Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron who wrote (3470)	5/19/2004 2:18:51 PM
From: Elmer Flugum	Respond to of 36917

Dig More Coal, The Hybrids Are Coming forbes.com The all-electric car doesn't have much of a range. Hybrids don't save much gas. But just plug in the hybrid, and you have a winner. Coming this Fall: a backup generator from General Motors that you can also use as a pickup truck. The technology under the hood could have quite an impact. Indeed, it could allow the U.S. to displace 200 million barrels of foreign oil per year with 40 million tons of U.S. coal. A coal-powered car? Absurd though that may sound, that's exactly what a hybrid becomes if configured to allow its battery to be recharged from an electrical outlet when the car is parked. Chevy's new Silverado hybrid isn't--it sends electric power the other way, through a 2.4-kilowatt AC power outlet that can run your kitchen appliances out in the middle of nowhere. In your own garage, however, it would make more sense to treat the truck as the appliance and recharge its batteries by plugging it into the wall. A plug-in hybrid would save most drivers a lot on fuel, because big power plants generate electricity a lot more cheaply than little ones. Running on $2-a-gallon gasoline, the Silverado delivers electric power at a marginal cost of 60 cents per kilowatt-hour. Compare that with electric power from the grid. The average residential price is 8.5 cents per kwh. Off-peak prices, at utilities that offer them, are far lower. You could charge your truck at night. Opportunistic recharging would play a role. Once the plug-in hybrid catches on, recharging terminals will proliferate, acting and even looking a whole lot like parking meters. Mall owners will validate your recharge card when you shop in their stores. To the electricity cost must be added the wear and tear on the rechargeable battery. All told, says Edward Kjaer, director of electric transportation for Southern California Edison, refueling at the plug should cost no more than a third as much as refueling at the pump, and in many cases a lot less than that. Sticking coal with the same highway-construction taxes you pay at the pump would narrow the gap only a bit. GM's EV-1 all-electric car, offered in California from 1996 to 2000, was a flop despite the cheap all-electric fuel. Reason: Drivers want to take long trips, too, and batteries can't come close to matching the range provided by gasoline. With a plug-in hybrid, however, the gas tank will get you up the mountains on the weekend, while the rechargeable battery gets you to and from the office and the mall. And the battery is far smaller than the 19-kwh monster used in the all-electric car. At present the main reason for going hybrid isn't to tap into the grid. It's to improve efficiency by running the gas engine at a much steadier speed, switching it off entirely whenever the car stops and recapturing a bit of energy from the brakes. The hybrid became feasible only with the recent advent of high-power semiconductors that make the mechanical-electrical-battery interfaces compact, reliable and cheap. But once you go there, it doesn't take much to let the grid recharge the battery. "We now have the sophisticated control systems, power electronics and battery management," says Robert Graham, who studies electric cars at the Electric Power Research Institute. "I don't see any technical hurdles to practical plug-in hybrids coming to market now and displacing very significant amounts of gasoline."