Over the weekend, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela threatened to halt oil exports from his country to the United States if Colombia attacks Venezuela over the harboring of FARC and ELN terrorists. Chavez said, "If there was an attack on Venezuela from Colombian territory or from anywhere else, promoted by the Yankee empire, we would suspend oil shipments to the US, even if we have to eat stones. We would not send one more drop to US refineries." According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, nearly 10 percent of America's crude oil imports come from Venezuela.
The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, in a show of bi-partisan support, approved this morning a bill to put 400,000 electric vehicles on the road in three years. The
Promoting Electric Vehicles Act of 2010 passed the committee on a 19 to 4 vote. Senator Murkowski (R-Alaska) said after the vote, "I am willing to take the risk where we're putting our money on the electrification of vehicles."
The $3.6 billion bill, authored by Senator Dorgan (D-North Dakota) spends $1.5 billion on research, including a $10 million prize for the development of a vehicle battery with a 500 mile range, and up to $250 million for deployment communities that would serve as large-scale pilot programs for the rest of the nation. The deployment communities will receive targeted incentives to promote the purchase of electric vehicles and the construction of charging stations to learn best practices for the rapid deployment of electric vehicles.
Posted by: Josh Kalla in electric cars on
Jul 19, 2010
Stories, such as
this one, raise concerns about electric vehicles being suitable for cold weather. But should we in Minnesota actually be worried about purchasing electric vehicles?
Probably not. That story is about the Mini E, an experimental vehicle with just 450 cars in the United States and another 150 in Germany. It's a vehicle that uses ducting to direct warm air at the batteries rather than an engineered thermal management system, which is what the soon-to-come-to-market Chevy Volt is using. The Volt is being built so that the batteries have their own antifreeze and coolant systems designed to keep the batteries operating at optimal conditions. A similar technology already exists in the Toyota Prius, which comes equipped with an exhaust heat recirculation system to warm the antifreeze of a cold engine and an efficient air conditioner for warm weather. The Chevy Volt has undergone extensive cold-weather testing in Kapuskasing, Ontario, located 500 miles northwest of Toronto. You can see video of those tests here. Two of the initial launching sites of the Chevy Volt include Detroit, with its average January temperature of 19 degrees Fahrenheit, and Washington, D.C., which received over 55 inches of snow last winter.
T
he City of London is out of the gates and well on its way to becoming Europe's electric vehicle capital. London Mayor Boris Johnson released in May 2009 his
Electric Vehicle Delivery Plan, which calls for 25,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2015 and 100,000 electric vehicles as soon as possible. His plan envisions that all Londoners will be within one mile of a charging station by mid-decade. To accomplish his goal, 22,500 of these charging stations will be located in offices for employee and company use. The remaining 2,500 will form a publically accessible pan-London network of charging stations at a range of locations such as residential on street spaces, public parking ramps, retail locations, and London Underground stations. Approximately 500 of these will be ‘on-street' charging stations and the remaining 2,000 will be located in supermarkets, parking ramps, London Underground car parks, and at retail locations.
The Pan-London Electric Vehicle Charging Scheme will bring together the publicly accessible charging stations in London into one network and will be developed later this year. Registered customers of the pan-London scheme will be able to use any of the publicly accessible charge points on the scheme, recognisable by a single pan-London scheme brand.
Environmentalists aren't the only ones supporting electric vehicles these days; the U.S. Army has joined automakers to produce fuel-efficient, combat-ready electric vehicles. The reason: according to the Brooking Institution's Fueling the ‘Balance:' A Defense Energy Strategy Primer, "A $10 increase in the cost of a barrel of oil increases the price of [Defense Department] operations by $1.3 billion. To put this into context, each $10 price increase is equivalent to a loss of almost the entire U.S. Marine Corps procurement budget." Furthermore, according to Thomas Mathes, development director of the Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, a 1 percent reduction in fuel consumption in Iraq would put 6,500 fewer troops in harm's way protecting fuel lines and sources.
America, and in particular Minnesota, is far behind the rest of the world in enacting legislative initiatives to promote electric vehicles.
Posted by: Josh Kalla in electric cars, business on
Jun 30, 2010
Yesterday, while the DOW lost over 250 points, PayPal founder Elon Musk's electric vehicle startup Tesla Motors raised $226 million in its initial public offering. Though Tesla has only sold about 1,000 of its electric vehicles and has not had a quarterly profit yet, investors are confident in the startup. Tesla, which began trading at $17 a share, leaped nearly 41 percent to close at $23.89. Hilary Kramer, president and chief investment officer of A&G Capital Research, is calling Tesla a "game changer."
Fresh Energy executive director Michael Noble was quoted in last week's
Pioneer Press article "
Minnesotans plugging into electric vehicles." "With everybody talking about reducing our reliance on oil, electric vehicle technology is the biggest idea for widespread deployment of new cars that don't run on gasoline," he said.
Read more about how Minnesotans are getting on board with electric vehicles, and what policy makers and business leaders are doing to support the trend.
Posted by: Josh Kalla in pollution, electric cars on
Jun 30, 2010
Conventional vehicles with their internal combustion engines are causing a public health crisis:
According to researchers at Tufts University, 40 million Americans, or 16 percent of households, live within 300 feet of a four-lane highway, railroad, or airport.- Researchers at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine found that "exposure to outdoor levels of nitrogen dioxide (N02) or other freeway-related pollutants was a significant risk factor for asthma."
- Researchers from the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts University found that, "Traffic exposure at roadway volumes as low as 20,000-40,000 vehicles/day may increase cardiovascular disease risk through adverse effects on blood pressure and inflammation."
- According to a paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Public Health conventional automobiles are the largest human-caused source of particulate matter pollution, which has been strongly associated with heart disease, cardiopulmonary disease, atherosclerosis development, cystic fibrosis, chronic lung disease, and some forms of cancer.
- In 1996, the Natural Resource Defense Council conducted an analysis of epidemiological studies and concluded that 64,000 people die annually from heart and lung disease attributable to particulate matter pollution. Nearly twice as many Americans die from particulate matter pollution than in automobile accidents.
Posted by: Josh Kalla in report, electric cars on
Jun 28, 2010
The National Research Council is a part of the National Academies and receives its funding primarily from the federal government. The National Research Council's mission is to provide elected officials, policy makers, and the public with expert, scientifically-sound advice. In 2009, the Council released a report entitled Transitions to Alternative Transportation Technologies-Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles. Our review of the report finds that much of the analysis and resulting conclusions from the National Research Council's report on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are incomplete or based on out-of-date information.
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