Converting hybrid vehicles — particularly the Prius and Ford Escape — into plug-in hybrids has become a profitable niche industry for a few specialty companies. But the net impact of this new mini-industry has been much greater by influencing consumer and industry opinions.

Promoting the technical feasibility of PHEVs has been a significant factor in the auto manufacturers’ decision to develop the dozens of plug-in and all-electric vehicles now scheduled for delivery in the next five years.

But the earliest and strongest voice promoting PHEVs isn’t happy with that limited success. Felix Kramer, the founder of CalCars.org, says that getting to a million electrified vehicles by 2015 won’t do nearly enough to address climate change and energy independence, and now he’s setting his sights on electrifying internal combustion engine vehicles. He’s clearly on to something.

CalCar’s new “Big Fix” initiative wants to electrify some of the biggest emitters and gas-wasters — pickup trucks, SUVs and vans (PSVs). When used in delivery routes that are often well under 40 miles per day, they spend much of their time starting, stopping, and idling, and get among the worst MPG ratings around. Converting one of these vehicles to a PHEV or EV will reduce fuel consumption and emissions to a much greater degree than trading in a Sebring for a Prius.

SPVs, most notably the Ford F-150, have been among the top sellers for more than a decade, creating an inventory of millions of vehicles that could be converted. They also have much more space for battery packs, which makes for a simpler conversion than a compact car. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove and electric vehicle guru Andy Frank are fully on board, lending their considerable credibility to the idea.

The Japanese postal service has already begun converting its fleet of vehicles to EVs, and the U.S. Postal Service wants to do the same with more than 140,000 of its delivery vehicles. The cash-starved agency could save millions per year if the federal government decides to provide assistance, which would be more sustainable than a bailout.

The biggest impediments are the cost and potential resistance from the auto industry. The battery cost can be upwards of $20,000, making for a slow payback period if gasoline stays around $3 a gallon. The economics will improve over time, especially if conversion kits are produced in volume and battery manufacturing ramps up as the technology evolves.

But the harder sell will be convincing the auto industry that keeping vehicles on the road instead of buying new vehicles is a good thing, and that they should be a part of that business. Upgrading existing SPVs could be a multi-billion dollar business, extending the life of vehicles and preserving the energy cost sunk into building them. While Ford, GM and Chrylsler are best-suited to engineer conversions, this mass rethinking of the company would be an even bigger shift than the current change to becoming manufacturers of PHEVs and EVs.

Convincing fleet operators to convert will likely be easier than the consumers, legislators and car companies needed to make it happen. It’s not impossible, but it will take an extensive and well-orchestrated effort.

Appearing courtesy of Matter Network.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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The United States has entered a new energy era, ending a century of rising carbon emissions. As the U.S. delegation prepares for the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December, it does so from a surprisingly strong position, one based on a dramatic 9 percent drop in U.S. carbon emissions over the past two years and the promise of further huge reductions.

Prominent among these carbon-cutting initiatives are stronger automobile fuel-economy standards, appliance efficiency standards, and the potential to heat, cool and light buildings with carbon-free sources of electricity.

On the supply side are efforts supporting the development of U.S. wind, solar and geothermal energy resources.

Even though part of this decline in carbon emissions was caused by the recession and higher gasoline prices, part of it came from gains in energy efficiency and shifts to carbon-free sources of energy, including record amounts of new wind-generating capacity. This impressive drop in carbon emissions should enable the United States to push for a steep cut in Copenhagen.

For a country where oil and coal use have been growing for more than a century, the fall since 2007 is startling. Last year, oil use dropped 5 percent, coal 1 percent and overall carbon emissions 3 percent. Projections for this year, based on Energy Department data for the first eight months, show oil use down by an additional 5 percent.

Coal is estimated to fall by 10 percent. Altogether, carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels, including natural gas, dropped 9 percent over the two years.

In the past, I’ve been considered a pessimist in my work on mounting population pressures and looming food crises. I’m still very concerned about these issues. But today the improving numbers on carbon emissions are not debatable.

Although Congress is considering legislation that would cut emissions only 15 or 20 percent by 2020, it’s clear to me that with just a little effort, the United States could far surpass this. Given the potentially catastrophic climate change the world is facing, we should push in Copenhagen for an 80 percent reduction by 2020.

Efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and cut carbon emissions are underway at every level of government — national, state and city — and in corporations, utilities and universities. Beyond this, millions of climate-conscious, cost-cutting Americans are altering their lifestyles to reduce energy use and carbon emissions.

Despite the coal industry’s $45 million annual budget to promote “clean coal,” utilities are giving up the coal ghost. On July 9, Bruce Nilles, coordinator of the Sierra Club’s national grass-roots program to ban new coal-fired power plants, announced the 100th cancellation of a proposed plant since 2001.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, with a fleet of 11 aging coal plants (average age 47 years) and a court order to install more than $1 billion worth of pollution controls, is considering closing its John Sevier Fossil Plant near Rogersville, Tenn., along with the six oldest units out of the eight at the Widows Creek Fossil Plant near Stevenson, Ala. Altogether, about 22 coal-fired power plants in 12 states are being replaced by wood-fired power, wind farms or natural gas plants.

Utilities are facing falling demand not only because of the economic slump, but also because of advances in efficiency. The potential is evident in the wide variation among states, with some embracing energy-efficient technologies and others mired in old ones. The Rocky Mountain Institute calculates that if the 40 least-efficient states were to achieve the electrical efficiency of the 10 most-efficient ones, national electricity use would be reduced by one third. This would allow the equivalent of 62 percent of the country’s 617 coal-fired power plants to be closed.

While some U.S. coal plants are closing, wind farms are multiplying. Last year, 102 wind farms came online, providing 8,400 megawatts of electricity-generating capacity, the equivalent of eight coal-fired power plants. Forty-nine wind farms were completed in the first half of this year, and 57 more are under construction. More important, 300,000 megawatts of wind projects (think 300 coal plants) await access to the grid so that construction can begin.

U.S. solar cell installations are growing at 40 percent a year. With new government incentives, this rapid growth in rooftop installations on homes, shopping malls and factories should continue.

Beyond this, solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity are going up fast in California, Arizona and Nevada. The availability of a molten-salt heat-storage technology that enables the plants to continue generating power up to six hours past sundown is spurring broad investor interest. About 6,000 megawatts of solar thermal power plants are under construction or development.

Oil use is declining, too. It has dropped precipitously for several reasons including the economic downturn, but also the growing insecurity about oil supplies and consumer concern about future gasoline prices.

And gasoline use will drop further as the fuel economy standards announced in May raise the fuel efficiency of new cars 42 percent and light trucks 25 percent by 2016. The trend is strikingly evident in the new vehicle sales figures for the first eight months of this year, which show a significantly higher average of miles per gallon than the vehicles sold over the same period of last year.

Impressive though these gains are, the really big gains in fuel efficiency will come with the shift to plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. Not only are electric motors three times more efficient than gasoline engines, but they make it possible to run cars on domestic wind-generated electricity at a gasoline-equivalent cost of 75 cents a gallon. As the low fueling cost becomes more apparent, the shift to plug-ins and all-electric cars will come far faster than most policymakers anticipate.

With carbon cuts, it’s time to stop talking about political feasibility and start talking about scientific necessity. The science is scary. We need not go beyond ice melting to see that civilization is in trouble. The Greenland ice sheet is melting. If it were to melt entirely, and that obviously would take a few centuries, sea level would rise by 23 feet.

The latest reports suggest that we are looking at a rise in sea level of up to six feet this century. Such a rise would inundate part or all of many low-lying coastal cities, such as London, Miami, New Orleans, Alexandria and Shanghai, producing millions of refugees. Such a rise would also inundate the rice-growing deltas of Asia, devastating harvests in Bangladesh and Vietnam.

The melting of the glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau will deprive the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers of the ice melt that sustains their flow during the dry season and the irrigation systems that depend on them. Let us not forget that China is the world’s leading producer of wheat and rice. India is number two in each. Anything that reduces their grain harvests will raise food prices everywhere.

To have a decent shot at saving the larger ice masses means cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. This would halt the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, now 387 parts per million (ppm), at 400 ppm in 2020. We would then be able to start reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations to the 350 ppm that the U.S. government’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, says is necessary to stem global warming’s most egregious effects.

If the United States pushes for an 80 percent cut, will the rest of the world follow? In particular will China, now the world’s leading carbon emitter, cooperate? And what about India?

In times past, if countries resisted international initiatives, the international community could resort to trade boycotts, export embargoes or tariffs on exports from the offending countries. Bilateral penalties are also an option. The United States is, after all, China’s largest export market.

But this situation is different because some countries are affected more directly by climate change than others and because an aggressive carbon-cutting effort attracts investment in the new energy industries.

The two countries building the most coal-fired power plants — China and India — are among the countries whose food security is most directly affected by global warming. Smaller countries such as Egypt, South Korea and Japan can import half or more of their grain supply, but these two population giants cannot because the exportable supplies do not exist.

The good news is that China’s strategy is changing fast, shifting to wind, solar and geothermal energy. Although the world is worried about China building a coal plant each week, and rightly so, the pace seems to be slowing and, like the United States, China is closing many of its older, dirtier coal plants.

On the renewable front, China’s wind-generating potential is seven times its current electricity consumption. Although a late starter, China is building wind farm complexes on a scale the world has not seen before.

In recent years, the United States has led the world in new wind generating capacity, but within the next year, China will overtake the United States, moving so fast we might not even see it go by.

On the solar front, two-thirds of the world’s rooftop water heaters are in China, and it’s now the world’s leading producer of solar cells. Earlier this month, China announced plans to build a 2,000 megawatt solar cell complex, a facility four times larger than any in the United States.

For India, the answer to the carbon-cutting challenge and to its future energy needs lies not only in wind energy but in the solar riches of the Great Indian Desert. The harnessable solar energy there could power the entire Indian economy. The new solar thermal power plants, which can generate electricity several hours after sundown, could wean India from its coal addiction.

Underlying the carbon-cutting question are: Where will the new energy industries be located? Who will be building the wind turbines, solar panels and highly efficient light emitting diodes? The countries that cut carbon emissions fastest will have a competitive advantage.

Stabilizing the earth’s climate is a complex undertaking and fraught with risk. If the United States leads — and does so boldly — I believe the world will follow.

This article was originally posted on the Earth Policy Website by Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the forthcoming “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.”

Appearing courtesy of Celsias.

[photo credit: random foto, Wayne National Forest, future atlas, benuski]

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NPR’s On Point never disappoints, and their show with Christopher Steiner, author of $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better was no exception. Steiner’s thesis is that as liquid hydrocarbons become all the more difficult to naturally extract and regulation makes them all the more costly to refine and use, prices will inevitably rise. At $20 a gallon, we might not recognize our lives…all for the better, says Steiner.

People will live and buy their locally-grown produce in mixed-use developments clustered around high-speed rail lines. In Steiner’s view, $6 a gallon is an inflection point that begins to redefine the way we live our lives. But, will innovation (or the US government) ever allow prices to remain at that level? Not according to Mark Mills, co-author of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy.

In Mills’ reckoning, prices will never sustain that kind of climb. Our technology and innovation are too good and governments will unleash incentives to combat that kind of price climb that will result in more production of synthetic hydrocarbons. Moreover, long before we reach $20 a gallon, more expensive natural hydrocarbons (i.e., tar sands) will become competitive. What about Europe, you ask, where gasoline has sustained prices at $7 a gallon? Those prices have not pushed leading oil concerns on the continent dramatically innovate in production or technology and they have triggered a very different lifestyle – including smaller, more efficient cars and much broader use of public transportation. But, much of the gap in price between Europe and the US is tax. The revenue goes to governments, so the companies are not pushed to look for alternate fuels.

But, Mills view of innovation is not universal. According to October’s Esquire, the guys over at the Common Wealth Opportunity Capital are bullish on oil.

“Every ounce of gold ever mined is still here,” the hedge fund’s principal Reagan Silber notes, but “every single barrel of oil ever drilled is gone.” Silber doesn’t see acceptable solutions emerging in time. “If you are long on oil, you are short on ingenuity,” he concludes.

Whether you are an investor planning your portfolio, a futurist predicting the shape of our alternative energy utopia, or an industry insider trying to position your company for more market share, there is a lot up in the air; but, one thing is clear: our energy policy will dictate much about the way we live our lives — $20 a gallon or not.

[photo credit: Paul Garland]

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By all accounts the cash for clunkers incentive program has exceeded all expectations in both volume of sales, as well as answering skeptics by getting fuel inefficient vehicles off the road.

The new vehicles being purchased average nearly 10 mpg higher, saving nearly 4 million barrels of oil per year and eliminating the production of tons of greenhouse gases.

More importantly, the program and its surrounding attention seems to have driven consumers towards hybrids and fuel efficient vehicles even more than a 50 cent spike in the price of gasoline. According to Brian Benstock, the VP and GM of Paragon Honda and Acura, the program is also introducing new customers to imports. Benstock said the program has reversed the ratio of domestic/import trade-ins at his dealership. Previously about 70 percent of his customers were trading one import (mostly Hondas) for another. Now it’s the opposite: 70 percent of people walking in the door are swapping American made autos for Hondas.

The simple reason for this switch — no Hondas qualify as clunkers under the program, so customers now Benstock’s talking to customers who previously bought American SUVs and pickups. He said the Honda Civic (37 percent of sales) is the hottest seller, followed by the Accord, and then the Insight hybrid. Paragon ran out of Civic Hybrids a few weeks ago, so for now his sales people are putting people in standard Civics by touting its fuel efficiency and adding incentives. He expects to have more Civic Hybrids by the end of the month.

Sales overall are nearly back to “pre-recession” levels Benstock says, with just as many additional customers who aren’t getting the cash-back as who are. He admits that this stimulus has “done exactly what it was supposed to do — stimulate sales,” but that at some point auto makers have to take over in generating sales on their own.

Ford and GM have also seen a strong increase in sales, while the impact at Chrysler has been more modes.

The Senate will likely push through another $2 billion to extend funding for the program. Benstock says the “right” vehicles are being driven off the road through the program. Most of the vehicles are older SUVs, minivans and trucks. “They’re junk.”

American consumers have proven that with the right incentives — monetary in nature — they’re willing to buy more fuel efficient vehicles. The lesson for automakers (especially Detroit) is that with Congress and gas prices leading the way, the shift to fuel efficiency will continue.

This article originally appeared on Matter Network.

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The cash for clunkers program is already proving too good to be true. The $1 billion in funds allocated for the program is almost gone after less than a week, and now congress is scrambling to get an additional $2 billion to extend the program.

With sales up at Ford and at dealerships, the program can be viewed as an unabashed success for the auto industry. And the environment is also winning, as the vehicles being purchased are estimated to be 69 percent more fuel efficient than the vehicles being dumped, according to the website CashForClunkersInformation.org.

On average consumers will save $750 per year on gasoline, which will offset a few of the car payments for their new vehicles. About 70 percent of the cars being traded in were from U.S. car companies, and almost three-quarters of the vehicles were SUVs, vans, or pickups.

But the trade-in program has 2 flaws that should prompt legislators from a knee-jerk reaction to extend the program. First, while the vehicles will be recycled, it still wastes much of the value of functional vehicles. It will take a lot of energy to put the metal and other parts back into use, and most of the components will go for naught.

Many of the newer models being traded in could have been converted to run on natural gas or ethanol, which could reduce emissions to an even greater degree than a few MPG extra without wasting the vehicles. Shouldn’t any program aimed at boosting the environment and economy also consider conversion companies or component suppliers, who are also hurting these days?

Also, hybrid vehicles can be converted to plug-ins for not much more than the $4,500 that some folks are getting for dumping a clunker. PHEV conversions would save emissions and reduce foreign oil dependence to a much greater degree than upgrading someone’s clunker to a 25 mpg car.

Taking a breath before resuming funding to consider all of the options would make sense, but it’s not likely to happen.

This article originally appeared on Matter Network.

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by agathabrown, turtleanddove

The current cap is 10 percent. An ethanol trade group called Growth Energy has formally requested an increase to 15 percent, saying it will create more than 100,000 jobs and pump more than $24 billion into the economy, Reuters reports. There’s also the added benefit of increasing the demand for ethanol by 6 billion gallons a year, MSNBC says.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying whether a higher blend would harm older cars. Some newer vehicles are designed to run on E-85 (an 85 percent blend).

Ag. Secretary Tom Vilsack (former Iowa governor) supports the move, and says raising the threshold to 13 percent is a good baby step. He even talked (speaking to farmers) about going as high as 20 percent in the future.

Ag. secretaries from 11 states also are pushing for up to 20 percent, and have written to President Barack Obama (whose mailbox is probably pretty full, just to put this in perspective). The state officials say it will be difficult to meet a federal requirement that 36 billion gallons of ethanol be blended into the U.S. fuel supply by 2022 without lifting the 10 percent cap, notes Autobloggreen.

The EPA has about 270 days (starting in early March 2009) to respond to Growth Energy’s request.

With some ethanol companies tanking in the bad economy, and lobbyists on both sides, there’s likely to be substantial debate and hopefully a little science when it comes to making a decision. Early results from the U.S. Department of Energy on using higher blends in so-called legacy vehicles is (pardon the pun) a mixed bag.

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