The National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA) is out to change the perception of electric vehicles (EVs).

"EVs are more than glorified golf carts," says Chip Gribben, the NEDRA's PR Director. "Our whole mantra has been to dispel the myth that EVs are slow and we have been pretty successful."

Founded in 1997, NEDRA organizes drag racing competitions to show off the speed that vehicles powered by electricity can reach. As interest in electric vehicles has grown in recent years, so has the popularity of NEDRA's drag racing competitions.

This isn't only reflected by growing crowds. Gribben cites major sponsorship deals and notes that several NEDRA drivers have begun getting sponsorship from battery companies. NEDRA was also recently invited to the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing Series in July. "The fact that we have been invited means that the racing community is beginning to take a serious look at electric drag racing and NEDRA," he says.

Check out some videos of electric vehicles burning rubber at various NEDRA competitions below.

In last September's competition, the "KillaCycle" set a new NEDRA record by going a quarter of a mile in 7.864 seconds (reaching 169 miles per hour).

At the same competition, another electric bike, the ElectroCat, set a new NEDRA record for a 48-volt street-legal motorcycle by an eighth of a mile in 13.24 seconds (reaching 52.97 miles per hour).

The video above shows a Tesla roadster racing an in OBS junior dragster in a competition held earlier this year.

In this race, a Tesla roadster goes up against an electrified 1972 Datsun 1200, called White Zombie.

In this clip another electric drag bike, AGNS, makes a run.

Silicon solar cells built on a nanostructured substrate (top left) have a surface patterned with nanoscale domes (top right). The scale bar in both electron-microscope images is 500 nanometers. The diagram shows the layers of the device, from bottom to top: a quartz substrate, a reflective layer of silver, a transparent conducting oxide, the active layer of amorphous silicon, and another oxide layer. Credit: ACS/Nano Letters

The accumulation of dust on the surface of a solar cell can block light and cut into cell efficiency. Researchers at Stanford have demonstrated that solar cells patterned at the nanoscale with domed structures absorb more light and, as a bonus, are self-cleaning.

The nanoscale patterning is not just on the surface of the cell but is applied to every layer. The cells are built on a substrate patterned with nanoscale cones. The bottom layer is a film of silver 100 nanometers thick that acts as an electrical contact and a light reflector; atop this is a film of amorphous silicon sandwiched between transparent conducting layers. Though the substrate is jagged, the accumulation of layers results in domed structures that happen to resemble the mushroom-like structures other researchers have been developing for self-cleaning surfaces. An added layer of hydrophobic molecules makes the cells nearly superhydrophobic: water droplets roll along the surface, pulling dust away with them.

These nanodome structures not only repel water, but help trap light. Because they're so small--about 500 nanometers in diameter--the nanodomes interact with light in a cool way, absorbing 94 percent of all light from the infrared to the ultraviolet. A flat solar cell made from the same materials absorbs only 65 percent of light in the same broad spectrum. So far the overall power conversion efficiency of the cells is 5.9 percent. The lead researcher, Stanford materials science professor Yi Cui, says these patterning techniques could be applied to other solar materials. This work is described online in the journal Nano Letters.

Solar companies presenting business plans to investors at a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) conference this week devoted particular attention to how they hope to compete with Chinese manufacturers. The audience at the NREL Industry Growth Forum in Denver consisted largely of venture capitalists and partners from private equity firms.

Stellaris, a company that assembles solar modules in Lowell, MA, has already received $6.1 million in funding to develop techniques for packaging silicon and thin-film cells. The company, represented at the conference by CEO James Paull, is seeking further financing in 2010.

Paull said that while European companies' cell-to-module costs are 70 cents per watt, China's are half that. "Solar modules have become a commodity, and China is dominating," he said. Like most of the other presenters, Paull didn't reveal too much about his company's technology. But he said that Stellaris hopes to save costs by adding passive plastic concentrators to silicon and thin-film cells and by reducing cell sizes.

An executive from a large European solar company expressed skepticism, however, that the US will ever be able to catch up with Chinese solar manufacturers. The executive, who manages his company's operations in China, said his company had explored manufacturing in California and Texas but that the labor costs were much too high. That said, he was at the conference looking for new solar technologies to buy up--an area where the US does still have an edge.