing very little.

But when that battery gets charged, those atoms (or, as they’re technically called, since they hold a charge, ions) shuttle across to the other skyscraper — the anode or, in this analogy, the office block. They go to work. And a fully charged battery is one where the anode’s structure is chock-full of these charged lithium ions. When that battery is being used, the ions are shuttling back home to the apartment block, generating a current along the way.

Understand this shuttling to and fro between cathode and anode and you understand broadly how rechargeable batteries work. This concept — the notion that ions could travel across from the crystalline structure of one electrode to nest in the crystalline structure of another — was Whittingham’s brainwave. He called it intercalation, and it’s still the basis of how batteries work today. Whittingham put the theory to work and created the world’s first rechargeable lithium battery. It was only a small thing — a coin-sized battery designed for use in watches — but it was a start. Per kilogram of weight (or rather, given its size, per gram), his battery could hold as much as 15 times the electrical charge of a lead–acid battery. But every time Whittingham tried to make a battery any bigger than a small coin cell, it would burst into flames. In an effort to tame the inherent reactivity of lithium, he had alloyed it with aluminium, but this wasn’t enough to subdue it altogether. So Whittingham’s battery remained something of a curio until the following decade, when researchers working in the UK and Japan finally cracked the code.

The key figure here is an extraordinary man called John B. Goodenough, an American physicist who, as it happens, was born in Jena, the German city where Otto Schott and Carl Zeiss first perfected technical glassmaking. After studying at Yale, Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Goodenough eventually found himself in charge of the inorganic chemistry lab at the University of Oxford in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where he played the pivotal role in the battery breakthrough. Among his team’s achievements — commemorated today in a blue plaque on the outside of the lab — was the discovery of the optimal recipe for the cathode (that apartment skyscraper) in a lithium-ion battery. The material in question was lithium cobalt oxide, a compound that improved the safety and the capacity of these batteries, providing them with a stable cathode matrix in which the lithium ions could nest. It wasn’t that battery explosions could be ruled out, but at least they were no longer inevitable.

The final intellectual leaps occurred a few years later in Japan, where a researcher called Akira Yoshino perfected the other ingredients. He paired Goodenough’s lithium cobalt oxide cathode with an anode made from a particular type of graphite — that very variety they still make from the needle coke produced at the Humber Refinery — and the combination worked brilliantly. Lithium ions shuttled safely and smoothly from one side to another as he charged and discharged the battery. He also worked out the best way to fit these two electrodes together: by pasting the materials on to paper-thin sheets and coiling them together in a metal canister, separated by a thin membrane. This final masterstroke — which meant that if the battery began to overheat the separator would melt, helping to prevent any explosion — also evoked those first cells created in France by Gaston Planté. The rechargeable battery began life as a spiral of metal compressed into a canister; after more than a century of experimentation and a complete transformation of materials, it came of age in more or less the same form.

But it would take another few years for these batteries to find their way into consumers’ hands, and it would happen a long way from either Esso’s laboratories or Oxford’s chemistry labs. Japanese electronics firm Sony had been on the lookout for a better battery to power its camcorders, and came across the blueprints drawn up by Goodenough and adjusted by Yoshino. Adapting these plans and adding its own flourishes, in 1992 it created the first production lithium-ion battery: an optional power pack for some of their Handycam models. These packs were a third smaller and lighter than the standard nickel–metal hydride batteries, yet they carried even more capacity. In the following years, lithium-ion batteries gradually proliferated into all sorts of devices, but it wasn’t until the advent of the smartphone that they found their first true calling. These devices, with their circuitry, their semiconductors, their modem chips and bright displays, are incredibly power hungry, demanding the most powerful of all batteries. Today, almost all smartphones run on batteries derived from the discoveries of Whittingham, Goodenough and Yoshino. The trio was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019.

That this invention — first prototyped in America and then mostly developed in England — only came to be mass produced in Japan is one of those topics that still causes frustration in the Anglophone world. Why, when so many of the intellectual advances in battery design happened in Europe and the Americas, was production always dominated by Asia? The short answer was that Japan had a burgeoning market for the manufacture of the very electronic goods — initially video cameras and Walkmans — that needed higher-density batteries.

As the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, lithium-ion batteries became an essential component of the electronic world, in laptops, smartphones and, eventually, electric cars. Smartphones could not have happened without the extraordinary silicon chips inside, powering the circuitry, housing the processing units and bestowing memory storage, not to mention providing optical sensors for the camera. But none of these appliances would have been practical without light, powerful batteries of far greater energy density than their predecessors.

All of which is why demand for lithium has begun to outstrip our ability to extract it from the earth. And unlike copper or iron, which we have many centuries’ experience producing, the lithium industry remains in its infancy. Up until recently there were few mines and the pools in the Salar de Atacama were still relatively small. Today they are big enough to be easily visible from space, a gigantic pastel paint palette smack bang in the middle of the desert.

This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.

The post How we built a less-explodey lithium battery and kickstarted the EV revolution appeared first on Best News.

The battery capacity in the new Juice Pack varies depending on which iPhone model you have. The iPhone 15 version has a 2,400mAh battery, the iPhone 15 Pro model moves to 2,600mAh and the iPhone 15 Pro Max variant is 2,800mAh. The case supports passthrough charging and will prioritize the iPhone when both need power.

Mophie’s iPhone 15 and 15 Pro cases have identical external dimensions (despite the phones’ measurements being different) at 161 x 75 x 17.54mm (6.3 x 3 x 0.7 inch). Meanwhile, the iPhone 15 Pro Max version measures 174 x 81.1 x 17.12 mm (6.85 x 3.2 x 0.67 inch). The case is made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and has slightly raised corners to help with drop protection.

The Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone 15 series costs $100. The battery case will be available for pre-order in late February from Mophie’s website.

Mophie

Mophie Juice Pack

Pre-order the Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone 15

$100 at Mophie

We’re reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

The post Mophie resurrects the Juice Pack for iPhones appeared first on Best News.

In fact, the theme of this hardware is supersized capaciousness since every element of it has been built to service the most extravagant McMansions. For instance, the solar input can take up to 16.8kW of power at a time, letting you wire up to 42 400W panels at a time. Combined with the ability to draw extra power from the grid when energy costs are low and you should see the initial outlay paid back fairly quickly. And the company says output runs from 7.2kW — enough to run a Central Air unit — all the way through to 21.6kW with enough additional gear, which should be enough to power most key appliances in your home.

On its own, the Ultra is plug-and-play, although if you want to take advantage of its higher outputs and deeper integration with the home, you’ll have to buy its Smart Home Panel 2. That will of course require the services of a qualified contractor but, even so, the company says that installation is pretty clean and tidy. Not to mention that it’s nice and quiet when outputting less than 2,000W to help avoid complaints from the neighbours.

If you’re looking to splash out on a new whole house battery backup system, the Delta Pro Ultra is available to order starting today. For the first month, the inverter and battery will set you back $4,999, while the Smart Home Panel 2 costs an extra $1,599 when bought separately. Not to mention you can snag both in a bundle for $6,399 until February 9, when prices for all three will leap up to their RRP of $5,799 (Ultra), $1,899 (Panel 2) and $7,499 (bundle).

EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultra

$5,799+ at EcoFlow

We’re reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

The post The EcoFlow Delta Pro Ultra is a home battery that can harvest power from 42 solar panels appeared first on Best News.

The Saloon, which is its flagship concept EV, has an aerodynamic design and rides low to the ground. While the Space-Hub is quite a bit boxier and renders show it with seating that has passengers facing each other. Besides touting a spacious cabin, Honda did not share much about when or if it plans to actually manufacture a car inspired by the Space-Hub concept.

1 / 7

Honda Saloon and Space-Hub concept cars CES 2024

The first entries in Honda’s 0 Series lineup will feature advanced driver-assistive systems that pair with the carmaker’s Sensing Elite software. In the latter part of the decade, Honda expects the 0 Series to gain automated driving features through the integration of AI.

Around the same time the company expects to implement dramatic improvements to its battery technology, like fast charging from 15 to 80 percent in around 15 minutes and reducing battery degradation to less than 10 percent over 10 years. Those are bold goals, especially for a company that is a little late to the EV space.

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

The post Honda debuts new EV concept with two futuristic Series 0 models at CES 2024 appeared first on Best News.