Charged Up for Electric Cars

Charged Up for Electric Cars appears in today's Washington Post Outlook section. It's an interview with Shai Agassi, one of the leading proponents of all-electric cars. Agassi has recently entered into an agreement with the government of Hawaii (that's him with Gov. Linda Lingle at left) to roll out electric car stations statewide.

Agassi says, "President-elect Obama has to say that every parking spot in America [needs] to have electric power." It's not so much about electric-vehicle technology or battery technology, as some other advocates would have us believe, it's more about what will replace today's gas stations. He wants drive-through stations that look like car washes and will exchange your depleted battery for a charged one. You'll do this on a yearly plan that you buy for so much a year. You'll pop into one of these stations after you have exhausted the 100-mile cruising range of your car's existing battery. For everyday use, though, you'll just recharge your existing battery. Thus the need for every parking spot to have electric power.

"The cost of [installing recharging stations] is two months worth of oil," says Agassi. "And then it pays for itself again and again and again."

Won't all this overtax our existing electric grid and generating capacity? No, because "every electron we buy from the [electric company in Hawaii] will be matched with renewables [such as] 20 more windmills on Maui."

And we need to do this nationwide why? "The government cannot afford not to go off oil. Every time the price of oil goes up, the trade deficit goes north of $1 trillion. Every time the economy starts picking up, it will crash because the price of oil will go up again. So the only way to get the economy picking up is to get off oil."

TreeHugger

TreeHugger is another indispensable resource for budding green revolutionaries. For eco-conscious consumers, it hosts Buy Green. (You can also access Buy Green by clicking on Green Buying Guides in the TreeHugger masthead.)

Yahoo! Green

One of the problems I'm running into as a budding "green revolutionary" is the huge number of resources out there on the Internet that need to be investigated. So many of them, so little time. To the rescue, thankfully, comes Yahoo! Green.

That collection of green-related material hosts Lori Bongiorno's blog The Conscious Consumer, also worth checking out to help you consume in eco-friendly ways.

De-Cluttering Your Mailbox

De-Cluttering Your Mailbox in a recent TIME Magazine has tips on keeping snail-mail spam out of your mailbox. That's a green thing to do, since "paper spam eats up an estimated 100 million trees each year, with 44% of junk mail ending up — unopened — in landfills." Transporting junk mail to your mailbox and those of millions of others wastes gasoline by the tankerful. And I pity the poor postal workers who have to sort the likes of PennySaver and carry it to every mailbox in the United States, every week.

ProQuo.com can help you opt out of credit card solicitations, catalogs, coupon mailers, sweepstakes announcements, etc., etc., etc. You sign up for free, activate your account, then opt out of junk mail sources one by one, at your discretion. Some of the junk mail sources accept an immediate electronic opt-out which ProQuo generates for you. Far too many, though, make you mail in a form letter which ProQuo gamely feeds you. Then there are those irritating sources that make you leave the ProQuo site and enter their own ... where you have to figure out what to do on your own, with no further help from ProQuo.

As for catalog opt-outs, ProQuo ideally lets you just click on a catalog you want to stop receiving, fill in some vital information (including your customer number, so it's best to have a catalog in hand) and send the opt-out right away. If you don't know the customer number, you can so indicate ... but you get the feeling the catalog company may just toss out your request on the basis that they "can't find" your identity in their database. For that matter, there seems to be no law that any company has to honor any such opt-out request, no matter how complete the information you give them.

ProQuo has a paltry list of catalogs it knows about — though it lets you suggest new ones — so I found it better to go to CatalogChoice.org, where the list is huge. This is another free site, and the procedure is similar ... though the sheer number of catalogs makes locating one you want to cancel harder than at ProQuo. CatalogChoice ideally has gotten each catalog's sender to agree to honor opt-out requests in advance, though two of the three I tried to opt out of were shown as not having entered into such an agreement. CatalogChoice will still send these catalogs your opt-out request (including your customer number and/or source or key number if you know it) but there are no guarantees that the request will be honored. CatalogChoice also provides links to these nonparticipating catalogs' customer service and privacy pages so you can try to cancel them one by one the old-fashioned way. As with ProQuo, catalogs not in the CatalogChoice system can be suggested for future inclusion.

I haven't tried it, but the TIME article also mentions the pay site GreenDimes.com, which will charge you $20 per year to do the same kinds of things.

The article says 89% of poll respondents support the creation of a national Do Not Mail list that would be like the successful Do Not Call Registry, which bars commercial enterprises from phoning you out of the blue with their solicitations. So far, in none of the 19 states where such an initiative has been debated has it passed, owing to the fact that mail advertising works. The 56% of junk mail that does not go unopened gets enough consumer response, it would seem, to yield an estimated $646 billion a year in sales! Some of that lucre undoubtedly finances powerful lobbying that keeps state legislatures and the U.S. Congress from killing the goose that lays all those golden eggs.

Repower America

Repower America is all about exactly what its logo says it's about:

It wants America within ten years to burn fossil fuels no longer: coal, oil, gasoline, natural gas. We need to switch to wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, and other renewables; start building more nuclear power plants, which are much safer than they used to be; and convert our existing fossil-fuel power plants to capture and store their carbon pollution.

One of the initiatives Repower America supports is the Unified National Smart Grid. The grid which transmits electric power to your home or business from the plants that generate it needs updating. This is a so-called "infrastructure" project that needs doing anyway, as grid inadequacies currently cause blackouts and brownouts all the time. The inadequacies are "reported [see here and here] to cost the nation $80 billion to $188 billion per year in losses due to grid-related power outages and power quality issues."

The current grid in the U.S. is an antiquated patchwork that was anything but intelligently designed. If we're going to be forced to update it — and we are — why not spend the extra money that it would take to make it truly a marvel of 21st-century technology?

If we did that, then clean electricity generated anywhere in America — with an emphasis on the anywhere — could power homes and businesses across the nation. Homeowners and businesses could pick and choose among power sources nationwide, and could opt to buy some or all of their power from green/clean sources, even if it meant accepting a higher charge per kilowatt-hour.

To make that possible, national electricity "interstates" could be built to use advanced high-voltage power lines to move power to where it is needed more quickly and cheaply than is currently possible. There would also be high-tech power management facilities that could rapidly open up the equivalent of "extra lanes" in the interstate so that, say, "smart-grid operators can capitalize on a wind power plant with ample wind in the Dakotas when they expect rising air conditioning use on a hot day in Miami. Or hydropower storage can be quickly dispatched if winds are expected to temporarily subside."

Also, the local smart grids that feed into the national smart grid would buy and sell power from its customers' households and businesses. That's right: if you erected (say) a wind turbine or solar panel array on your property or building, and on a given day it generated more electric power than you were presently using, the excess power would move out onto the grid, where it would be sold at the going rate. The proceeds would go into your account at the electric company, where they could be used to reduce your electric bill. (Or it could be used for other purposes. Anyone see a merger between the local electric company and PayPal on the horizon?)

The ability to sell power back to the grid would depend on our switching our house or business to using a "smart meter [that] can spin both ways." With one of those, we could even sell back power that we had previously "downloaded" to a plug-in hybrid car.

Meanwhile, businesses and individuals would be able to monitor their energy costs in real time and make choices to lower their bills by adjusting their activities, allowing less stress on the grid and reduce electricity bills.

The Unified National Smart Grid is just one of the initiatives that Repower America supports in its bid to wean us off dirty, greenhouse gas-emitting energy sources in a decade. If you like their ideas, please consider joining the over-two million people who have already endorsed them by entering your email address and first and last name in the form on their home page.

It Won't Be Pretty ...

As I said in Code Green for America, America needs a new sense of national purpose. Thomas L. Friedman writes about it in his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America: We need to dedicate ourselves to cleaning up our energy act. Instead of continuing to use as much of the Energy from Hell as we do — CO2-emitting coal, oil, and natural gas — we need to switch to renewables: solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass, and so forth. Even nuclear. Renewables are the Energy from Heaven.

If we clean up our energy act, we can sell the technology to the Chinese and other countries whose people are going capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and middle-class by the billions.

If we clean up our energy act, we can put petrodictators in the Muslim/Arab world out of business. That will promote their populations' going capitalistic, entrepreneurial, and middle-class — instead of breeding human cannon fodder for the Osama bin Ladens who'd like to tear down the polyglot modern world and replace it with repressive Islamist sharia.

If we clean up our energy act and get the rest of the world to follow suit, we can head off the worst that global warming bodes to inundate us with by the middle of this century, and manage the damage that it is already too late to avert.

If we and the world clean up our energy act, we can save species beyond number that would otherwise disappear — forever — after eons on this earth. Most of them are species we haven't even discovered yet. We need species diversity to provide new sources of lifesaving medicines, to keep the global ecosystem afloat, healthy, and resilient, and simply because for us to allow countless living species to perish just so we can keep our Hummers gassed up would be, frankly, beneath contempt. For us to let that happen to millions of species we have yet to discover and catalog would diminish us in our own eyes irretrievably.


Friedman makes all that abundantly clear in the first half of his book. In the second half, he gets down to brass tacks and tells us exactly what we need to do.

It's not pretty, folks.

Because it isn't going to come cheap.

Code Green, as Friedman dubs the green revolution we need to bring about, faces a steep uphill battle. Coal-oil-gas are so entrenched that we will need to systematically make big sacrifices in order to supplant them with solar-photovoltaic-wind-hydro-geothermal-biomass-(and yes even) nuclear.

Many of the sacrifices will hit us in the form of new or increased taxes: "a carbon tax [directly on carbon emitters], a gasoline tax increase ... a cap-and-trade system that indirectly taxes carbon emitters" (p. 251).

Some of the sacrifices will hit us in more subtle ways. For instance, Friedman talks of a "renewable energy mandate." In Thomas Friedman Column: "Bailout (and Buildup)" I mentioned his calling for a U.S. government mandate that "every utility in the country ... produce 20 percent of its power from clean, non-CO2-emitting, energy sources — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass — by 2025."

Sounds good on paper, right? Well, until the alternative, renewable energy sources are "taken to scale" and head "down the cost-volume learning curve," they'll come at a premium price. Who is going to pay that price? It will ultimately be the consumers of the "clean electrons" these energy sources will provide — you and me.

Unless, of course, Uncle Sam subsidizes the clean electrons. Then it will be the taxpayers who'll bear the cost burdens — again, you and me.

Thomas Friedman Column: "Bailout (and Buildup)"

New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman's recent column "Bailout (and Buildup)" steadfastly refuses to sacrifice our "budding clean-tech revolution" on the altar of financial recovery. Friedman, whose latest book is Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, rightfully worries that the return of gasoline prices to under $2 a gallon, after a summer of $4 gas, sends the wrong signal.

This was then:

Americans drove less, polluted less, exercised more, rode more public transportation and, most importantly, overwhelmed Detroit with demands for smaller, more fuel-efficient, hybrid and electric cars. The clean energy and efficiency industries saw record growth — one of our few remaining engines of real quality job creation.

This is now:

But with little credit available today for new energy start-ups, and lower oil prices making it harder for existing renewables like wind and solar to scale, and a weak economy making it nearly impossible for Congress to pass a carbon tax or gasoline tax that would make clean energy more competitive, what will become of our budding clean-tech revolution?

Today's bailout mentality compounds the problem ... but if the bailout is handled right, it could be a blessing in disguise:

“Is the economic crisis going to be the end of green?” asks David Rothkopf, energy consultant and author of “Superclass.” “Or, could green be the way to end the economic crisis?”

It has to be the latter. We can’t afford a financial bailout that also isn’t a green buildup — a buildup of a new clean energy industry that strengthens America and helps the planet.

To turn the panic bailout into a green buildup, we need:

• Mandated clean energy generation: by congressional mandate, that "every utility in the country ... produce 20 percent of its power from clean, non-CO2-emitting, energy sources — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass — by 2025"
• Consumer incentives to save energy: "that every state move its utilities to a system of 'decoupling-plus' ... getting paid for how much electricity or gas they get you to save," not how much they get you to use
• Tax incentives for clean energy technology: such that "any company that invests in new domestic manufacturing capacity for clean energy technology — or procures any clean energy system or energy savings device that is made by an American manufacturer — can write down the entire cost of the investment via a tax credit and/or accelerated depreciation in the first year"
• Stimulus package money to modernize building codes: "money from any stimulus package ... directly incentivize and support states’ efforts to implement and intelligently modernize their building codes to get already well-established national 'best practices' quickly into their marketplaces"
• Stimulus package money to do other things: "targeted investments in scientific research, mass transit, domestic clean-tech manufacturing and energy efficiency that will make us a more productive and innovative society, one with more skills, more competitiveness, more productivity and better infrastructure"

Oh, and President Obama should lead by example ...

... starting by reinventing the inaugural parade. Get rid of the black stretch limos and double-plated armored Chevy Tahoes inching down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, let the next president announce that he will use no vehicles on inauguration day that get less than 30 miles per gallon. He could invite all car companies to participate in the historic drive with their best available American-made, fuel-efficient, innovative vehicle.

That last one sounds like a tall order, Tom! Can the Secret Service get a Toyota Prius with bulletproof glass?