Green Options

Nissan has announced plans to launch the large-scale production of electric cars and batteries in the United States, with a massive 50 billion Yen ($516 million) facility in Smyrna, Tennessee.

The site will be capable of knocking-out an impressive 50,000 to 100,000 EVs by 2012, with investment possibly DOUBLING to 100 billion Yen (more than $1 Billion).

For those of you driving clunkers, you may soon be able to turn that eyesore into cash. The House and Senate have agreed to designate $1 billion for the Cash for Clunkers program to be funded out of the significantly larger $106 billion wartime spending bill. Not yet law (Congress is expected to pass this bill this week) the bill will pay people for their “clunkers”. The goal is twofold: to get fuel inefficient cars off the road and to encourage consumers to buy new, fuel efficient vehicles.

A consumer who has a qualifying car will receive either a $3,500 dollar voucher or a $4,500 voucher. Your voucher credit depends on the improved gas mileage as compared to your current car.

Listening to NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, there was a segment in which some environmentalists lamented Obama’s new fuel economy standards as being a small drop in the bucket for what needs to be done to solve our climate problems.

While this is true, two comments made by Harvard University Professor, Robert Stavins, during that segment struck me as weird and based in something less than reality — a kind of academic fantasy if you will. At the time, I was driving and the comments slid out of my mind. But last night an old friend from college brought it up again in a Facebook thread and it got me thinking more in depth about it.

In the last weeks, GM has increased the intensity of its internal dialogue and negotiations with the Obama Administration to keep from being killed off. A summary of where GM is as of right now:

Now that we’re all buying less gas with hybrid and electric cars, how are we going to fund road construction and repair?

Faced with dwindling cash reserves, several states are considering raising their Gas Tax. Those with efficient vehicles will come out ahead. Low income families, the trucking industry and the alternative fuel industry will finish last.

Now I am all for taxes - there are many essential services that the government performs and they need money to do this. Most often, gas tax goes directly into maintaining and repairing roads and highways - a costly endeavor - but absolutely essential to keep our country alive.

What I’m specifically concerned about is how this will affect three groups: those with low incomes, the trucking industry, and the alternative fuel industry.

At first glance, the latest numbers from the Cleantech Group look like terrific news. After all, they conclude that 2008 was a record year for cleantech investments, with venture deals in North America, Europe, Israel, China and India reaching a total of $8.4 billion, up 38 percent from $6.1 billion in 2007.

But most of that money was dealt out in the first three quarters, with investment slowing significantly – as expected – in the fourth quarter.

According to preliminary numbers, venture capitalists in these regions committed $1.7 billion in 99 deals in the fourth quarter, down 35 percent from the third quarter and 4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007. In North America, by far the biggest venture-capital region, fourth-quarter investments totaled $1.14 billion, a decrease of 38 percent from $1.83 billion in the third quarter and of 5.8 percent from $1.21 billion in the last quarter of 2007.

Editor’s Note : This is a guest post from William Ellard, an economist specializing in energy and renewable energy markets. He is currently working with national solar energy firms to bring distributed solar power to municipalities in the American Southwest.

During a recent work meeting with the Western Renewable Energy Zones Initiative, it became clear that the recent push for renewable energy in the western US has major wildlife and environmental implications. As an alternative energy economist, my contribution in the meeting was to present some of the new solar energy technologies and explain how distributed solar could be deployed without disturbing wildlife ecosystems.

According to a just-released report from the well-respected Brookings Institution, the US is experiencing its longest and quickest decline in the amount of driving since World War Two — a decline which the report’s authors claim marks a permanent shift away from the automobile and towards other forms of transportation.

The report, The Road… Less Traveled: An Analysis of Vehicle Miles Traveled Trends in the U.S., points out that the beginning of the current decline in driving predated the high gas prices of last summer and, as gas prices have come back down over the last few months, drivers are not going back to their cars (click the graph below for an expanded view of these statistics).

So, finally we complete the trifecta. Chrysler says they need $7 billion in loans to stay afloat through 2009 and have pointed to the example of their ENVI design unit in leading the turnaround with the introduction of many new Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (NEV), City Electric Vehicles (CEV), Range-extended Electric Vehicles (ReEV), and full-function battery electric vehicles (BEV) by 2012.

As the second of the Big Three to come wagging their tails between their legs to the US Congress, General Motors is asking for a total of $18 billion dollars to avoid imminent bankruptcy. The only problem: nobody gave them the electric car memo.

Unlike Ford, which in their tail wagging earlier today made a huge shift to focusing on electric car development, GM chose to focus their restructuring plan on the fact that they have a large number of fuel efficient vehicles (defined as 30+ mpg on the highway) already on the road. Plus, they say that by 2012 more than half of their cars will be flex-fuel capable.