Car dealerships will begin installing electric vehicle chargers this week in anticipation of the Nissan Leaf’s much-anticipated December roll-out.

Dealerships in Arizona, California, Oregon, Tennessee and Washington will put in more than 40 240V chargers by the end of the week, Nissan announced. Each dealership will have four charging docks, two for “operation support” and two for customer use.

By January more than 150 dealerships in the five launch markets will have chargers, the company says.

In Germany an all-electric (converted) Audi A2 recently traveled 375 miles on a single charge of its impressive battery pack.  The trip took place from Munich to Berlin while averaging about 55 mph and with the heat on.

The Audi was converted to all-electric by DBM Energy, running on its state-of-the art battery pack.  The company, headed by 27-year-old Mirko Hannemann,  has developed the battery with what they call the KOLIBRI AlphaPolymer Technology. According to Hannemann, the battery is able to operate with 97 percent efficiency and is easily charged with nearly any power source. More impressively, the company claims that if charged with a high-voltage system, the battery can reach a full charge in 6 minutes.

Does the Nissan LEAF live up to its claim of 100 miles per charge (MPC)?

We've been hearing for over a year now that the new, all-electric Nissan LEAF will be capable of attaining a range of 100 miles for every full charge of its battery back. The skeptics claimed this range was unlikely or only obtainable with strict, hypermiling while driving.

Now that the car is set to be unleashed to the public and several "real" folks have had a chance to drive the car for an extended period of time, it seems that the claims of 100 MPC are actually quite realistic.

Read more: The Nissan LEAF and Driving Range

October has been a big month for solar energy projects on public lands.

Six projects, all of them in California and Nevada, have been approved this month by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. On Monday, Salazar permitted Solar Millennium to build a 7,000-acre, 1,000 megawatt solar power plant near Blythe, Calif. The project is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs during construction and some 221 permanent jobs when it becomes fully operational.

Last week the secretary gave the Calico Solar Project the go-ahead to start ramping up on 4,604 acres of BLM land in the Mojave Desert, about 37 miles east of Barstow.

The EPA proposed new fuel standards aimed at reducing emissions and fuel consumption of semis, heavy-duty pickup trucks, tractors, and vocational vehicles by 10 to 20 percent by 2018.

If approved, the standards could reduce greenhouse emissions by about 250 million metric tons, and save 500 million barrels of oil and about $41 billion in net benefits over the lives vehicles produced within the program’s first five years, according to the EPA and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

“It is estimated an operator of a semi truck could pay for the technology upgrades in under a year, and save as much as $74,000 over the truck’s useful life,” the agencies claim. “Vehicles with lower annual miles would typically experience longer payback periods, up to four or five years, but would still reap cost-savings.”

Read more: Feds Propose Fuel Standards for Heavy-Duty Trucks, Tractors and Vocational Vehicles

It’s fitting that the world’s largest producer of solar panels opened its first U.S manufacturing plant in a region known for generations as the “Valley of the Sun.”

Suntech Power Holdings Co. flipped the switch this month at its new plant in Goodyear, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, where the sun shines hard and bright about 350 days out of the average year.

According to Suntech, a global leader in the production of silicon solar modules founded in 2001 by solar scientist Dr. Zhengrong Shi, the 117,000-square-foot Goodyear plant will initially produce Suntech's 280W Vd-series modules, which are used for commercial and utility-scale electricity generation.