People are excited about ethanol as an alternative to gasoline. You can just grow the basic sources needed as grain, for example. Can this solve all of our problems? Careful now: Do you know how much grain it takes to make the ethanol needed to fill up the 25 gallon tank of an SUV?
Enough grain to feed 1 person for a whole year!
I learned this on today’s Science Friday. Ira Flatow’s guest on this topic was Lester Brown, the founder of the Earth Policy Institute. It was an excellent discussion, covering several elements of the discussion, from economics to chemistry. Basically, we are on the verge of a real competition between growing crops for food and growing them for fuel. Is this wise? It could spell a major transformation of the world’s economy, and not a positive one from the USA’s point of view, given how much of the world’s grain supply is sourced in the USA.
Lester Brown is telling us to be very careful about the “gold rush” to ethanol that is happening right now. Is it globally thought out? Should we be looking at other sources, such as fast growing maple trees, switch grass, etc? Why are we not transforming our infrastructure to make more use of the energy that is available in the form of wind generated electricity? After all, with the efficient electricty storage devices that are available for vehicles right now, should we not be focusing more on doing a lot of our short automobile journeys on stored electricity?
Wind power can bring the electricity costs way down, Lester Brown says, to a point where ethanol will find it hard to compete. One of his key points is that we should be exploring this alternative a lot more than we are.
This is an excellent discussion, and Ira interviews Brown and raises discussion points very well. I highly recommend it. See the links to listen to it at the Science Friday page, here.
A somewhat biased point of view of my own follows, on part of this topic. (I apologize to Prius owners who actually bought theirs as part of a concerted program of efforts to do the right thing:)
Unplug your little car for a trip around town to run errands, and then come home and plug it back in for a recharge – not an unattractive model. The technology is already here, but we’re not making it available for everybody. This leads me to the over-priced and over-hyped Prius. It annoys me how much it has become a status symbol first and foremost, and only secondarily a genuine choice to help the environment and reduce the energy crisis. I’d go almost as far as saying that they annoy me almost as much as the Hummer.
This point of view is maybe a function of me living in LA, where they are both used to smugly beat you over the head as a means of showing how the owner can conspicuously consume… and where Prius owners are rewarded for their ability to make such an expensive choice by being allowed to drive their car in car pool lanes with only one occupant! I’ll be impressed with the Prius and other such cars when the everyday car buyer can purchase one….when it stops being a choice that the richer car buyers can comfortably afford to make.
Perhaps I’m a bit too militant about this, but I really think that as a society, we should be so much further along with this now. Such technology should be already available to all, and if this has to be done by heavy subsidy and taxation, it should be.
-cvj
These would be more expensive than even a regular Prius, but it is much easier to capture the CO_2 and pollutants released from a few hundred power stations than from a few million tailpipes, and off-peak electricity is a *lot* cheaper than gas.
If the climate warms, then can the US start growing sugar cane? Even if not, running up the price of sugar due to fuel would probably have a positive health care effect.
As for efficient vehicles, there is an easy way to get:
-A vehicle with hybrid fuel efficiency
-A lower sticker price than a standard sedan
-A great status symbol
-Allowance in the HOV lane (in most areas)
-Parking privledges in many areas
Get a motorbike.
The “real” reasons for the push are not to free us of forign oil, or clean up the atmosphere. Ethanol takes a lot of energy to make. Most of the energy comes from natural gas that we import. If we decide not to import and use our coal reserves, then ethanol is dirtier than gasoline. Another precious resource we are loosing is water. Do you know how many gallons of water it takes to water the crops to make one gallon of ethonol? You know I havent thought about that untill just now so I dont have the awnser but I’m thinking “lots”.
We can convert every ear of corn in america to ethanol and still only slow down imports of oil by 25% or so. Thats the point. Corn becomes higher in demand, we no longer have a surpluss and the price of corn goes up. The farmers make more money and the republicans get re elected. A great side effect of this is now we don’t have any grain to give away to the starving people in third world countries. (I am being sarcastic)
Unfortunatly for us, (US) the amount of ethanol produced from corn is not very good. Sugar cane would be MUCH better as a source of ethanol but the continental US does not have the right climate.
Maybe it did (since it has blocked no other legitimate comments so far, if I recall), but now it seems to be warming up to you since your last comment got through without my help. I will keep an eye on it for a while longer…..
Cheers,
-cvj
Does your anti-spam system have it in for me, personally? 🙂
Over on my blog, I was having a bit of trouble with the new anti-spam system, built into MovableType 3.31, until I took a sharp knife to it. Haven’t had so much as a whimper since then.
Jacques:
Duly noted, & apologies.
Yep, the mpg is close, but at 12:1 CR, you can never run gasoline again, so there is a tradeoff involved.(except race gas which is about 2.5x more expensive than 87 octane)
Jacques: – Sorry again about the delay of your comment. The anti-spam device again….I found it lurking in its prizon and released it. Thanks for being patient.
Best,
-cvj
I didn’t say it was 1/3. I said it was 1/3 less (i.e. 2/3). Sorry for the confusion.
Interesting that one can improve the efficiency of an ethanol-based engine by increasing the compression ratio by enough to (nearly?) make up the difference. I didn’t know that.
Jacques,
The energy density of ethanol isn’t 1/3 that of gasoline in usage, in reality, you’ll consume 15-30% more fuel, going from gasoline to E85 (holding all other variables). However, that vehicle is making 5-15% more horsepower, through chemistry.
“De-tune” the extra power out of the engine, and you cut down on the extra consumption, some, but not all.
The other nice thing about ethanol is that you can increase the compression ratio (ethanol has a 113 octane rating), which drives up the efficiency of the Otto cycle.
So, with an engine designed to run stricly on an ethanol blend, you can increase the compression ratio to around 12:1 (most production gasoline engines are 9/9.5:1), then “de-tune” it to produce typical passenger car power, and the loss of mpg becomes trivial.
Just something else to keep in mind.
I got into the affordable car search because of the amount of driving i have to do. It’s about 35,000 miles per year. If your car only lasts 100,000 miles, then you’re buying a new one every three years. And, your old car is nearly worthless at the end of it. The solution for me is to buy used. Last year, my ‘new’ car had a Kelly Blue Book value of $1500. It would have been $1500, but the car I have had some damage, which i was able to repair with an expenditure of time, and not much money.
Many cars seem to last about 100,000 miles. Three factors seem involved. Time rots the vehicle. So, you only get 10 years or so. For younger cars with high mileage, the trends seem to be that small engines last longer, and manual transmissions last longer. My own experience is that the 4 cylinder engines seem to last to at least 250,000 miles. The 6 & 8 cylinder engines seem to last to 100,000 or 150,000. My mechanic claims that one 6 cylinder engine dies at 40,000 miles – but that would be covered for the new buyer. It’s easy to find engines with 80,000 miles for my Mazda. There’s a Ford that uses the same engine, whose automatic transmission dies at 80,000 miles. My Mazda engine lasted 290,000 miles. I can pick up a used engine, and expect to put another 200,000 miles on it, for $400. $800 installed. Beats buying a new car.
The second thing about all these miles is the amount of fuel that one must purchase. My ancient Mazda was getting 37 MPG. 5 speed manual, 2.2 liter 12 valve 4 cylinder engine. My newer Saturn is getting 43 MPG. 5 speed manual, 1.9 liter engine. I expect to get another 100,000 miles from it. I’ve been asked, “Is it a hybrid?” No. Nothing special. Small engines get better highway miles. Why? Well, an engine that can deliver 300+ horsepower cannot deliver 20 horsepower efficiently. That’s all it takes to cruise down the highway. Oh. Cruise control can give you an additional 10%. For nothing. Same speed. Cuts down on traffic tickets too.
A friend has a diesel Jetta – and gets about 55 MPG. No hybrid. Very clean. Nothing new. Just a small 4 cylinder deisel, and 5 speed manual.
If people bought only as much car as they needed, the amount of fuel purchased could drop by 30%, easily. That’s without any new high tech. If the 55 MPH signs went up on highways, we’d save about 15% fuel overnight. It is legal to drive at 55 MPH even on Michigan highways that post 70. Save yourself 15%.
(This is the other Richard)
I have to point out that the root problem of the energy problem is over population. We have way too many people on this planet, and with wealth now being spread to some third world countries, the hunger for energy is accelerating.
One of my fears concerning the corn based ethanol “gold rush” is that a large fraction of our already greatly diminished fertile top soil will be managed (and raped) as a purely industrial resource, with an attitude not unlike that of our current extraction industries (mining and logging companies). If no one is eating the corn, the increased use of of high toxicity chemical pesticides and fertilizers to maximize profit would be just too tempting, ultimately damaging the soil and extracting nutrients at a high rate. Fertile top soil is a very limited resource.
My Corolla gets almost 40 miles/gallon on the highway, but mileage diminishes greatly in the extremely inefficient city traffic patterns here. Much of our driving is caused by stupid politics and social policies.
As an example, the city that I’m living in is very dog unfriendly, providing little activity space for dogs and dog owners, forcing many dog owners to drive long distances to county parks where dogs are welcome.
Here’s an intersting company in the solar space…
http://www.solfocus.com/
I think that non-imaging optics are a key to effective use of solar.
I view solar at this juncture (no pun intended) as providing incremental peak power on hot sunny days in the summer. (when it is most available and most needed)
Back to my previous comment. I think the who arena is tangled in mythology to the point that it is going to take some serious sorting out among objective rational folks to really identify the issues and opportunities.
e.
Hi Jacques,
Thanks. (I’m sorry that your comment took time to appear: enthusiastic spam-gobbler held it up while I was out cycling all day. It is still learning.)
No, I don’t mind seeing windmills a bit. I’m quite used to them actually, having had them in parts of England for some time.
“But it can be done.” — Aha!
I’m sorry, which arithmetic operation would you like me to perform on your behalf? Have you tried the “Calculator” application just to the right of your dock at the bottom of your OS X screen? It’s marvellous!
More seriously, I’ve gone through some of the “math” already. See my report on the excellent (feel free to disagree) talk by Nate Lewis on the matterhere.
Yes, I have heard of energy density. To let the fact that “the best battery technology that we have available isn’t even on the chart” compared to gasoline get in the way of progress is oversimplistic and is a fact that is largely irrelevant to the heart of the matter, since nobody is suggesting that we just carry on as normal by just replacing our gasoline engines with batteries for all tasks. We use the alternative energy sources we deploy (with the different ranges of energy densities they come with) in a variety of different ways. This is where public transport must be considered right alongside the discussion of having more electricity in personal transportation options. You know that word “diversification” you sneered at at the beginning of your comment? I think you’re not fully appreciating what it means.
Cheers,
-cvj
Diversification is the key to any solution to this looming problem.
Was that controversial?
Wind generation? Current state-of-the-art wind turbines are 1.5 MW devices. The Spanish are prototyping a 3.6 MW wind turbine. It has a blade span larger that the size of a Boeing 747-200.
With current technology, in optimal locations, wind produces electricity at a cost of $0.04-$0.06/kWh. I think the DOE hopes to push that down to $0.03/kWh on-shore and $0.05/kWh off-shore (I hope you enjoy staring at off-shore windmills from your Southern California beaches). Connecting a diffuse source of electricity (often in remote locations) to the grid is a nontrivial challenge. But it can be done.
The current (2005) installed wind generation capacity in the US is 9.1 GW. The hope is to have 100 GW by 2020. Current total US energy consumption is 3.2 TW. Do the math.
As to cars and trucks, I think the concept you need to have in mind is energy density. You need to be able to store a lot of energy/pound. Gasoline is amazingly efficient that way: about the same energy density as TNT. Ethanol is about a third less efficient (among its other drawbacks). And the best battery technology that we have available isn’t even on the chart.
Maybe the best hope is to make cars lighter, by replacing steel with advanced carbon composite materials. Amory Lovins gave an enthusiastic talk about that at the Aspen Energy Conference. (I’ve been going around joking about the added benefit that these materials would make your car invisible to radar.)
Jacques,
Please calm down. You’re among friends, I hope you realise. I’ve no idea what emotional argument about sugar vs food you’re talking about. Nobody said anything about replacing all the cornfields with some other crop.
I’m not against things in as stark a way as you seem to be suggesting. Neither is Brown, actually. In fact, while you found him infuriating, he seems to have made some of the same points you did, if I recall correctly, which is why I was puzzled as to whether you’d listened. I was wrong – you did listen. Great. He spoke at length about the Brazillian’s use of sugar cane for ethanol, indeed.
The issue is about diversifying the effort. Not treating ethanol as the magical fix-all for the energy problems. This is where I agree with him whole-heartedly. A diversity of effort. Simple really. Not an all or nothing solution based on one thing…. then being all for that thing, and against the others…. That sort of reasoning will not work. You seem to want to oversimplify someone’s argument by focusing on one component of it and blowing it out of proportion in order to make a simple (supposedly killer) counter-argument. This is odd to me.
For example, he speaks a great length about wind generation of electricity as a means to take the pressure off the corn-to-ethanol chain. Do you have a comment on that?
Look, I’m not saying that the guy is the second coming or anything. I just found it an interesting and thought-provoking discussion. And not as obviously wrong as you seem to be suggesting.
Thoughts on wind generation? Diversification?
Cheers!
-cvj
I’m sorry, I really, really don’t understand that argument.
Plowing over a cornfield and planting switchgrass has exactly the same effect of diminishing the supply of corn as a food source that diverting the corn to ethanol production would have. (So would plowing it over to build a WalMart.)
Sugar cane is also a food source. But, at least in the tropics, it is an economically viable biofuels source (unlike corn-based ethanol, which is viable only with massive subsidies). Are you against using sugar cane as biofuel, because of the deleterious effect on the world sugar market?
The “competition” between using a given crop either for food or fuel is a total red-herring (not to mention that the residue from ethanol production is still usable as animal feed, which is where the vast majority of our corn crop goes anyway). It may tug at the emotional heart-strings, but I think we physicists have something of an obligation to raise the level of the debate above mere emotional reaction.
And, yes, I did listen to Brown’s podcast. While his heart’s in the right place about some things, I found it mostly infuriating.
IP:- Yes, the worry was indeed expressed that the effect on corn production for the world market needs to be considered carefully… hence the pointing out of the equivalence between one corn food year and the 25 gallong fill up. The point is that corn is very inefficient for that purpose and we need to diversify the enthanol effort. He speaks a lot more about this in the program.
Nigel:- The battery technology has come along a lot further. Also, the idea that is being pushed now is that we will build infrastructure to allow several alternative sources of energy to plug into the grid. So the electricity for your plug-in would come from wind, ethanol, hydro…..etc.
Overall, I have to say that I like the fact that Sinclair tries these ideas, but I also have to say that (at least on personal transport) he clearly has a big problem with designing in commonsense practicality (at least from the perception of the user, not the designer) and with marketing of the thing. The C5 never made any sense to me as being thought of as a car, and this contributed to the ridicule it received, which helped damage the whole electric car idea in many people’s minds in the UK. It has no “carness” to it at all, and should never have been marketed as such. It was basically a recumbent electric bicycle masquerading as a car, and might have been better marketed as such. Recently, he returned again with a supposedly revolutionary idea. The press flocked to the demo, desperate to have another thing to make fun of “that whacy inventor is at it again”, and sure enough, another marketing disaster (imho): He’s decided that the folding bike market needs his help. He designed a folding bike that is just ridiculous, because, once again, it is not actually a bike. It is actually a scooter (for US readers, mean one of those skateboard-like things with a post having handles, which got popular again a few years ago by making them shiny… “kick-scooter”?) that you can pedal. It should be marketed as such. Not as a bike. It fails as a bike in the mind of the user. It has no “bikeness” about it, and that’s the marketing mistake. I forgot that I meant to post about that press conference. Guess which folding bike it was pitted against in a demo for the press?
-cvj
Hi Clifford,
I’d like to offer my experiences of using an electric “car”, the Sinclair C5, in the 1980s, plus the background to why people don’t buy them.
Sir Clive Sinclair is an electronics guru who started out selling miniature radios the size of matchboxes in the 1960s, then produces one of the first brands of pocket calculators, digital wrist watches, and finally computers (Sinclair Spectrum) sold in quite large numbers in the UK up to 1985.
Then he made the disaster of plowing all of his hard earned capital into a scheme to replace many of the gas-guzzling petrol cars in the UK with personal electric transport. The idea was that the bigger the size of an electric car, the lower the efficiency, and by reducing the size to a single seater you get something which will run people to the railway station or local shops, etc., efficiently without polluting the local environment: they are really more like large tricycles than cars, see pics at http://www.sinclairc5.com/
Sinclair got lotus to design the vehicle, which is why it is streamlined. I was just a schoolkid, but was saving pocket money or working at a theme park selling ice creams so when the price fell because few of the electric “cars” sold, I was able to buy one.
Although it was designed to be powered entirely by batteries, there were pedals so you could get home by cycling if you ran out of juice. The speed was good on level terrain but the battery performance was temperature dependent.
The weather gets very cold in winter in the UK for long periods, and electric cars are pretty useless in the cold. Batteries cannot deliver power efficiently when cold. Low temperatures adversely affect the electrochemical reaction rates, and it is precisely in cold weather that you don’t want battery problems. You are cold and you want to get someplace fast.
A related problem is the lack of heating in cold weather. The open design of the vehicle did not allow any sort of heating, but it is obvious that this would be an issue in any kind of electric car: because you can’t use waste heat from the engine radiator as a heat source to heat the car, you are really stuck with putting in an electric heater which will drain the batteries faster.
In an enclosed electric vehicle in really hot weather, air conditioning would have the same draining effect. I don’t think it is really practical. Lithium ion batteries are the ideal power source for electric vehicles, but they are still too expensive to use for vehicles. They also have some of the usual problems with poor delivery at low temperatures.
I suspect that hydrid cars will turn out to be more polluting than regular direct transmission cars. All that will end up happening – in most cases – is that efficiency will go down so pollution will increase. Instead of using the petrol motor to power the transmission, you’ll use it to power a generator which will charge a battery (most of the time the overnight charge from a power socket in your home will only last an hour of use before you need to start the generator), which in turn will power the electric motor transmission. This long sequence will make the car less efficient because of energy wasted as friction and waste heat in the intermediate conversions.
Anyhow, I hope I’m wrong! Maybe hybrids will prove to be used efficiently by most people, or the technology is better designed than I imagine.
Best wishes
Interesting. I feel my car ignorance creeping up on me (i’m a pedestrian learning about cycles, for the record), but that’s not going to stop me from throwing some random thoughts out here, jsut off the top of my head, lol.
I’m not sure that the Prius is such a big deal here in the UK (although this may be my not living in a car-poser kind of area), although what a lot of more environmentally conscious car-needing people are doing is to convert their cars to LPG. In London particularly, there is a financial incentive to do so, because drivers of LPG cars don’t pay congestion charges in central London, whereas other drivers do.
The gaps in my knowledge of global economy are creeping up on me too, but doesn’t the majority of US-grown corn go for export? And if so, should we be concerned about those people’s reliance on corn, possibly as a staple?
I guess what I’m wondering is whether the really is no rational economic reason for producing the amount of corn that the US does. It is certainly the case that the US overproduces corn, and much of it then goes to waste. But it is still presumably the case that there is a rational market incentive to grow that much corn, or it presumably wouldn’t be produced in those quantities.
–iP
donna:- I agree, but we’ve got to make progress on all major fronts. I am a well-known enthusiast of public transportation (see all my Cosmic Variance posts, under “environment”), which I personally feel is one the primary (but not the only) areas to focus on. Thanks.
Jacques:- I don’t think you’ve listened to the program. you’re bringing up lots of points that I already agree with, which have been discussed there. The post was meant to be a starting point, a lead in….. not intended to regurgitate everything in the program. I think we more or less agree on the most important points here.
Elliot:- Thanks…..All good questions. Let’s keep discussing them here, in this post and others….I’ll be talking more about these things….. By the way, I think there will always be baggage. It has to be on the table too, to some extent. Otherwise the discussion is not really going to produce anything….
-cvj
The sober reality is that it will take 30-40 years to transtion our energy infrastructure no matter what the alternative. I believe we need a non-political deconstruction of the energy issue with everything on the table. That includes nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, biofuels as well as ways to utilize coal/nat gas in other ways.
It also includes re-examining the energy grid/consumption, building insulation, conservation, alternatives to internal combustion as we have known it etc.
So I pose this set of questions…
Do we have an energy problem or do we have an energy conversion problem?
Is there a peak demand issue or a normal load issue?
Is the issue dependence on foreign sources of energy?
Is the issue economic or political?
Is the issue greenhouse gases and there effect on global warming?
Do we fully understand the effects of the oceans and ocean inhabitants on atmospheric gas ratios?
Do we have a well thought out public transportation and/or logistics delivery infrastructure in America/The World as a whole?
How many people really need to commute to work given broadband access and improvements in the internet/IT infrastructure?
Lots of stuff to think about and I have not to date seen a completely objective/rational discussion on the entire arena. Everybody (myself included) tends to bring baggage to the conversation. I throw this out as a challenge in that I think without a consensus energy “philosophy”, we wind up with parochialism at best and corruption at worst.
Cheers,
Elliot (stepping down from his soapbox now)
We would be a lot better off to increase and promote use of public transportation, and building patterns that allow easy car-free access to groceries and essentials.
In case you haven’t heard, there already is a quite hefty Federal tax credit for hybrid cars.
(I would fully agree, however, that is stupid to structure it, as has been done, so that the credit is phased out once the manufacturer has sold a certain number of units. IIRC, this has already happened for the Prius, and will soon happen for the Accord hybrid.)
And, as I said, corn-based ethanol is a stupid source of biofuels. But I don’t think your “corn is food, too” complaint would be assuaged if we plowed over millions of acres of cornfields and planted switchgrass (or maybe miscanthus) instead.
But that’s probably what we should be doing. There’s no rational economic reason for producing nearly as much corn as we do in this country.
Jacques,
I think you’re not getting the fact that much of what I am saying is a self-admitted emotional reaction to the fact that we are so behind in where we should be with regards electricity as a major component of the way we transport ourselves, and an emotional reaction against the fashion-icon aspect of the Prius over in my home city. It is just the way it is… I am inclined to like the efforts with hybrids, eveon though it is so messed up, in my opinion.
I do not agree that the price differential has to be such that the hybrid or 100% electric car has to be more expensive than than the all gasoline vehicle. I don’t buy the “apples vs oranges” argument. It is not actually an argument so much as a defence of the status quo. It is not just the free martket that should determine the prices of in these matters. That is my point. I believe that we should, as a society, as a species, be prepared to change the economics to server the greater good. There is no question that there is a huge amount of damage that is being done by an all petrol vehicle. So make it more expensive than an electric or hybrid vehicle. To stop you pricing out the ordinary person and making hybrids/electrics even more of a fashion icon and conspicuous consumption vehicle, what you do to reverse the differential is bring their prices way down, not raise the price of petrol vehicles. It will require a huge change of infrastructure, a retooling of hte industry, etc, but it is possible. If we just sit there and say “apples and oranges”, “market forces”, “they will always be more expensive”, then we’re just sitting back and letting the oil companies walk all over us while pocketing their profits….. just like we’ve been doing for so long…. nothing will change much (certainly not at the pace it should) and these things will remain fashion icons and choices that only the rich can make.
P.S. to your P.S.: No, it is not a misleading statistic. The point was that it is corn that is being discussed in that statistic, and that corn does serve a very important other purpose in our lives and in our economy, locally and globally. Yes, the point of part of the radio discussion was indeed that we should not be rushing to make corn the primary way we produce ethanol. There are other, more efficient sources of ethanol. That was the point the interviewee was trying to make.
So yes, “one tank = one (corn) food year” is very true and very relevant if we continue on the track we are right now. Listen to the program to get the full set of discussion points. It’s all in there and a lot more information too.
Cheers,
-cvj
Yes, the the premium will shrink, as production ramps up. But that was not the point. Hybrids will always have a higher sticker price than the corresponding conventional vehicle. That’s not some failure of capitalism, or some La-La land fashion, it’s the way things are supposed to be.
Apples and oranges. Yes there are some very fuel-efficient conventional-engined small cars. They, too, would be 1.5-2 times more fuel-efficient with a hybrid engine.
At current gas prices, a hybrid engine pays for itself in under 4 years (probably much less for a typical LA driver). If your chi-chi LA drivers don’t hold onto a car for that long, that’s their problem, not mine. Someone (probably more deserving) gets to buy that used Prius at a steep discount.
P.S.: A more useful (and less misleading statistic) about corn-based ethanol is the following: in 2005, 14% of US corn production was converted into ethanol, replacing 2% of US petrol consumption. There are a lot of drawbacks to ethanol as a fuel (low energy-density, hydrophilic, and corrosive). And corn is one of the least efficient ways to produce it. But this shows that you’re not quite as far-off as your “one tank = food for a year” would lead one to believe.
Jacques, Richard – welcome!
You know, Jacques, if the truth be told, I agree with you (up to a point) about the neccessity for there to be a period where it starts out as an expensive toy. Then it catches on, prices drop, etc. It is always this way for a new technology. But it does not make it any more palatable. (And there are so many other things we can do and could have done with ordinary cars, were the car manufacuterers willing many years ago, a well known depresing fact that makes the current situation and Prius-hype all the more annoying.) You should try living with the whole Prius thing in LA and you’ll see what I mean. It is so much more about being a status symbol than a real choice for the environment. It is the annoyance of people being able to hand over a chunk of money to drive a thing that shouts to everyone that you are being good about the environment, without actually changing your behaviour in several other areas. I doubt the Prius will ever pay for itself for those people because they will not actually keep the car -or any car- for longer than two years anyway. They’ll trade it in, etc. It is conspicuous consumption, just like the Hummer is. Although it is indeed the lesser “evil” of the two, I’ll grant.
It is the hype about them that it the most annoying thing. As Richard pointed out, they are not hugely more efficient than some small cars, and from a pragmatic standpoint, the economics of it leaves a lot to be desired.
And the carpool lane thing….drives me nuts. But I know it is all for the greater good. I know, I know… It just did not have to be this way.
-cvj
I caught the very first part of this report, but missed the rest.
Thinking about it, there is a very good reason why most “alternative” energy sources are more expensive than oil — if they were cheaper (or did not involve other compromises), we would be using them already.
Further, my impression is that the Prius is unlikely to ever pay for itself, even with gas at $3 or $4 a gallon. It is a lot more fuel efficient than an SUV, but it is not *vastly* more efficient than a small car like a Honda Civic, but it is substantially more expensive. On the other hand, early adopters of hybrids help grow the market, and the price is likely to fall as production becomes more efficient, so purchasing one does have important spin-off effects.
My preference would be for a plug-in hybrid, which could power itself up in the garage and only use the petrol engine for longer trips. [Although as I say this I realize that as I live in a “historic district” with narrow lots and little off-street parking, I am one of a comparatively small fraction of US residents who would find it hard to benefit from such an innovation, unless I could mount an outlet kerbside and put the switch for it inside my house to prevent freeloaders.]
These would be more expensive than even a regular Prius, but it is much easier to capture the CO_2 and pollutants released from a few hundred power stations than from a few million tailpipes, and off-peak electricity is a *lot* cheaper than gas.
Sorry, Clifford, but I think you are all wet on that one. Most alternative energy sources (nuclear, solar, … and — yes — the Prius) involve higher up-front capital costs, in exchange for cheaper operating costs down the line. That’s just the nature of the tradeoff these technologies involve.
(That’s not to say the tradeoff is necessarily worthwhile. In the case of photovoltaics, for instance, you need to run for an alarmingly large number of years before the energy produced exceeds the energy expended in their manufacture.)
To ease the pain, Governments (Federal and State) offer hefty subsidies for the purchase of hybrid cars (perversely, not the Prius anymore), photovoltaics, etc.
[Full disclosure: we woulda bought a hybrid car the last time out, were we not faced with a 6 month wait for delivery.]