Posts Tagged ‘car’

Wasted fruit and vegetables = pollution from 20% of cars in Brittain

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

From the Times in Brittain:

An analysis of bin contents from 2,000 homes in 11 local authority areas has shown that a mountain of wasted fruit and vegetables is being created across Britain.

Full results of the survey are to be published next month, but its initial findings show that food waste accounts for 40 per cent of all household rubbish.

Besides apples, households are also dumping 5.1 million potatoes a day, 2.8 million tomatoes, 1.6 million bananas, and 1.2 million oranges. These were not scraps or peelings but whole items in good condition.

Wrap revealed before Christmas that about 6.7 million tonnes of food a year is dumped in bins. This represents a third of all food bought for consumption at home and is worth a total of £8 billion, or an average £400 for every household.

However, by preventing this scale of food waste about 15 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year would be saved, the equivalent of taking one in five cars off the roads.

As I said yesterday… composting (or even better eating what you buy) can save the world!

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Ford, GMC, and Chrysler should go down in flames, never to be seen again.

Friday, January 30th, 2009

For a few moments I sympathized with the big 3.  They keep saying how it’s just so hard to develop attractive vehicles that get good gas mileage that people would buy.  I started to believe it.

But then I found out that some High School students from Philadelphia have developed not 1, but 3 different hybrid electric-diesel vehicles.  Check out their website here. Their top car is a carbon fiber sports car driven by an electric drivetrain with diesel backup.  It gets 60+ mpg, with a 0-60 mph time in 3-5 seconds.

Currently they’re working on a Ford Focus that gets 100 mpg for the Automotive X-Prize.  They say that on battery alone it can go 60 miles.  As a bonus, when getting on the highway the diesel engine kicks on for a bit more electric power.  For long distance the 2 cyclinder diesel engine recharges the battery pack as one drives.

Okay… so seriously, the Chevy Volt wont even be ready for 2 more years, and it doesn’t even have the (expected) performance that these uneducated unexperienced kids are getting.  And it’s going to cost $40k.

Perhaps the big 3 ought to think about redirecting some of their lobbying and advertising dollars to America’s High School kids.  It might be money better invested.

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Bailout + electric cars + power grid = free fuel

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

It looks like the auto industry will get the bailout that they’ve been looking for in the amount of about $18 Billion.

I didn’t write the bill but if I had I would have made following changes.  Once implimented we could literally be seeing nearly free transportation (once the electric car has been paid for).

  1.  Condition the bailout on the introduction of at least 5 electric vehicles by GM and Chrysler.  The vehicles would be lead-acid battery powered, have a minimum range of 50 miles and a minimum top speed of 65 mph.   When better/cheaper electrical storage than lead-acid becomes available we’ll all switch to it.  With a huge market available many more companies would jump on the battery development bandwagon… batteries are the single sticking point in electrical car design.
  2. While we’re up to bailing people out why not just add in a few more dollars and improve the nations electrical grid such that they are smarter and have the capability to withdraw power from electric cars.
  3. Use the electric cars as a giant battery.  Wind power is cheap and way more abundant at night.  Furthermore, running a coal plant at the same power output 24/7 produces greater efficiency than trying to adjust the output to varying and somewhat unpredictable demand.
  4. Currently night time electricity is cheaper than day time and peak electricity so….
  5. The electric car owner charges at night with cheap energy, drives to work using a small fraction of the battery and plugs into a station at work hooked to the grid.  When energy demand peaks occur during the day, the power company pays to take some electricity from the car batteries to meet the demand.  Then a bit later it replaces the used electrity.
  6. As a bonus, replacing the roof of your car with a flexible PV would further reduce overall energy cost for the electric car.

No solid figures for the reader, but since electricity is cheaper as a fuel for an automobile and the difference between peak and night time energy is about the same price as the cheap energy one could likely offset all of the fuel costs.

Wouldn’t that be a boon to the economy?  Imagine if instead of paying $1k-2k a year for fuel each citizen had no fuel costs.  If President Bush’s tax rebates were an economic stimulus then having no fuel costs would have a double or triple net effect.

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