Climate Progress recently reported on a study that found both economic and environmental benefits if homes in the northeastern United States upgraded older heating systems by moving from heating oil to switchgrass. However, one point to emphasize was the findings were specific to those circumstances — the region, the homes, and that particular use.

Switchgrass was not nearly as good an idea for electricity generation or transportation fuel. Further confirming the need for a diversity of renewable solutions to our energy needs, a recent study determined that electricity generated by solar beats out biofuels for powering cars under myriad scenarios.

The report, put together by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and published in Enviornmental Science and Technology, compared five different approaches to see what was the most efficient way to power a compact passenger vehicle for every 100 kilometers driven:

1. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) run on electricity from solar power.
2. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from switchgrass.
3. Internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) run on switchgrass biofuel.
4. Battery-electric vehicles run on electricity from corn.
5. Internal combustion vehicles run on corn-based biofuel.

The analysis considered land-use, greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel use, and took into account the production and use life cycles of both the fuels themselves and the vehicles they power.

In terms of land-use, solar significantly out-performed all other options. It performed modestly better than switchgrass in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and significantly better than corn-based biofuel. Solar was actually equal or slightly worse than switchgrass when it came to fossil fuel requirements over the totality of the life cycle, but it still out-performed corn-based internal combustion. (And, of course, gasoline.)

So all things considered, a pretty clear win for solar-powered electric battery vehicles:

A write up over at Green Car Congress has more details on the assumptions and variables in the study’s modeling.

“PV is orders of magnitude more efficient than biofuels pathways in terms of land use — 30, 50, even 200 times more efficient — depending on the specific crop and local conditions,” Roland Geyer, a UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management Professor, told Science Daily. “You get the same amount of energy using much less land, and PV doesn’t require farm land.” The central bottleneck, as the report notes, is the low efficiency of photosynthesis:

Biofuels for ICVs and bioelectricity for BEVs use photosynthesis to convert solar radiation into transportation services, that is, they are sun-to-wheels transportation pathways. While photosynthesis has a theoretical maximum energy conversion efficiency of 33 percent, the overall conversion efficiency of sunlight into terrestrial biomass is typically below 1 percent, regardless of crop type and growing conditions.

“Today’s thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity,” Geyer explained — hence solar’s superior performance. In fact, the WWF’s Solar PV Atlas found that as far as land-use goes, solar is so efficient that less than 1 percent of global land areas would be needed to supply all the world’s electricity needs in 2050.

Traditional corn-based biofuels are problematic on all sorts of levels: Carbon emissions from agricultural production over their full life cycle largely wipe out any carbon benefits at the point of actual vehicle use. They compete with human food supplies and food cropland, driving up global prices and contributing to global poverty and instability. And new cropland sequesters less carbon from the atmosphere than the grassland or forest it typically displaces.

Switchgrass and other cellulosic biofuels, while they avoid disrupting food supplies, are not immune to these other flaws either. On top of that, their commercial viability at any time in the near future is far from certain.

For the clean car fleet of the future, electrical and hybrid vehicles relying on a grid powered by solar — and presumably wind, hydroelectric, and such — still appears to be the way to go.

By Felix Kramer and Max Baumhefner, via Switchboard

When it comes to consumer products, environmentalists generally don’t encourage people to buy new and buy now. But that’s what we’re about to do because electric cars are significantly cleaner than gasoline vehicles, and driving one can save you serious cash at the pump.

Perhaps you’ve already thought about buying an electric car, but dismissed the idea for one reason or another. Let’s look at some common misconceptions, and offer some good reasons why you might want to reconsider:

“I should drive my current car into the ground.”

“Hold on,” you say to yourself, “I already own a car that gets 25 miles a gallon. I want to get my money’s worth from the investment.” The sooner you start saving gas, the better it is for the planet and your pocketbook. There’s no use in throwing good money after bad at the pump, and the sooner you sell your current car, the less money you’ll lose to depreciation.

“I’d just be switching my pollution from the tailpipe to the power plant.”

If you want to go green, driving on electricity is a clear winner. Using today’s average American electricity mix of natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar, an electric car emits half the amount of climate-changing carbon pollution per mile as the average new vehicle. In states with cleaner mixes, such as California, it’s only a quarter as much. To find out how clean your electric car would be today, plug your zip code into the EPA’s “Beyond Tailpipe Emissions Calculator.” You should also know that, because old coal plants are increasingly being retired and replaced by cleaner and renewable resources, plug-in cars are the only cars that become cleaner as they age.

“What I save on gas, I’ll pay in electricity.”

On average US residential electricity rates, driving one of today’s electric cars is the equivalent of driving a 27 mile-per-gallon car on buck-a-gallon gasoline. It’s been that way for the last four decades, and is forecasted to stay that way for the next three decades. Experts basically throw up their hands when asked to predict the price of gas next year, let alone 30 years from now. One thing we do know: the price at the pump will jump up and down due to geopolitical events beyond our control. If you’re tired of that rollercoaster, call your local utility to ask about electricity rates designed for plug-in cars.

“I’ll hold off until prices go down and there are more places to charge.”

If you’re thinking you’d be better off waiting for a cheaper, better electric car, and a charging station on every block, consider the following:

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After a difficult first year in 2011, during which Chevrolet sold a mere 7,671 Volts, sales of the vehicle shot up to a respectable 23,461 car sales for 2012 — driven largely by consumer demand reacting to high gas prices. According to the Washington Post (hat tip to Treehugger) that surge looks likely to continue: General Motors will be upping 2013′s production to 36,000 units.

Able to run on electrical or gasoline power, the Volt — along with other hybrids, electric vehicles, and fuel-efficient cars — has helped boost job growth in the automotive sector in the face of a sluggish economy. This happened despite a storm of right-wing contempt for fuel-efficient automobile technology over the last few years, which focused largely on the Volt as a symbol of President Obama’s (largely successful) attempts to give the American automotive industry a chance to retool itself and get back on its feet.

Since then, overall hybrid sales increased 50 percent in 2012 from the previous model year, sales of plug-in electric vehicles tripled, and GM itself captured 7 percent of the hybrid market — up 2 percent from the year before. And now the company is looking to bulk up its Volt production by 20 percent:

General Motors Co. is planning to build as many as 36,000 Chevrolet Volts and other plug-in hybrids for worldwide delivery this year, 20 percent more than in 2012, two people familiar with the effort said.

GM is planning to build 1,500 to 3,000 of the fuel- efficient vehicles a month, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified because the target isn’t public. GM sold about 30,000 Volt and similar Opel Ampera cars globally in 2012, said Jim Cain, a company spokesman, who declined to give a target for this year.

Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson has struggled to compete against more successful alternative-power vehicles such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius. The CEO originally touted the Volt’s gasoline-and-electric system as the technology of the future and forecast global Volt sales of 60,000 in 2012, before settling for half that amount.

The 36,000 target is “probably a doable number,” Jim Hall, principal of consultancy 2953 Analytics, said. “It will have a full calendar year in Europe” and GM will probably sell more this year now that the Volt is eligible for the car-pool lane in California, he said.

Admittedly, these numbers remain behind GM’s previous hoped-for targets. It still lags Toyota, which boosted its hybrid sales 70 percent in 2012 over the previous model year, dominating the market with 892,519 sales of its various Prius hybrid models worldwide. The Prius starts at $24,200 — and a subcompact Prius model sells for $19,080 — which undercuts GM’s $39,145 four-seat Volt.

So good news for electric and hybrid cars as a whole, and thus for fuel efficiency and the environment. But less so for the Volt itself.

Still, the Chevy Volt has several factors going in its favor. It was selected as 2011′s North American Car of the Year — with 92 percent of those surveyed telling Consumer Reports they would buy open again. Meanwhile, fuel standards are set to require 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, technological moves on the horizon promise to make the car’s lithium ion battery technology lighter and more efficient, and there’s every reason to think high gas prices are here to stay.

A rechargeable lithium-ion battery, in BMW’s Mini E electric car. (Photo: Reuters)

Lithium-ion batteries are an extremely common form of rechargeable battery often found in consumer electronics such as laptops and cell-phones. At those smaller scales the batteries’ technology is reliable and well-understood, but at larger sizes there have been challenges.

The electrolyte component in the batteries is typically liquid and quite flammable, and the batteries as a whole are prone to shorts, overheating and catching fire. Boeing’s new Dreamliner 787 fleet was recently grounded worldwide after two separate incidents in which the on-board lithium-ion battery, which supplies the planes with auxiliary and back-up power, caught fire.

Improvements in larger lithium-ion batteries would be a big step forward for technologies such as electric cars or electrical grids, and thus for sustainable transportation and energy. To that end, a group of researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have just published preliminary work on a new form of battery that relies on a solid electrolyte. According to a piece in today’s Climate Wire, as well as a recent report in Technology Review, the new batteries promise to be lighter, safer, and able to store five to ten times more energy than the batteries on Boeing’s 787:

The ORNL researchers, in work published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Chemistry Society, have an easy method for making a nanostructured form of one solid electrolyte. The nanostructure improves the material’s conductivity 1,000 times, enough to make it useful in lithium-ion batteries. The researchers also showed that the new material is compatible with high-energy electrodes.

The solid electrolyte isn’t as conductive as liquid electrolytes, but the researchers say they can compensate for this by making the electrolyte very thin, among other measures. Even then, the batteries might not charge as quickly or provide the same boost of power possible with liquid electrolytes, but this would be okay in many applications, such as in electric cars, where the sheer number of battery cells makes it easy to deliver adequate bursts of power.

The solid electrolyte not only makes batteries safer, it could also enable the use of higher energy electrode materials. As a result, while the rate at which these batteries deliver power may be less than today’s lithium-ion batteries, the total amount of energy they can store would be far higher. A much smaller battery could then be used—saving space and weight on airplanes and greatly reducing the cost of electric vehicles.

The team restructured the solid electrolyte to be porous at the nanoscale, which yielded the far higher level of conductivity. The solid electrolyte also helps prevent shorts, and unlike the liquid counterparts won’t degrade electrodes. That’s particularly important for building better lithium-sulfur batteries, which can store tremendous amounts of energy but have safety problems and o far haven’t been able to recharge enough times to make them useful for something like an electric car.

The ORNL team’s work is still in the embryonic stage: The tests have only been carried out with cells about the size of a coin, and the research into compatibility with lithium-sulfur batteries specifically remains unpublished.

China is trying to get a leg up on the market for clean transportation by bulking up the rate it’s been filing patents. According to a recent report in Europe’s China Daily, China filed over 2,000 patents for alternative-energy cars in 2012, placing it just behind Japan and the United States, and dead even with Germany and South Korea:

With a worldwide push for sustainable, clean transportation, patents are vital to survival in the global new-energy vehicle industry, China Intellectual Property News reported.

China had filed more than 2,000 patent applications – 8 percent of the world total – for new-energy cars by the end of last year to share the third place with Germany and South Korea, according to the statistics from Thomson Reuters.

Japan ranks the first with nearly 9,000 patents, followed by the United States with 4,000, accounting for a respective 60 percent and 22 percent of the world total.

China has actually been in the patent game for sometime. In 2011, the country’s patent office received more applications — for all forms of invention, not just green technology — than any other nation. At the same time, very few Chinese investors seek to patent their ideas abroad — less than 5 percent between 2005 and 2009. As The Economist put it, if an inventor has a genuinely good idea, they’ll seek to patent it as many places as possible. Concentrating merely on China’s office could be an indication that other incentives are driving the patent, such as the chance to snatch up a government subsidy.

The race between various countries to accrue patents in alternative-energy also raises the possibility of “patent wars,” such as those that have riled the world of software. Companies and interests attempt to round up and hoard patents in order to corner sources of revenue. That is, of course, very profitable for them, but it also tends to dampen innovation in the relevant industry. The spread of patents forces companies and inventors to spend ever more time and money making sure every conceptual aspect of the technology they’re working on is in the legal clear, or is properly licensed. That drives up costs for the companies, for consumers, and slows down the creation of new products and technologies that can raise everyone’s well-being — like cars and other forms of transport powered by sustainable energy. It arguably even drives up inequality.

The problem is especially acute in the software world, where it’s especially difficult to organize who has the rights to what into a public and easily-searchable database. But in principle the inefficiencies and transaction costs that come with over-zealous competition for patents can afflict any industry, including green tech and green transportation.

In February of 2011, for example, Butamax Advanced Biofuels, a joint venture between BP and DuPont, sued another advanced biofuels company, Gevo, for infringing their patent on a process to produce microbial-based biofuel.

by Justin Horner, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Predictions and prognostications are the stuff of the New Year–and why should driving trends be any different?  Will 2013 see a continuation of what has now been a nearly 90 month drop in population-adjusted Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT)?

Courtesy of William Lark Jr. and MIT

by Max Frankel

Next month, Senator Jeff Merkely (D-Oregon) will drive an all electric vehicle from Portland to Ashland — a distance of about 285 miles — to show off the viability EVs and Oregon’s new electric highway program.

While Senator Merkley’s trek is great PR for EVs and his support in congress is vital to the continued development of the next generation of vehicles, the future of the electric car isn’t just on the nation’s highways, but in the cities.

For the last few years, scientists and researchers at MIT have been working on a project called the CityCar. The CityCar represents a radical rethinking of the urban mobility paradigm — a shift from conventional vehicles operating in a cramped, polluted, dangerous environment to vehicles specifically optimized for urban centers.

What is the City Car?

As MIT describes, the CityCar is unlike any vehicle in production today. “It does not have a central engine and traditional power train, but is powered by four in-wheel electric motors. Each wheel unit contains drive motor (which also enables regenerative braking), steering, and suspension, and is independently digitally controlled.”

The decision to eschew a traditional motor and drive train allows the CityCar to do quite a few things that other cars can’t, like O-turns for instance. Since the wheels move independently, the car can also move sideways into parallel parking spaces. It also allows the body of the vehicle to be lightweight, safe, and spacious since it requires no large, clunky battery back.

Courtesy of Franco Vairani and Technology Review

Without a rigid drive shaft, MIT’s engineers had the freedom to allow the CityCar to fold in half — a revolutionary concept. When a CityCar arrives at its destination, it folds up, compacting itself into an area 1/2 its normal size, and stacks with other CityCars much the same way that grocery carts do. The driver then simply walks straight ahead and out of the vehicle. using this technique, between three and eight CityCars can fit into one conventional parking space.

The CityCar can then charge while in its compact, stacked form.

The front of the vehicle is the passenger compartment, which houses the joystick used to control the car. The joystick represents another innovation, a shift from mechanical control, like the steering wheel, to electric, “fly by wire” technology. “The rear compartment provides generous storage for baggage, groceries, and so on. When a CityCar folds, the baggage compartment remains level and low for easy access.” According to MIT:

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Gas prices may have dipped in the weeks leading up to the Memorial Day weekend, but consumers are still responding to high gas prices.

According to a new poll from Consumer Reports, 37 percent of Americans say that fuel economy is their top consideration when looking for a new car. That makes efficiency the most important factor for consumers by far.

The next closest consideration was safety, which was ranked as a top priority by 17 percent of Americans.

The poll also showed that nearly three quarters of respondents were open to considering new types personal transportation like electric vehicles:

The survey, conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center, found that car owners were open to different ways of saving at the pump, from downsizing to looking at hybrids, electric cars, or models with diesel engines. In all, nearly three quarters (73 percent) of participants said they would consider some type of alternatively fueled vehicle, with flex-fuel (which can run on E85 ethanol) and hybrid models leading the way. Younger buyers were more likely to consider an alternatively-fuel or purely electric vehicle than drivers over the age of 55.

Electric vehicle sales in the U.S. have been slower than expected. While record numbers of Chevy Volts were sold in March, the following month saw a major dip in sales. Nissan has faced a similar pattern of sales with its Leaf.

But auto industry executives say it’s far too early to draw conclusions about the success of the electric vehicle in the U.S.

“I don’t want you to take a one-month or two-month sales result in one particular market to try to make your opinion about the evolution of a very important technology for the industry,” said Nissan’s CEO in April.

Despite the current lag in the EV market, it is clear that America’s relationship with the automobile is changing. Consumers are driving less, using less fuel, and buying more efficient cars. Indeed, many younger consumers are choosing not to buy automobiles at all.