The Peristaltic Testator

You know you had a good idea when someone beats you to it.

Years ago, I saw in empathetic agony a guy trying to get his wheelchair up a curb cut-out that was just a bit too steep for his arms to handle. I saw the problem; he didn't have enough leverage. I started doodling.

Keep in mind that I was at the time very interested in electric-assisted bicycles, going so far as to help sell them in town. When you are a hammer, all manner of problems look nail-y. I figured that a regular wheelchair suffered from two things in hilly environs;

( Too many LJ cuts, for one. . . . )

Just read a very revealing opinion piece about the BBC show Top Gear faking electric car breakdowns. They're being sued by electric car maker Tesla for trying to pretend a car that can usually drive hundreds of miles on a charge only managed 55. It looks like they repeated the prank with a new Leaf.

The author of the article is dead-on in noting that the Beeb is not in the hands of corporate hacks, in that they are not supported by commercial advertising. What that same author fails to appreciate is that Top Gear definitely is.

Really, think about it. How many electric vehicle makers are there? How many are selling their cars right now? Not many, folks, not many.

By contrast, how many gas and diesel powered car makers are out there? How many are selling their cars? And how is it that an albeit top-rated show gets access to all those flashy gas and diesel cars? Do they pay for the privilege of driving the latest Rolls or Ferrarri? I highly doubt it.

No, Top Gear must tout the party line on electrics as long as that party line is dictated by the sellers of competing petroleum-fueled cars. If they actually dare to like the Tesla or appreciate the Leaf, they can kiss goodbye their next test of the latest Corvette, Bentley, Fiat, Rennault, Ford, Peugot, Volvo, Aston Martin, GMC, Land Rover . . . need I continue?

Remember just a few weeks ago Warren Buffett bought BNSF outright? The press blather was predictable: "Our country's future prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system."

Last night, though, while discussing an oil-poor future, my economist friend mentioned an alternative situation for buying the rail: electrification.

From The Journal of Commerce:

Earlier this year, BNSF Railway’s chairman, president and CEO, Matthew K. Rose, said he was in talks with transmission line companies that want to install new power lines in the railroad’s right of way. And he said BNSF was exploring whether that could help the railroad convert large parts of its sprawling western network to electricity.

Industry sources indicated other large carriers were looking at the same options, as Congress and the Obama administration push to upgrade the capacity of the U.S. electricity grid and tie in more alternative power sources including wind energy farms.

My friend also sent me a post from a rail site (sadly, one locked down to members only) which said:

If the wind- and solar-power crowd are really able to create some critical mass in their plans for mass conversion to such energy generation, transmission corridors for new high voltage lines are going to become necessary in the West. The battles for these rights-of-way are already starting to brew in several places in the West. . . .

Single steel pole towers, which are more easily situated on a railroad right-of-way than the old wider-footprint lattice-work towers, are now capable of handling up to the 765,000 volt lines being discussed for transmission from potential wind and solar fields in the West. . . .

Combine this observation with Buffett's planned wind farm facilities and one sees a definite business plan shaping up.

Buffett started as an oil man. He knows what's coming: Fuel shortages leading to ever higher fuel prices. Electric rail lines -- fed by the power lines sharing the corridor -- give him an incredible advantage, if he can get the major routes powered in time. And because he bought the rail outright, he won't have to dither about with quarterly stockholder reports. This means he can take his sweet time electrifying without worrying about "enhancing shareholder value" every few months.

General Motors will soon be bankrupt. I'm not saying this out of spite, out of schadenfreude, out of a need to lash out at the auto behemoth. Rather, my judgment stems from a realization that the monster has become not only too big to turn its business practices around, but is further infected with a corporate culture that lacks the initiative to even attempt such a reversal of practices and fortunes. Anyone can see this to be the case. All you need to understand are the concepts of corporate culture and how they differ from business to business, from culture to culture. Right now, the biggest three auto making countries are the US, Japan and Germany. (Other car making countries like Korea, China and India are growing in importance, but their products and histories are not really available for me to judge, so I'll stick with the big three as I tick off the elements of each that give my argument some weight.)

Let's start briefly with Germany. ( Years ago, I worked with a deckhand/diesel mechanic named Jack. )

PBS's Frontline recently tackled global warming and the corporate forces against change in its most recent episode, Heat. (You can watch the full two hour episode at the site.) Among the interviews, they examined GM's new concept plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt. If you happen to follow the link to the Volt's official site, you'll notice a dearth of actual information on the damned thing, let alone any tech-specs that make such sites in any way interesting. There's a reason. The Frontline crew was invited to shoot some road footage of the Volt as a part of "Heat." The prototype slowed to under 10mph on a gentle grade, finally stalling at the top of the hill. It had to be pushed into the truck that brought it to the shoot.

Martin Smith also interviewed a GM PR hack, asking the one question that everyone in the entire world needs to be constantly asking anyone associated with the Evil Behemoth: Why build the Volt when you had a perfectly good electric in the EV1, a car you recalled and crushed. . . ten years ago? The hack tried to correct the record, noting the cars were near the end of their life cycles had been "recycled," and that several had been donated to museums and universities.

The first part about the cars being "too old to drive" was bogus through and through. Most of the lessees protested the end-of-lease recalls. Many of them offered to buy the cars outright for far more than the market would warrent. Really, see Who Killed the Electric Car. The PR hack's last bit about the museum and university donation program proves only partially true; the donated vehicles came disabled and enjoined with strict warnings for the receivers to never, never, never try to restore the cars to working condition and (gasp!) actually drive the cars. Most of the cars were delivered with key components of the drive system removed. In fact, only the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) got a complete car:

Only 40 EV1s were preserved, according to Jill Banaszynski, manager of the EV1 donation program, to be given to museums and institutions or kept for research by GM. Of these, the only fully intact EV1, complete with its (now inert) lead acid battery, is today part of the NMAH collection. “Our requirement is that all the vehicles in the museum have to be complete models,” says Withuhn. “We may remove parts, but we have to know that if we wanted to drive a car, or a steam engine, we could -— not that we would. It’s a question of authenticity.”

This stipulation initially posed a problem for GM, which had decided to take the cars off the road because only a relative handful of technicians knew how to work safely on the powerful batteries. But a series of negotiations proved fruitful, and the museum, in March of 2005, received its own complete example of an exemplary machine. (Emphasis mine.)

That line suggesting that "only a relative handful of technicians" proves reason enough to disable the cars? Bull. Complete and utter bull. Sure, the EV1s do have a pretty high voltage pack, over 400 volts, IIRC, but there are lots of folks out there who work on similar voltages daily. . . and many of them can be found at universities. Duh. No, the EV1 was disabled to prevent anyone from seeing those cars on the road ever again.

You see, it turns out that folks sitting high in GM's corporate office towers, the people who make the core decisions regarding what products it will produce and why, have funny feelings compared to the majority of, say, the majority of scientists in this world. Stephen Colbert reinforced that lesson when he had GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz on his show. Take a peek:

Here Lutz is promoting the car that has at least a chance of pulling GM out of the toxic sea of red ink in which it currently gasps and bobs, and Lutz openly shares the fact that he doesn't believe carbon dioxide build-up causes global warming. "32,000 scientist" believe GW is caused by sunspots? Really, Bob? Really?!? Way to sell the whole Volt concept. I'm sure your target market would agree.

The Bottom Line? General Motors is run by a bunch of old fogies that are not only running their company into the ground, taking all of their employees with them, they furthermore haven't the slightest idea what they are doing wrong, and are therefore highly unlikely to change their corporate course in any positive way anytime soon.

I'm sorry, but when any group runs pell mell through a crowd with a revving chain saw, it's time to act. The sooner GM closes its doors and cedes its market share to companies that don't suck so very, very much, the better everyone both in front of and behind the tailpipes will be.

It's just sad.


*The "Die, Die, Die," of course, refers to a corporate death, not literal death. I may not share, er, any opinions with GM corporate, but that certainly doesn't mean I wish them ill.

Very few news or opinion pieces concerning the future of our electrical grid seem nowadays to lack a nice picture or two like those above and below these words.



What makes these two technologies possible, however, often eludes the corresponding press pieces, perhaps because even the reporters writing the stories ( fail to appreciate the beauty and promise of distributed generation. )


X-Posted to home_effinomic.

For some reason, I really, really like electric motorcycles. It's an odd combination, the electric and the motorcycle, for several very good reasons that, had I been aware of these reasons at the time, might have convinced me to abandon the fascination and led me toward more profitable pursuits. Alas, it was not to be. I got hooked. In retrospect, though, my years tilting at this particular windmill has given me unique insights into what does and does not make for good electric motorcycle design.

I put those insights to the test last Thursday, and drove what I truly feel to be the very first practical, commercially available electric motorcycle ever to his the market: The Vectrix.



( I'm going to go into as much information as I can offer. I plan to ramble and reminisce. The following is long and not for the squeamish. )

First of all, let me remind all that I used to work full-time on boats. I drove them as captain, crewed them as deck crew. Passenger, cargo, cargo-passenger -- did it all.

But I didn't get to see an awful lot of real sea. There is plenty of work right here in good ol' Puget Sound. I seldom worked more than a few miles from shore.

I have long dreamed of the tramp's life, a self-contained existance on a boat, mostly, putting about infinitely. Too much Melville, London, and Conrad. Way too much Hayden. The problem, of course, is that to enjoy life, one must pay for the boat. Boats are expensive, little more than Large Holes in the Water Into Which You Throw Money. One definition for "boat:" acronym for "bring out another thousand." And that's the situation for yesterday's boater. Factor in one of the biggest cost of boating (outside of moorage and repair), fuel, and today's prices make just bumping around a game for the wealthy.

Oh, and if you think fuel is expensive, price sails. Damn. . . .

No worries. I have a bit of experience with electric vehicles. It's not brain surgery to swap out a smokin' engine and fit a diminuative motor. Most boats use gensets for power very poorly, running almost full out to keep the television glowing. Very wasteful. It's far more efficient to run the genset only occassionally to charge batteries (the larger the bank the better -- think ballast) and to convert that direct current source to alternating as needed with an inverter. Boaters often suppliment the genset power with solar panels and small wind turbines. Depending upon useage, the gensets can go days without running. Connect the battery pack to a motor through a controller, and away you go!


The last type of boat I drove professionally

In fact, one can get quite a bit of mileage out of low-speed electrics. At the University of Washington, the Department of Intercollegic Athletics hired me for a few years to shuttle folks visiting Husky and Seahawks games from the anchorage in Union Bay (yes, that's where the jeans maker got it's name) to Husky Stadium. Most recently they have used Duffy electric boats for the shuttling. In a bay with a strictly enforced 7 knot speed limit (8 mph, for you lubbers), speed is not a priority. We operated those shuttles for 10 hours straight sometimes.

Hey, it beat working.

Bugdet cutbacks have ended that particular boating gig for me, sadly. There are others on the horizon.

Ah, but let's get back to the tramp's dream. I lately read two articles in rapid succession.

In the first, scientists develop portable generator that turns trash into electricity. It's a nifty gadget that converts old food, wrappers and (of special interest here) plastic waste into electricity, providing". . . approximately 90 percent more energy than it consumed" to perform the task. Essentially, it eats the stuff you can't, making power.

Such a gizmo has limited use (given the purchase cost) in a Seattle home with weekly trash and plastic recycling pick-up, and really cheap electric power. It might, however, serve well on a largish boat with electric drive. . . provided one could find a good source of plastic floating trash. It is in abundance here in the Sound, sadly. But with shores and rocks and winds and other boats, one would have a less than peaceful drift collecting it. I've done this, but that's a story for another post.

No, what you would need would be a large, open ocean with relatively moderate weather about a gazillion miles from freakin' anybody, all stockpiled with lots o' flotsam.



Folks, let me introduce you to the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a whirling cesspool of plastic inorganics clogging the middle of the Pacific. Winds and currents circling the Ring of Fire carry our bobbing waste to a vast dead zone filled with trash:

I did a quick calculation, estimating the debris at half a pound for every hundred square meters of sea surface. Multiplied by the circular area defined by our roughly thousand-mile course through the gyre, the weight of the debris was about 3 million tons, comparable to a year’s deposition at Puente Hills, Los Angeles’s largest landfill.

3 million tons of trash. Or, with the converter device, millions of tons of power.


The ocean could use less of this plastic trash;
and I could use the power.

Phase One: Buy a large, beat-up but seaworthy boat, maybe even a power barge for deck space and stability. Equip with electric drives, a couple of good gensets, lots of bulletproof batteries.

Phase Two: Get one of those plastic-to-power converter devices. Make up some story about testing the thing in a marine environment, or working tirelessly to rid the oceans of trash. There must be some grant money out there for either cock-and-bull story.

Phase Three: Take time off work. Stock up on lots of food. Drift in the gyre, dipping nets, hooks and pikepoles to power your seclusion. Do lots of fishing, grilling it on an electric outdoor grill.

Forget what people look like, if only for a while.

. . . the mechanic about to troubleshoot your vehicle says "Wow, I've never seen one of those before!"

The fingers are thoroughly crossed.

This just in from Bill Dube, builder of some pretty cool electric vehicles. He now has a new 1/4 mile drag speed record on his KillaCycle.

Here's the video.



By the way, the KillaCycle is all-electric, and the only non-Harley to ever participate in the All Harley Drag Races . . . which explains the very non-electric motor noises in the background.

Since the camera person didn't get the focus on the scoreboard, here's the end of his post:

Just as Scotty crossed the finish
line, the rear motor splashed plasma onto the track, creating an
awesome fireworks display. (You MUST see the video.)

The scoreboard lit up showing: 8.760 @ 145.44 mph