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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketIn addition to my work at 2GreenEnergy, I’m a partner in two companies related to electric vehicles. One is the largest website on Earth dedicated to EVs — an 11-year-old website with 225,000 unique vistors a month — EVWorld.com. I’ve very proud of the work that Bill Moore, my fine friend, has done through the years in forwarding the cause of clean transportation.

Another partnership of which I’m happy to be a part is its subsidiary, EV World Associates. I’m trying to create a video to tell our story there, the first vesrion of which you can see below. You’ll see at a glance that the images are too low-res and that it needs help in a million different directions. But I think that the basic message is clear: we’re here to serve.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu1QATNg4c0&w=425&h=344]

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Wind Energy

In recent times, there has been a lot of attention being given to usage of green and clean energy. The governments of different nations are bent upon adoption of green and less polluting energy options. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the European Commission (EC) and other national governments back up the economic models of energy policy decisions. In the process, they tend to ignore the risks involved such as fuel price risk, supply risk and political risk.
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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketYesterday, I wrote a post featuring a video on our driving habits and how they’re likely to change, given our newfound spirit of environmental stewardship. It seems that more and more of us every day are ceasing to define ourselves in terms of the cars we drive, as we’re realizing that our love for the zoom and sex appeal of internal combustion engines is a selfish and shallow thing — and not a part of who we really are.

I compared this phenomenon to wearing fur coats. They feel good, they keep you warm, and they tell the world that you can afford the best. But they come at the expense of incredible cruelty to the animal kingdom. One morning a few decades ago, we woke up, smacked our palms against of collective foreheads, and decided that this was simply not acceptable behavior for civilized people.

I believe the same epiphany is right around the corner in transportation. Here’s the video.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

I started to write a blog post on this subject: how our appreciation for clean energy will cause a shift in our relationships with the cars we drive.  Then I decided to make short video out of the concept. I hope it’s of some value.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfS5oSR54r4&w=425&h=344]

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

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My colleagues here at 2GreenEnergy — particularly Bill Paul — are constantly reminding me that the greatest potential for renewable energy lies outside of US borders, and that this is largely due to regulation. So, to stimulate a bit of discussion on the topic, I just posted this piece on Renewable Energy World called Renewables and Regulation.  

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Guest blogger Garth Barker writes:

… wind developers are finding it harder to finance projects due to curtailment potential of that variable renewable.

I just completed the last interview for my book on renewables with Dr. Peter Lilienthal, CEO of Homer Energy. This whole subject of integrated variable energy sources, like wind and PV, is a very interesting one – and it will obviously grow in importance as these sources begin to occupy a larger percentage of our overall energy supply. Fortunately, there are technological solutions in the form of software, along the lines of that offered by Homer Energy – originally developed at NREL. And as you can imagine, the situation is even more acute for small grids, e.g., some island in the Aleutians, versus a larger grid, e.g., the West Coast of the US.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

PhotobucketGuest Blogger Geoff Nicholson writes:

I’d like to comment on your recent post about public sector support of renewables. 

I spent the better part of my aerospace career in R&D. My experience was that private entities couldn’t plan for longer than one product development cycle. For aircraft and jet engines that tended to be about 5 to 10 years. Their ability to create a basic research vision and hold to a technology development plan was not very good, except for corporate research groups that had lots of research ideas but couldn’t care less how or when the technologies were introduced into real world products.

 If it weren’t for government funding of critical, long-term research projects/programs, we would still be flying propeller airplanes. All of yesterday’s and today’s jet engines/aircraft were really developed under military government contracts from the ’40s through the ’80s. The commercial sector didn’t have the capital to individually or, for that matter, collectively fund the myriad of technology development programs necessary to field a jet aircraft. It was too big a hurtle for the private sector.

 Since the end of the cold war, government R&D funding for aircraft has all but dried up compared to before. And, arguably no revolutionary product innovation has occurred since — only incremental improvements. The most noteworthy development has been a painfully slow and halting move toward composite airframe structures to reduce weight. No wholly new propulsion schema has been innovated. No truly revolutionary airframe schema has succeeded. We still suck, burn and blow air in engines that have the same basic design since the 1940s. We still fly tubes with wings on them. We just do it more efficiently than before while trying to drive the cost of manufacturing down. In other words, aviation has slumped into the mature end of the product life cycle curve without the impetus of government R&D funding.

 And, the rest of the world has substantially caught up to us. What used to be dozens of US aircraft manufacturers have consolidated into less than a handful. Airbus, Embrear, Bombardier and others have taken market share from US companies, hand over fist.

So, is there a need for government involvement? Yes. Should the government fund basic R&D? Yes. Should government fund end product development? Maybe, but only for a few pilot programs but not for the vast majority of end products since the government doesn’t care too much about market demand for product features and functions and the various combinations of desirable product features.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

PhotobucketI encourage readers who may be interested in electric transportation to sign up for Paul Scott’s blog. Paul is a spokesperson for Plug-In America, and one the great forces for progressive environmental policy. He also happens to be a terrific writer.  I notice that he gathered a number of rave reviews to a recent post in which he concluded:

I don’t I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait till the day when it’s rare to see an internal combustion car. At some point, they’ll be anachronistic reminders of a day when people didn’t think twice about spewing poisons into the common airshed. Like smoking in line at the grocery store, you won’t believe people used to do it everywhere.

I responded:

Paul, I agree with the others — you really are one of the great writers on the subject. For what it’s worth, the analogy I use is women wearing mink coats — all the rage in the mid-60s, but completely gone from our culture a few years later, when we all gasped in the collective recognition that it was simply wrong. And this is exactly what I expect will happen with internal combustion engines: they will become regarded as something we used to do – something that no longer has a place in our world.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

PhotobucketFrequent commentor and all-around smart guy Larry Lemmert writes:

I whole-heartedly believe (that it’s business that’s causing the rapid migration to renewables) and for that reason, the role of government should be limited to cheerleader on the side-lines, offering only tax credits to lubricant the transition, but largely to just stand back and keep out of the way of this tidal wave of green development….”

Thanks for writing in, Larry.  I go back and forth on this. I ran that idea by George Douglas, spokesperson for NREL, in the interview I conducted with my him for my book on renewables, and he politely by firmly took my head off.

I asked, “Isn’t technology is typically developed in the private sector? What was the thought process behind doing this in a public agency?”

He responded, “Well, the first statement is not true. How did we get to the moon? Public sector development of technology. The Internet is public sector development of technology. Really, the model that people think about is the Bell Labs model – the long-term investment in technology. But after the Second World War business itself became much more increasingly interested in short-term returns.

“And the role of government in investing in high risk and long-term research was given a great deal of credibility during the Second World War. The development of radar, development of nuclear arms, and so forth — specifically aimed at harnessing nuclear power. So Oak Ridge National Laboratory, San Diego National Laboratory, Los Alamos, etc. all grew out of that. So, there has been, at least for the last 60 to 70 years, the divide between what research is generally pursued by private enterprise and what research is pursued by the government and in academia. It’s the difference between near-term results, and by near-term — I don’t mean tomorrow — but in the 10 to 20 year time horizon, and much longer-term problems and results.”

We’d all like to say, along with Jefferson, “That government is best that governs least.”  Try to find a politician who runs on a “big government” platform.  Even as he’s spending your money as fast as he can get hands on it, he’s telling you that he’s for small government.

But you have to admit that NREL’s position on this gives us something to think about.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I was on a conference call this morning with people in Los Angeles, New York, Dublin, London, and Istanbul, trying to raise money for a large run-of-river hydrokinetics project in Turkey.  I’d have to go back a long way to recall a conversation representing that many time zones.

What I find noteworthy here are two things:

1) Sadly, most of the really important renewables projects are happening outside the US. I’m reminded of this constantly – normally accompanied by a warning that the US really cannot afford to take a backseat in terms of the development and implementation of alternatives to fossil fuels. We’ve done a good job in information and communication technologies, with companies like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc., but we need to be equally aggressive – and ultimately successful — in leading the way to clean energy.

Renewable energy legend Bill Paul, who has joined us here at 2GreenEnergy as a financial writer, points out the importance of the European, Asian — even African markets virtually every time we speak.  Bill keeps his finger on the pulse of 75 different sources of information every single day — many of which feature projects in some fairly exotic places.  When we first met over lunch, he mentioned that it’s likely the Sahara will soon be the site of enormous amounts of solar thermal, providing power for much of Europe, and that this heightens the importance of following the stock exchanges in Tripoli and Algiers.  Wow – that’s a lot of information to juggle. 

2) The financial mechanics behind deals of this size (the project we discussed this morning is 109 million Euros) are incredibly complicated. I was so lost on this call I didn’t know which end was up. Fortunately, I was able to introduce the parties, mute the phone, sip my coffee, and listen quietly until it was time to thank everyone for participating and hang up. I’m blessed to be associated with people 10 times better at the financial side of this than I’ll ever be.

Calls like this remind me of the first video I made when we started this site, where I asked: “What’s causing the rapid migration to renewables? It’s business. The world is figuring out that there are enormous profits to be realized from pushing toward clean energy.”

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