Newsweek: Apple's Electric Car Faces Challenges as Project Chief Leaves

The head of development for Apple’s secretive electric-car project, code-named Titan, is leaving the firm amid internal problems within the company, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Steve Zadesky, who previously worked as an engineer at Ford, is reportedly leaving Apple due to personal reasons not related to his performance; however, sources claim the Titan project has hit a number of challenges. 

Apple employees working on its autonomous electric car are complaining that there are a lack of “clear goals for the project” and that deadlines imposed by management are too ambitious.

The Hindu: France Commits €300 Million for Solar Energy

French President François Hollande on Monday committed €300 million (around $325 million or Rs. 2,200 crore) over the next five years for the global development of solar energy and said the real challenge was to attract investments worth a trillion dollars to promote the renewable energy source.

“The French Development Agency will allocate for the development of solar energy €300 million over the next five years,” Hollande said after inaugurating the interim Secretariat of the International Solar Alliance at Gurgaon, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Through this solar alliance, the French president said, he would like to open a new chapter to help give countries with no resources other than the sun an opportunity to produce electricity for meeting the needs of most of their people.

International Business Times: EVs Could Be Charged in 15 Minutes Using New Storage System

Swiss scientists have developed an innovative charging station system that is able to drastically cut down the charging time for electric cars from eight hours down to just 15 minutes, which is not currently possible.

Researchers from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) have developed a new charging station system that is able to charge electric cars in just 15 minutes by using a whopping 4.5 MW of power.

FutureStructure: Los Angeles Power Department Asks Customers to Help It Ditch Coal

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wants to put coal in its past, and it’s turning to its customers to pay for the transition.

The department’s board of commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a rate hike for electricity consumers in order to bolster its work to meet renewable energy goals. Those include eliminating coal as a power source in the next 10 to 15 years and sourcing one-third of its power sold from renewable energy, as well as increasing energy efficiency 15 percent by 2020. Some of the money will also go toward replacing old power poles, about half of which are at least 60 years old, according to a press release from the department.

NPR: San Diego Mulls Whether to Let City, Not Utility, Buy Alternative Energy

San Diego is the largest city in the country to commit to using only renewable energy, a goal that political parties, environmentalists and business groups hope to meet over the next 20 years.

Everybody's on board now, but there could be trouble brewing on the horizon. The problem is whether to set up an alternative energy program that would put the city in charge of buying electricity instead of the power company. It's a concept called "community choice aggregation."

"Imagine if you only had a single option for wireless service," says Ty Tosdal, an energy regulation lawyer. "It wouldn't present any kind of competitive pressure on companies to bring their prices down."