Gas Prices and Conservation

Hooray for Tracy Riehle! She is one of the first people in Wausau to go electric - in transportation. Teresa Mackin covered this story for Newsline yesterday and here is the video:

Good story Teresa! It is very relevant during these times of high gas prices. What Tracy Riehle has done is something I am planning as well - to drive an electric car in town. The type of car Tracy has is defined as a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV). It only travels as fast as 35 mph. Some of you who live out in the country or who commute a long way to work might be saying "this will never work for me". Don't be so sure. A large variety of electric cars are coming to market. I have talked about the very expensive Tesla and Lightning, but also about the cheaper Zap and conversion kits. One that I haven't mentioned is Th!nk. It is a Norwegian car company that plans to bring electric cars to the U.S. as soon as next year. Check out the website and you will find that this little beauty can travel 124 miles at speeds up to 62 mph. You can find NEVs for around $10,000 or less. The larger faster sedans will probably cost in the $20,000 to 40,000 range. Getting an electric car makes sense on so many different levels I can't list them all today, but if you are a regular reader of the blog you probably already know anyway. Electric cars are a better long term choice than biodiesel, hydrogen, hybrids, compressed air, and ethanol.

The main point is that GAS IS EXPENSIVE, and the price of gas IS NOT GOING DOWN ANYTIME SOON! Unbelievably, I still run into people who think the price of gas will go down, down to what it was 10 years ago - like a dollar a gallon. Wake up and smell the roses. The price of gas is more likely to hit $5 a gallon within the next year than drop down to $2.50. Doing gas protests or sitting around complaining are completely useless activities. Taxing oil companies will only make the price go higher and hurt american companies along the way. Tracy Riehle took matters into her own hands and now she is saving nearly $100 a week (nearly $5,000 per year!). I took matters into my own hands by buying a bicycle. It is about time more people did the same.

While some people would rather just sit around and complain or push for useless government tax schemes, many businesses are hard at work saving energy. Believe it or not, internet data centers are one of the biggest users of electricity in the U.S. Network companies are using software (and in some cases new hardware) to cutback on energy usage. Here are a couple of stories (story 1 story 2) about using simple power savings modes on servers to cut energy usage up to half. At the annual SID conference display and TV makers are focusing on green solutions to make their products more energy efficient. Here is some recent research at the University of Illinois showing some promise for using copper nanotubes in new displays. This could also dramatically cut the electricity demand of new big screen and small screen TVs. Smarter thermostats are also in the works.

In the United Arab Emirates they plan to turn an entire city into a zero emissions city. In order to help in this effort they are banning cars in the zero emmissions city. Only public transportation will be available, although "personal transportation pods" will also be used. I suppose it it easier in the UAE to accomplish such a mammoth undertaking because they certainly have a lot of sunshine for solar power.

If you had solar panels on your house, today would be a good day for collecting energy from the sun. High temps should reach 70 for the first time this May. Showers and thunderstorms will move through the area tonight and then cooler and drier weather will persist from Wednesday afternoon through Friday. There is still a chance of rain over the weekend, but it is starting to look like it might hold off until late Saturday so the weekend might not be a washout.

Meteorologist Justin Loew.