Electric Car Developments in France

There’s some good news for a country that is being much more proactive about energy use and climate change than the U.S.  A nationwide electric car recharging network is going to be built in France.  An energy utility and a car maker are leading the way on the project, set to debut in just two short years.

The project will receive €400m of state backing over the next four years, which has been personally guaranteed by President Sarkozy.

To be worked out is who will be responsible for the charging station infrastructure, which is nothing to sneeze at.

The early front-runner is California-based Project Better Place, which has confirmed it is in talks about the project. The company is already building electric car recharging networks in Denmark and Israel, based on a model that sees cars quickly swap empty batteries for fully charged ones at roadside stations.

I’ve been a fan of Better Place ever since I heard about them, about a year ago now.  I checked their plans out, which seem relatively well-developed for a new company.  They have been very aggressive about putting themselves at the fore of the electric car wave that is slowly (for now) building momentum.  The article actually skips over a number of cities that are also in contact with Better Place – including a couple in the U.S. that are planning on building out electric car charging stations.  It’s just unfortunate that it’s only a small handful of mayors and governors in America that recognize what the dominant form of transportation will soon be.  It makes sense that a national approach, such as Israel’s, Denmark’s and now France’s, should be pursued.

Interestingly, after fighting higher mileage standards quite vociferously for years in the U.S., Chrysler is among the competitors trying to get a foothold in the France electric car market.  But they can’t build their U.S. fleet to meet higher efficiency standards, they told Congress.  Nobody would buy the cars.  Uh-huh.  Their European fleet meets Europe’s standards, which are much more aggressive than the U.S.’.  After stupidly fighting a U.S. mandate, I wasn’t sorry to see their survival in question last year into this year.  They’ve done what they could to destroy the U.S. middle class.  They found out how untenable that approach was.  Hey, Chrysler, how about doing some fighting for this technology state-side?

Check out Better Place‘s ongoing marketing approach.

Pickens Finally Pushes His Real Plan

T. Boone Pickens, the multi-billionaire oilman who helped fund horribly immoral ads against Democratic candidates came out with the Pickens Plan last year.  After looking it over, it was easy to see he was using his wind energy plan as a front for an alternative goal.  After looking into it a little further, it became obvious that Pickens only wanted to look ‘green’ so that he could control a larger portion of the natural gas market, then sell that natural gas as part of a transportation sector makeover, so that he could make billions more.  Which he’s free to do, of course, in our messed up semi-market-based economy.  I wrote three posts on Pickens before feeling comfortable that he wasn’t likely to succeed in his ridiculous plan any time soon -

Bad Energy Plan & Hypocritical Representatives

Pope, Podesta and Pickens: Energy Policies and Climate Change

T. Boone’s Millions and the Corporate Media

Chevy Volt Media Blitz

I heard quite a bit about the Chevy Volt in all forms of media yesterday.  The more I heard, the more I realized that commentators and pundits that I consider trustworthy were, in this case, doing a lot of heavy lifting for Chevy in the form of free marketing.  I think the Volt will be a good vehicle and an interesting case in how the automotive sector might be shifting.  That said, there were a number of claims that I thought needed to be cleaned up.

Let’s start with this NYT article.  In the lede: GM puts Volt’s Mileage in triple digits.  Well, that’s nice.  GM also told Americans two years ago that the truck and SUV markets in the U.S. would keep them on top of the automotive world.  How did that turn out exactly?  What is the official source of mpg ratings?  The E.P.A. – and they haven’t assessed the Volt’s performance yet, mostly because the methodology to do so remains in draft form.  But GM is doing what GM should be doing: trying their hardest to build up expectations for the vehicle.

What are those expectations?  230 mpg in city driving.  Wowsa!  Doesn’t that sound awesome?  Actually, it should be 230mpg* in city driving – and that asterisk should be pretty darned big!  Drivers might get 230mpg if they drive less than 40 miles from charging station to charging station in laboratory-like conditions: no hills, no A/C or heat, etc.!  More likely, drivers in every-day conditions could see ~100mpg performance.  Now, that’s nothing to sneeze at.  I think it’s a very good half-step forward.  But here’s the thing: there are 100mpg cars available today.  Modify a factory car today with $10K or so, and 100mpg is already well within reach.  So where is the dramatic technological leap forward?

Nissan has countered that it’s upcoming hybrid, the Leaf, could get up to 367mpg.  The same limitations I described for the Volt apply here, also.  Nissan is also working with Better Place to manufacture and deploy all-electric vehicles, which wouldn’t need any gas whatsoever to drive!  Now that’s what I call progress!

Rethinking Economic Actions By Democrats

After encountering two independent mentions of recent economic actions proposed and enacted by Democrats by sources I’ve come to trust, I find myself looking at them in new light.  The program most in question for me is Cash for Clunkers.  It’s proven wildly popular, and at first I thought that was a great thing.  With additional perspectives, I’m no longer sure it is.

First of all, I’m going to squash a talking point that Democrats are using to justify the program: the environmental benefits.  They don’t exist.  At least not the to the extent that Democrats like Sen. Levin would have you believe.  The environmental benefits of Cash for Clunkers is negligible.  Here are the key stats:

The total savings per year from cash for clunkers translates to about 57 minutes of America’s output of the chief greenhouse gas.

U.S. drivers go through that amount of gas every 4 1/2 hours, according to the Department of Energy.

So we’re giving away $1,000,000,000 dollars to get 250,000 cars off the road to save 57 minutes of carbon emissions and 4 1/2 hours of gas.  Is that really the best use of money that we can come up with?  I don’t think so.  How about investing that $1 Billion in research on battery technologies – that would generate many times the investment in future returns.

Urban Areas Lose Stimulus Funds To Rural Areas

In a continuation of a trend that has been around for too long already, metropolitan areas around the country are being short-changed funds from the first stimulus bill passed just a few months ago.  Despite providing more than three-quarters of the nation’s economic activity (read: providing more than three-quarters of the tax dollars going to the federal government), and despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans live in urban areas, those same areas have received less than half of the stimulus funds from the largest stimulus source of funds.

I have the same opinion on this as I do the unfair tax and funding mechanisms that are regularly in place: it needs to stop.  It makes no sense to send more tax dollars to areas that didn’t provide the money.  Federal spending needs to go to areas that provided the funds in the first place.  If rural areas want infrastructure and projects, they need to come up with ways to fund them themselves.  It amazes me that urban-dwellers are constantly lectured about not having “values” like rural-dwellers do.  I don’t think greed is a value worth having.  I don’t think you should steal from your neighbor then complain they’re doing nothing to help you, don’t care about you and have no values.

New Automobile Emissions Rule

President Obama yesterday announced a new federal plan toto cut new vehicle carbon emissions and raise mileage by 30 percent. The new requirement is estimated to cost consumers an extra $1,300 per vehicle starting in 2016, or $700 on top of the expected $600 from previous standards’ increases.  Fuel savings, using today’s dollars per gallon, would make up that increased cost in just a few years.  If gas prices increase in the next 7 years (a virtual certainty), the increased cost will be offset that much quicker (which unsurprisingly was not in any media reports that I’ve seen or read).

What do the more aggressive targets really mean?  It’s being estimated that 900 million tons of CO2 won’t be emitted.  That would help (if even only a little) keep our total CO2 emissions under 1 Trillion tons, as several researchers are now saying we need to stay under to prevent catastrophic climate change.  Every billion tons not emitted is a little more buffer we give ourselves, which is important because the 1Trillion ton metric is relatively new and not very robust.  It could be significantly lower.

Cars will be required to get an average of 39mpg starting in 2016, up from today’s 27.5mpg standard.  The good news is the current operational average is 32.6mpg.  I think an addional 6.4mpg in seven years is easily doable.  Kudos to the Obama administration for orchestrating this rule.  A lot of disparate interests were brought together to make this work.  That couldn’t have been done with the previous administration.

Ford Retooling Plant(s) To Build Electric Cars

I could hardly believe it the first time I saw the headline, but Ford is retooling the Michigan Assembly Plant.  No longer will it manufacture gas-guzzling, greenhouse forcing SUVs and trucks.  It will instead begin to manufacture Ford’s Focus and by 2011, it could be manufacturing electric Ford Focuses.  Which is interesting, because I still hear naysayers going on and on about there isn’t a market for electric vehicles in the U.S.  I’ve done my fair share of criticizing Ford, but this plan flies in the face of their now-dead strategy of selling high-profit vehicles.  There is a market for electric vehicles in the U.S. today and it will will only grow by 2011.  I would be willing to bet that Ford won’t be able to keep up with the demand when they first sell the electric Focus.  The NY Times article also reports that Ford will introduce four new electric vehicle models to the U.S. market by 2012.  Two other Ford plants will undergo similar retooling to begin manufacturing smaller cars and not trucks and SUVs.

Look, Ford could have done this 5 or even 10 years ago.  The technology was ready.   The market was ready.  Ford wasn’t ready – not until they were faced with possible extinction.  Sometimes it takes a close call with disaster to change behavior.  I was never an advocate for Ford’s failure.  I repeatedly pointed out that I thought they were making unrealistic business decisions.  This announcement sets the stage for a stronger U.S. domestic auto manufacturer for the 21st century.  It represents a huge step forward – one that will force GM and Chrysler to respond in kind.  It also puts more pressure of foreign automakers like Toyota and Honda, although their hybrid and electric vehicle technology is arguably in better position to compete today because they’ve brought products to market already.  In the end, it’s the consumer and the environment that really wins.

Oh, this also puts pressure on municipalities and other stakeholders to come up with an infrastructure that can support mass electric vehicle usage.  I would recommend officials at all levels of government to be aware of these developments so their constituents can exercise their choices as they want.

Colorado Energy and Politics News – Part I

I got behind the news late last week and into the weekend, so this the first of two roundups of items I saw.

State Representative Sara Gagliardi (D-JeffCo) introduced a bill (HB09-1331) that promotes low-emitting cars and trucks. It makes changes to the existing tax credit for purchases of vehicles using alternative fuels, for purchase of idling reduction technologies or for conversion of vehicles to use alternative fuels.  I heard a segment on the Ed Schultz show earlier this afternoon about an idling technology that I’ll have to look into.  It sounded like it would reduce the amount of fuel burned from 1 gallon per hour during idling to 1 gallon per 20 hours, but I could have heard the improved ratio incorrectly.

Corporate Media Continues Anti-Plug-In Reporting

Anything that would delay a program to bring 1 million plug-in hybrids to the market gets attention by the corporate media.  This MSNBC article does what hundreds preceding it has done: it casts such an effort in a very negative light, relying on every pro-fossil fuel talking point to disparage plug-in vehicle technologies.  It’s more than unfortunate that corporate media outlets continue to parrot talking points rather than engage in some real journalism.

Here is the secondary lede, word for word:

Technology still to expensive and automakers haven’t committed to plan

Well, that’s that then.  Except it isn’t.  I’ll start by pointing out that the corporate media’s overwhelming journalistic integrity over that of say, bloggers, doesn’t quite explain why simple spelling errors aren’t caught.  What they meant to say was the technology is still too expensive.  Unless ‘still’ and ‘expensive’ became verbs since I went to grammar school.

In any event, the article goes into a tiny bit of detail on how much battery technology would add to the price of a car.  What it doesn’t do is report on any battery technology advancements that have been made in the past few years.  Is it enough to drive down the price of large-scale battery technology?  Well, it won’t happen tomorrow, obviously.  But interestingly, that lede hides a lot of harm that the automakers have purposefully done to ensure battery technology remains expensive.

How many battery technology patents does GM and Ford hold?  More than a few.  They’ve held them for years (in some cases decades) now.  Why haven’t they employed them in a larger-scale effort?  Because their executives saw no reason to allow cars to be weaned off of fossil fuels.  While sitting on those patents, those same automakers also spent millions on lobbying to ensure that fuel economy standards remained the lowest in the industrialized world.  Those two things didn’t happen in two separate vacuum chambers.  There were part of a coordinated and idiotic business strategy that most people recognize has failed spectacularly.

Battery technologies that will allow sub-15 minute recharges are being researched and developed.  Battery technologies that push the maximum range of a vehicle are being researched and developed.  Where are this information and more in this pro-failed-industry article?  Nowhere to be found.  It will take a President who isn’t beholden to fossil fuel corporations to change the heavyweight auto manufacturer’s way of doing business.  Without that effort, the so-called Big 3 will (would have already) fail(ed).  There are plenty of start-up companies out there who are looking to expand the marketplace of plug-in hybrid vehicles.

The article notes that it took 8 years to get 1 million hybrids on U.S. roads.  The article fails to note that during that time, gasoline never got higher than $2 per gallon.  Energy realists recognize that sub-$2 gas will become a rarity in the near future.  Prices are more likely to remain higher in the future as the scarcity of oil becomes more apparent.  If it costs $4 per gallon (or more), auto manufacturers won’t be able to make plug-in hybrids fast enough to satisfy demand, as Toyota and Honda discovered last year with their respective hybrid brands.

Is 1 million plug-in hybrids by 2015 an audacious goal?  Absolutely, it is.  That was one reason to set it.  Even if it isn’t explicity reached, moving down that path will become a critical factor in our efforts to deal with climate change, national security and our economy.  The demand is there – it has been present for a long while.  The outdated major auto manufacturers have prevented sustainable progress toward Obama’s (Americans’) goal for many years.  It’s no wonder they’re failing.   Other companies will step in to meet that demand eventually.  And it will happen despite the corporate media’s attempts to sabotage it.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 Is Introduced

House Energy and Commerce Chair Henry Waxman and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chair Ed Markey released their draft energy and climate bill last Tuesday.  It’s very comprehensive.  It’s also far from perfect.  It’s also, for now, just a draft, sure to change and be amended.  For those of you who just want a quick peek at what this bill is about, here is the bill’s 5-page summary (pdf) and here is a portion of the introduction:

The legislation has four titles: (1) a “clean energy” title that promotes renewable sources of energy and carbon capture and sequestration technologies, low-carbon transportation fuels, clean electric vehicles, and the smart grid and electricity transmission; (2) an “energy efficiency” title that increases energy efficiency across all sectors of the economy, including buildings, appliances, transportation, and industry; (3) a “global warming” title that places limits on the emissions of heat-trapping pollutants; and (4) a “transitioning” title that protects U.S. consumers and industry and promotes green jobs during the transition to a clean energy economy.

Overall, the bill is pretty decent.  It’s not as strong as I think it should be.  Knowing that it will be amended and changed in subcommittees, committees and during Senate-House negotiations, I’m afraid I see too much room for major weakening to be done.  There is no time left for weakening.  The U.S. needs to take an aggressive stance on greenhouse forcing.  We’ve caused plenty of change to the climate system already with even more to come that’s “in the pipeline”.  Whatever this legislation ends up doing, it will take time to implement and then more time to take effect.  Then there will be interactions with the international community.  As the world’s largest greenhouse forcer, it is up to us to take responsibility for our actions and start leading the world on the most critical 21st century issue we’ll face.

Below, I go through most of the 5-page summary items.  The items stack up to a pretty big list.  Having this draft summary is important as we’ll see what changes are implemented in the next couple of months and what the final legislation ends up containing.  Oh, and if you’re feeling really adventurous, here is the entire draft bill (Big pdf!).