I spent the beginning of last week at a great conference on North Carolina’s Energy Future. While in future posts I want to offer specific reflections based on individual speakers, let me first quickly highlight a few clean tech and energy policy ideas from various sources that I found particularly compelling:
- “Feebates” — the idea is simple: tax owners of high-emissions/low-mileage vehicles and transfer money from those fees (in the form of a tax rebate) to owners of low-emissions/high-mileage vehicles. An easy, straightforward incentive that pays for itself.
- Composite Cars –many Americans have a tremendously dangerous misconception that heavier cars are safer. In reality, heavier cars yield deadlier accidents. An alternative to bulky steel frames are carbon composite shells that can be manufactured 10-100 times stronger than steel. The great part? They weigh just a fraction of a similar sized steel frame. This is crucially important considering the energy wasted by conventional (heavy) cars, SUVs, and trucks. As a Rocky Mountain Institute Report points out:
“The contemporary automobile, after a century of engineering, is embarrassingly inefficient: Of the energy in the fuel it consumes, at least 80 percent is lost, mainly in the engine’s heat and exhaust, so that at most only 20 percent is actually used to turn the wheels. Of the resulting [20%] force, 95 percent moves the car, while only 5 percent moves the driver, in proportion to their respective weights.”
- Smart Power Grids –power distribution systems with at least three key features: (1) a two-way flow of electricity, allowing micro-level power generation systems (solar panels on houses, to use an obvious example) to feed excess energy back into the grid; (2) energy storage capacity that’s dispersed over a given area to optimize power flow (minimize the distance electricity travels) and (3) a decentralized power-generation system that makes micro power plants like wind turbines and solar cells more cost effective by drawing all energy produced by those sources into a common pool and sharing the power-generating burden across a variety of sources. I’ll be the first to admit that I have a lot to learn about Smart Grids, but these types of major infrastructure overhauls will eventually be necessary as we transition to new energy technologies. I’ve heard of at least one company working on this technology, though I know there are many more.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user EdTarwinski.
