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Plug-in And Hybrid Cars Are Coming, Like It or Not
March 6, 2008 | 3 Comments
Opposite to the drives to get more energy and fuel to market and pull down prices the effort to make more efficient vehicles is well underway. This week saw the Volkswagen announcement of a parallel diesel design and the Chevy Volt is an exemplary PR effort to get anticipation built for the series hybrid design.
Felix Kramer of CalCars.org has been an advocate for efficient electric transport for a long time. He has talked with EnergyTechStocks.com and over three articles has offered these points.
Kramer looks for an “explosion” of plug-in and hybrid vehicles starting in 2010 through 2012. The large mass of “trillions of dollars of investment” is focused now on two paths, electrical power generation and replacing the auto fleet. Its becoming clear that more and more of us will be driving something that gets plugged in and sails right by gas stations much more often than in the past.
The battery and capacitor fields are improving faster than anticipated only a few years ago. The coming battle over land use for fuel or food is just getting underway, and the cellulosic or chemical processing choice looks to be some time off. In concert to that, Kramer and other advocates who have the ear of the mainstream press are pushing General Motors and other manufacturers to sell plug-in charged cars. This may offer GM an opportunity to become a market leader again. The observation that a Chinese company may sell a plug-in that has a 60-mile range. There are also dark horse small companies such as Fisker Automotive that plans production runs in 2009 and 2010. Fisker is partnered with Quantum Technologies that may provide deep capitalization.
While Mr. Kramer declined to get into specific names of companies, most astute observers note that many companies are working on technologies that could cut fuel use by 20% or up to 50%. Much of this technology will be retrofit systems that can be installed in existing vehicles.
This field has serious implications and impressive prospects for reducing fuel use. Should a high quality retrofit become available for low cost with wide availability two issues become worthy of note. The power generation business will be at a true point of revolutionary growth and automotive producers will be faced with lower demand for new products.
Other industries that could see big changes would be the oil business, primarily the OPEC type producers, and the biofuel producers. While Kramer seems to focus on this or the writers at EnergyTechStock.com are framing this way isn’t known. The most likely projections don’t include any kind of collapse, rather some investments that have highest costs per barrel may suffer. But from OPEC’s point of view so many companies world wide busily developing plug-in and hybrid retrofit kits has to be a little alarming.
The last article about Kramer’s thoughts offers the most reassuring or alarming prediction, depending on one’s point of view. The article offers that the next president will institute sweeping new policies that will end the U.S. addition to oil permanently. The bait in the assertion is that 350 billion dollars a year would still be in the U.S. or a similar import bill for any other country would stay home. These ideas while true rely on business and consumer investments before the reductions. Thus, paying the onerous rates and investing to cut the operating costs simultaneously. For most of the world that will be a steep and difficult transition to make.
The discussion reveals that Kramer predicts that whoever is the next president, very early there will be an executive order requiring the Federal Government to buy large numbers of plug in vehicles and provide subsidies for everyone else. It’s thought that this would start a transformation of the transportation market, and marked increase the pace of plug-in and hybrid sales.
The ID of the “guiding light” for such a transition is David Sandalow, a former National Security Council member under President Clinton. Sandalow has since become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and has proposed the “Reynolds Project” named after an Indiana community that is seeking to use only renewable energy. Sandalow is quoted in a recent interview with Wired.com that plug in vehicles are “the most important part of the (fuel) solution.”
Sandalow seems to have another hot thought based in the “vehicle to grid” concept of using the battery stock installed in vehicles to assist in peak load management. While an interesting theory the V2G idea is being tested. The assumption that Sandalow makes that “if we could connect our cars and trucks to the infrastructure, the potential for reducing oil dependence dramatically, and in a short period of time, would be incredible.” Spoken like a bureaucrat.
Mr. Kramer seems to like to rely on the government to direct the market place and Sandalow’s background points to the same. The concern is the lack of interest in the self-interests of nearly 300 million Americans who might like to make choices based on what is best for them.
I found the three-part article offered by EnergyStocks.com informative, not so much for the technology but for the thinking that this will be guiding the mainstream press and the political class. And that is much more of a concern than any ideas about an energy crunch, global warming or any of a number of issues that are really best handled by individuals making informed decisions in their own best interests.
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[…] Plug-in And Hybrid Cars Are Coming, Like It or Not The most likely projections don’t include any kind of collapse, rather some investments that have highest costs per barrel may suffer. […]