Retire the clunker?

By Elisa Wood

January 15, 2009

What would it take to convince you to get rid of your gas-guzzling old clunker? Would $5,500 do?

Some members of Congress think this is the magic figure. Under a bill introduced in the House and Senate today, Uncle Sam would give you a credit of up to $5,500 to scrap your old car. You could spend the credit on a new, fuel efficient vehicle or mass transportation.

The proposal makes a lot of sense and has won support from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

Why the incentive? Because the rush for hybrids and other fuel-efficient autos is largely an upper- income trend. Nearly half of the nation’s $100,000/year-plus earners own cars that are less than four years old. But only about a quarter of the $40,000-$45,000 set have such young vehicles, says an ACEEE whitepaper. http://aceee.org/transportation/Crusher%20white%20paper%20fin.pdf.

The credit would bring middle-income families into the market to buy new and cleaner cars. Greater sales of these cars should reduce the cost of their advanced technologies.

Equally important, the credit helps fill a hole in the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard passed in 2007. The CAFÉ standard requires a 40% improvement in fuel economy for new vehicles by 2020. Nice idea, but not enough people buy new cars for the standard to significantly lower our oil use. In fact, about 70% of today’s auto purchases involve used vehicles.

Called the Accelerated Retirement of Inefficient Vehicles Retirement Act of 2009 (ARIVA), the bill would apply to used cars that get less than 18 miles/gallon and would be in effect from 2009 to 2012. ACEEE estimates consumers would retire 575,000 vehicles annually and save 46,000 barrels per day of oil by 2013.

I think I’d take the deal. But will Congress and the Obama administration? Stay tuned.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Front-load washers: Leaky solar panels revisited?

By Elisa Wood

December 11, 2008

Some days I’d like to throw my front-load clothes washer out the back door. But that probably won’t be necessary because it may walk out on its own.

The LG product shakes and rattles so much in the spin cycle that it ‘walks’ several inches across the floor each day. One guest to my kitchen thought we were experiencing an earthquake. Sears repairmen have visited twice, but tell me nothing is wrong with the machine: front loaders just do that. In fact, one repairman confessed that he’s called out to homes “all the time” because of these over-agitated beasts.

I spent several hundred dollars more on this machine than I would a conventional washer that loads clothes from the top. I was willing to do this because front loaders are more energy efficient. They use about one-third as much water as top-loading machines. That translates into less energy needed to warm the water. Front-loaders also spin faster, removing more moisture from clothes so that they require less time in the dryer.

The machine includes sophisticated electronics and can perform all sorts of tricks — from automatically measuring the size of laundry load to singing me a sweet song when the cycle is over. But I eye its friendly R2D2-like exterior warily. How soon before all of the rattling and rolling breaks the delicate electronics, and I have a hefty repair bill?

Several months after I bought the machine, Sears advised that the machine might stop shaking if I shored up the laundry room floor from below and replaced the linoleum with tile. Sears sales folks did not tell me before I bought the machine that its successful use required home remodeling.

Supposedly, a next generation front loader will be released shortly that does not try to escape its owners. I’m not sure what good that does me – and so many others – who already put down our hard-earned cash on today’s poor design.

I write this not to whine about my purchasing misstep, but to point out the dangers that faulty products cause the green energy movement. We’ve been down this road before. In the 1980s, when high oil prices piqued consumer interest in renewable energy, the industry rushed solar panels to market without properly training installers. Many roofs leaked. Renewable energy became associated with poor quality. Today, the solar industry wisely puts a great deal of effort into proper training of installers and product warranties. Solar panels, in fact, are now associated with quality custom construction. But it took years to restore consumer confidence.

Energy efficient appliances risk the same backlash if they take advantage of our desire to do the right thing. Consumers are willing to pay more for greater efficiency; their willingness will falter if energy efficiency becomes associated with inferior workmanship.

The stakes are high. In the not-too-distant future the auto industry is likely to offer the plug-in hybrid vehicle. A source I interviewed recently pointed out the enormous damage to public confidence that will occur if the plug-in hybrid is introduced before its battery is perfected. Not long ago several million laptop computers were recalled because their batteries overheated and sometimes caught fire. Imagine the consumer dismay if several million plug-ins cars – far more expensive than laptops — were recalled ? I am as eager as anyone to fuel my car by plugging it into an electric socket. But I do hope the auto industry takes its time overcoming the difficulties of perfecting the battery and gets it right before marketing the cars.

The public supports green products now more than any other time in our history. We may think that this support is rock solid. I’m not so sure. My front-load washer could rattle anything.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Toasting Pop-Tarts cheap: How electricity may solve our energy woes

By Elisa Wood

October 23, 2008

We tend to talk about electricity in terms of its problems — it degrades the environment, costs too much and messes up scenic views. But the Manhattan Institute’s Peter Huber takes a different stand in his new report “The Million-Volt Answer to Oil.”

Huber says electric power may be the cheap, efficient resource we seek to give America energy independence. He divides energy into two camps: electric power and transportation fuel. Our energy woes stem from our dependence on oil for transportation. To get over $4 per gallon gas, he says, we need to connect our transportation fleet and home heating systems to cheap 4 cents/kWh electricity.

“We spend roughly half as much on electricity—about $350 billion a year—as we’re currently spending on $100-a-barrel oil, and electrically powered systems do more, faster and better, than oil-fired alternatives,” he says in the report.

Huber’s theory opens the door wide for use of plug-in hybrid cars and electric heat pumps. “If we could deliver electricity straight to electric motors connected to our wheels, it would deliver miles at a price that most current car engines could match only on gasoline priced under a dollar a gallon. Delivered to our homes at off-peak prices, electrical heat would cost homeowners a lot less than $4-a-gallon heating oil,” he says.

Of course, electricity doesn’t cost 4/kWh cents everywhere. Some places it is 19 cents/kWh. And no matter where you live, the price goes up and down dramatically all day, depending on how many customers use power at any given time. When the East Coast is winding down its work day and its electricity prices fall, the West Coast is still going full tilt and its electricity prices rise. The trick is to transmit the cheap power quickly from place to place, and keep it rolling over four time zones by building a new and sophisticated high-voltage transmission backbone that can handle such movement.

“A kilowatt-hour of electricity toasts as many Pop-Tarts in Palo Alto as it does in Poughkeepsie; an efficient, integrated market with cheap, long-distance transmission available would charge everyone the same price for toasting them,” he says.

The technology exists, and it is not terribly pricey, to create such a transmission system. Huber estimates that building a 21,000-mile grid to network all major sources electricity, and push wind power from the Midwest to the coasts, would add roughly 0.3 cents/kWh to the current 9-cent/kWh average retail price of electricity.

He points out that a single 765-kV transmission line can move “almost 1 percent (4 GW) of the total average power generation of the entire United States, or 0.5 percent of the power that Americans collectively consume during the most power-hungry minute of the year.”

With such a transmission system in place, developers could build power plants and wind farms in rural expanses, rather than the crowded coasts where people object to the intrusion on their space.

Last, he points out that very few US power plants now use imported oil as a fuel, and instead use domestic sources, increasingly renewable. “With electricity, America controls its own destiny,” he says.

As Huber tells it, electricity is not part of the energy problem, but is the overlooked solution.

See the report at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/eper_03.htm.

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Mr. Pickens, What About Plug-In Hybrids?

By Elisa Wood

July 17, 2008

T. Boone Pickens deserves kudos for his attention-grabbing television campaign aimed at helping America kick the oil habit. The billionaire energy fund manager can stop the most dedicated channel surfer mid-click when he proclaims that our spending on foreign oil could soon become the largest transfer of wealth in human history.

Pickens’ plan has two parts www.pickensplan.com. The first calls for more use of wind power. No surprise there. Few forward-thinking energy plans do not put wind generation front and center.

But we’re stumped by the second part of his plan, which is that we use the wind power to replace natural gas-fired power plants and then use the left over natural gas for cars. On the surface the equation seems to make sense: it cuts back on our use of gasoline. But scratch a little, and Pickens’ idea doesn’t seem to add up.

Consider what has happened to the power generation industry this decade. We have seen a proliferation of new natural gas-fired plants because gas is a relatively clean fuel, and the plants can be built quickly and easily. As the nation moves toward regulating carbon dioxide emissions, public policy (intentionally or not) encourages even more of their construction. This is because gas-fired plants do not emit as much carbon dioxide as the coal-fired plants that provide about half of our electric power.

Unfortunately, as we’ve built more gas-fired plants, demand for natural gas has increased and its costs have skyrocketed. Gas prices are largely blamed for the tripling of electricity rates over the last eight years in places like New England.

The Pickens plan wants to replace one expensive fuel with another to power our cars.

Given this reality, wouldn’t the Pickens plan make more sense if it pushed plug-in hybrid electric cars? www.pluginpartners.org Plug-in cars appear to be a natural companion to wind power. Presumably car owners would plug their vehicles in at night to recharge. Evening is typically a windy time, so turbines would whir, pushing power into the grid to feed the cars. We won’t run out of wind as we could natural gas, and it is essentially a free fuel. On top of that, plug-ins are nearing commercial operation and do not require massive building of fueling stations, as natural gas-fired vehicles do.

Obviously, our electric grid will never be powered only by wind. But it seems we could avoid much of the massive transfer of wealth Mr. Pickens warns about by trying to push the wind/plug-in car relationship. So, Mr. Pickens, what about the plug-in hybrid?

Visit energy writer Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets newsletter and podcast