Dec 26 2008

The Green Seen

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

Several items relating to the business and technology of clean energy caught our attention this week:

• United Parcel Service is adding bicycles during the holiday season to deliver packages to customers in six states, saving fuel and maintenance costs. UPS ran a pilot bicycle-delivery program in Maine and New Hampshire in 2007 and expanded this year to California, Oregon, Washington and Tennessee. A bike and trailer can deliver only 15 to 20 packages on a single run, but UPS estimates that for every three bikes on the road during the peak season it will save 17 gallons of fuel per day and $38,000 in vehicle maintenance costs. The UPS fleet, which experimented with electric trucks in New York City in the 1930s, also includes alternative fuel vehicles and seven new hydraulic hybrid trucks for more fuel economy and fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
• In other transportation developments, Japan has launched the first cargo ship partly propelled by solar power. The 60,213-tonne freighter -- the Auriga Leader -- is equipped with 328 solar panels to generate 40 kilowatts of electricity to support lighting and the crew quarters. This is a tiny fraction of the energy the ship needs, but the developers -- Nippon Yusen K.K. and Nippon Oil Corp. -- hope to increase seagoing solar power. The vessel will carry Toyota vehicles to customers overseas.
• The "smart grid" has arrived, sort of. During a recent power outage in an ice storm in Massachusetts, a man converted his Toyota Prius car into an emergency generator to power his home for three days. John Sweeney wired a DC to AC inverter into his Prius to run his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan and several lights on five gallons of gas. "The device allowed the engine to run every half hour, automatically charging the car battery and indirectly supplying the required power," according to the local newspaper.

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