Nothing Like the Smell of Toxic Fumes in the Morning....

As I drove to work this morning for a while I was driving behind a pick up truck that I believe was diesel. Whatever the fuel used, the truck was leaving a huge stream of smoke as it drove down the highway. Even the picture above doesn't do it justice.

I passed the poison-belching behemoth as quickly as possible but started thinking, what did I really accomplish?  All these other cars that I'm following are spewing hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, sulphur oxides just like the truck was except I couldn't see it. That's one of the problems with tailpipe pollution, it's mostly invisible so people don't really realize how bad it is to breathe or just think it dissipates in the air. I think if all tailpipe exhaust were visible, like it was on the truck, then people would be more concerned with it and demand change. Just because we can't see the poison doesn't mean it's not killing us.

Electric cars like the MINI-E aren't necessarily emission free. Sure there are no tailpipes but the electricity that was used to charge the batteries was probably generated from burning coal so there is pollution created which will come out of the smokestack of the power plant instead of the tailpipe of the car. However, it is much less than the pollution that you get from burning gasoline. Plus, if you really want to factor in the entire cradle to the grave environmental impact from oil as compared to coal then the difference becomes even more pronounced in the favor of the coal generated electricity. Then there is the fact you CAN make your own electricity like I do with my home solar PV array. This combination makes an EV a true zero emission vehicle. Lets hope the EV + PV combination becomes common in the near future now that electric vehicles will finally be available for sale here in the US. I'm looking forward to seeing less and less tailpipes in front of me as the shift to battery electric vehicles begins.

Four Months of Driving on Sunshine

MINI-E roof graphics and my house & solar system in the background

It's been almost four months now since I installed a 8.8kw solar photovoltaic electric system on my roof. The system has generated nearly 5 megawatt hours of electricity and roughly half of that clean, renewable energy has gone into my MINI-E's battery pack to allow me to drive about 10,000 miles.

The great feeling of driving an electric car and not using oil has had even greater meaning to me recently with the disastrous oil leak currently in the Gulf of Mexico. Charging the car with electricity I produce myself takes it up even another notch. One of the arguments against electric cars is that a majority of the electric generated in the US is made from coal fired powerplants and that EV's just displace the pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack. There is some truth to that but it still doesn't mean the electric cars aren't better for the environment. Every comprehensive study that I have read that compares the amount of pollution from electricity generation to the pollution from burning gasoline shows how much worse it is to burn gasoline. Then if you consider the cradle to grave supply chain of oil it becomes even more obvious. From wars over oil to oil supply chain disasters like what we are witnessing off the coast of Louisiana, there really is no comparison. Then consider the fact that you can make your own clean renewable electricity, as I do and the argument isn't even worth continuing, it's game over.

Hopefully with electric cars like the Nissan LEAF, the Chevrolet Volt and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV coming to dealerships in the very near future, I won't be such an aberration. I'm pretty sure as more and more people buy electric cars they will see the environmental and economic benefits of installing a home based Solar PV system to generate their own fuel. I'm not the only one that thinks that either, there even is a website that is dedicated to combination of electric cars and solar electric systems. It's called Solar Charged Driving and you can check it out here: SolarChargedDriving.com

Another thing I've heard is that our current infrastructure can't support the charging of hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of electric cars. This point has been countered also by people that point out that the majority of EV charging will take place at night when there is a great surplus of electricity. I can't really say one way or the other since I don't have the data that would support either argument. I can say it's true that most EV's will charge at night and you can program your EV to charge whenever you want so you can take advantage of off peak rates and charge when there is a surplus. Now if people follow my example and decide to install a solar PV array, they will be helping the grid instead of hurting it. By supplying electricity to the grid during daylight hours when demand is highest, and charging at night when demand is low and there is a surplus, I am actually helping the grid, not creating a problem with my EV. Now imagine if there were hundreds of solar arrays in every town, supplying electricity locally and reducing the strain on the local power grids. I think EV owners will be much more inclined to install solar systems, as I did. I had always thought about it, but it wasn't until I got the MINI-E and realized that I wanted to be driving electric cars from now on that I actually decided to install the system.

Soon we will see if the public embraces the electric cars that are coming to market. If they are received as well as I think they will be, than you can bet you'll start seeing more and more shiny black panels popping up on rooftops across America.

BP Oil spill continues to grow, threatens Louisiana's entire way of life

Ever since April 20th  when the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded and sank, claiming 11 lives of the coast of Louisiana, over 210,000 gallons of crude oil has been spewing into the waters from the seabed some 5,000 feet below. The extreme depth of the well is problematic in getting getting it capped, shut off or even allowing BP to capture the oil as it exits the pipe. So far efforts to stop the flow have been futile and estimates of 90 days to get it stopped keep surfacing. If indeed is is another 90 days, simple math will tell you that this spill has the potential to be twice as large a spill as the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 when 10.8 million gallons of crude spilled into the Prince Island Sound in Alaska. Compound that with the fact that nobody died when the Valdez spill occurred and it's beginning to look like this is going to be the worst oil spill the United States have ever had occur.

The really terrible thing about oil spills is that the affected ecosystems can take decades to recover. We can't just force BP to hire thousands of workers to clean up all the oil soaked beaches and rocks and then proclaim 'it's fixed". The oil can wreak havoc on the entire food chain from plankton up to whales. This delicate balance isn't easily or quickly repaired and may take decades for the ocean to come back to life in the region. So much of the area's economy depends on the fishing industry and tourism, both of which may be in complete ruin within the coming weeks.

When I first started researching electric cars, I did so for a couple reasons. First, I like new technology. I liked the fact that auto makers were exploring a new propulsion system that would be the biggest change in the automobile industry since there even was an automobile industry. Secondly, I believe know that America needs to move in a new direction with energy generation. We simply cannot continue down the current unsustainable path we are on. The price we pay for oil it too high. I'm not talking about the $2.85/gallon you pay at the pump because that only tells a small part of the story. I'm talking about the millions billions trillions of dollars we, the tax payers pay to protect our "oil interests" around the globe. I'm talking about the American kids that come back from the Middle East in boxes because we need to make sure the oil keeps flowing our way for as cheap as possible. I'm talking about the absolute disasters that ocurr when an oil tanker runs aground or an oil rig explodes and sinks and millions of gallons of crude oil contaminate and destroy everything in it's path and leave behind the stench of death for decades.

Using electricity as a fuel to propel automobiles will not cure all of our energy ills. Much of the electricity produced here in the US is done so by burning coal and there is nothing clean or nice about the mining process or burning it but it is still way less detrimental to the environment than the process of drilling, refining and burning oil is. Plus, all of the coal we use in mined domestically so we're not sending trillions of dollars out of our economy to foreign countries, many of which hate us. 

Then there's the fact that individuals have the ability to generate their own clean, renewable electricity right at their own homes and you can never say that about oil. As much as it pains me to read the news about this oil disaster in the Gulf, if there is a bright side I think it's going to open more eyes and help others agree that we need a new domestic energy policy. One that lessons the reliance our oil and there is no quicker way to accomplish that than beginning to transition from gasoline burning vehicles to electrics.

Another ecological disaster thanks to our Big Oil friends

After the explosion that claimed 11 lives, the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon sunk some 36 hours later. Since then, it has been spewing 42,000 gallons of crude oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico some 40 miles off the shores of  Louisiana. The visible spill is now roughly 1,300 square miles and rapidly growing.

Often when I read various online blogs and there are discussions over electric vehicles verses internal combustion engine cars, inevitably the discussion turns to the fact that much of the electricity in this country and around the world is produced by burning coal which itself is bad for the environment. This is true, burning coal (or burning just about anything for that matter) to produce energy is not environmentally friendly and we do need to develop more clean, renewable sources of electricity generation. However that doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that oil is better, it just means that the current electricity generation methods aren't perfect, but it's still a better fuel than oil.

One only needs to look at the scope of disasters like what we currently have off the coast of Louisiana to see the disastrous results of oil spills. If a train carrying coal to a power plant derails and spills, we can simply pick the train back up, scoop up the coal and the incident is over. When a tanker like the Exxon Valdez dumps 11 million gallons of oil into the water or a oil rig like the Deepwater Horizon sinks they create an epic ecological disaster that lasts for decades, costs hundreds of millions of dollars and kills uncountable amounts of wildlife.

I charge my electric car on electricity generated by my solar electric system at my home, but even if I was using electricity generated from a coal burning power plant I know it is still a much better energy solution than drilling for oil is.

MINI-E #250 Is Now Truly a Zero Emission Vehicle

My new solar electric system is up and running so I'm now "charging on sunshine" as some of the others in the MINI-E trial lease program that have a PV system like to say. My system will generate enough electricity to charge my car plus provide about 90% of my home electricity needs. I know of three others that have a MINI-E and a solar array at their home. Peder Norby drives MINI-E #183 in California, Don Young drives #364 in New York as does Gordon Miller with  #217. There are probably more since many that are involved in the MINI-E program are definitely "energy conscious" individuals.

I'm still getting familiar with the system but one of the great features that SunPower, the system I went with, offers is online monitoring. It's a really cool feature that allows you to access your systems production from any computer. It gives you real time production figures and you can look at the daily, monthly and yearly production from the system so you know exactly how much electricity it has produced. I will soon have an link on this blog for anyone that wants to see these figures (as soon as I figure out how to). Maybe Peder can help me with that as he had it set up on his MINI-E blog since he has a Sunpower system also.

Finally, I can now say the car is really a zero emission vehicle(or at least as close as you can get). One of the arguments that electric car detractors always use(because they have little else to fight with) is that electric cars that charge off the grid aren't zero emission vehicles because the power plants that provide the electric burn coal and other things so electric cars are no better than gasoline burning cars are. This is called the "long tailpipe" argument whereas the electric cars tailpipe stretches all the way to the electric producing power plant. There is some truth to that argument and we need to find alternative ways to produce cleaner, renewable energies. However, the pollution generated from drilling for oil, transporting it across the world, refining it and then transporting it to gas stations where you have to drive your car there to refuel, then have carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, sulphur dioxide and particulate matter constantly spew from the rear of your car everywhere you drive, is much worst than the impact from driving an EV that is charged from a coal burning power plant no matter how you look at it.

Plus, you CAN generate your own electricity from a clean, renewable source. Which is something you can never say about gasoline.