- Chief Operating Officer, partner, Sensortech Services, LLC – medical device program management and logistics (present).
- Vice President, Board of Directors, KUSP Central Coast Public Radio; Producer, News and Information, Talk Show, and Automotive Technology (present)
- Master of Business Administration with honors, W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University (2005)
- Environmental Engineer, GM-Toyota (NUMMI) and FMC Corp, Environmental, Health and Safety Compliance (1983-89)
- Research Technician, University of Santa Clara, Mechanical Engineering Department, Vehicle Emissions Testing Laboratory, Alcohol, Diesel and Gasoline Fuels and Fuel Blends (1980-83)
- Instructor, Environmental Management and Emergency Response, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz Extensions (1989-98)
- FAA Licensed Private Pilot and Airframe & Powerplant Mechanic
- Parent of 3 (adult) boys, partner to Martha Watson
New Ford Fiesta final catches up with Honda’s 1984 Civic:
From fueleconomy.gov
Estimated
New MPG Annual
Fuel
Cost
Model city hwy
Honda Civic 4 cyl, 1.3 L, Manual 4-spd, Regular
5.4 NA
32 city
39hwy
$1150
Compare to Official EPA Window Sticker Fuel Economy
Hi, John!
Good call on the Ford Fiesta! I’ve driven one and really loved the car. For a gasoline-fueled vehicle, it displays impressive fuel efficiency and the most recent news is that the Fiesta also displays top-of-its-class crash safety. In fact, Ford just passed Toyota in having the most vehicles in its lineup with the highest crash-saftey ratings. The Fiesta is a car I’d consider buying!
Best,
Kelly
Hi Kelly,
I heard you speak on the radio show “Your Call” about electric cars. I don’t own an electric car but I follow the technology and I’m eager to get one.
When I inevitably get that question about electric cars being powered with electricity from coal, my response is this:
Right now electric cars are less that 1% of the cars and renewables in many places generate less than 1% of the electricity. Hopefully in 10 years a quarter of cars will be electric and a quarter of electricity with be from renewables. In California you used to be able to by electricity generated by renewables. In the places where you still can, it probably still pencils out to charge your electric car from that even if it costs a few cents more per kilowatt. It would be worth the extra cost just to shut up the naysayers.
In 40 years there will probably still be some coal plants and there will probably still be some hummers tooling around too. It has nothing to do with electric cars.
Hi, Francis!
Thanks for listening and for taking the time to comment!
I hear what you’re saying, and I might add that I’m excited about “distributed” electricity generation from individual homeowners’ solar panels and ultimately by small fuel cells that might power an apartment complex. The concept of relying on ‘the grid’ for our electricity may also fade in the future, in the face of many “micro-producers” of energy from private homes to business parking lots (such a Google maintains).
Keeping our minds and our options open are important as we seek solutions to avoiding our own extinction!
Best,
Kelly
Kelly,
I’ve been listening to you program on my way weekly to UC Davis where I have worked on alt fuel vehicles for 2 decades. I think you do a great job explaining the big shift that is in process.
tt
Hi, Tom!
Thanks so much for listening! A compliment, coming from a person “in the business” is very gratifying!
You drive from Santa Cruz to Davis? Wow! Where is that Tesla Model S you need?? *smiles*
All the best,
Kelly
I share the hopefulness that want to see the grid we get our electrons from powered by renewable fuels, particularly the sun. (Is the sun renewable? Hmm, must occurred to me that it doesn’t fit our usual definition, but we probably won’t be around when it is no longer a mighty fuel source. Delivering enough energy every minute to provide all the [accounted for] energy used by the entire planet for a year. My own rooftop PVs result in no annual electricity cost at my all-electric house, water well, and full time office and plus the electricity consumed by my tenant (who has propane hot water, heat, and cooking). Thanks to PG&E for giving me a threefold higher rate for on-peak production/consumption so I can manage my consumption and come out dollars ahead.
I like to think there is enough roof area sitting in the sun in California residences and low-rise businesses/light industrial/warehouse spaces that we could do it. I have done the calculations and it looks right to me.
So what’s the problem? I guess most people haven’t the motivation and/or the spare cash to invest in a cleaner future even though the State of CA has been paying a third of the cost of PV systems in recent years. Actually, if you cost the components, they are substantially less than half the cost of a solar-contractor installed system, The labor was only about three or four full technical worker-days for my 2.5 KW system. There was the sales commission, the permits and application for the state rebates, and the profit. How much profit? I would be curious to know. Figure $300/d per worker or about $1,200 for installation; $7K to $10k for the components (panels, mounting racks, wiring, and inverter), and that leaves about $10K to $12K for commission and profit. OK, they have overhead — somebody has to pay for all that advertising they are doing and there was that 2 or 3 hour visit from the salesman to my house before he plugged in the numbers into his template and printed out the boiler-plate-heavy proposal.
Back to the electric cars. They are not zero net energy, no matter where it comes from. It does take somewhere on the order of 4 to 7 years of energy production to pay back the energy cost of producing, delivering, and installing the PV system. Perhaps large scale solar systems are somewhat more efficient, but then you have the transmission losses and the loss of all the undeveloped land. Those impose environmental costs that are not negligible but that are not calculated in most analyses. In the end, we need to do a total life cycle energy, environmental, and economic analysis of any of these systems.
The best solution, of course, would be to drive less… and less and less. That might require a combination of changes in the relationships between homes and workplaces/schools/shopping — something like the densities in old European cities or in Japan where energy intensity is generally about half that of the US with relatively equivalent standards of living. New public transit would help. Finally, walking more or biking could become an American activity (again). It’s remarkable to see people driving a block to park again in order to avoid walking half a block to shop in downtown Santa Cruz.
So, the long and short of it is that the electric car still uses fossil fuels directly or indirectly and, sadly, will likely do so for a very long time. You can “buy” renewable energy, but the electrons delivered to your house come from the grid. An analysis at UC Davis showed that going electric is not a completely neutral move when one looks at the patterns of electricity generation and consumption associated with electric cars.
Take a look at UC Davis talk from Friday: abstract -
Plug-in Hybrid Vehicle GHG Impacts in California: Integrating Consumer Research with an Electricity Supply Model
Time: January 14,2011 , 1:30 pm ?3:00 pm
Location: 1065 Kemper Hall, UC Davis
Speaker: Dr. Jonn Axsen, Post Doctoral Researcher, ITS- Davis, UC Davis
Abstract: We explore how plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) may reduce source-to-wheel greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from passenger vehicles. The two primary advances are the incorporation of 1) explicit measures of consumer interest in and potential use of different types of PHEVs and 2) a model of the California electricity grid capable of differentiating hourly and seasonal GHG emissions by generation source. We construct PHEV emissions scenarios to address inherent relationships between vehicle design, driving and recharging behaviors, seasonal and time-of-day variation in GHG-intensity of electricity, and total GHG emissions. A sample of 877 California new vehicle buyers provide data on driving, time of day recharge access, and PHEV design interests. The elicited data differ substantially from the assumptions used in previous analyses. We construct electricity demand profiles scaled to one million PHEVs and input them into an hourly California electricity supply model to simulate GHG emissions. Compared to conventional vehicles, consumer-designed PHEVs cut marginal (incremental) GHG emissions by more than one-third in current California energy scenarios and by one-quarter in future energy scenarios—reductions similar to those simulated for all-electric PHEV designs. Across the emissions scenarios, long-term GHG reductions depends on reducing the carbon intensity of the grid. –
http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/events/seminarseries/winter11/Axsen.php
hal
Hi, Hal!
Thanks for listening, reading and responding! Your points are well-taken. Energy-efficiency and conservation seems to be like herding cats. No single solution is the answer and there are a lot of boats that need to “float” on the rising tide of energy efficiency.
Best,
Kelly