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Posts Tagged ‘Energy’

Fuel Subsidies: The World's Dumbest Transportation Policy?

There are plenty of transportation policy ideas which get my spider-sense tingling. But in most cases, I think it’s at least possible to form a coherent case in favor which doesn’t strain the basic tenets of logical argumentation. However, I am pretty much at a loss when it comes to government subsidies for transportation fuel, a strong candidate for the title of the world’s dumbest transportation policy.

In the developed world, governments often don’t tax fuel enough to make up for the externalities produced by driving. (Yes, United States, stop shuffling your feet and looking at the ground, I mean you.) But I’ve whined about that enough in the past.

In this post, let’s look at an even more egregious situation that is disturbingly prevalent in the developing world, especially in oil-producing countries (see this). Many governments not only do not tax fuel enough, but actually expend revenue to subsidize fuel and keep gas prices artificially low. In effect, they are paying people to drive.



A Car that Gets 262 MPG

Volkswagen has designed it, it’s called the XL1:

The XL1 represents the car as blue-ribbon science fair project. But unlike other megacars, which are built to maximize speed and power, this one, more than ten years and upward of a billion dollars in the designing, contains not one centimeter of wasted space or poundage. The engineers eliminated power steering because it would have added 10 kilograms. For maximum lightness, the core of its body and chassis is comprised of a one-piece molded carbon-fiber monocoque. The magnesium wheels get wrapped in custom-light Michelin rubber. The windows lower with hand cranks. There’s no radio — the sound system wraps through the Garmin GPS — and no place to plug in your smartphone, because Bluetooth is lighter.



A Better Way to Think About Sustainability

In a recent TED talk for TED2013, design consultant Leyla Acaroglu tackles some persistent sustainability myths and advocates a new way of thinking about sustainability. From the TED blog:

Acaroglu wants you to think beyond choosing a material for your grocery tote. Instead, she encourages us to think about the entire life of a finished product, to think hard about the net impact a product has on the environment. This is life-cycle thinking, not just whether a product can be recycled, but all the parts of its existence: material extraction, manufacturing, packaging and transportation, product use, and end of life.

Electric tea kettles, for example, are an unlikely drain on the environment:

In the UK, 97 percent of households have an electric tea kettle, and 65 percent of tea drinkers admit to overfilling their kettles, boiling way more water than they need for a cuppa. One day of extra energy use from these kettles is enough to light all the streetlights in London for a night. What we need, Acaroglu says, is not better materials for the tea kettle, but a behavior-changing kettle that helps you boil just what you need.



An End to the Gas Tax?

When you are a transportation professor, it is your privilege to hear a lot of zany ideas. I have heard about a scheme to create a fleet of intercontinental freight zeppelins (actually, this may not be quite as zany as it sounds). Fifty years after The Jetsons, there are still dogged advocates of flying cars. The most common thing I hear is that we should attack congestion by building monorails down the medians of the freeways. I have no idea how the monorail has bewitched our citizenry (too many trips to Disneyland?), or what precisely is so offensive about the idea of trains that run on two rails, but it’s amazing how beloved the monorail is, so much so that an episode of the Simpsons parodied it. Monorail! Monorail!

Because I love hearing people’s ideas and have no desire to be rude, I engage in an exacting regimen of meditation, yoga, and deep breathing so I can exhibit the equanimity of a lama when hearing goofy ideas. But occasionally something comes up that none of my mantras or self-hypnosis can handle.

To my mind, Governor Bob McDonnell has fashioned one such idea. He is proposing eliminating the state’s gas tax.



Consuming More Energy in the Pursuit of Saving Energy

Next week, we’ll be putting out a Freakonomics Radio podcast called “The Cobra Effect.” Without spilling the details now, I’ll tell you that it’s about unintended consequences, the kind of stuff that happens when clever-seeming incentives are let loose on an even cleverer public.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by the following e-mail from a reader named Eugene Kim:

My locality in Virginia has mandated biennial emissions inspections for automobiles before registrations can be renewed on those years. Since mine is expiring at the end of this month and it’s been two years since my last emissions test, I took my car to the service station this morning. They don’t seem to actually measure any emissions; they merely check the OBD computer for stored readings.

Here’s where it gets stupid. I don’t drive a lot. I take the train to work so I only drive on weekends, if that. (If you’re wondering why I even have a car, I bought it when I lived in the Midwest and needed it, but moved to the East Coast shortly thereafter and was upside-down on my loan. Plus I feel strangely vulnerable without a car.) Anyway, my car is idle a lot while the battery charge depletes slowly. And apparently, if it drops to a certain point the computer loses all those readings. I didn’t think it had gotten that low since the car hasn’t had any problems starting.



Summer Solar Power

The City of Austin has given us a windfall:  As of October 1, it will pay 12.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for power generated by our new solar system instead of the previous 3 cents/kwh.  Of course, this seems fairer to me—but it also reflects more closely the value of the power we generate for the grid.  Demand varies over the day and season, and the city prices higher when more power is used (in summers, mostly for air conditioning)—it engages in peak-load pricing, a form of price discrimination.  Supply is limited by capacity, and in some cases in summer the capacity constraint is reached.  The power we produce is storable, presumably for release during the peak times when its opportunity cost is highest.  Thus the increased price paid to us reflects the value of what we generate.  Regrettably, my joy at this windfall is tempered by the simultaneous substantially increased price when we must purchase power because our system fails to generate enough for our needs!



A New Kind of Toilet Paper

Our podcast “The Power of Poop” explored a variety of uses of human waste, including fecal bacteriotherapy (or a “transpoosion”), a poop-powered car, and homes heated with human waste

Now there’s another use. From Israel’s Ynetnews:

Dr. Refael Aharon of Applied CleanTech has developed a system capable of turning stinking sewage into a renewable and profitable source of energy. How?

About 99.9% of the drainage which comes out of our homes and flows through pipes is water. The remaining 10% are comprised of solid substances which can be used for the production of cellulose, which is used to produce paper.



The Prius Driver’s Conundrum

For a singularly grim, if fiercely literary, assessment of the earth’s environmental fate, the grizzled wisdom of Cormac McCarthy is always there to deliver the dark pronouncement that we’re flat-out doomed. “The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die,” explains the judge in McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. “[B]ut in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night.” Darkness, in essence, will fall at the very moment when we think we’re out-of-our-mind brilliant. 

Brilliance in conventional environmentalism has thus far been embodied by the caricature of hybrid-driving solar evangelists with soft spots for local farms, grass-fed beef, and re-useable shopping bags adorned with inscriptions of ecological virtue. Such popular solutions to our environmental quandary come not only with the eager endorsement of a progressive political establishment, but with the added appeal of basic pragmatism. Drive a more fuel-efficient car, eat locally, seek energy-efficient light fixtures, and vote “yes!” for public transit initiatives — such ideas simply make sense. And thus they’ve become the nuts-and-bolts of modern environmentalism.



FREAK-est Links

This week, Smith College Logic professors prank the whole campus; how much of the world’s energy use goes to the Internet? Maps showing the geographic prices of weed, and unbanked America; out of 7 billion, which number human are you? And, why are Japanese women paying to have their teeth messed up?



Breakthrough Batteries?

The more time you spend talking with smart people about the energy future, the more you hear about the holy grail: great batteries. To that end, a couple of recent developments in BatteryLand are encouraging news. The first battery of interest comes from MIT:

A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make “refueling” such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car. The new battery relies on an innovative architecture called a semi-solid flow cell, in which solid particles are suspended in a carrier liquid and pumped through the system. In this design, the battery’s active components — the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes — are composed of particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. These two different suspensions are pumped through systems separated by a filter, such as a thin porous membrane.



FREAK-est Links

MIT turns 150, women prefer sad men to happy ones, an interactive map of wages in cities across the U.S., and more.



The Rare Earth Conundrum

Electric cars are all the rage today, but some of the smartest people I know believe that moving towards electric vehicles is a terrible idea. Looking casually as an outsider at the unappealing economics of electric vehicles (the need for a new and immensely expensive infrastructure, cars that cost much more than either traditional gas engines or hybrids, limited ranges and long recharging times), I find it hard to understand why the Obama administration is pushing electric cars.
One argument I’ve heard is “national security,” the idea being that electric vehicles would make the United States less dependent on imported oil. Be careful what you wish for, however, because if electric cars become a mainstay, we may be trading one dependence for another that is even more troubling. Ninety-five percent of the world’s output of rare-earth metals today comes from one country: China. By some estimates, demand will outstrip supply within five years. At least with oil we know there are fifty years of oil reserves readily available. Moreover, oil is produced all over the world, limiting the monopoly power of any one country.



Looking Back at the Gulf Horizon Spill

It’s been almost a year since the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and more data is available on the magnitude of the spill. In a recent article, The New York Times describes the spill’s size as “some 4.9 million barrels of oil.” That led me to two numerical musings.
First, I wanted to make the number meaningful by comparing it to another large, famous spill: the Exxon Valdez. Its size is imprinted in my memory as 11 million gallons, which is about 250,000 barrels. So the Deepwater spill was about 20 times larger than the Valdez. In retrospect, that makes sense. The Deepwater well reached into a geologic formation. Whereas the Valdez was merely what one could take from another formation and stuff even into a big ship.



What Is Google's "Largest Investment to Date"?

According to the official Google blog, it’s a recent $168 million investment in a solar-power plant:

We’ve invested $168 million in an exciting new solar energy power plant being developed by BrightSource Energy in the Mojave Desert in California. Brightsource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will generate 392 gross MW of clean, solar energy. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 90,000 cars off the road over the lifetime of the plant, projected to be more than 25 years. The investment makes business sense and will help ensure that one of the world’s largest solar energy projects is completed.



Everything's Coming Up Shale Gas

In the Wall Street Journal, energy guru Daniel Yergin writes of the massive promise of shale gas. It’s the subject of the current cover story of TIME: “This Rock Could Power the World.” And this is what President Obama said in his energy-policy speech at Georgetown last week: Now, in terms of new sources of energy, we have a few . . .



The Next Alternative Energy Source?

If you’re looking for the next big alternative energy craze, look no further than your toilet. Gerardine Botte, a biomolecular engineer at Ohio University, has developed a “technology to generate hydrogen fuel from urine.”



Why Are the Roofs of School Buses Painted White?

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of school buses that are yellow everywhere except for the roof. I was perplexed as to why. According to this nearly 20-year-old New York Times article, the reason is that white tops are more reflective, lowering the temperature inside the bus by an average of 10 degrees during the summer. The source of that statistic is a very non-scientific sounding North Carolina pilot study.



Harnessing the Volcano

Here’s an energy source you probably haven’t thought about: volcanoes. “Ormat Technologies (ORA) has tapped into the Pacaya volcano in Guatemala,” reports Stockerblog (citing a Reuters article). “The country’s goal is to have 60 percent of its energy generated from volcanoes, along with hydro power.”



Dirty Data?

Are e-mail attachments bad for the environment? Data-storage expert Matthew Yeager thinks so.









A Very Renewable Energy Source

Faced with a plague of rabbits, some wild and some abandoned pets, the city of Stockholm is pursuing a unique pest-control strategy. The city is hunting, deep-freezing, and shipping the rabbits to a heating plant in central Sweden where they’re processed for fuel. Three thousand rabbits have been culled this year.



Be Cool, Ditch the Tie

In Bangladesh, a country whose power shortages are particularly severe during its hot summers, it doesn’t make much economic sense to dress up in a stuffy suit and then crank up your office’s AC to stay cool. That’s why, to cut down on air-conditioning use, the prime minister ordered a new dress code for the country’s civil servants: no more ties and suits – just simple, short-sleeved shirts. Casual Fridays every day shouldn’t be too difficult to enforce.



Why Pressure Cookers Are Big in the Netherlands

As the price of energy rises in the U.S., however, I would bet that we will be substituting away from ordinary cookers and toward energy-saving pressure cookers. It’s a nice illustration of how choice of technology depends on prices.



I Fell for Their Data

I fell for a stupid article and turned off my home PC last night. The article says that Americans who leave computers on overnight are wasting $2.8 billion on energy costs per year. It ignores the cost of turning computers off — and having to turn them on again the next morning. Let’s say that process takes five minutes per . . .



Does a Big Economy Need Big Power Plants? A Guest Post

Amory B. Lovins is the energy maven’s energy maven, viewed variously as a visionary or a heretic in his assessments of how the U.S. and the world should be generating and using energy. More specifically, he is the chairman and chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a man who has won many awards, written many books, and, as if that weren’t enough, was a fan favorite for Energy Secretary when we asked blog readers a few months ago to give incoming President Obama some advice.