As my client John Collings and I contemplate the future of his business, EV Profiler, and the way we need to present it to the market, we turn our attention to the basic message: removing the concept of range anxiety from the equation in the sales process. With the EV Profiler, you have a conversation between an EV prospect and a dealer rep that goes like this:

Customer: You say I’ll get X miles in range. But I drive in hilly terrain, and I’m not exactly a little old lady behind the wheel. I do 75 miles per hour on the freeways – and more, when I think I can get away with it. Somebody told me that, mile per mile, I’ll use twice as much charge per mile at 75 as I will at 40. This whole EV thing sounds like a non-starter to me, since the range I get in the real world may be absolutely terrible.

Salesman: I hear ya – and there’s an easy way to find out. Put this device in the car you’re driving now for a week, and just drive as you normally do. It transmits your exact real-time energy use to a computer. It tracks your speed, acceleration, braking, climbing and descending hills, and so forth – with amazing accuracy. You’ll receive a report every night by email, and at the end of the week, we’ll review a report summary together, and see pretty much exactly how far you could have gone in the — (e.g., Nissan LEAF).

 

Sounds like a solid, slam-dunk sort of sales tool. But what if an OEM, say Nissan, is so confident in its sales projections that they don’t think this is necessary? What if the OEM is hedging its bets on EVs overall? What if  …? There are a half-dozen other scenarios that could make this device unrequired. But I have to think, at the end of the day, that there are a whole bunch of EV prospects who are very interested in the idea of driving by gas stations for the rest of their lives, but are sitting on the fence, each wondering: “Will this work for me?” The EV Profiler brings a rock-solid answer to a very good question.

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I got through the first half of Ian McEwan’s masterpieceSolar” on the plane ride home from the East Coast this afternoon.  For my money, he’s one of the top two or three living authors of fiction – and here, of course, building a story around global climate change and renewable energy, he’s tapped into an interest of mine – and of yours.

But how fictional is this, really? (more…)

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Wednesday, I was lucky enough to attend a conference presented by the Institute for Integrated Economic Research, a non-profit research organization focused on developing an unbiased view of global economic processes.  I’ll be interviewing one of its key people and a presenter at the conference, Nate Hagens, for my next book, and Nate wanted me to come up to speed on his thinking before we spoke, so that I could ask better questions when the time came. (more…)

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I’m on a train headed to New York City this afternoon for a series of meetings, the first of which will be lunch with my friends at Eos Energy Storage.  Their breakthrough in zinc-air energy storage will enable them to sell their product for $160 per kilowatt-hour — about one-third of what we’re paying today for lithium-ion.

My challenge will be to use my connections in the electric vehicle industry — my “friends of friends” — to help Eos nail down a manufacturing partner in this strategic space.  I have a few good ideas, and I’m sure I’ll leave the meeting with a dozen more, as the conversation naturally spawns new and different ways of thinking about the problem.

I really like and respect these people, and that’s half the battle; life’s too short to work with people you don’t “get on” with, as the British say.  

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I’m back in Washington D.C. today, principally to attend a small conference. Nate Hagens, authority on global resource depletion, has invited me to listen to his presentation on the subject, aimed at NGOs.

Nate has granted me an interview for my next book. Though he won’t be able to fit that in today, he highly recommended that I attend the conference, and take away content for use in the book. He’s one of the world’s great thinkers in this arena; I’m very much looking forward to the talk.

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I had lunch yesterday at a trendy new Japanese place in Hollywood with Stephanie Cooper, a brilliant young lady who will be doing an internship at 2GreenEnergy, helping us develop more content. “If it’s not too forward a request, please tell me your life story,” I began. “What interests you most about this subject? What are your personal strengths as a researcher and as a writer? What do you want to accomplish here? What’s your overall viewpoint of clean energy?”

I could tell right away that I was in the presence of a very cool-headed and talented young person. “Wow,” I said with a smile mid-way through the meal. “You have a terrific background for this, and, as it turns out, we agree on pretty much all the basic principles at stake here. That’s really nice, though not 100% necessary; I have no problem at all with people who have different viewpoints.”

But let’s be honest. It really IS easier to like someone – and to work with them on a day-by-day basis — who looks at life the way you do. It would be hard to work with an axe-murderer or even some lesser brand of sociopath. Being candid, do we really esteem equally viewpoints that run far counter to our own?

I’m looking forward to a fine collaboration here.

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I’m generally pessimistic about the quality of life that I see for most Americans in the foreseeable future. There are so many general reasons for this: lack of American competitiveness in the global marketplace, our failures in education, declining work-ethic, dogged adherence to clearly unsustainable business practices, over-consumption, under-saving, and corruption, resulting in the failure of our elected officials to lead us in directions that are truly good for us in the long-term.

But along with those general reasons, here’s a specific one, along with an anecdote to illustrate my point. The people working in the trenches of Corporate America – most of the specialists, managers, directors, vice presidents, etc. – are terrified of losing their jobs, and are not taking any actions whatsoever that might endanger the tenuous hold they have on their careers – even if such actions are clear winners for the corporation that issues their paycheck.

As to the anecdote, I have to keep this totally anonymous, so forgive my lack of detail. I just got off the phone with an old friend, whose old-line Fortune 500 company had two successful engagements with Mueller/Shields, the marketing services firm of which I was managing partner for 15 years. Over the past few months, my friend has made numerous attempts to bring me in for a third campaign, each of which was rebuffed. I called him just now in an effort to see if he wanted to take a new tack, or otherwise make another run at this.

“I’m leaving the company, Craig. It’s dying, as I’m sure you can believe. We’re unable to get our act together, and we’re pulled apart by business unit managers who do not and will not work together to refashion the company into something that could be relevant to today’s world. I can’t stand being here, watching masses of people, all frightened to get whacked in the next round of lay-offs, covering their asses, afraid to do something that could get them fired, even though those are the very actions that could save the company. I’ve been hired by a start-up with a brand new product delivery model, and they want me to take that vision into the marketplace.”

I hate to sound like an alarmist, but we appear to be facing the “end of an era” for the American Empire in so many ways – and the extinction of the corporate dinosaurs whose culture doesn’t fit the ways of the modern world is perhaps the most obvious example. But, as they say, “everything’s good for somebody,” and let’s recall that the extinction of the literal dinosaurs 65 million years ago paved the way for the life forms that culminated with homo sapiens. Similarly, the demise of our institutions that are evolutionarily unfit will give rise to a new epoch.

But what will it look like? Here’s where “new energy” – meaning a combination of renewables and efficiency — comes into the picture. If we in the U.S. can embrace this bold new arena, it will go a long way towards creating the prosperity and sustainability that could change the course of all this.

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We at 2GreenEnergy are taking on an intern, and tomorrow, at a wonderful Japanese restaurant in Hollywood, I have the pleasure of conducting a kick-off meeting over lunch. The way I explain this to those interested: Let me start with the bad news: I can’t pay you, and I can understand that this may be a show-stopper. But if it isn’t, let me tell you the good news: this is a win for everyone — literally.

1) 2GreenEnergy gets more content, further propelling us forward in the search engine rankings, and providing more good material for our readers.

2) I’ll work with you directly, helping you, to whatever degree I am able, to learn this subject and develop your skills as a researcher and writer. And probably most importantly,

3) The other seven billion people on this planet will benefit, as your work will further illuminate a path toward clean energy.

I have to say that this intern really gets this, and I’m thrilled to have her on board.

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Hydrokinetics is quite an appealing subject; here’s why: huge masses of water are moving all around us more or less constantly, in our ocean tides and other predictable currents, as well as in our large rivers — and rightfully, these have been the subjects of most R&D in the arena.

Until I received a call from a fellow in Northwestern Spain the other day, I had never considered the hydrokinetic potential represented by waterfalls and steep rapids. Obviously, here’s a case where a great deal of energy is released in a concentrated space; that’s certainly a good thing. But how can one extract that energy in an inexpensive, eco-friendly, and aesthetic manner?

Well, sadly, the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) I signed prohibits me from answering that question publicly. But I am convinced that there is, in fact, a way to do it, and I encourage potential investors to write in, sign the same NDA I did, and determine for themselves if they think this thing has legs. I believe most of them will agree with me, that this idea has great potential if it’s pursued diligently and professionally.

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Holy smokes, things are getting ugly around here. Here’s the beginning of Matthew Vadum’s recent article, “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American”

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

I normally laugh stuff like this off, and let nature take its course, figuring that people with extremist views will be regarded as the nut-jobs they are, and immediately dismissed from the circles of serious discussion. And I would have thought that the author of this piece, equating the poor with criminals and suggesting they’re more susceptible to bribery, which is about as outrageous as it gets, would have won some sort of prize for the speed with which he was dispatched. But this guy’s getting national attention from huge, well-respected sources. That’s not good, folks.

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