Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Nothing concentrates the mind like a clear numeric goal. Here’s my nomination for a national environmental goal: 99g/km.

Car enthusiasts will recognize this number instantly: It’s the unofficial target of many green automakers for carbon dioxide emissions – 99 grams of CO2 per kilometer traveled.

Expressing the goal that way makes more sense than the usual fuel economy standard in miles per gallon (though as we’ll see, they have much in common). After all, every other car pollutant is measured and regulated in grams per unit of distance. Current federal standards dictate exhaust emissions of no more than 0.25 grams per mile of smog-producing hydrocarbons, 0.4 g/mi of nitrogen oxides and 3.4 g/mi of carbon monoxide.

Why not hold CO2—a greenhouse gas pollutant--to the same kind of standard?

As we know, establishing those emissions standards worked wonders, achieving results that many automakers claimed were impossible. Back in the 1950s, when the sources of smog in Los Angeles were first discovered, new cars coughed out an average of 13 g/mi of hydrocarbons, 3.6 g/mi of nitrogen oxides and 87 g/mi of carbon monoxide. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Setting a similarly tough but achievable standard for CO2 emissions could have the same beneficial effect, helping us combat the deadly effects of global warming.

At the current federal fuel economy standard, 27 miles per gallon, the average new car pumps out about 203 grams of CO2 per kilometer. It would take an average fuel economy of just over 55 mpg to cut emissions to 99 g/km. (My figures are based on federal guidelines indicating that one gallon of gasoline produces 8,788 grams of CO2 when burned.)

Crossing the magic threshhold of 100 g/km has become a powerful motivating factor for many competitive automakers—in fact, it’s a metric they now routinely boast about for their most efficient new and forthcoming models.

The Peugeot 3008 Hybrid4, the gasoline-powered Hyundai 110, the award-winning Volkswagen Golf BlueMotion diesel, the Toyota iQ, the Audi 1.6 TDI diesel, and the Ford Focus ECOnetic, among others all now tout a rating of 99 g/km.

Isn’t it time we made 99 g/km our new car standard? 

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

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

Scientists at Napier University in Edinburgh, Scotland, say they have developed a new vehicle biofuel made from Scotch whisky byproducts. The fuel is derived from pot ale liquid from copper stills and spent grains. "While some energy companies are growing crops specifically to generate biofuel, we are investigating excess materials such as whisky byproducts to develop them," Professor Martin Tangey, director of Napier's Biofuel Research Center, told the Financial Times. Tangey says tapping whisky byproducts "is a more environmentally sustainable option and potentially offers new revenue on the back of one of Scotland's biggest industries." Scotch whisky exports were a record $4.85 billion in 2009, or about one quarter of the UK's food and drink exports.

The BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is attracting new remedial clean-up technologies. They include an oil-separating centrifuge system made by Ocean Therapy Solutions, oil-hungry bacteria grown at Tel Aviv University, and an oil-absorbing robot developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The New York Times Green blog reports. The M.I.T. device is a solar-powered nanofiber conveyor belt said to absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil. Using "swarm" robotics, thousands of the devices could form "teams" to attack a spill. M.I.T. plans to enter the invention in an oil clean-up competition from the X-Prize Foundation with a $1 million prize for collecting and recovering spilled oil. 

The San Francisco Bay Area is gearing up to install 5,000 car chargers over five years for an expected surge of electric and plug-in hybrid cars like the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt and models from Mitsubishi, Toyota, Tesla and other automakers. The nine-county Bay Area currently has about 120 chargers. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District has approved a program for organizations to install chargers in the next five years at homes, apartments, office buildings, parking garages, BART stations and shopping malls. "We're trying to address range anxiety," says Damian Breen, director of grant programs for the air  quality district. "We want people not to be worried their electric vehicle is going to run out of juice."

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

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

Four teams from Switzerland, Germany, Australia and South Korea this week launched a solar-powered, emissions-free 80-day around-the-world race from Geneva to draw attention to electric vehicles. The 18,000-mile Zero Race will run through Moscow, Shanghai, Vancouver and San Francisco before stopping in Cancun, Mexico, for a United Nations Climate Conference, and then the vehicles will be shipped to Portugal and end the race in Geneva next January. Two vehicles are battery-powered scooters and the other two are custom sedans. The Zero Race is organized by Swiss adventurer Louis Palmer, the first person to go around the world in a solar-powered vehicle.

Iceland to become world leader in electric cars? A Forbes article suggests Iceland could be the first to make electric vehicles the default national transportation. Three quarters of the island nation's 317,000-plus population lives within 37 miles of the capital Reykjavik. Forbes says rural areas could probably be wired with just 15 fast-charging stations. "That, coupled with with the fact that 80 percent of  Iceland's energy is cheaply produced renewable (from geothermal and hydro) should give you a good idea why this is the ideal test bed for electric vehicles," the article says. Iceland has an agreement with Mitsubishi to deliver i-MiEV all-electric cars to the island with a claimed range of 80 to 100 miles.

The greenest college in the land is small Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vt., according to a survey by the Sierra Club's Sierra magazine. The college, with 820 undergrads, offers an extensive environmental studies program, burns wood chips and methane from cow manure for heat and electricity, and aims to become carbon neutral. The magazine sent an 11-page questionnaire to 900 colleges and universities to find the greenest institutions and received 162 responses. After Green Mountain, the top 10 colleges based on criteria from energy sources to financial investments included Dickinson College (Pennsylvania), Evergreen State College (Washington), University of Washington, Stanford University (California), University of California-Irvine, Northland College (Wisconsin), Harvard University (Massachusetts), College of the Atlantic (Maine), and Hampshire College (Massachusetts). 
 

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

The next time you go shopping online or to a big-box store, consider this: the trucks that haul the TVs, vegetables, shoes or lumber for your buying pleasure consume more than one-eighth of all petroleum used in the United States.

Or to put it another way, medium- and heavy-duty trucks make up only 4 percent of all vehicles on our highways, but burn more than 20 percent of all fuel used in U.S. road transportation. The reason: they average only 6 miles to the gallon, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

That’s why, at President Obama’s direction, the U.S. Department of Transportation has just sent the White House historic new draft fuel efficiency standards for trucks, aimed at significantly reducing America’s greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on foreign oil.

The administration believes that existing technologies will permit manufacturers to boost truck fuel efficiency by as much as 25 percent.

If so, some of the credit should surely go to recycled nuclear arms experts at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who are applying expertise gleaned from studying the turbulence from weapons explosions to understand and minimize the air turbulence and drag from moving trucks.

Scientists at the lab, funded by DOE and collaborating with truck manufacturer Navistar Inc. and others, used the world’s largest wind tunnel at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale to develop and test simple modifications of truck bodies to improve fuel efficiency up to 12 percent.

That translates into reduced diesel fuel consumption of 3.4 billion gallons annually, for a saving of $10.2 billion a year. It would also prevent emissions of 36 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, according to the lab.

The best thing is that the modifications--including an underbody panel and flaps at the back--don't require retooling the entire truck industry. “This is a technology that could easily be installed on the tractor trailer trucks that are out on the highway today,” said Kambiz Salari, LLNL’s lead scientist on the project. “And 12 percent is just the beginning. We expect to increase that savings even more during the current series of wind tunnel tests. It’s time to market is incredibly quick. In just three years, we could see these devices on the road and realize the real fuel savings.”

The LLNL research project cost only about $4 million, but the payoff to the trucking industry and to the U.S. economy from these and other advances could be huge.

Improving the fuel economy of larger trucks by an average of 3.7 mpg would slash U.S. oil consumption 11 billion gallons annually by 2030, according to a report issued this year from the Union of Concerned Scientists. The net savings could amount to $120,000 per tractor-trailer over eight years and the recycling of those savings throughout the economy could create more than 120,000 new jobs nationwide by 2030, according to UCS and CALSTART, a transportation technologies consortium.

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

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

A catamaran made of 12,500 used plastic bottles completed a four-month, 8,000 nautical mile San Francisco-to-Sydney voyage across the Pacific Ocean to draw attention to plastic waste in the world's oceans and landfills. The six-man crew of the 60-foot "Plastiki" was led by David De Rothschild, a descendant of the Rothschild banking family and an adventurer and ecologist. He named the craft in honor of the original Kon-Tiki, a raft made from balsa wood, that launched a 4,300-mile Pacific voyage in 1947 by Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, from South America to French Polynesia.

The long-awaited plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt will carry a sticker price of $41,000 before a federal tax credit pushes the cost down to $33,500. The Volt goes into production in September and will initially be sold in California, New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Texas, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The rival all-electric Nissan Leaf, which will also go on sale this year, starts at $33,000 before a $7,500 tax  credit. General Motors says the Volt has an all-electric range of 40 miles before a small gasoline engine starts up to run a generator to power the electric motor for a total range of 340 miles. Nissan says the Leaf will run 100 miles on a battery charge. Both GM and Nissan will also offer leasing the cars.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), headquartered in oil-rich Abu Dhabi, has signed up 148 countries and the European Union to develop new energy supplies around the globe. Thirty-one nations -- Albania, Samoa and Mexico are the latest signatories -- have ratified the treaty that formed IRENA in 2009 to work for more bioenergy, geothermal, hydropower, and wave, solar and wind power  resources. Most of the Middle East oil producers and U.S. have signed but not ratified the IRENA treaty, while Saudi Arabia, Canada, China, Russia and Venezuela have yet to join the group.  

Posted by: Kory Raftery

"If you care about addressing the climate issue…or about clean air…or putting the country on a path to energy independence…or about reviving investment and job creation…then you have to be revved up about the electric car," said Chris Johns, president of Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) at the outset of today’s Plug-In 2010, an international conference centered on bringing electric vehicles (EVs) to market.

Automakers, electric car component manufacturers, utilities and drivers have converged upon San Jose to discuss all things relevant to electric cars. Industry movers and shakers are sharing information and sizing up the competition before EVs start arriving in American neighborhoods. By the time the conference opens next year, folks owning vehicles like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf should be quietly pulling into their driveways and garages.

Based on the high adoption rate of hybrid vehicles in the last few years, Johns predicted that the Bay Area alone will see somewhere between 220,000 and 845,000 vehicles "plugging in" over the next decade. That’s both exciting news for an electric utility, and a huge responsibility given that a single EV can suck as much power from the grid as three homes in San Francisco.

"At the end of the day, we’re the entity charged with making sure there’s enough clean, affordable power on the grid," Johns said. ". . . And, in our customers’ eyes, we’re responsible for the quality of their experience when they bring that new vehicle home and plug it in for the first time."

PG&E isn’t new to this challenge. The utility has been working to advance clean transportation for the last 20 years or so. The company currently operates the largest utility fleet of clean vehicles in America. It was the first utility to add a Smith all-electric bucket truck to its fleet, will be the first to add Raser Technologies’ all-electric extended range pickup trucks and is awaiting delivery of nearly a dozen Chevy Volts later this year.

For current EV owners, the utility offers a special pricing plan, which gives customers a steep discount in exchange for charging their cars during off-peak hours. Making sure that new owners charge at night will be critical to avoiding the need to build new power plants to meet their demand, Johns noted.

PG&E just began a pilot project with the Electric Power Research Institute that will allow the utility to better understand the infrastructure necessary to support the future of EVs. The program will allow PG&E to examine how long different vehicles take to charge and their impacts on the electric grid at different times of the day.

"The goal is to prove that this works at scale, that it functions seamlessly for the customer and that it’s secure," Johns said. "The pilot is running this year and next year, and we see it as a critical step that can help commercialize the new technologies needed to serve the mass EV market."

As Johns underscored, "there’s an entire ecosystem that has to develop in order to support electric vehicles." And the electric utility, like the gas station of old, is a critical part of it. 

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Driven by the global warming clock, the promise of energy security and the lure of untold profits, investors are betting billions of dollars on the race to find the ideal alternative fuel for cars, buses and trucks.

The list of contestants is long and growing. Corn ethanol? Cellulosic ethanol? Biodiesel? Compressed natural gas? Liquefied natural gas? Octanol? Hydrogen? Electric?

Three researchers at Argonne National Laboratory suggest in a new report that the transporation fuel of the future might be propane, the same stuff used for heating and cooking in cabins and trailer homes.

To my surprise, they report that propane is already the biggest selling alternative fuel in the world, powering more than 13 million vehicles worldwide. In the United States, about 160,000 vehicles run on propane, also known as liquefied petroleum gas or “autogas.” The state of California has about 1,600 vehicles that can operate on propane. In Europe, propane propels 7 million vehicles, including models manufactured by Ford and GM.

Propane has several virtues. It works well with only minor modifications to internal combustion engines. Although it has only 86 percent the energy content of gasoline, it has none of the range limitations of all-electric vehicles. It can be produced from ample supplies of domestic natural gas. And it’s nontoxic, noncarcinogenic and noncorrosive, according to the researchers.

The Argonne scientists report hat a vehicle powered by liquid propane made from natural gas would eliminate the need for equivalent petroleum imports and would cut greenhouse gas emissions by 18 percent or more.

Apparently ongoing research into applications of propane fuel is still being funded by the Propane Education and Research Act of 1996. Federal stimulus funds awarded by the Department of Energy last year will support a buildout of propane fueling infrastructure in 20 cities as part of a Clean Cities program. But the overall shortage of propane stations in the United States (2,400 versus about 160,000 gas stations) and the higher price of propane in some markets is deterring speedy progress.

The California Energy Commission calls propane “a low-emission, economic, and easily used fuel that can play an important role as an alternative, non-petroleum fuel for our state and the nation.” Everything hinges on whether the propane industry manages to change “can” to “will” in the near future. One thing’s for sure: the alternative fuels market can’t and won’t support more than one or two winners.

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

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

Google Energy will buy 114 megawatts of wind energy from a wind farm in Iowa for 20 years at an undisclosed fixed rate beginning on July 30. The deal is the first for the Google subsidiary after it received federal approval earlier this year to trade clean power on wholesale power markets. The company says it will sell the electricity on the regional spot market for renewable energy certificates to offset Google's carbon emissions. The Iowa wind farm is owned by NextEra Energy Resources LLC.

London is launching a $177 million program to develop bicycle "superhighways" to connect central London with towns outside the city. Fully developed, it would be the world's second-largest urban cycle hire system after Paris. London Mayor Boris Johnson, Barclays bank and Transport for London have opened the first two pilot routes now drawing 5,000 cycle journeys daily and aiming for 27,000 trips a day by 2013. Highly visible blue cycle lanes will have safety mirrors at junctions, stop lines at traffic lights, segregated lanes, and realignment of traffic and bus lanes to create more space for cyclists. "You have got to have a powerful and visible statement on the roads that asserts to every Londoner,  whether on two wheels or four, that the capital is a cycling city," says Johnson.

Shopping for a college with a sound environmental studies program? The 2011 Fiske Guide to Colleges reports its top 10 list for undergraduate environmental degree programs: Colby College (Maine), College of the Atlantic (Maine), UC-Davis, University of Colorado, Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), Eckerd College (Florida), Evergreen State College (Washington), University of North Carolina-Asheville, Tulane University (Louisiana), and University of Washington. Some of these colleges have appeared in other  green college lists, including the Princeton Review, College Sustainability Report Card and Sierra magazine's Cool Schools list.
 

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

The good news first: Americans are paying less in gas taxes per 1,000 miles driven, and per $100 of income, than at anytime since 1929, according to USA Today. In fact, in inflation-adjusted dollars, gasoline taxes were more than twice as high in the early 1970s.

Now the bad news: There’s no free ride. Because gasoline taxes haven’t kept up, there’s not enough money to fix potholes and repave roads. And because gas taxes are so low, American drivers may be among the slowest in the world to adopt cleaner, more efficient electric vehicles as they begin hitting the market toward the end of this year.

The federal gas tax, only $18.4 cents a gallon, hasn’t increased since 1993. Inflation has whittled away its value. USA Today’s Dennis Cauchon notes that despite driving 7 percent more miles each year, Americans will be paying almost 20 percent less in federal, state and local gas taxes in 2010 than in 2000 (adjusting for inflation).

As those funds dwindle, don’t count on general taxes picking up the difference. Degraded roads and bridges will mean slower and bumpier rides, shorter lifespans for our vehicles, more risk of accidents and higher costs of doing business. Nonetheless, political support for an increase in gas taxes is slim.

Meanwhile, a new study by Pike Research shows that because U.S. fuel prices are among the lowest in the world—about half to a third those of other developed countries—the savings to drivers from switching to electric vehicles will be much lower here than in other markets. That’s true even accounting for the fact that gasoline and diesel cars in Japan and Europe are typically more fuel-efficient than their counterparts in the United States.

Using a simple model for illustration, they calculated annual fuel savings of about $2,000 in Norway, $1,700 in Great Britain, France and Japan, but only just over $800 for a typical driver in the United States.

“Smaller annual savings means a longer time to pay back the premium that EV buyers are likely to pay,” a Pike analyst notes. “While many of the early EV owners will be thinking more about the environment (and showing off to their neighbors) than about their wallets when buying, a shorter payback period would help to convince consumers who are more price-sensitive to purchase an EV.”

Posted by: Leonard Anderson

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

San Francisco start-up SunRun Inc., the leading U.S. provider of home solar financing, has raised $55 million from investors led by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, one of the largest rounds for a solar leasing firm and a sign that solar developers are eyeing expansion beyond California, the New York Times Green blog reports. The investment follows a $100 million tax equity project to fund SunRun's solar installations by Pacific Energy Capital II, LLC, a non-utility subsidiary of PG&E Corporation. "We're seeing early signs of an inflection point in the market where the cost of offering a solar solution is becoming cheaper than utility pricing," said Warren Hogarth, a partner at Sequoia Capital. "We're moving from people buying solar because it's a nice thing to do to buying solar because it makes economic sense." 

The investment drum was also pounding this week with shares of electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc. surging more than 40 percent on its initial public offering of stock on the Nasdaq exchange. Tesla's closing share price of $23.89 pegged its market capitalization at $2.22 billion on its first day of trading. So far, Tesla has sold more than 1,000 of its $109,000 electric Roadster and  plans to introduce a $50,000 four-door electric sedan for sale in 2012. But Tesla may run into stiff competition from Nissan's electric car, the Leaf, priced at $25,000 after tax credits, and the $35,000 Chevy Volt to go on sale by the end of this year. Tesla doesn't expect to see a profit for at least two years.

Electric cars may turn up en masse in Paris next year if Mayor Bertrand Delanoe can launch a car-sharing program available at 1,000 locations in the city and suburbs. The plan,  said to be the largest in the world since Amsterdam scrubbed a car-share project in the 1980s, would offer 3,000 plug-in vehicles. Four companies are bidding to run the program, and the French automaker Renault may offer its first electric cars, the Fluence Z.E. and Kangoo Express Z.E. models expected to go into production next year.