Green Options

Recently, a man named Ben Nelson put the finishing touches on his DIY electric motorcycle. His first electric vehicle project, Ben started by finding a motorcycle he liked with a blown engine and stripping it of all it’s old, gas-burning components. From there he did some research on electric vehicles, and was able to put together a great bike for a low price.

The bike certainly isn’t made for the race [...]

Now that you know when it is and what it’s called, I’ll tell you a bit about what it is. Firstly, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Hybrid Fest isn’t really all about hybrids. I know this because my website is a sponsor this year, and we’re definitely not all about hybrids.

So what is HF really? It’s a get together with tons of green car enthusiasts, including hybrid owners, biodiesel producers, ecomodders, and everyone else. The show will be kicked off early on Friday with a fuel economy competition and then get down and dirty on Saturday and Sunday with speeches, discussions, hybrid test drives, and a whole host of other goodies you can find out about on the website. HF will also be a time for companies to show off new green tech, including some of the big guns like GM and Toyota, but also many smaller companies working on things like plug-in hybrid conversions.

In Europe, not so much…

Brazil, which has to a large degree lead the ethanol charge because of its ability to use sugar cane for ethanol production rather than corn, now relies on the biofuel for 16% of its energy needs. This puts ethanol at #2 in Brazil for largest energy sources, right ahead of hydroelectric, which accounts for 14.7% of electricity production. Both of these sources, however, are behind petroleum, which is the largest energy producer in Brazil.

In the US, on the other hand, ethanol still does not play such a prominent role, even though 23.7% of the annual corn crop is going to create biofuels. The market share that ethanol commands in the US will likely only increase, especially as new technologies allow for the production of cellulosic ethanol and sources other than corn come into vogue.

I’ve heard of making fuel from wood before, but rarely does using wood as fuel come up. However, just today I was pointed to this site, hosted by a local radio station, with a real-life example of someone burning wood as a fuel in his truck.

I can’t say for sure how the system works, whether it’s dual fuel or the wood-burning supplies all the fuel the engine needs, but it doesn’t appear to be a hoax and is certainly interesting. Evidently, during WWII, there was some experimenting with alternative fuels (due to shortages caused by the war), and one of the results was the wood burning automobile.

Source: greefus groinks

There’s been a lot of buzz on the internet and on TV about ecodriving, hypermiling, ecomodding, or  other techniques for saving fuel. EcoModder.com, a site dedicated to modifying cars and driving habits for fuel economy, recently released a list of 100+ hypermiling tips.

These tips are definitely worth a look for anyone interested in saving a few dollars at the pump, [...]

Image source: Wikipedia

There’s been talk about the VW 1L concept for years. Since VW built the original, fuel economy, safety, price, and release date has been speculated upon and argued about, and I’d finally stopped thinking it was ever going to happen. However, according to VW’s CEO, it should hit the market in 2010.

The VW 1L is so named because, in theory, it only consumes one liter of fuel per 100 kilometers traveled. For those of us in the US, this translates into about 235 MPG. Definitely far and above anything on the market currently. The concept, developed in 2002, actually got better fuel economy, scoring a sweet .89L/100km in VW testing. It’s likely to use more fuel in real world use, but with that kind of mileage in testing it’s unlikely that anyone would complain about an “unsatisfactory 200 MPG.”

As the automakers scramble to make plans for achieving 35 MPG by 2020, it seems that our suspicions that the task is entirely possible without fancy hybrids or hydrogen cars has been confirmed. The manufacturers been achieving high mileage in Europe and Japan for years now, so I expect to see it in the US eventually. Luckily, there are six exciting new technologies that are going to make it possible in the US.

These technologies are interesting because they come without the paradigm shift that seems to accompany buying a hybrid or a small economy car. Cars equipped with this green tech will be just like any other car, just more efficient.

More on the six new engine technologies after the break.

It’s not quite the same type of hybrid drive-train you’d see in street vehicles, but in an exciting announcement, Max Mosely of F1 has announced that all cars will become hybrid by 2013, along with other changes to the vehicles.

The hybrid system that will be phased in is known as KERS, which stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery System. KERS doesn’t store as much energy as a traditional hybrid system, but it only weighs 55 pounds and the limited energy storage capacity is well suited for Formula-style racing.

Recently, I discussed the interaction between clean energy and the future of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The study cited makes it clear that unless we clean up power production, there isn’t much point in moving to PHEVs from regular, old hybrids (HEVs).

Interestingly enough, MIT has just come out with a new study, profiled by Green Car Congress, which studies all sorts of vehicle options and how each vehicle will perform in well-to-wheel greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions. This study was done particularly on HEVs, PHEVs, battery electric vehicles (BEVs), and fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs). The MIT researchers came to the conclusion that ultimately, electric propulsion in automobiles could eliminate our dependence on petroleum, which to me sounds like an exciting prospect, regardless of GHG emissions.

This is something I (and a lot of other people) have been wondering about for a while in regards to plug-in electric vehicles (PHEVs, like the Chevy Volt) and pure electric vehicles (EVs, like the Lightning GT and Subaru R1e). PHEVs are not a new thing, and they have been discussed on Gas2.0 before, but there is some interesting news that recently came out of Carnegie Mellon University suggesting that if we don’t make our power generation system less carbon intensive, PHEVs could have little benefit over regular hybrids (HEVs).