Plug In America will host West Coast Inauguration parade with 30+ EVs
The AltCar crowd around the EV1 and the Chevy Volt. Photo to Amy Williams
Many of the people in Plug in America were excited by Barack Obama's win in the US presidential election. So excited, in fact, that they applied to be part of the Presidential Inaugural Parade that will take place later this month. Well, with 1,300 other groups having the same idea, PIA's electric and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) contingent was not selected to take part in the Washington, DC event. Undeterred, PIA has announced their own "Inaugural Parade West: Plug In, America!" which will cruise through Santa Monica, CA on January 17. So far, PIA expects over thirty "EVs and PHEVs, including Teslas, numerous RAV4s (with tens of thousands of miles on each), Vectrix bikes, Chevy S10s and conversions." Chris Paine and his film crew will be on hand as part of their work on the sequel to "Who Killed The Electric Car?" As for major automaker participation, PIA said that, "We've invited GM to bring a vehicle. That will be the next news update. Or miracle? Hey, they brought a Volt to AltCarExpo...." (see above).
[Source: Plug In America]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Carney 2:32PM (1/05/2009)
Electrics aren't the solution yet.
The power grid heavily depends on coal, and unreliable, weak, expensive solar and wind can't pick up the slack. Tidal and geothermal are too limited and local; hydro-electric drowns upstream land and parches downstream; and fission produces nuclear waste.
Until we get to cheap abundant fusion power (which will require a big refresh of research funds, not tied to the scelerotic, bureaucratically bogged down, dickering-delayed multi-national consortium that has delayed progress right when competition fueled advances took us to breakeven), we'll still need internal combustion engines.
The short to mid term solution then is flex fuel: cars that can burn gasoline or alcohol with equal ease.
Alcohol burns cleanly without soot, smoke, or particulate matter, and even (if you're talking ethanol and plant methanol) burns carbon neutrally. Cultivating ethanol and plant methanol plants also cools the planet. Alcohol is non mutagenic and non carcinogenic, and biodegrades in a day if not hours into harmless components rather than persisting in the environment, so no more Exxon Valdez or your local gas station ruining the aquifier. Alcohol even produces far less stuff causing acid rain and ozone smog.
This capacity costs only $100 per vehicle to add at the factory (much cheaper than hybrids, which keep us locked in to oil and only slow its growth), and mandating it as a standard feature like seatbelts would create the critical mass market enabling owners to demand alcohol pumps at the local gas station, which consumers will want because alcohol is CHEAP.
Reply
Eletruk 3:18PM (1/05/2009)
I am tired of hearing this response.
If you subscribe to 100% renewable energy, then at least YOUR energy will be offset by wind/solar/hydro, etc.
Since I assume YOU do not have an electric car (I have 2 and an electric bike), you can continue to give this lame excuse for electric cars being a poor solution. Buying an electric vehicle (or converting your existing gas burner) does more than use less fossil fuel, it also doesn't use imported gas. The thing about electricity is, we can make it ourselves. You can get solar panels, you can get a wind generator, if you live near a stream, you can even install your own hydro generator.
Tell me how many options you have for generating your own gasoline?
Even if Electric Vehicles run from coal generated electriciy, you STILL will generate less CO2 than traveling the same distance on gasoline.
If you charge your electric vehicle at night, you get to use off peak generated electricity, and if it's coal generated, you are using energy that probably would have been dumped, since they do not shut down coal generators at night, they still have to keep running and generating electricity. So you might as well use it rather than waste it.
Studies have said that the current grid can support up to 180 MILLION electric vehicles without any additional generating capacity for this reason.
Sorry, but the existing system will support EVs just fine, and still reduce CO2 production.
Oh, yeah. Alchohol isn't cheap, why do you think most of the ethanol producers are going bankrupt, even with government subsidies. It is way less efficient to produce alcohol, more than just about any other energy source, except maybe Hydrogen.
Yanquetino 4:02PM (1/05/2009)
We could've predicted that a naysayer sockpuppet would be the first to post the usual broken record comment on this story.
paulwesterberg 4:21PM (1/05/2009)
ICE car: 20% efficient - cost to drive 200 miles@25mpg = $16 to $32.
Electric Car: 85% Efficient - cost to drive 200 miles = $4.
I buy 100% wind power from my local electric company at an additional cost of 1 cent per kwh or about $5 per month.
A friend of mine works at the power company and he says that payback on a wind generator is 5-7 years.
Carney 4:41PM (1/05/2009)
Eletruk, methanol is pretty close to being capable of self-generation, since it can be made from any biomass, including sewage. And few people can put up a windmill or waterwheel anyway, or a solar panel that can generate enough juice to move a family size vehicle filled with the brood and its stuff, rather than a frail weeny euro-toy.
Your claims of ethanol's non-viability reveal your ignorance. Brazilian sugarcane ethanol is exremely cheap right now, as is methanol. A flex fuel mandate ensuring that all new cars can run on alcohol would create the critical mass guaranteeing a market. Domestic corn ethanol growers would have all the business they can handle and more. If in conjunction with the mandate we dropped our tariffs on Brazilian and other foreign ethanol, cheap ethanol would be widely available here, and methanol's broad diversity of available sources guarantee its low cost on an indefinite basis. No one can "corner" the market and choke production to jack up the price.
Wind's per kilowatt costs are far higher than the competition, and that isn't going to change.
Chris M 5:47PM (1/05/2009)
Only half of the US electricity comes from coal, and the percentage is dropping as more renewable sources come online. Stationary fossil fueled powerplants use several efficiency boosting techniques that are too big and bulky for cars, so the efficiency is much higher. Combined with the very high efficiency of electric vehicles, the result is less carbon from plug-in usage, even when powered by coal!
Alcohols and other biofuels will have some usage, but there simply isn't enough farmland available to run all our transport needs. Unlike Methanol or Ethanol, Butanol can be used in existing vehicles without modification, so it isn't necessary to go for a "100% flex fuel" solution
Carney 12:15AM (1/06/2009)
Chris M, your comments on efficiency, both of coal plants and
electric cars, are food for thought. I should say that methanol can
be made from coal, as well, burning far more cleanly than the most efficient coal plant.
Furthermore your comment on farmland is untrue.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/in-defense-of-biofuels
More than half of America's land is arable and only half of that is
farmland. Of that, only one third is cultivated. Less than a third
of that is used for corn, and only a fifth of that for ethanol.
So there's oodles of room for dramatic expansion of ethanol crops.
Furthermore there's the whole rest of the world, much of which is desperately poor and would love to grow some cash crops for our fuel needs and get their hands on some of the billions we currently send to OPEC.
Also methanol can be made from the crop residues of ethanol crops.
Despite its odor problem, Butanol's a promising fuel but is economically non viable right now whereas m/ethanol is ready to take off given a flex fuel mandate given its inherently lower price and easy availability.
Yanquetino 4:15PM (1/05/2009)
I sure wish I could be on the sidelines to cheer Plug-In America for the effort! If SCE (with their i-MiEVs) and BMW (with their Mini Es) will accept the invitation to also join in, it will be a sight to see.
I know that Plug-In America wants to mend broken fences with GM, and the latter even provided a prototype Volt for its first fund-raiser at Chris Paine's home, but if it were my decision I wouldn't let GM rain on this EV parade. UNLESS... they agreed to restore the EV1 in the Peterson Auto Museum to working order and drove it at the front of the pack. Now that would REALLY be a sight to see!
Reply
nads 10:43PM (1/05/2009)
"Until we get to cheap abundant fusion power..."
Nothing to see here folks. Just the oil conglomerates flexing some muscle online. No sane person is even suggesting this.
Wouldn't it make mores sense to build a smart grid and invest heavily in renewable energy production, than simply scrapping EVs until fusion power is widely available. It sounds comical and this guy is posting it in every EV related article on here.
Reply
Carney 12:23AM (1/06/2009)
Actually, the biggest influence in my thinking on this has not been sinister oil CEOs handing me bags with dollar signs on them, but former NASA rocket scientist Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of "Energy Victory: How to Win the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil".
http://www. energyvictory.net
By no means is he an oil shill, and thus neither am I.
Matt Lenart 11:55PM (1/05/2009)
i say let the people choose. offer an alternative and dollar votes will speak for themselves. otherwise we'll keep chasing our tails until something more promising comes out 5 years from now only to be replaced by some "better", more-promising technology which would be "ready" 10 years later, then something even better is promised 10 years after that before the previous technology materializes. so many brilliant minds out there, let's start w/ what we already have that works.
also would like to see one of the donated EV1's in the parade w/ their student-rebuilt controllers. i wonder if the general would allow them on public roads just for such an occasion.
Reply
Velvet_Kevorkian 7:15AM (1/06/2009)
There is a better solution, but the drastic change needed would weak havoc upon society and it's economy. We can only hope our new Commander in Chief is the leader he's been hyped up to be.
Ever see Zeitgeist 2?
http://www.webtvhub.com/watch-zeitgeist-2-addendum-full-movie-for-free-truth-is-not-told-it-is-realized/
Reply