Matchmaking, Better Place and the Mileage Fee

June 21, 2009

Here's a little marriage that wants to be arranged: the Mileage Fee and Better Place's software platform.

The Mileage Fee offers a unique opportunity to put the traffic jam on a diet, and it is gaining traction as a way to deal with dissappearing gas tax revenues as people drive less, drive more fuel efficient cars, or eventually drive cars that don't use gas at all (read the preceding link commentary to feel the gaining traction part). To be deployed broadly, however, the mileage fee needs GPS systems to be manufactured into new vehicles.

Shrugging Atlas*

June 19, 2009

The weight of the world is on our shoulders these days it seems, considering the burden of the seemingly intractable energy issues we bear:  swelling populations that harbor swelling aspirations to dramatically increase their energy use, national security insecurities and doubts about the security of energy supply, the depletion of finite fossil fuel resources, climate change and the things we might not know about costs to the natural systems that sustain life, wild swings in the price of fuel. Ugghh.It's bad. Really bad.

But maybe bad is the best thing that could happen to us. Maybe being hemmed in by problems sets the stage for particularly excellent creative response. As Margaret Boden suggests in her Stanford treatise creativity and unpredictability: "constraints, far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking."

Smart Garage

May 17, 2009

Consider these rather large silos of development:

• the electrification of cars
• renewable energy 
• smart, interactive buildings that use less energy (and sometimes even produce energy--the trend towards net zero and net plus)
• a smart, interactive electrical grid

Converging on the Road We Go

May 10, 2009

Robert Samuelson's Washington Post op-ed "The Bias Against Oil and Gas" articulates a divide on how we see our energy future: oil versus clean energy. Samuelson draws an implied "choice between promoting renewables and relying on oil" from Obama's statement that "we can remain the world's leading importer of oil, or we can become the world's leading exporter of clean energy." But really there is no divide. Really, each is focusing on separate elements of the same, integrated challenge. Like blind men calling out their impressions of the elephant, Samuelson has his arms wrapped around a sturdy leg; Obama, the trunk. Getting from here to there relies on legs and trunk. We need both.

The Most Important Mistakes Are Made On the First Day

April 04, 2009

"The most important mistakes are made on the first day of the project." This durable piece of thinking from the world of the architect and builder underscores the importance of setting off in the right direction. The cost of being a few degrees off, of setting up on the wrong bet, can multiply painfully as a project progresses. 

We are at the whistle clean beginning of so many monumental projects: the Smart Grid, the recharge grid for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles, an array of renewable options, electric rail, the mileage fee; none existed at any sort of scale, even in our imagination, at the turn of the century. Yet all are being conceived and planned and implemented at a torrid pace, right now. We are ripe for making our biggest mistakes... RIGHT NOW.

Take the vehicle recharge grid. Several companies are developing charging stations and the attendant infrastructure for cars (Better Place, Electricite de France, Portland General Electric). If they got distracted by their focus to emerge from the array of technical possibilities with the best solution, or to be victors in the marketplace, we might make the important mistake of overlooking what is best for broad implementation of a charging infrastructure for cars. 

For example, not standardizing the charging station interface (the plug and the receptacle) to let any car use any station, the world over. Different car makers, different grid operators, maybe dozens of plug and receptacle types. A confounding interoperability impediment avoided simply by clicking a few degrees right or left, by agreeing to collaborate around a standard.  From the missed opportunity to collaborate, a recharge grid with features so messy and costly that a decade and a million charging stations down the road it is dismissed by the fickle consumer, with no marketplace victors.

Hopefully, attitudes like Better Place founder Shai Agassi's will permeate these undertakings. (When Wired asked Shai whether he was worried that competitors might steal his ideas, he responded: "The mission is to end oil, not create a company.") From such visionary underpinnings, the ventures launched today may well be driven by minds geared to avoid the most important mistakes. 

The most important mistakes are made on the first day of the project.

We are on the first day of the project.

Photo: W.J. Cendak II showing just a little of the iron and muscle that follows the first day of the project, bringing up a tower crane.

The Carbon Horror Picture Show

January 12, 2009

The Rocky Mountain Institute offers an interesting map that lets you see where America's oil has come from over time, since 1973. As the import bars swelled and contracted as the map moved through time, I imagined nooses hung round the American neck by places like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, with all the dramatic tension of a good horror flick.

Check it out here. Stop it, start it, drag the timeline around at will, and get a time-motion picture of America's growing dependence on foreign oil.

Photo: Thomas Vaclavek on flickr

Tom Leppert Has a Little Conversation with T. Boone Pickens

December 04, 2008

It was "only five, maybe ten minutes," Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert said of his conversation with T. Boone on using natural gas instead of diesel (the City is on the verge committing its bus fleet to diesel). It's interesting how competing objectives and moving target costs can obscure clear choice. Diesel saves $54 million over natural gas, proponents said at first...$200 million they said later. How are they forecasting for diesel and natural gas, given the volatile price histories of each? Is there a way for them to make account for the external costs of foreign diesel dependency? Are the fuels environmentally equivalent (diesel was dirty but is getting cleaner, but is it cleaner than natural gas today; will it get cleaner still going forward--who can weigh in authoritatively)?

In the absence of an over-arching national strategy (sustainably eliminate foreign oil dependence, for instance), it's tougher to evaluate options for local decisions with so many moving price pieces and in the swirl of so many opinions. Here's hoping that people like incoming National Security Advisor Jim Jones, a former Marine with a keen sense of how energy and national security issues intersect, can articulate a national strategy that creates a meaty backdrop for state and local decision making (like the for-now-stalled Dallas fleet fueling decision).

National strategy doesn't have to dole out incentives to influence local decision making. Example. Building mechanical engineers often over-designed air conditioning and air distribution systems because "you don't get in trouble with building owners if occupants don't complain," and most owners weren't good at connecting sloppy, inflated construction design with inflated construction costs and utility bills. Green building strategy helped us re-look at the habit of over-designing air conditioning and brought a renewed focus on efficient design. Green building strategy didn't hand out rebates to go green, it just helped people think about things differently.

Likewise, a clear national strategy to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil could help shape that swirl of opinion that decides whether city buses are diesel or natural gas.

Photo: Katherine Anderson on flickr

Walmart Has a Little Conversation with T. Boone Pickens

December 01, 2008

 

When Walmart has a little conversation, it's a big conversation because Walmart is the largest retailer in the world. Walmart had a little conversation with T. Boone Pickens last month about providing fifteen percent of its Texas stores' power from wind.

Things that make the little conversation bigger:

• Walmart ultimately wants to be powered by 100% renewable energy
• Walmart's wind will be cost competitive with traditional electricity: walmart_wind.pdf
• If Walmart does it, others are likely to follow
• Walmart is considering making its own wind power
• Walmart is also considering fueling its fleet with natural gas
• Walmart showcases large, efficiency driven businesses exploring the opening territory between efficiency and sustainability

Little conversations offering big evidence that the sustainability flywheel is gathering momentum.

Photo: Audrey Hamdan on flickr

Gotta Kick the Habit When Oil is Cheap

November 20, 2008

President-elect Obama's incisive recognition that the hard work, the real work, of kicking the oil habit happens when the price of a barrel is low is excerpted from Steve Kroft's 60 Minutes interview here:

Kroft: When the price of oil was at $147 a barrel, there were a lot of spirited and profitable discussions that were held on energy independence. Now you've got the price of oil under $60.

Mr. Obama: Right.

Kroft: Does doing something about energy, is it less important now than…

Mr. Obama: It's more important. It may be a little harder politically, but it's more important.

Kroft: Why?

Mr. Obama: Well, because this has been our pattern. We go from shock to trance. You know, oil prices go up, gas prices at the pump go up, everybody goes into a flurry of activity. And then the prices go back down and suddenly we act like it's not important, and we start, you know filling up our SUVs again.

And, as a consequence, we never make any progress. It’s part of the addiction, right? That has to be broken. Now is the time to break it.

Photo: f2 on flickr

CO2 Solved?

November 11, 2008

Well, partly, anyway. Here’s a recent report from a recent Academy of Natural Science pub on getting huge amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Sounds too good to be true? The magical, naturally occurring rock is called Peridotite and it may enable a very simple and scalable approach with permanent storage (no chance of leaks), low cost and low maintenance, and it's being tested soon. Here a snippet:

Accounting for engineering challenges and other imperfections, they assert that Oman alone could probably absorb some 4 billion tons of atmospheric carbon a year-a substantial part of the 30 billion sent into the atmosphere by humans, mainly through burning of fuels.

And better yet, there's plenty more peridotite outside Oman. From a climate change mitigation perspective, it may well become the world's pet rock.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons