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Gentlemen, Start Your Plug-Ins
R. James Woolsey, Wall Street Journal
…Once plug-ins start appearing in showrooms it is not only consumers and utility shareholders who will be smiling. If cheap off-peak electricity supplies a portion of our transportation needs, this will help insulate alternative liquid fuels from OPEC market manipulation designed to cripple oil’s competitors. Indian and Chinese demand and peaking oil production may make it much harder for OPEC today to use any excess production capacity to drive prices down and destroy competitive technology. But as plug-ins come into the fleet low electricity costs will stand as a substantial further barrier to such market manipulation. Since OPEC cannot drive oil prices low enough to undermine our use of off-peak electricity, it is unlikely to embark on a course of radical price cuts at all because such cuts are painful for its oil-exporter members. Plug-ins thus may well give investors enough confidence to back alternative liquid fuels without any need for new taxes on oil or subsidies to protect them.
Environmentalists should join this march with enthusiasm. Replacing hydrocarbons with fuels derived from biomass and waste reduces vehicles’ carbon emissions very substantially. And replacing gasoline with electricity further brightens the environmental picture. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute has shown that, with today’s electricity grid, there would be a national average reduction in carbon emissions by about 60% per vehicle when a plug-in hybrid with 20-mile all-electric range replaces a conventional car.
(30 Dec 2006)
Article is viewable by subscribers only. Discussion and excerpts are on a Peakoil-com thread Woolsey Holds out Hope (WSJ): elec/hybrids + alternatives. -BA
Travel Habits Must Change to Make a Big Difference in Energy Consumption
Matthew L. Wald, NY Times
…Almost everything Americans do uses energy, making the earth warmer and purses thinner, and often raising demand for oil from unstable places. People eager to reduce their consumption can take many steps, but the size of their benefit – or cost – is not always evident.
The New York Times compared a number of such steps by three standards – reduction in global warming gases emitted, reduction in oil consumed and the dollar savings.
The calculations, shown in the accompanying chart, found that while choosing energy-efficient lighting and appliances makes a difference, changing how we travel would make by far the biggest difference.
Energy-saving light bulbs, the experts say, are relatively easy to adopt, and if everybody used them, the collective difference would be large. But they do not rival vehicles in potential savings.
(30 Dec 2006)
Energy will color the auto world in 2007
Dan Lienert, Forbes
One thing will most color 2007: energy. Concerns about energy will affect sales of large trucks and SUVs–Detroit’s backbone–and will make small cars more attractive than they have been in recent years. Energy issues will continue fueling the move toward smaller, car-like “crossover” SUVs. Lots of new ones are forthcoming. Even Corvette advertising hypes fuel economy these days, and with the success of the Tesla Roadster, even the electric car is back–in a big way. Flagship luxury cars are getting hybrid and diesel variants. Energy concerns will affect every type of automobile in 2007.
Hybrids, diesels and ethanol-powered cars are not solutions to America’s energy crisis and in fact buy very little time. Ethanol has way too many drawbacks. It’s expensive to produce, doesn’t deliver as many miles per gallon as gasoline and is not available in many places. More important, hybrids, diesels and ethanol depend on fossil fuels. The world is going to run out of cheap crude oil, and as China motors up, the decline only accelerates. We need a replacement for fossil fuels, such as hydrogen- or solar-powered cars, not a massive government program to sell people on ethanol.
(31 Dec 2006)
Related:
Motown breakdown (animation)
Subcompacts find niche in U.S. market
Train travel takes off
Amtrak ridership jumps 22% on Ann Arbor route
Susan L. Oppat, Ann Arbor News
Amtrak ridership in Michigan, and in Ann Arbor in particular, are at record highs this year, after the bump in gasoline prices last summer and increased airport security prompted people to look for other ways to travel.
Ann Arbor ridership was up to a record 140,413, from 108,498 the year before, said Marc Magliari, a Chicago-based spokesman for the passenger rail service.
Across the state, ridership on the three Michigan passenger rail lines during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was up to 732,318, compared to 604,721 the previous year.
(29 Dec 2006)
