I cannot emphasize efficiency enough. I have had my Chevy Volt since late July, and I've driven about 6200 miles, mostly electric. So far, I am averaging 181 miles per gallon. That is climbing, btw, because I rarely use gas.

But the real efficiency news is that I've saved about $550 in "fuel" costs over the first 6 months of ownership. That includes my electrical charging costs and my gas costs, compared with a comparably sized car, averaging a typical 25 miles per gallon gas efficiency. I also assume $3.50 per gallon.

I have noted it before, but it is such a stunning difference in efficiency, I will mention it again. My Volt uses about 37 kWhs to drive 100 miles. At $0.095 per kWh, I pay around $3.50 to drive 100 miles. Of course, a typical 25 mpg car, traveling 100 miles, will cost $15 to drive the same distance.

If there's one thing I will criticize EV manufacturers for, it is not highlighting this kind of efficiency in their advertising. I do not think people really understand just how superior an electric motor is relative to a gas engine.

If you have not test driven an electric vehicle, you should think about. I think you'll be surprised.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/30/414170/conservative-media-distort-chevy-volt-safety/

If NHTSA had actually followed Chevy Volt procedures and drained the Chevy Volt battery after the crash test, there would have been no battery fire. But they stuck the heavily damaged car with a leaking battery in their back lot and let it sit there for 3 weeks, at which point the battery caught on fire.

Question for Republican anti-renewable energy folk: when you crash your car so badly that you can't drive it, do you park it in your driveway and sit in it waiting for it to catch fire for three weeks? Hint: if you do that with a gasoline car, don't do any smoking around your car, because if the crash caused a gasoline leak you won't have to wait 3 weeks for a fire. What's the first thing the cops say to you if they can smell gasoline? Get out of the car sir, you are going to have to sit over there in a safe place.

I think never in human history was more fear mongering performed over a more trivial and silly "threat" than in the case of the Volt battery fire.  But let's remember, anything green is bad, the Saudis are our friends, and if we run out of gasoline God will make more.

Here's my latest article for The Examiner:  http://www.examiner.com/going-green-in-baltimore/semaconnect-and-lenkin-company-install-ev-charging-stations

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/issue/

Okay, so in the first year of production, 2010, the new wave of electric vehicles have only sold around 17,000 units. The Chevy Volt (plug in with gasoline engine to re-charge the battery pack) and the Nissan LEAF (pure plug in) did not totally replace the gasoline vehicle in a single year.

I realize that is a total shocker for the global warming denialists and Big-Block Mustang V8 fans here on Gather, but here's a bit of perspective: In the first year of HYBRID gas electric technology here in the USA, only 9350 units were sold. Hybrid vehicles went on to sell a high of 350,000 units in 2007, then gradually slacking down to a mere 275,000 units this year in the face of a slight decrease in gasoline prices relative to 2007-8. If you make that comparison, EVs in 2010 did not make a terrible showing. How about gasoline cars 100 years ago, how popular were they? Well, since the electric starter was not yet invented and you could easily get your arm broken while trying to start the motor, not real popular yet. You can whine about the Chevy Volt battery fire if you wish but it needs to be mentioned that 1. nobody died, and  2. the battery fire occurred in a Volt that had been wrecked in a collision several weeks previously while it was sitting empty in a lot. Still worried?  Your fellow Gatherite Steve B. drives a Volt and he is not worried about a battery fire. By the way, gas prices are moving up again with the tension around the Straits of Hormuz. By the way, have you ever seen a gasoline vehicle on fire from a gasoline leak in the engine area? I have. It's not pretty, and there are tens of thousands of those annually, and people do die in those cars sometimes.

The Washington Post newspaper is now calling for the termination of the $7500 tax rebate for electric vehicles. Doing the math, 7500 times 17,000, the US taxpayers spent around 1.275 billion bucks to jump start the new wave of electric vehicles.  How much did the US taxpayer spent subsidizing oil? You don't want to know. Beyond the obvious Exxon tax breaks, there's the cost of stationing aircraft carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf region.  That don't come cheap, mon ami. Would we have aircraft carrier battle groups steaming up and down the Persian Gulf if we were not worried about Iran interrupting the flow of oil through that waterway? Well, I can't think of any other reason. You can get just as good a skin tan in Florida way cheaper.

I like saving money. I was actually thrilled when the Congress recently did one thing right- they got rid of the Federal subsidy for corn ethanol, saving the taxpayers some 6 billion annually. Of course the only reason they did this is that ethanol does not need a price support currently.  But killing the electric vehicle when it is just starting out seems like a foolish bargain.  A technology in which the USA is actually competing with the best of foreign nations, which is widely believed to have the potential to sell hundreds of thousands of units annually within a few years? You want to pull the rug out from under that? The result of such a move could be 1. Japan takes over as the world leader in the technology and eventually makes big money on it or 2. nobody sells any electric vehicles and we remain fully dependent on oil for transportation. Which of those do you prefer?

If you want to get technical, overall feebates for all new vehicles might be a better way to go than rebate incentives for EVs. But in practical terms, those Tea Party House Republicans who want to kill anything with the word "Green" on it, who want to pretend that global warming is a hoax and that we can meet our oil demand in house just by drilling a bit deeper, those dudes are not going to vote for feebates. No sir, they would get rid of the EV incentives and trot off to a yummy lunch with caviar. pork rinds, and double martinis paid by Exxon lobbyists. Let's be real about it, that's the way life is.

The "smart grid" is the concept that the network which supplies electricity to Americans needs to be improved. To a certain extent, "smart grid" is an imprecise term. It does imply an electrical network that would be more effective than the currently existing one in terms of transmitting electrical power where it is needed and when it is needed.  There is widespread popular support for this idea even though most american citizens only have a vague idea of what the smart grid might look like. It is also not understood by the public that a number of taxpayer dollars in the Obama "stimulus" funds went into smart grid investments.

Is there much to be gained by this? Well, energy scientists agree that the demand for electricity in the USA is headed sharply upward  over the next couple decades at a time when energy is becoming more expensive. The smart grid offers one avenue of dealing with this constructively. According to "Smart Grid: integrating renewable, distributed, and efficient energy" by Fereidoon Sionshansi (2012, Elsevier) an investment of between 338 and 476 billion dollars in improvements to the US electrical grid would result in a net benefit of between 1,294 and 2,028 billion dollars. That yields a cost-benefit ratio of between 2.8 and 6.0. Not chump change we are talking about there.

It is worth noting that incentives could play a role in this. In other words one aspect of the smart grid would be to induce humans to use electricity at non-peak times in order to prevent blackouts and crashes of the system. But humans don't all want to lose any of their daily conveniences- some are very willing, some not. Another issue is the importance of weaving renewable energy such as wind and solar into the grid. Obviously the sun does not shine at night, so solar power has issues. Obviously winds do not blow at a constant rate, so wind derived electricity also fluctuates. Smart grid approaches address this problem, especially with strategies to harness peak power generation or store it.

If you find this topic interesting, please say so in a comment and I will consider a follow up article. Thanks.

I got stuck watching Fox Business on tv yesterday. I had no choice, I had to get something to eat at the Chinese restaurant down the street at work.  They decided to talk about the Chevy Volt. They stated that Chevy has only sold 6000 units of this vehicle in its first year. So far, accurate. They then proceeded to string together a bunch of outright lies and half truths and omissions to paint a ridiculously inaccurate picture of GM as a comatose ward of the State. It ended up not even being about money at all. Nobody even said "invest in Ford, invest in Toyota, invest in Hyundai." It was about right wing anti-Obama politics, wearing a silly face mask that said "money" on it. It was horrifying that this absurd nonsense was peddled as "news."

Then I open the newspaper this morning, and there is good old Bart Hinkle, the libertarian commentator in my local Republican newspaper. Bart's chosen topic is, you guessed it, the Chevy Volt. His title is "Would you buy an electric car from this man?" with a photo of President Obama.  Okay, I get it that the USA had to save GM from bankruptcy and that did cost the taxpayers, but it was a choice between owning a share of GM or no GM.  Would you prefer no GM? You left that out.

Then Bart proceeded to leave out a lot of other stuff. Yeah, he mentioned that there is a $7500 tax credit when you buy a Volt. Truth. Then he mentioned that the battery charge for the Volt only takes you 40 miles. True, but he left out the fact that the gasoline motor then starts to recharge the battery and you can drive another 300 miles at around 80 miles per gallon of fuel. That's a big thing to leave out, Bart. Then you note that GM only sold 1000 Volts in October out of 187,000 cars sold by GM.  Yes True.  But that's not bad for the first year of a new technology! You left that out.

Look, I can remember this same line of crap being spewed 10 years ago about the Toyota Prius. It's never going to work, it's a gimmick, the car will blow up, get a nice roomy Hummer instead. FYI, the Prius has now sold over a million units worldwide and is still going strong after several revisions. Hummers? That division of GM died.

I get that libertarians are upset over interference in the marketplace. But if you don't want to buy a Volt, don't buy a Volt. Meanwhile, as you say yourself, Bart: "Electric Cars one day may take their place alongside the Internet as one of the great life-changing innovations of our time."  Gee Professor, you just might be right there. But here's the thing, how do we get from here to there?  We refuse to spend a dime on the technology until the last drop of oil flies out the tailpipe?  Or we START the journey now, spending some actual implementation and assembly line dollars on putting out Model A, which will improve with Model B?

You argue as if technological change is instantaneous, Bart, but it is not. The electric car was invented over a hundred years ago and was replaced by the newly born technology of gasoline internal combustion at a time when global warming was not yet fully understood by anyone.  If we had had today's batteries in 1900, it's possible that the internal combustion engine never would have gotten off the ground.  The technological possibilities of electric vehicles are indeed economically compelling in terms of cost advantages over petroleum- and it needs to be noted that even the first effort down the road is not a failure. The Chevy Volt and the Nissan LEAF do not blow up and kill everyone inside the vehice. They work. They also are cheaper to operate than their old school gasoline competitition. But oh the horror, the dreadful inconvenience of having to actually plug it in over night. Do you have a cell phone? Do you plug that in?

I am left wondering what the Republican anti-renewable anti-electric vehicle want to actually propose beyond We Hate Obama.  You state that someday electric vehicles will work. Okay, then why not get busy? You state that you have nothing against renewable energy. That's a stretch when you are against any public policy that promotes them. Okay, let's say for the sake of argument that you are okay with renewables but you just don't want the citizens of the USA to spend a dime on them. Are you proposing that we even the playing field by getting rid of the massive subsidies for fossil fuels including tax breaks galore?  Silence and the sound of crickets. Eric Cantor is okay with ending tax breaks for fossil fuels- except that no he's not, because they get him re-elected on a regular basis through the magic of milking the petroleum cow for cash come November.

Imagine our planet in the year 2030. It's not that hard, you will probably still be alive unless you are over 70.  Do you want us to be shoveling out a couple hundred billion dollars to the mideast (whatever mideast exists in 2030, who can guess) for gasoline? Or Canada or Russia or Venezuela or Brazil, fill in the blank. My point is that the USA is not blessed with amazing amounts of petroleum at this point. Do you want to create an environmental disaster of the first magnitude by trying to squeeeze oil out of rocks?  You mentioned that global warming is real, Bart. then you sniffed that the Volt does not solve that. Well of course the sale of 6000 electric vehicles does not fix global warming. But if you don't want to start down the road, what's your answer? That also seemed to be missing from your screed.

Do you plan to fix global warming by kissing the butt of Exxon? Not gonna fly Bart, they have already committed to not investing in renewables, and therefore the success of renewables means death for Exxon. What else would work for Republicans. Oh yes, "Let's wait to invest in renewable energy until it's cheaper than fossil fuels."  But hey dummy, the process of investing in renewable energy is what eventually gets it to be grid competitive. If you wait for it to get cheaper than coal, it ain't gonna happen.

I'm tired.  If this is the road you want to go down, fine. But when we end up someday relying of renewable energy a lot more than we do today, what are you going to say? Is it going to be "thank God we saved America from renewable energy?" No, that would not work. Is it going to be "aren't you grateful that we have to buy all these solar panels and wind turbines from China?" No, because we are not going to be grateful. Not when we could stand a chance of actually participating in this industrial revolution by spreading around a little seed money- much less seed money, by the way, than China is spreading around.

I am just wondering where you are going with this. Could you take a break from whining and share your plan?

Announcing the Launch of My New Website!

Bending Light

Studio~DJem18 Galleries

Voyages

The Dance of Light and Darkness

Refracted Demesnes

A site that presents a link to "abstract worlds" ... those places outside of our everyday reach and conscience... in the form of artistic print photography.

Below the waves and exotic places...

Come See the Collection! ...

Click on the pictures to Go there. Or copy this link:

http://refractum.blogspot.com/

Enjoy!                                                   ~ DJE

<noscript>

I enjoyed reading “Bottled Lightning: superbatteries, electric cars, and the new economy” by Seth Fletcher. Published in May 2011, it’s an effort to summarize the scientific and economic process that has brought us to our present day effort to re-do our transportation system with the use of electric batteries. Caution: this book is very information rich, and probably only succeeds with readers who actually are curious about battery powered cars.

Did you know that Exxon explored the idea of electric cars in the height of the 1970s oil crisis? Yeah, you read that correctly: EXXON. Exxon sold off those battery labs and electric motor manufacturers in the 1980s and never looked back. Well, there might be a few regrets about the fact that the entire cell phone industry is now based on those lithium batteries that Exxon gave up on. But hey, hindsight is 20/20, know what I mean? Even weirder, in the wake of the Bhopal disaster, Union Carbide sold the battery research to Sony who figured out how to make it work in 1990. Don’t you hate it when that happens, USA?

Overall, this book is work of popular science that traces current battery technology to its roots back close to the year 1900, when Thomas Edison attempted to come up with a battery powerful enough to defeat the internal combustion engine. Tom failed. Then Fletcher continues to bring us up to date- with a rather boring section that explains the endless efforts of companies to sue each other over lithium battery patents, and finally an interesting bit about lithium mining- and don’t believe what you hear about there not being enough lithium in the world to support a car battery industry. Bolivia for example has enormous deposits, undeveloped for confusing reasons. And by the way, Lithium mining is way cleaner for the environment than Uranium mining or Gold mining.

Fletcher provides a valuable perspective her in portraying technological revolutions as they actually are- not a matter of a single brilliant breakthrough, but rather as a matter of a series of discoveries and reactions to the discoveries. Companies go out of business and sometimes their knowledge is ignored or wasted for a time. Some of those events or non events take place in the world of government- and that all takes time too. Eventually of course, engineers thought it over and realized that if a tiny rechargeable battery can run a cell phone, a much larger rechargeable battery can run a car. When you finally get a product to the marketplace that makes sense, then everybody wants in- even those snotty Germans who used to whine that electric cars will never work. Then you get into the competition phase- it looks like chaos and plenty of people are going out of business, but a new industry is being born. Finally, Fletcher concludes with an overview of the attempts to make a battery that works even better than a Lithium ion battery, and offers his viewpoint that battery powered vehicles are for real and can be expected to gradually rise in numbers to become a major sector of transportation technology.

As a journalistic effort to explain this green technology offspring of the worlds of science, engineering, and business, this is a pretty good book. It would do an adequate job of shutting up those fossil fuel fans who pontificate on the hopelessness of battery technology (if of course any of them would be willing to read it- which none of them are). Overall, I would have to grade it a “B.” It’s not the last word on this, because the last word is not yet written. Besides, Fletcher is not the gold standard in reportage. The electric car is undergoing rapid change. The “Prius” model of hybrid gasoline/electric, merely improving the efficiency of a gasoline engine by some 30% to 80% depending on how you tweak the bells and whistles, that was nice and Toyota has sold around a million units. But the potential goes beyond those sorts of numbers. The Chevy Volt will take you 40 miles on no gas, then continue down the road for up to 300 miles a day at 100 miles per gallon. Got a problem with that? Oh right, the battery costs too much. Sure, but expanded mining and economics of battery scale are going to reduce that cost. If you want more information about the Chevy Volt, ask Steve B, here on Gather. He drives one. Here ya go: http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474979815622.

It’s interesting to live in times of change, similar to the years between 1900 and 1915, when the automatic starter saved early automobile owners from broken arms and convinced people to go with gas. The battery fire that recently occurred in a Chevy Volt following a collision means that it’s all over for electric, right? No kidding, there are folks who say that. And by the way, that thing they call global warming? It's not going away.

Stay tuned.. :)

Technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

The Virgin Earth Challenge is a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges' satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.

Among the 11 shortlisted organizations are:

• biochar (Biochar Solutions, Black Carbon and Full Circle Biochar)
• carbon capture, particularly from ambient air (Carbon Engineering, Kilimanjaro Energy and Climeworks)
• enhanced weathering (Smart Stones)

Above three technologies (biochar, carbon air capture and enhanced weathering) have great potential to help out with carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere. To combat global warming, further technologies should be considered, such as in Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Arctic Methane Management (AMM).

How effective each technology is in one area is an important consideration; importantly, each such technologies can also have effects in further areas.

Further areas

Global warming is only one out of multiple areas where action is required; an example of another area is the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica; effective action has already been taken in this area, but the growing hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic shows that further action is necessary.

A safe operating space for humanity is a landmark 2009 study that identifies nine essential areas where sustainability is stressed to the limits, in three cases beyond its limits.

The inner green shading represents the proposed safe operating space for nine planetary systems. The red wedges represent an estimate of the current position for each variable. The boundaries in three systems (rate of biodiversity loss, climate change and human interference with the nitrogen cycle), have already been exceeded. From: A safe operating space for humanity, Rockström et al, 2009.

Areas and applicable technologies

The table below shows these nine areas on the left, while technologies that could be helpful in the respective area feature on the right.

As said, each of technologies may be able to help out in multiple areas. As an example, by reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, biochar and carbon air capture can also indirectly reduce carbon dioxide in oceans and thus help out with ocean acidification. Enhanced weathering could additionally reduce carbon dioxide in the oceans directly, thus presenting itself even more prominently as a proposal to achieve sustainability in this area.

Similarly, algae bags located in the mouth of a river could help out in multiple areas. They could produce biofuel and thus help reduce aviation emissions, while in the process catching fertilizer runoff, thus reducing emissions of nitrous oxide (the largest ozone-depleting substance emitted through human activities in a 2009 NOAA study) and also reducing depletion of oxygen in oceans.

Implementing the most effective policies

Policy support for such technologies is imperative. Just like some technologies can help out in several areas, some policies can cover multiple areas. As an example, a policy facilitating a shift to cleaner energy can both reduce greenhouse gases and aerosols such as soot and sulfur. Sulfur reflects sunlight back into space, so reducing sulfur emissions results in more global warming, but conversely global warming can be reduced by releasing sulfur over water at higher latitudes.

How many different policies would be needed to support such technologies? What are the best policy instruments to use?

Traditionally, government-funded subsidies and standards have been used to contain pollution, sometimes complemented with levies and refundable deposits; this can also work for chemical pollution. Standards have also proven to be effective in reducing the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer, while - as said - policies could at the same time also be effective in other areas, in this case reducing the impact of CFCs as greenhouse gases.

However, standards don't raise funding for support of such technologies, while taxpayer-funded subsidies make everyone pay for the pollution caused by some. Hybrid methods such as cap-and-trade and offsets are prone to corruption and fraud, which compromises their effectiveness. Local feebates are most effective in facilitating the necessary shifts in many areas.

Two sets of feebates

To facilitate the necessary shift away from fuel toward clean energy, local feebates are most effective. Fees on cargo and flights could fund carbon air capture, while fees on fuel could fund rebates on electricity produced in clean and safe ways. Fees could also be imposed on the engines, ovens, kilns, furnaces and stoves where fuel is burned, to fund rebates on clean alternatives, such as EV batteries and motors, solar cookers and electric appliances. Such feebates are pictured as yellow lines in the top half of the image below.

Support for biochar and olivine sand could be implemented through a second set of feebates, as pictured in the bottom half of the image below. Revenues from these feebates could also be used to support further technologies, as described in the paragraph below.

Further technologies should be considered for their effectiveness in specific areas, including:

• release of oxygen to help combat methane in the Arctic and to help combat loss of stratospheric ozone
• use of plastic sheets to capture methane
• use of radio waves to enhance methane decomposition
• diversion of water from rivers to avoid warm water flowing into the Arctic Ocean
• release of aerosols over water at higher latitudes
• surface & cloud brightening to reflect more sunlight back into space

Further reading:

Feebates
Biomass
Carbon Air Capture and Algae Bags
Enhanced weathering
Oxygenating the Arctic
Ozone hole recovery
Enhanced methane decomposition
Desalination
Vortex towers could vegetate deserts
Carbon-negative building
LEDs: When will we see the light?
Thermal expansion of the Earth's crust necessitates geo-engineering
Towards a Sustainable Economy
The way back to 280 ppm

As many of you know, my wife and I bought a Chevy Volt in July. Since that time, the Volt has become, more or less, MY car. I think my wife is just being VERY nice. I don't drive HER car much any more, but on occasion, I do - and thereby discover just how spoiled I have become. Compared to MY Chevy Volt, my wife's Nissan Murano (a very nice car, by gas vehicle standards) is PRIMITIVE. It is loud and jerky, and the ride is rough.

Chevy Volts are arriving in most GM dealerships across the country, now, so your local dealer should have one available for test driving. I recall, when my wife suggested that we go look at one in July, I had no real intention of actually buying one. I really was aiming for a Nissan Leaf. But after test driving the Volt, I was "hooked". The Volt rides very smoothly, quietly, and powerfully. I had had no idea what a fine car the Volt is. And my impression continues to be just that. And no....I do not miss gas stations. In fact, the other day, I drove MY WIFE'S CAR to fill it up - and when I got out at the gas station, I had a strange moment of disorientation. I had to stop and think to myself, "OK, what am I supposed to do here?"

But here's, the real kicker. Even as much as I have kept up with advances in "green technology", even I have been shocked by how superior the electric motor is to a gas engine. I'm referring to efficiency especially - as well as performance and comfort. I pay roughly 20% to travel 100 miles, compared to what you will pay for gas to cover the same distance - given a comparably sized car, and $3.50 per gallon gas prices. It costs me $3.14 to travel 100 miles.

So here's my challenge - go test drive a Chevy Volt yourself. See if you don't get hooked. Then come back and post a comment. I'd like to see what you think!!

One final note - if you DO get hooked, consider buying your Volt before the end of the year, so you can take advantage of a $7500 federal tax credit. Your state may also have incentives, which your dealer will know about. I look forward to hearing from you.