PHEV Tracker!

Almost a year ago I set out to create a document tracking all of the EVs on the market.  I meant to make it an ongoing project and to keep it updated, but unfortunately there has been just too much going on over the past year, both in my life and in the EV market, to keep up with this.  So I was understandably excited to discover this PHEV vehicle tracker.  Finally, someone else has realized the need for this type of information.  Up to this point there was literally no other way to find an inventory of all PHEVs on the market.

Greenlings: An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation

I love it when the blogosphere manages to produce something more than a transactional piece of news, and after reading this post on Autoblog Green I’m nearly giddy.  Autoblog Green has decided to run an extended series of articles introducing sustainable transportation to the uninitiated.  Topics include “Can a car run on natural gas?”, “What is regenerative braking?”, “Battery basics for beginners” and many more.  If you’re interested in the topic and not yet an expert, check it out.

I love it when online journalism proves that it deserves that title.

San Fransisco's Solar Farm: Good or Bad Idea?

Government participation in business has become a huge topic over the past year and it’s something that I’m very interested in.  I really think we’re writing the next chapter in the history of controlling the means of production.  In the past we had extremists such as Hayek and Trotsky; now we have centrists like Obama. 

While I personally tend towards extremism, I’m becoming more comfortable with some of the market interventions that we’re beginning to see in renewables.  I’m all for renewable portfolio standards—the government should regulate emissions—but the stimulus package went far beyond simple regulation.  The stimulus package asks all levels of government to deploy capital and to play an increasing role in business (never one of government’s strengths).

It’s hard to skim through renewable energy news without running into this topic.  I was recently skimming VentureBeat and saw an article on a new solar farm that San Fransisco is developing.  Or, to be more precise, San Fransisco has committed to a multi-year PPA with Recurrent Energy which will own and operate the plant.  The PPA rate will be $.235/kwh rate and will be used to power government buildings.

It seems a little odd to me that San Fransisco would enter into a PPA rather than purchase electricity directly from the utility.  California has a (comparitively) very progressive set of utilities and aggressive renewable portfolio standard.  It seems to me that utility and power generation regulation are appropriate ways for a state to shape energy policy.  Making independent, risky, and complicated power purchase arrangements is not.

I also wonder whether the price being paid is reasonable.  I don’t know what PPA rates typically are in CA (although I did try looking it up).  I was able to find a very interesting report on the state’s renewable portfolio standard and energy price projections called MPRs that they use to evaluate potential projects.  In short, the $.235/kwh price is about double the comparable baseload MPR.  There are two legitimate reasons why this price discrepancy could exist.  First, solar is not a baseload resource and so some element of the premium is due to the fact that on-peak power is more valuable.  Second, the city may be able to sell renewable energy credits for the power it generates. 

There is another possibility, however: San Fransisco may be purchasing power at a non-economically-optimal price.  At first glance this would seem to be completely fair—if the voters of San Fransisco want to have their own supply of solar electricity then more power to them, right?  I disagree.  Government, as business, has limited resources and needs to deploy them in the most economically efficient ways possible.  Solar is a very legitimate public policy goal but needs to be pursued using the most appropriate tools.

Update on Exits

I posted here on the impact that the non-existent IPO market has had on the venture capital industry for the past nine months. Well…looks like we may be starting to see IPOs start to move again. This week two companies—OpenTable and SolarWinds—went public, with shares trading at premia over the original offering price.

We shall see where this goes, but it’s definitely encouraging.

Sustainability and War

I’m not quite sure why this hadn’t occurred to me before, but when the thought struck I was slightly baffled by the fact that not only had it not crossed my mind but it also seemed to be an obvious missed connection by the public at large. I was reading this article in Greentech Media and my jaw dropped at one particular statistic. It costs $418 per gallon to supply oil to the military in Iraq. As soon as I saw that, my mind started thinking through all of the logistics that must be involved in transporting oil to a forward base. Supply lines under heavy guard, with entire units, assets, and corresponding support structure all sucking down their own energy. Tanker trucks in heavy armor accompanied by more guards. Et cetera.

I don’t know the first thing about conducting a war or military supply chain. What’s great about this figure is that I don’t have to. If oil is currently about $1 per gallon then the logistics and support required to get it to the front lines are fully 417 times that amount. And certainly some large portion of that amount goes towards energy, since all of that support infrastructure requires oil to operate. All in all, military operations are a huge hydrocarbon sink.

This made me stop and think about the real lack of critical thought that is given to sustainability by the general public. Two of the “hottest” media topics in the past couple of years have been sustainability and war. Clearly, there is a rather profound relationship between these two topics. The media constantly focuses on small-potatoes sustainability topics such as making sure I turn off the lights when I leave a room. What we should all be discussing, instead, is the impacts that the decisions we make as a society have on sustainability.

Who among us considered the carbon impact of going to war in Iraq when that discussion was happening? Should we have? Is sustainability really only something that matters when we aren’t making any real sacrifices—turning the lights off—or does it define the way that both individuals and societies should think about every decision they make?

The US military used 144 million barrels of oil in 2004. This is roughly on par with the entirity of Greece. 40 million of that was directly related to military operations (as opposed to the maintenance of a standing army). The US DoD is the largest single consumer of oil in the entire world. Do these facts affect your views on war and peace? They affect mine.

Surprisingly or not, there appears to have been very little work done on the sustainability impacts of war.  A rather primitive series of case studies begins to explore the linkage between environment and war.  Another article presents an overview of the topic but basically admits that no detailed work exists to provide hard data.

Here are my brief thoughts on the topic.

• From a pure energy consumption perspective, the impact of having a significant peace-time army is significantly larger than the impact of actual deployment.
• The financial costs of war can be thought of as a sustainability impact, as these all represent opportunity costs.  I wonder what cleantech could do with a trillion dollars?
• Actual environmental devastation from conflict is dramatic and unpredictable.  Remember the oil spills / fires during Desert Storm?

I’ve intentionally left out the social bottom line in this discussion as public discourse does often focus—if narrowly—on this issue.  What I think is particularly under-appreciated are war’s environmental impacts.

Update on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 10:51AM by Tristan Handy

An interesting Rob Day blog entry recently touches on this topic in a slightly more positive way.  We’re not disagreeing with each other, but his perspective is a good new dimension to what I’ve said here.