Energy Economy

Air travel becoming an expensive luxury

This brief report discusses the fact that airlines are dropping nonstop flights even to and from major cities like New York. For business, this is devastating, as the increased cost of tickets can, to some extent, be moderated via other cost-cutting measures. But sending business people on trips that take all day instead of three or four hours is devastating, because you can't recover the lost time spent traveling.

Power and broadband drive economic development

In a series of broadband planning meetings earlier this week, I heard about several companies that were seriously considering moving their operations to another city if the local electric power infrastructure was not improved. The firms said they were experiencing multiple outages per month that often lasted an hour or more.

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Is California the new Detroit?

Aptera Motors just raised $24 million in funding. The company plans to build a super-efficient car. That makes Aptera at least the second new car company in California, following in the footsteps of Tesla Motors, which makes the super-fast Tesla electric sports car.

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Tennessee is ready for electric cars

Tennessee legislators have done a very simple and very smart thing. They have passed legislation that allows small electric cars with limited speed (e.g. up to 35 mph) travel on roads where the posted speed limit is 40 mph.

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Pure Electric Vehicle is just what we need

The Pure Electric Vehicle is just what we need. If this car actually gets built, it has the simplicity, low cost, and small size that could potentially win millions of buyers. The designer is promising to sell it for $9,999, meaning it will only cost the equivalent of four tanks of gas 8^). Kidding aside, for the price, a lot of households could quickly justify the cost of this vehicle as a second or third car.

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Why VPNs are important to communities

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are fast becoming a major issue with respect to broadband. A VPN is a way for a remote user (e.g. from home, traveling) to be connected to the corporate or business network as if he or she was in the office. It gives the home-based worker or business traveler complete access to all the documents and services he or she would normally have sitting at their desk.

Smart Grid could be even smarter with broadband

Chicago ComEd electric power customers may end up paying an extra $3 per month to help fund a Smart Grid data network that will allow ComEd to better control power use and to speed diagnosis and identification of power outages.

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The Smart Car: 40 mpg in city driving

Expect to see lots of these around town in the next several years: the Smart Car is a gas-sipping commuter and errands vehicle that would fill the bill nicely as a second car in a lot of households. Next: let's see the electric version of this car, and I don't want some complicated "hybrid," I just want a cheap electric motor and some batteries. I'll plug it in at night, and stick a solar panel in the back window to get free charging during the day while it sits in the office parking lot.

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Broadband Properties '08: Gas prices are already driving work from home

Dan Rogers, an economic developer from Kendall County, Texas, just told a story about a conversation that just occurred last week. A middle manager who lives in Kendall but commutes about an hour to work out of the region related to Rogers that he had negotiated an agreement with his firm to let him work two days a week from home to save on the cost of commuting. He was able to do that because he has fiber to the home and can access the corporate network as if he were sitting in his office at the main company location.

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Community broadband, the rural economy, and commuting

The sharp increases in gas and diesel fuel are raising the cost of commuting. Even if fuel prices recede (as they did after the '73 oil crunch), it seems likely that we will never see $2 gas again, and it may be that $3 gas becomes the new normal.

While the cost of fuel affects everyone to some extent, rural communities may be at most risk. Many workers in rural towns drive long distances to work, and a doubling of the cost of such drives may make it too expensive to make those commutes for a $12 or $14 per hour job.

Fuel surcharges as a hidden cost of doing business

Look for "fuel surcharges" to rapidly increase the cost of certain kinds of services. Our last Fedex bill included a $10 fuel surcharge on top of the normal $48 delivery charge for a single package. It's hard to imagine, given the volume of packages that Fedex handles, that every package now requires a 20% surcharge.

Never get caught without power

This little gadget would be a useful addition to any home emergency kit. It is a small, folding solar panel that fits in almost any bag or briefcase and has a variety of adapters to charge cellphones, iPods, GPS receivers, and other small portable devices. The best thing about it is its USB port, so it will charge almost anything that can be powered via USB.

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Nuclear will power electric cars

Electric cars don't produce emissions, but the batteries have to be charged up by something. If that something is fossil fuel, you still have pollution and potentially high energy costs. A new generation of nuclear power plants, which emit virtually nothing into the air, may be part of the long term solution to the ever increasing cost of fossil fuels.

The new plants are smaller, safer, and loaded with safety features that make them easier and safer to manage.

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Terrorist attacks on electric power

If there was not already enough to worry about, the CIA has indicated that the agency has credible evidence of terrorist cyber-attacks on electric power grids outside the U.S.

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Wiring homes for electric power

The Energy Economy continues to generate some of the most innovative new ideas we've seen in a long time. University of Delaware researchers have proposed V2G technology (Vehicle to Grid). A home and automobile designed to support V2G would be able to send electric power stored in the battery of an electric vehicle back up the grid--making your electric meter spin backwards and reducing your electric bill.

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Is there a "solar boom" on the way

A California start up backed by the Google founders may have developed, finally, the break through that the solar energy business has been waiting for. Traditional solar cells have always required an expensive fabrication process that used silicon as a raw material. Nanosolar has developed a process that prints a nanotechnology based ink onto thin sheets that can be put on roofs of buildings, on top of cars and trucks, and anywhere that electric power is needed.

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Human-powered generator

If you have worried about having some alternative source of power during power outages but don't want to keep a gas-powered generator around, this new human-powered generator from Freeplay may be just the thing.

Is cheap solar just around the corner?

A new manufacturing process for creating solar panels at half the cost of the old way of making them is about to come online in a new plant in Colorado. Developed by a Colorado State engineering professor and perfected over sixteen years of study, the new low cost solar electricity option could open many more opportunities to use solar power to replace fossil fuels.

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Let's just grow some oil

An ugly, smelly weed called jatropha may be another piece of the energy puzzle. According to a Slashdot article, the weed produces a seed that can have up to 40% oil content, which can be easily converted to a biofuel for diesel engines. Jatropha apparently grows easily, requires little water or fertilizer, and can be grown on marginal lands that would not support energy intensive crops like corn and soybeans.

High efficiency solar cells

The Energy Economy continues to churn away quietly. While oil prices bounce around like a barrel full of superballs, research in hydrogen, solar, and other alternative energy sources is setting the stage for a dramatic shift in how we obtain and store energy. The latest development involves a dramatic increase in the efficiency of solar cells--some 60% better.

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