RMI’s Project Get Ready partner cities already ahead
On the heels of President Obama’s reiteration of his 2008 goal to put more than 1 million plug-in cars on the road by 2015, Vice President Joe Biden recently announced a plan to make this commitment a reality.
Most notable is a proposal for a competitive grant program offering 30 communities up to $10 million each to become early electric-vehicle adopters and ramp up infrastructure investments.
Luckily, some U.S. cities have had a significant head start, due to initiatives like Project Get Ready and others that connect communities to put them on the EV fast track.
“Thanks to big investments by automakers and local leaders, we’ve helped drive significant advancements in EV readiness in more than a dozen cities across the U.S.,” said Matt Mattila, a Rocky Mountain Institute transportation consultant. “Now, attention is shifting towards capturing data and lessons learned from these early rollouts.”
Utilities thrilled and worried about electric cars
Published: Sunday, 21 Nov 2010 on CNBC.com
NEW YORK – The first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, and the nation’s electric utilities couldn’t be more thrilled — or worried.
Plugged into a socket, an electric car can draw as much power as a small house. The surge in demand could knock out power to a home, or even a neighborhood. That has utilities in parts of California, Texas and North Carolina scrambling to upgrade transformers and other equipment in neighborhoods where the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt are expected to be in high demand.
Not since air conditioning spread across the country in the 1950s and 1960s has the power industry faced such a growth opportunity. Last year, Americans spent $325 billion on gasoline, and utilities would love even a small piece of that market.
The main obstacles to wide-scale use of electric cars are high cost and limited range, at least until a network of charging stations is built. But utility executives fret that difficulties keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers_and their neighbors_could slow the growth of this new niche.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” says Mike Rowand, who is in charge of electric vehicle planning at Duke Energy.
Auto executives say it’s inevitable that utilities will experience some difficulties early on. “We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,” says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America.
Electric cars run on big batteries that are charged by plugging into a standard wall socket or a more powerful charging station. A combined 30,000 Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts are expected to be sold over the next year. Over the next two years, Ford, Toyota and every other major automaker also plan to offer electric cars.
GENEVA – An experimental solar-powered plane took off from western Switzerland on Wednesday for a 24-hour test flight — a key step in a historic effort to one day circle the globe using only energy collected from the sun.
The plane with its 207-foot (63-meter) wingspan left Payerne airfield shortly before 7 a.m. after overcoming an equipment problem that delayed a previous attempt, the Solar Impulse team said.
Clear blue skies on Wednesday allowed the prototype aircraft to soak up plenty of solar energy as it flew over the Jura mountains west of the Swiss Alps. The big question, however, was whether the plane’s 12,000 solar cells could fill up its batteries with enough energy so the plane could fly through the night.
The flight is going “extremely well,” said team co-founder Bertrand Piccard, a record-breaking balloonist whose father and grandfather also accomplished pioneering airborne and submarine feats.
“The goal of the project is to have a solar-powered plane flying day and night without fuel,” Piccard said. “This flight is crucial for the credibility of the project.”
By late afternoon, pilot Andre Borschberg had his oxygen mask on and was cruising at almost 29,500 feet (9,000 meters), having earlier dodged low-level turbulence and thermal winds that are frequent in the mountains.
This is not the first nor the last electric airplane. NASA had similar planes, and you can find consumer planes here that are electric: http://www.electraflyer.com/
Under-reported story: Reports that OIL is leaking from multiple locations in the seabed, thus the well is leaking oil underground into seabed sideways.
BP continues to lie and hide the true magnitude of this BP-created disaster.
How much exactly is gushing? the initial claim was of 1k , then 5k, 10k, then it was 25k barrels a day, and now it is 40k barrels. When will this stop?
There is almost no independently owned news media. The “news”, the things you are allowed to hear and not allowed to hear – are completely managed and controlled. The talking heads on TV yell at each other as if they were arguing about something, but that is for show.
The two parties depend on exactly the same sources of funding. There is no appreciable difference in policy at all.
1. We are not getting the truth from BP. BP has continuously and dramatically understated size of gusher.
2. We have no way to be sure BP is devoting enough resources to stopping the gusher. BP is now saying it has no immediate way to stop up the well until August, when a new “relief” well will reach the gushing well bore, enabling its engineers to install cement plugs.
3. BP’s new strategy for stopping the gusher is highly risky.
4. Right now, the U.S. government has no authority to force BP to adopt a different strategy …
Expressing grave concerns is not enough. The President needs legal authority to order BP to protect the United States.
5. The President is not legally in charge. As long as BP is not under the direct control of the government he has no direct line of authority, and responsibility is totally confused.
This article was originally posted May 25, 2010 at 8:30 am
I fully expect the following events to occur — I do hope I am wrong:
British Petroleum with subcontractors (Transocean, Halliburton and others) will (appear to) work hard on stopping the oil gusher (referred to as a “spill”).
BP tries to fix the problem, all the efforts try to stop the leak and harvest the crude oil for production.
BP decides to ditch their attempts to harvest this oil (from this hole) and moves on to try to permanently seal the hole.
After many tons of crude oil spilled, millions of dollars spent, priceless nature is destroyed, and after months of trial they will fail to stop the gusher.
Due to BP’s apparent failure, the US government will take ownership of this problem and attempt to stop the gusher/spill.
BP is now out of the picture, for a short while.
The US government will have to spend a few billions of dollars on this disaster.
The US government will have to hire the same subcontractors that caused this mess, because they are the most qualified ones to fix this mess. Transocean, Halliburton and others will be subcontracted by the US government. BP employees will be also contracted for their expertise.
The persons who created this disaster will essentially be bailed out. [Does this sound familiar so far? (hint: wall street bailout)]
Halliburton will be paid again (this time by we the people, not by BP) to clean up their mess.
British Petroleum, Transocean and Halliburton will be reprimanded in some fashion, but it will too late, too little and essentially just political theater, just for show.
Eventually, the gusher/spill will become a leak.
Monitoring this leak will have to continue for decades.
Further attempts will have to be taken to stop this leak and maintain the containment.
The leak (like so many other disasters) will disappear from the main stream US news media.
You will hear numbers in millions even billions of lost dollars (in lost property and economy). Yet,
The real loss here is priceless. The real loss wont be given to you by economists or politicians.
History will quickly be rewritten , new disasters will distract.
Observations:
This is one other example of corporate welfare in this bailout era
The corporations are too big to fail
The problems are too big to ignore
No one else knows how to fix the problems, except for those who created them.
The corporations make a profit regardless of their performance
The corporations make a profit regardless of destruction and loss of life resulting from their actions
We pay them, we get taxed, we obey the law, they pay law makers (in various ways) to make the law
The Ocean Futures Expedition Team discovered this massive oil slick just 24 miles off the coast of Louisiana. The oil stretched as far as the eye could see and down to about 15 to 25 feet deep. Amongst the muck swims a Man o’ War and a small fish that swims alongside for protection. The team is encountering many floating globs of rust colored oil; dark black fresh crude; and oily surfaces as they explore the coast.
We need funding to keep our team in Louisiana. Please consider making a donation on our YouTube site or website.
BP cut corners, made decisions to save money and compromised safety resulting in this disaster.
Article: BP Knew Of Deepwater Horizon Safety Risks Almost A Year Ago – By Jack Loftus on May 31, 2010 at 12:00 AM
Top kill has failed. As BP moves on to whatever it is they plan to do next, we’re learning executives knew there were “serious problems and safety concerns” with the rig as early as 11 months ago and did nothing.
… totally knew, because the Army Corps of Engineers told them exactly that! … BP senior drilling engineer Mark Hafle:
Though his report indicates that the company was aware of certain risks and that it made the exception, Mr. Hafle, testifying before a panel on Friday in Louisiana about the cause of the rig disaster, rejected the notion that the company had taken risks. “Nobody believed there was going to be a safety issue,” Mr. Hafle told a six-member panel of Coast Guard and Minerals Management Service officials.
Emphasis mine, because everyone at BP apparently knew there were issues with this rig, and yet they continued to cut corners, some as recently as June 22.
What happened on June 22? Why, that’s when Hafle, the same engineer testifying Friday, and other BP engineers wrote in an internal BP document that the metal casings used at Deepwater Horizon might collapse under high pressure. “This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Hafle wrote. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”
Blind Spot is a documentary film directed by Adolfo Doring that discusses peak oil and our dependence on fossil fuels. This is a link to its official website. The website describes it thus:
Blind Spot is a documentary film that illustrates the current oil and energy crisis that our world is facing. Whatever measures of ignorance, greed, wishful thinking, we have put ourselves at a crossroads, which offer two paths with dire consequences. If we continue to burn fossil fuels we will choke the life out of the planet and if we don’t our way of life will collapse.
According to one review, “It makes ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ look like a sitcom”.
The movie features interviews with William Catton Jr., Max Fraad Wolff, Richard Heinberg, Kenneth Deffeyes, Albert Bartlett, Roscoe Bartlett, James Hansen, David Pimentel, Joseph Tainter, David Korten, Jason Bradford, Elke Weber, Mary-Ann Hitt, Terry Tamminen, Ted Caplow and Derrick Jensen.
The movie is available for purchase as a DVD and online to stream on a few websites or download as a torrent. The movie is about 1.5 hours long.
“If we lived in a rational world, inhabited by rational human beings, viewing Blind Spot would be a mandatory prerequisite to taking any federal oath of office in the coming year. Were that to happen, there might be hope that the USA would resume world leadership and our renewed influence would be used to redirect ourselves and the world away from the unsustainable path upon which we plummeted along throughout the 20th century, mistakenly regarding the adventure as unmitigated progress. “
-William Catton Jr., author of Overshoot,
Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Washington State University Read more…
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