Renew News

Here are a few easy things you can do that will lessen your car’s impact on the environment, and reduce your guilt, all while saving you money on gas at the same time. Of course, your first consideration when driving should be your safety, and the safety of those around you, but once you’ve got that covered you can think about the things on this list.

1. Don’t accelerate up hills- Who doesn’t love punching it all the way to the top of a big hill? You’ve worked hard, you bought a great car, and it’s great to get out there and see what it’s got. Because cars are so good now, it’s easy to forget how much energy it takes to move your 3000 pound vehicle up a hill. To jog your memory, get on a bike and ride it up a hill. Now try it again from a standstill, and continually speed up until you reach the top. Most of the time when you are driving up a hill, it’s not going to kill you to maintain your current speed until you get to the top, and then accelerate when you are going down the other side in order to get up to the speed you want. It’s a minor change that will save you a bunch of fuel.
2. Check your tire pressure regularly- Boring, I know… but this is actually a big deal. Not only is this a huge safety issue (incorrect tire pressure affects cornering, braking, stability, and can even lead to tire failure), but under-inflated tires allow more tire to touch the road, increasing friction (and tire wear), which causes you to lose fuel economy.
3. Slow down- The faster you drive, the more gas you use, but let’s be realistic here. We are all busy, and I’m sure you need to get where you are going quickly. If you slow down just one or two miles-per-hour you probably won’t even notice the difference, but you will save gas, reduce your emissions, and be a safer driver all at the same time. This is especially easy to do on the highway: just set that cruise-control one or two notches lower.
4. Cut down on quick starts and stops- Of course quick starts and stops are fun, and sometimes necessary, so maybe you continue to be a bug-eyed, caffeine-crazed NASCAR driver on the way to work, and just drive home in a relaxed manner. With quick starts you burn a lot of gas to get up to speed that quickly, and with quick stops you are turning all that energy you bought (in the form of gas) into wasted heat with your brakes and tires. If you take your foot off the gas a little sooner on your way up to a red light you can coast into it and maybe even take it on the fly once it turns green, thereby saving gas, and your brakes.
5. Warm up your car by driving it- I know it sounds crazy, but modern cars don’t need to be warmed up the way cars of the past did. Even in the depths of winter, the best way to warm up your car is by driving slowly for a few blocks before you punch it to get to work.
6. Drive Less- This one is not so easy, and that is why it is number six on a list of five things, but I had to include it. The best way to lessen your impact and save money is to use less gas. This is not possible for everyone, but if you rode your bike to work one day a week, took mass-transit, or walked to the coffee shop instead of driving, it would make a big difference.

Interestingly enough, several of these lessons were really taught to me by driving my Prius. I think we would all drive very differently if every car had a real-time fuel-efficiency gauge.

If you like lists of simple things, check this one out:

5 Simple Things You Can Do To Help Save The World

A nice article with a broad view of electric vehicle conversion from the good folks over at TreeHugger.com

Read the article: Converting Your Car to an Electric Vehicle

I have been against nuclear power for as long as I have given any thought to the issue.  I hate to say it, but I have just changed my mind.  There is a great article in a recent Discover Magazine that lays out the important details, and is the first comprehensive comparison I have seen of the pros and cons of nuclear vs. wind, solar, and coal.

Of course I strongly believe that we need to put massive effort into making solar power and other renewable energy sources viable, but the truth is that wind is not constant and solar is not yet very efficient.  When compared to the massive amount of coal we as a nation (the United States of America) burn, nuclear seems to be the lesser of the two evils until we can get renewables to cover a greater percentage of our energy needs.  To be sure, I ONLY see nuclear as a stop-gap measure, but we need to take action now to decrease our national carbon emissions.

Read the Discover Magazine article here.

The bar has been raised yet again. Lithium Technology Corporation out of Pennsyvania has released a new line of lithium batteries
that are “…the answer the automotive industry has been searching for.” according to their website.

The Future of Thongs has a great article on the new 125 mpg hybrid. Read it here.

Learn more about Lithium Technology Corporation on their website.

photos: Michel Zumbrunn

The Venturi Company from Monaco is hitting the renewable energy vehicle market full-force. They have three different models already: The Eclectic (a golf-cart looking super eco-car; below), the Astrolab (in between a sports car, and a an eco-car; above), and the Fetish (all-out sports car).

Only the Fetish is in production at the moment, but all of the cars will be limited productions even when they are in full-swing. The Eclectic will have a run of only 200. This seems to be the first time that a car has used more than one renewable energy source at once: both wind and solar in the same car.

The ranges are still small, and the top speed of the Eclectic is only 31 mph, but I think all three cars have arrived as the first practical, production, renewable energy vehicles. Of course the top two models will cost a pretty penny (and have awesome performance to match), but that’s how it is with any new technology.

You can read more, and get all the specs at the Venturi website.

While the costs of setting up a solar or wind power system for an individual home can be prohibitive, there is another option. You can buy green power from the utility you already use. For a nominal fee (we pay four dollars a month) you pay your utility a little extra to buy electricity from a renewable source.

While the green power you buy does not go directly to your home, it does get fed into the electrical grid and helps pay for the costs of establishing, expanding, and maintaining the network of green power systems.

While the immediate feel good factor is relatively low because you cannot see the effects of your efforts, you are helping to subsidize a part of the power industry which will eventually be a major part of the effort to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

The link below is for Puget Sound Energy’s Green Power Program. Feel free to check it out. To see if you can purchase green power, contact your local utility.

http://www.pse.com/solutions/home_greenPower.aspx

The X Prize Foundation has announced several new X Prizes, and one of them is “To inspire a new generation of viable, super-efficient vehicles that help break our addiction to oil and stem the effects of climate change.”

The winner gets a HUGE amount of glory and, of course, $10 million.  The gauntlet has been dropped, so get those creative juices flowing.

Find out all the details for the Automotive X Prize here.

Could this be a sign of a change in societal thinking? We’ll see.

Read about the big Oscar wins here.

An Inconvenient Truth website: www.climatecrisis.net

With a bunch of educational flash games energyhog.org is a fun place for kids to learn about energy conservation. There is both an adult section and a kids section on the site. I found the adult section to be pretty basic, but if you are new to all this energy stuff, and haven’t been espousing the benefits of compact fluorescents and hybrid cars for decades like I have, then you can learn a lot. I thought the kid part of the site was the real gem though. There’s nothing like video games to get the learning going, and these games are actually fun too.

The Discovery channel is 3/4 of the way through their four part series on the car of the future, appropriately called Future Car. The most recent episode was about fuel and hit on everything from ethanol, bio-diesel, hydrogen and solar all the way to having a car powered by air.

A few of the finer details are a little off, but all in all the shows have been great. It’s really cool to see what the designers are thinking about, and what is on the way. Perhaps the most interesting thing for me in this episode on fuel is that a lot of the future is already available now. Of course they showed prototype cars that can do some amazing things, but really the near future of fueling our vehicles is not so much about bringing in new technology, as it’s about getting more people on-board with the advances that are already commercially available like ethanol, biodiesel and hybrids.

One of the great things about cable is that you get more than one chance to see a good show. If you missed any of Future Car, check out the schedule for your second chance.

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