I love me a fast Ford.

The 2011 Mustang GT gets a new 5.0 liter, 412 horsepower V8 engine, 25 mpg, and a plethora of other improvements. It is a real Camaro killer.

But if I’m going to be honest, it is the 305 horsepower V6 Mustang that has caught my eye. Not only does it share the GT’s sharper, improved looks, but Ford had estimated the V6 engine would return 30 mpg on the highway. Well the official certification results are in, and the Mustang gets 31 mpg highway, making it the first car with over 300 horsepower to get over 30 mpg.

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Let’s just say I’m not exactly a fan of the California Air Resource Board, or CARB. For all their good intentions, they cause a lot of headaches with unintended consequences of sometimes poorly conceived ideas–especially for those of us who enjoy performance cars.

But every now and then they get something right. And while Roush is a name most often associated with supercharged Mustangs, the company is also well known for its propane conversions. CARB recently approved both the F-250 and F-350 Roush propane conversions for street use. Yay!

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I remember when Subaru first introduced the WRX version of their Impreza sedan. I vowed to one day own one.

Alas, to this day I’ve yet to get my hands on one, but that vow remains. There have been murmurs of an impending Subaru hybrid vehicle for about a year now, although the company is certainly tiptoeing into the electric/hybrid car race. The first guess was the larger Legacy sedan, but Road & Track seems to think the the Impreza might be chosen instead.

Dare I hope for a hybrid WRX?

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We all want more choices, right?

Zero Motorcycles, maker of electric motorcycles, has heard the call and for 2010 they are giving customers more options to play with. They have also made improvements to acceleration, power, and their battery technology. It’s a good thing too, because competition in the electric motorcycle market is already starting to heat up.

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There’s no doubt that solar energy is one of the greenest sources of electricity and the idea of using it to power transportation is not new. We’ve seen solar-powered boats and solar-powered cars before, among other things, but we didn’t know until now that a solar-powered high-speed train was on anyone’s drawing board. Apparently, it is.

Conceived as a means of zero-carbon high-speed mass transit, the Solar Bullet would travel between Tucson and Phoenix, AZ at 220 miles per hour, cutting travel times from two and a half hours (in traffic) to just 30 minutes. Taking advantage of the high amount of solar irradiance in the American Southwest, the tracks would be covered by a huge solar array to provide it with the necessary power. The SolarBullet Campaign aims to increase awareness and support among Arizonians and build a team of university experts, engineers and transit specialists to move this project further down the line. Feel free to hit them up on Facebook or follow their Twitter feed to offer your own encouragement and keep track of the initiative.

[Source: SolarBullet Campaign]

SolarBullet Campaign shoots for high-speed solar train originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wind power is unreliable, expensive and doesn’t result in lower C02 emmissions. Why is Ontario still rushing ahead with it?

By Michael Trebilcock

T

he  Ontario government’s rush into renewable energy, and industrial wind turbine-generated electricity in particular, is likely to reveal the law of unintended consequences. The government needs to rigorously re-evaluate this precipitous policy before committing billions more in subsidies to it.

First, as to the cost of wind-generated electricity, the feed-in tariff for on-shore wind turbines in Ontario provided for under the Green Energy Act is 13.5¢ per kWh (and higher for smaller projects). This is more than twice the prevailing rates for electricity on the spot market in Ontario (less than ¢6 per KWh).

This cost increase will be fed through to industrial, commercial and residential consumers through various additional charges on their electricity bills. In addition, further expenditures are required to enhance and extend the transmission grid to accommodate these projects. A 2009 study by London Economics Consultancy, Examining the Potential Costs of the Ontario Green Energy Act 2009, estimates that the higher costs of green power will add hundreds of dollars to the average electricity bills of households throughout Ontario. 

Adam White, President of the Association of Major Power Consumers of Ontario, states:  “The situation is not sustainable because it will leave companies paying higher rates than competitors in other jurisdictions.” Toronto energy lawyer, Peter Murphy, states: “The government is sitting on a political time bomb.” Recent studies of wind power in Denmark, Germany and the U.K. reach similar conclusion about the impacts of renewable energy on electricity costs in these three jurisdictions. The Ontario government’s estimate of an increase in electricity costs per year from its renewable policies of 1% a year seems to lack any justification or credibility.

The contributions of industrial wind power to reducing CO2 emissions are at best marginal. Massive numbers of turbines are needed, and because of their intermittency and unpredictability, they require the availability of back-up generation, especially for peak-load capacity. In Denmark, Germany, the U.K., and now Ontario, this has entailed the construction of additional fossil fuel plants (typically natural gas plants) to provide reliability. These plants dramatically reduce the net contributions of wind power to CO2 abatement, which come at an extremely high cost relative to other abatement strategies (such as real-time pricing of electricity). 

In the case of base-load electricity, most of this is provided in Ontario by carbon-clean hydro and nuclear power so that, to the extent that wind power is used to provide base-load electricity, it displaces lower cost hydro and nuclear power and often results in exports of surplus power, often at give-away prices. 

In October 2007, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) — the government’s own agency, tasked with planning Ontario’s power system and now entering into long-term contracts with renewable energy producers — published its Integrated Power System Plan, where it analyzed a “high wind power” scenario for the province, and concluded:  “Since wind generation has an effective capacity of 20% compared to 73% for hydroelectric generation, additional generation capacity with better load-following characteristics would need to be installed. 

“This needed capacity will likely have to be obtained by installing additional gas-fired generation. Thus, in addition to incurring further capital costs for the gas generation installation, higher gas usage would be expected to make up for the reduced amount of renewable energy from wind compared to that from hydroelectric generation or this alternative. Therefore, this alternative would result in higher greenhouse gas emissions.” The OPA concluded: “Wind and solar power will never be more than a niche supplier of power in Ontario.”

What did the OPA see as the better alternative? Renewable hydro power sites in northern Ontario (which it identified). The OPA stated: “The hydroelectric generation developments included in the plan are cost effective compared to developing additional wind generation; this comparison includes the cost of transmission reinforcements. In conclusion, development of major hydroelectric generation north of Sudbury, with major reinforcement of the transmission north of Sudbury, is the preferred alternative compared to developing additional renewable generation in southern Ontario and other parts of northern Ontario.” 

This begs the obvious question, what has changed in two years? Beyond these sites in northern Ontario, in the medium to longer term there would be enough northern Canadian hydro power in Manitoba, Quebec and Labrador to satisfy Ontario’s needs for decades. If Boston and New England can depend on northern Canadian hydro power, why not Toronto? Moreover, prior demand projections for electricity need to be revised downwards to reflect not only the current economic recession (demand was down more than 6% in 2009 over 2008), but the long-term contraction in a number of Ontario’s electricity-intensive heavy manufacturing industries, such as steel and automobile manufacturing.

The potential contributions of renewable energy to the creation of jobs in the province require a heavy dose of skepticism. While the government has claimed that it plans to create 50,000 new green jobs in the province over the coming years, the additional burdens on industrial, commercial, and household consumers from higher electricity costs associated with renewable energy will kill existing jobs. Recent studies in Denmark and Germany find that very few net new jobs have been created as a result of renewable energy policies. In the case of Denmark, they have cost between US$90,000 to US$140,000 per job per year in public subsidies, and in the case of Germany, up to US$240,000 per job per year. According to a column by Randall Denley in the Ottawa Citizen of Jan. 24, 2010, the new manufacturing jobs entailed in the massive Samsung renewable project recently announced by the Ontario government will cost $300,000 each in public subsidies.

In an SNL Financial news wire report of Oct. 23, 2009, the Ontario Minister of Natural Resources was reported as stating that the agency had temporarily stopped accepting applications for proposed wind energy projects because it had already received 500 such applications and needed to make sure that it had appropriate processes in place before taking any more. Obviously, the massive public subsidies being offered have provoked a corporate feeding frenzy.

But corporate enthusiasm for subsidized wind power should not be confused with the longer-term public interest. In terms of cost, CO2 and jobs, wind power attracts a failing grade. It gets worse, with poor marks for localized impacts on flora and fauna, for potentially adverse health effects on local residents from persistent exposure to low intensity turbine noise, for potentially adverse impacts on local property values and for an environmental review process which the Ontario Environmental Commissioner describes as “broken.” All render renewable energy policy, at least as currently conceived by the Ontario government, one of the least compelling options in the challenging economic environment in which the province finds itself now. 

Picking technological winners in fields such as this, and then picking winners within classes of technology (such as Samsung) are fraught with the risk of costly errors. A better policy orientation would be first to price all sources of electricity, including environmental costs , and let consumers respond accordingly, and finally to subsidize breakthrough R&D in sectors that are significant sources of carbon emissions. 

As Jan Carr, former CEO of the Ontario Power Authority, puts it in a recent article: “The recent rush to “green” Ontario’s electricity system has produced a largely ad hoc approach to the selection and investment in power generation technologies that will unnecessarily increase the cost of electricity with far-reaching economic and social effects… Pricing carbon would have the advantage of continuing a century of economically rational development of the electricity system as an essential underpinning of modern society. To do other than proceed on an economic basis is to risk massive economic distortions… The alternative process of picking winners and losers in renewable energy technologies, based on perceptions and public opinion polls, puts us all at considerable risk.”

Before mortgaging its long-term future by awarding hundreds more 20-year fixed-price contracts to wind developers, the province of Ontario urgently needs an independent, objective, expert investigation, perhaps by the Auditor-General, of the prospective economic, environmental and employment effects of wind power and other renewable energy policies in the province.

Financial Post

Michael Trebilcock is professor of law and economics, faculty of law, University of Toronto, and co-author of “The Perils of Picking Technological Winners in Renewable Energy Policy,” an Energy Probe study released yesterday.

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The surprise US victory over Team Canada in the mens’ ice hockey game brought back many memories of the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” at the Lake Placid games. It also happened to be the 30th anniversary of that game. As a hockey fan and devout goalie (yes, I let people shoot pucks at my head) I was ecstatic at the victory.

What I was not so happy about was the apparent failure of three Olympia electric ice machines last Monday. Touted as a green solution to ice resurfacing, one machine after another broke, prompting officials to bring in the good, old fashioned, American-made, and fossil-fuel powered Zamboni ice resurfacers.

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The Chevy Volt is costing GM a pretty penny to produce, and GM execs like Bob Lutz think the company will continue to lose money on hybrids for years to come. But one way of offsetting those costs is to delegate the Voltec technology across brands to other markets. We already know GM is planning on making the Cadillac Converj. And now GM has just unveiled another voltec platform-based concept for its Euro-brand, Opel, ahead of the Geneva Auto Show.

Called the Opel Flextreme GT/E, it is a very muscular looking sedan with a sleek drag coefficient. The GT/E seats four and incorporates some rather surprising performance enhancers, like a rear spoiler that deploys at high speed to keep drag down.

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Most of us remember the original Honda Insight as that tiny, quirky car that got 70 mpg long before phrases like “peak oil” and “smart grids” had really entered our collective vocabulary. At the time it was introduced, major debates on climate change hadn’t even started. In that sense, the original Insight was far ahead of its time… so much so that you could say it missed the target by about 8 years. And after Toyota introduced the Prius, Honda was relegated to playing the hybrid bit part.

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If you’re like me, you were more than a little disappointed in Honda’s CR-Z hybrid coupe. The sharp looking hybrid two-seater, a spiritual successor to the CRX of the late 80’s/early 90’s, lacked both sportiness and the fuel efficiency of its predecessor. With just 122 horsepower on tap, a 3,900 pound curb weight, and MPG ratings 31 city/37 highway, it was a major let down for lots of people.

But Honda seems to be listening. AutoExpress is reporting that Honda is working with in-house tuning company Mugen to produce a sportier, more powerful CR-Z Type-R. But will fuel economy suffer?

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European carmakers are preparing their latest cool hybrid concepts for the 2010 Geneva Motor Show, which runs March 4 to 14. The dominant theme is green speed. Here’s a sneak peak at a few vehicle unveilings, which show some restraint on fuel economy, but hold nothing back on horsepower.

Mercedes F800 Style

Mercedes F800 Style

Mercedes will unveil its F800 Style plug-in hybrid concept at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. With its 10 kWh battery pack, the car can travel up to 18 miles solely on electricity—although perhaps not when pushed to the limits of its 4.7-second 0-60 mph acceleration and top speed of 155 mph. The combined output of the F800’s V6 gas engine with direct injection and its 109-horsepower hybrid system is about 400 total horsepower. Mercedes didn’t share its arithmetic, but estimates the average fuel economy of the F800 at 80 miles per gallon.

Other innovations include compact modular packaging of the batteries, motors and fuel cells to preserve interior space for five passengers; an instrumental panel that uses a camera to record your hand, thus allowing iPhone-like wiping, turning and zooming functions; and—believe it not—“traffic jam assist” for hands-free driving at low speeds. The F800 Style could be a sign that Mercedes-Benz is serious about delivering a plug-in hybrid version of the S-Class in the next few years, as promised. The Mercedes F800 Style can also be equipped as a fuel cell vehicle.

Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid

Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid

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Honda unveiled a sleeker more stylish Odyssey minivan concept at the 2010 Chicago Auto Show. New design elements could appear in the 2011 Odyssey. Within three years, Honda could produce a hybrid gas-electric version of the minivan.

Honda is developing a hybrid system suitable for larger cars such as the Odyssey minivan the Pilot sports utility vehicle. Tomohiko Kawanabe, Honda’s chief operating officer for automobile research and development, today told Reuters, “We’ve left the research stage and entered the field of development.” Kawanabe said these vehicles could hit the US market in about three years.

Honda took an early lead in hybrid development about a decade ago, but has fallen behind Toyota and Ford in the race for appealing fuel-efficient gas-electric vehicles. Honda has been advocating a two-part efficiency strategy: diesel vehicles for larger vehicles and hybrids for cars. However, it appears that the company might be flipping that strategy by producing larger hybrids for the US market and diesels with smaller engines for Europe and Asia.

In late 2008, the company abandoned its large-vehicle diesel strategy, but held firm to its goal of producing smaller relatively affordable hybrids. In July 2009, Honda president Takanobu Ito promised to speed up production of hybrid cars, focusing on small hybrids, such as the CR-Z and a Honda Fit Hybrid. Ito said, “Our theme is hybrids.” In January 2010, Ito said that it apply hybrid technology to Acura vehicles.

However, its biggest move in that direct, the 2010 Honda Insight, failed to capture interest from consumers. Last week, Honda Executive Vice President Koichi Kondo told Bloomberg that the 2010 Honda Insight might have compromised too much size in the name of efficiency, and hinted that the company might abandon plans for a gas-electric Fit. “There are plenty of people who think that the current Fit meets their needs already” Kondo said. “A hybrid version might seem expensive. Our engineers are really struggling.”

New Life for Honda Hybrids

In today’s interview with Reuters, Honda’s Kawanabe said the company is studying development of a small diesel engine for emerging markets including India, as well as in Europe. “If you want to compete in markets like India, and also Europe, (a small diesel engine) is necessary.”

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Richard Branson has invested $400 million in alternative energy technology and says he’s moving his business empire away from petroleum wherever possible.

A group fronted by Virgin CEO Richard Branson released a report this week warning that peak oil is not only real, but closer on the horizon than many might think. The Industry Taskforce for Peak Oil and Energy Security warns that demand for oil could outstrip supply as soon as 2015, a turn of events that would send ripples through nearly every economy and industry in the world. “We must plan for a world in which oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil price shocks have the potential to destabilize economic, political and social activity,” wrote Branson in the forward to the report. “Don’t let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did.”

The task force recommended swift action from government and business to accelerate the “green industrial revolution,” as well as the creation of actionable contingency plans should an oil crisis take place before a movement away from petroleum is complete. It warned that even if immediate steps are taken, there is a risk of serious shock to the food, transportation, heating and retail sectors. As one of the world’s leading travel providers, Branson’s Virgin Airlines would stand to be hit particularly hard in the event of such a crisis.

Branson is just the latest billionaire to warn of an impending oil crisis. Everyone with a television set, radio or Internet connection is by now familiar with legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens’ warnings on the subject. “The oil just isn’t there—no technology can change that,” Pickens told Mother Earth News in January. “And with China and India pushing up the global demand, new discoveries just can’t keep up with it.”

Both men are of course heavily invested in the transition to sustainable energy. Branson said last year that he plans to invest about $400 million in renewable energy technologies, while Pickens has invested upwards of $60 million on media promotion of his “Pickens Plan” alone. His total investment numbers in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

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A private plane carrying three employees of electric car maker Tesla Motors Inc., crashed this morning in a residential East Palo Alto neighborhood, killing all those aboard and damaging several local homes. Shortly after taking off from Palo Alto Airport at 7:55 am PT, the twin-engine plane went down in thick fog, hitting a PG&E tower near the Dumbarton Bridge. Nobody on the ground was injured.

The plane was a Cessna 310, registered to a company owned by Tesla’s senior electrical engineer, Doug Bourn. Though the names of the passengers are being withheld at the moment, early speculation is that all three were Tesla executives. CEO Elon Musk, who was not involved in the crash, released a statement shortly after. “Tesla is a small, tightly-knit company” said Musk. “This is a tragic day for us.”

The crash comes just a month after the company filed papers with the SEC in anticipation of a $100 million initial public offering.

Update:: Sources told Edmunds.com that the dead were Doug Bourn, 56, of Santa Clara; Brian M. Finn, 42, of East Palo Alto; and Andrew Ingram, 31, of Palo Alto. All three men were engineers for Tesla.

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Large companies like eBay, Google, Walmart and Fedex are already using and experimenting with the Bloom Box. The cost is high-$700k to $800K for a shiny new Bloom Box. There have been glitches that Sridhar has had to fix and he claims he makes quick business of it.

eBay’s Donahoe says that they have 5 Bloom Boxes on their lawn that run on bio-gas from landfill waste. So far the boxes have saved them over $100,000 in electricity costs.

Here’s one of the articles on Bloom Boxes at CBS News.

and

Leslie Stahl interviews the maker of the “Bloom Box” K.R. Sridhar at CBS News.

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The brain of any electronic device is the circuitry that operated the machine. Without the circuitry, the device is not even worth the cost of the plastic that it is made of. Any electronics device requires some kind of battery or it is nothing more than a paperweight. Recently, some new technology was created [...]
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