popular logistics

The ever-methodical J.C. Winnie at After Gutenberg has an outline of how the United States could replace fossil fuels with renewables for transportation needs - and this without a large change in vehicle weight, use patterns, or increases in mass transportation. Add those, and we’d have a plan that would be not only environmentally more palatable, but would substantially increase environmental efficiency. From After Gutenberg:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG; and, such anthropogenic emissions unequivocally contribute to climate change. The rise of CO2 corresponds to the rise in global temperature and loss of arctic ice mass. Annual carbon emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004. Coal-fired electric power plants comprise the single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world. By and large, such admonishments are being ignored by U.S. policy-makers.

While a planetary engineer in Germany, Roland Moesl, envisions saving life as we know it on Planet Earth, a green pundit in America, David Roberts, describes the Syllogism of Doom. Of course, in Germany between 2000 and 2003 their installed PV capacity quadrupled. And, this was while Germany was becoming the world leader in wind development. It is way past time, ‘Merika, to start doing things right.

A good start would be “the most comprehensive and credible report released on wind power by a federal agency in a decade” (and studiously ignored by mainstream media), which indicates how we could achieve 20% wind power by 2030. Yes, 2030 is too late to stop using coal, but as many have observed, no single strategy will suffice. Switching sooner to electric vehicles, strong support for solar and wind energy development, conservation and improved efficiencies can make an earlier contribution than the delayers have programmed us to expect. The growing risk with peak oil is that in their search for alternative fuel, Americans will ignore much more catastrophic change brought on by anthropogenic emissions. The coal and corn zombies must be repulsed.

That’s just an excerpt. Read the rest of this persuasive analysis at Project Gutenberg.

And we’ll pose a question - we’re beginning to notice county and local impediments to renewable installation - and an absence of state mandates to require utilities to buy surplus power back at reasonable rates. If end users installing renewables in grid-tied systems are discouraged from building capacity in excess of their own use, we’re going to have problems.

One alternative is the setting up of local power coooperatives. But we’re leery of solutions that require lots of lawyers and incorporations. As Malcolm Gladwell points out in The Tipping Point, sometimes the tipping point is making things easy.

This battle is being fought, and will be won, on the streets. And in New York City the hybrids are winning. New York’s Dept. of Transportation and other agencies are replacing their Ford Taurus and Contours with Prius and Civic Hybrids, not Hummers.

As of May of this year, 375 of approx. 13,000 yellow cabs had hybrid engines. The City has mandated that by 2012, 100% of the yellow taxi fleet must be hybrids. Link to NYC press release here. The new Ford Escape Hybrids get 30 MPG. The vehicle they will replace, the Ford Crown Victoria, gets 14 mpg. Taxi drivers in NYC absorb all the operating costs, including gas. So if they can spend less money on gas - they pocket the difference, and they make more money. $9,000, assuming 80,000 miles and $3.00 per gallon.

The next step will be the 38,540 livery vehicles licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, often referred to as “black cars,” the predominant model being black Lincoln Town Cars, which also get about 12 miles per gallon.

There is no government mandate to switch, however, a combination of market forces and one government incentive seems to have sparked the beginning of a change in the right direction. Outside Goldman Sachs‘ offices on Pearl and Broad, across the street from Fraunces Tavern, at any given time, you can see two or three Prius “limos” among the Town Cars. The Priuses get 40 mpg. The Lincolns get 12. The fuel costs for a Lincoln are about $20,000 per year, three and a half times higher than $6,000 for a Prius. Which translates to $14,000 more for the drivers.

The drivers love them - they pocket the cash. The passengers love them - they are a much quieter ride, they are better for the environment, and as an added bonus, they are permitted to use the High Ooccupancy Vechicle / Low Emissions Vehicle aka (Clean Pass) lanes. In New York rush-hour traffic, this could cut some trips in half - and cut from half an hour to an hour off of a rush-hour trip to Newark or La Guardia.

They’re also good enough for the United States Army’s Special Operations Command, which includes the Special Forces, and would include the Delta Force, if it officially existed. For other large groups of vehicles - the Postal Service, the New York City Police Department, our ambulances - using hybrid engnes isn’t even part of the public discussion, yet. But it will be. Write your Rep in Congress. Senate - Click Here, House, Click Here.

An outfit called CNW Market Research, which advertises “Clarity Context Vision” like Fox News uses the term “Fair and Balanced,” published a “study” claiming that the Hummer H2 has less of an environmental impact than the Prius. You can look for the 450 + page report here.

CNW asserts that the per mile cost of the Hummer H2 is $3.027 and the Prius is $3.249.

Heidi Hauenstein and Laura Schewel of the Rocky Mountain Institute analyze the data and conclude that CNW’s mathematics was flawed. You can find the their report on the web pages of EV World. They say that IF CNW’s methodology is correct, the Prius has a significantly lower impact on the environment than the Hummer. And, by the way, they question CNW’s methodology.

Dr. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute also weighed in on the debate. (Click Here) He states “the report’s conclusions rely on faulty methods of analysis, untenable assumptions, selective use and presentation of data, and a complete lack of peer review. Even the most cursory look reveals serious bias and flaws: the average Hummer H1 is assumed to travel 379,000 miles and last for 35 years, while the average Prius is assumed to last only 109,000 miles over less than 12 years. … “Dust to Dust” has already distorted the public debate.”

So here’s what I think.

According to Edmunds, the MSRP of the 2007 Hummer H2 is $54,100. The Prius is $22,175. I assume the vehicles have a lifetime of 100,000 miles and the price of gas is $3.00 per gallon. I know that the EPA estimates for the Prius are 50, and the H2 is so big and so heavy that it is exempt from EPA milage estimates, but I use 40 mpg for the Prius - because that’s what limo drivers who use the Prius in NYC get - and 8 mpg for the Hummer. GM Hummer claims that the Hummer H3 gets 20 miles per gallon on the highway. Maybe they put a hybrid engine in it. Maybe that’s rolling downhill, outfitted for sail, with the engine off and running in neutral.

Using those assumptions, My back-of-envelope reckoning concludes that the Hummer will burn 12,500 gallons and the Prius 2,500 as they are driven those 100,000 miles. That’s a difference of 10,000 gallons of gas. At $3.00 per gallon, fuel will cost $37,500 to drive the Hummer and $7,500 to drive the Prius. That’s $30,000 bucks. And if the average price of gas is $4.00 over the life of the vehicle, it’s $40,000.

Ignoring the purchase cost, and assuming $3.00 per gallon, the fuel cost is 38 cents per mile for the Hummer, and 8 cents per mile for the Prius. Factoring the costs to purchase the vehicle, and the cost of oil changes every 3000 miles, (34 oil changes at $25 each) the costs to drive a Hummer H2 are $92,460 while the costs to drive a Prius are $30,525. This works out to 92 cents per mile for the H2 and 31 cents per mile for the Prius.

So the bottom line is I don’t care what CNW says, altho it would be nice if their arguments were logical, coherent, and based on fact. Regardless, my next new car will be an aerodynamic hybrid.

MetaEfficient posts (post undated) on the  Matra MS1 Electric Bike:

This could be a great commuting machine — it’s an electric-powered bike designed by the French company Matra. The bike was recently introduced at the Paris Motorshow. It has a range of 60 miles, in addition to the mileage you add by using pedal power. It has a top speed of 30 miles per hour, but this is an artificial limit set on the motor.

It can be rigged to go faster, but officially, you’d have to get a license to drive it, because it would be considered a scooter. The bike also incorporates disc brakes and a regenerative braking system — nice.

This electric bike should be available for sale in Europe in the not-too-distant future, but no word on whether it’ll make it to the States. It will probably be priced around $5000.

Via: AutoblogGreen and Bikes In The Fast Lane

Link to Meta Efficient post.

Congressman Dingell’s loyalty to the US automobile industry is laudable. However, resisting higher mileage standards does not help the industry. It doesn’t help management, it doesn’t help the workers, and it doesn’t help the stockholders. (Click Here or Here) It helps the Japanese, especially Toyota.

Ford Motor Company, for example, started losing the taxi and limosine market to Toyota long before Mayor Bloomberg’s initiative that all new taxis were to be hybrids. All around Wall Street, where the limos pick up investment bankers and hedge fund managers in cars that are driven 50,000 to 100,000 miles per year, you see old Lincolns and brand new Priuses.

Each Prius (Edmunds, Toyota, Car Talk), which gets 45 miles to the gallon, will burn 2,222 gallons as it is driven those 100,000 miles.

Each Lincoln Town Car, (Edmunds, Lincoln, Car Talk), which gets 12 mpg, will burn 8,333 gallons in that 100,000 miles.

At $3.00 per gallon, fuel for the Prius costs $6,222; fuel for the Lincoln costs $23,333. It’s economics not environmentalism. Fuel costs for the Lincoln are almost four times higher than for the Prius.

Even with a new set of batteries at $5,000, the operating costs for the Prius are less than half those of the Lincoln.

GM and Ford act like a man with a toothache who won’t go to the dentist because it will hurt. But unless he takes action the man will lose the tooth. They act like someone with pain that ‘is probably nothing’ who dies of cancer. And Congressman Dingell is saying ‘It’s ok, it’s probably nothing.’

Dingell’s loyalty is laudable. But rather than tell them what they want to hear, he should tell Detroit the hard truth - milage matters. Or to paraphrase Bill Clinton, ‘It’s fuel economy, stupid!’

Mine is a multi-Prius clan. I drive one of that first batch of 2,000 that came in in 2001, courtesy of my Dad, who promptly traded up for the new body model. My brother has one of those, too.

So when I say that it seems like years since rumor first had it that PHEV (plug-in hybrid engine vehicle) upgrades were just around the corner, I mean really. I’ve read innumerable profiles of little Mom-and-Pop shops (invariably in CA) performing the conversions, and enough predictions that similar conversion services were coming soon to a garage near me that I put off the road trip. The Canadians are doing it & the kids are doing it, but the rest of us are just waiting around getting bothered, apparently.

Our best hope might just be with the DIY crowd, which is hard at work developing an open-source conversion guide and launch a fleet of “100+MPG Hybrids”–with the ultimate goal of pressuring the auto industry to do it Bettah.

From ToolMonger’s reporting from Maker Faire:

These people from GreeneMotor brought out a number of motorcycles and scooters that they converted entirely to electric power. They claim that you can ride 450 miles on a single dollar’s worth of juice — even at California rates. Thumb your noses at the Prius crowd — you’re really green now. At least you’d be the first person on your block with an almost totally silent ride.

From  GreeneMotor.com.

Via Toolmonger. Maker Faire is a project of MakeZine, to which we subscribe.