There’s a terrific post over at the blog Grush Hour, written by SkyMeter founder and chief scientist Bern Grush. A friend in Toronto was driving to downtown to visit him, so Grush documented the crazy path this person took while driving around trying to find the cheapest parking — in this case street parking. Multiply this particular example by the hundreds or thousands every day and you begin to see the larger impact on downtown congestion, smog, and a city’s carbon footprint. Grush argues that cheap street parking has got to go. “Underpriced parking carries a small, transient benefit to individuals who happen to be lucky on a particular day, but it carries a large societal detriment to all of us each day, every day,” he writes.

I encourage you to read his full post. Very interesting.

A team of electrical engineering undergrads from MIT have developed a new type of “regenerative” shock absorber that captures energy every time a vehicle hits a bump in the road. They claim a 10 per cent improvement in vehicle fuel efficiency, and have formed a company called Levant Power Corp. to commercialize a product. According to an MIT press release, “In their testing so far, the students found that in a 6-shock heavy truck, each shock absorber could generate up to an average of 1 kilowatt on a standard road — enough power to completely displace the large alternator load in heavy trucks and military vehicles, and in some cases even run accessory devices such as hybrid trailer refrigeration units.”

This is just one of several components/parts of a car where energy-efficiency improvements are still possible, and taken together they show how far we can take vehicle efficiency. I can only imagine how much vehicle fuel economy would improve at this time of the year in Toronto, given all the potholes we’re starting to see after the winter thaw.

BTW: I know biofuels aren’t a factor in vehicle efficiency, but they are a factor in the debate over carbon emissions. One problem with ethanol, aside from the whole fuel-from-food controversy, is that vehicle fuel economy takes a 27-per-cent hit because of the lower energy content in ethanol. So to drive the same distance on ethanol as you would with 100 per cent gasoline you’d be using much more fuel, and presumably paying much more. A U.K.-based engineering company called Ricardo Inc. says it has developed a technology that, according to president Dean Harlow, “turns the gasoline-ethanol equation upside down.” The flex-fuel technology, called Ethanol Boosted Direct Injection, offers the performance of diesel, at the cost of a gasoline engine, but running on ethanol or an ethanol-gasoline blend. Now, if we could just get cellulosic ethanol to start flowing on a commercial scale…

Three U.S. senators — two Democrats, one Republican — introduced a bill today that would create a national incentive program for the voluntary retirement of inefficient vehicles. The four-year program would apply to anyone who had a driveable vehicle registered for four months or longer that got no more than 18 miles per gallon. The vehicle owner would have the option of turning in the car, truck or SUV to be scrapped in exchange for a credit of $2,500 to $4,500. The credit could be applied toward the purchase of a new fuel-efficient vehicle or, in the form of a voucher, could be redeemed for transit fares.

If passed, the bill would aim to encourage the early retirement of up to one million vehicles each year — four million in total. “If enacted, this bill would be an important part of helping getting America’s struggling automobile industry back on its feet — and help consumers who are concerned about covering the cost of buying a more fuel-efficient vehicle,” said Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California.

What’s good about this bill is that it would create economic stimulus and help achieve the goals of emission reductions and energy security. (more…)

I guess it depends on what you call a solar car. I mean, a car with some panels on the rooftop might offer some juice, but until we see some major advances in cost and PV efficiency I can’t see how it would make a huge difference. Now, it does make sense if Toyota is looking at ways of better combining solar PV on a residential rooftop with vehicle charging.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see Toyota thinking so far in the future. Here’s a link to the AP story.

UPDATE: As expected, Toyota is denying that it’s building a solar car.

I’ve often wondered about the wisdom of trying to co-locate offshore wind turbines with wave-energy technology as a way of saving on transmission-line costs and creating a capacity factor that’s much higher than the two technologies on their own. Back in July I e-mailed Francis Farley, inventor of the Anaconda wave power converter — basically a snake-like machine that captures the kinetic energy in the waves as its various segments bob up and down. I asked Farley what he thought about the idea of pairing his system with offshore wind. “You have a good point,” he said. “There would be some economies in combining offshore wind with wave energy, and some sites would have both.”

I dropped the idea, thinking it might be good fodder for a column at a later date. Then I noticed this week that Eric Stoutenburg, a researcher at Stanford University, came to a similar conclusion in a research paper that he presented this week at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco. “If wave energy wants to get off the ground, it might have better potential to develop in the shadow of an offshore wind plant,” Stoutenburg told Cleantech Group. (more…)