When you think about McDonald’s, you will often think of hot and greasy fries, and sometimes, hot and greasy chicks. However, now you can associate McDonald’s with something a little greener – like an electric vehicle charging station.

A new Cary, North Carolina McDonald’s restaurant will include two charging stations that will be free for those who choose to use them. The environmentally friendly feature will allow drivers of electric cars to plug them in and charge them while they gorge on Quarter Pounders and Big N Tasty’s. Can we get a hoo raah?

Helda Rodriguez, president of NovaCharge, the Florida distributor of the ChargePoint stations, said that if the feature proves popular, McDonald’s can expand the system to add more stations. Once huge franchises like McDonalds start jumping on the electric vehicle bandwagon, you know the future is looking a whole lot greener!

EcoGeek is reporting that Norway is heading down a great path for sustainable living – proposing a ban on selling any new gas-only cars in the country starting in 2015.

Finance Minister of Norway, Kristin Halvorsen, is implementing a plan that dictates cars sold after 2015 must at least partially run on electricity or other alternative fuels. Hybrid vehicles and biofuel-compatible cars would be allowed.

Although there has been opposition, the ban wouldn’t eliminate out gas-fueled cars completely, it would just require new models to have the option of accepting alternative means of fuel. Moreover, older gas cars wouldn’t be affected by the plan.

One of the main obstacles in getting the general population to embrace electric cars is that because of the length of time it takes to charge a battery, long trips are impossible unless you pull over and take a five hour break every 100 miles or so.

Thanks to a recent breakthrough at MIT, we will be using lithium-ion car batteries that can be charged in less than an hour within the next two to three years. While this is still a ways from being as fast as filling up at the gas pump, it now makes longer trips a possibility in electric cars.

There is other research going on out there right now that is looking to reduce the charge time to mere minutes but what is exciting about the MIT battery breakthrough is that it does not use drastically different technology from the standard lithium-ion battery, which is why we can expect to see them in cars so quickly.

The new batteries have been nicknamed “Beltway Batteries”, after the orbital motorway in Washington DC, because it uses a bypass system that allows the lithium ions move more quickly.

The MIT scientists found that by coating the lithium iron phosphate cathodes in a lithium pyrophosphate it allows charged ions to move faster allowing the battery to expend and receive its charge faster.

The Beltway Batteries will have a use in not only electric cars but anything that uses a battery including cell phones and even solar power and wind energy generation since better batteries means that more surplus energy could be stored.

We at Sustainability Ninja think the Mini Cooper is a damn cute car. And now, the Cooper doing the smart thing by jumping on the electric vehicle bandwagon. Can we get a hoo raah?

In a floundering auto industry, when many automakers struggle to attract buyers, Mini has to figure out which buyers to choose, the good people over at BMW are having a problem: They can’t build enough electric Mini coopers to meet demand. Mini will release only 450 vehicles and another 50 in Berlin. From there, the company will decide whether or not to mass produce the vehicle.

Powered by a 100 % electric motor, the Mini E can accelerate to 62 mph in just 8.5 seconds, and reach a top speed of 95 mph. Unfortunately, Mini E is only available for lease and will be available in just three cities. Despite a hefty price tag, there has been a whopping demand for the car.

“We have to make sure their driving style fits with what we want,” Jim McDowell, vice president of Mini USA, told ANE. “If you drive 200 miles a day, that’s a longer daily drive than our range.”

McDowell says Mini has whittled the application list down to 1,000 people. The 450 people who will be selected should receive their cars in April.

Smart-grid technology is taking another step forward as IBM is joining with Danish research consortium EDISON and seeking to optimize wind turbine energy for use with electric cars.

The goal of the project will be to correspond wind turbine energy from the island of Bornholm, Denmark, with the power consumption of electric cars.

The goal of the project is two-fold: increase the number of electric cars in Denmark to 10 percent of the vehicles on the road while shifting an even greater emphasis to wind power in the country.

Denmark already receives 20 percent of its power from renewable energy sources like wind turbines.

IBM’s Global Energy and Utilities is currently involved in approximately 50 different projects like this that relate to smart-grid technology. Allan Schurr, vice president of strategy and development recently explained their emphasis on smart-grid tech saying that it can help utilities better integrate renewable energy sources and run the transmission grid more efficiently.

“Smart-grid technologies are not required to make larger use of wind and solar power but they can make them less expensive,” Schurr said. “Getting a handle on power supply and demand in real time helps address the variable nature of wind and solar power,” he said.

He went on to explain that many forms of renewable energy, particularly wind power, cause problems for power grid operators since power supply is unpredictable. Smart-grid technology can help modulate the loads so that if the wind is blowing, cars should be charging.

The Danish Edison project will try to use simulations and historical data to predict how best to correspond wind turbines power output with the charging of electric car batteries. An example of how this might function would be for a drop in wind speeds to be matched with a slow down in how fast electric car batteries are charged.

Smart grid technology can help balance electricity supply from wind power or solar energy with demand. This would mean eliminating the need for fossil fuel backup generators that are typically used as stand-by power suppliers.