Steve Bennen over at the Washington Monthly has some interesting comments on a story on the electrification of transportation by Jeffery Leonard, who is CEO of the Global Enviroment Fund. Steve's point about energy policy, especially as it relates to alternatives, finally coming to the front of the national debate with both candidates giving it lip service is heartening. But, Steve also highlighted a portion of Leonard's article which said that despite the good news of alternative energy policy getting attention on the national stage there is some bad news...
The bad news is that none of the current energy plans being debated in Washington or presented by the presidential campaigns adds up to sound long-term policy for dealing with the energy challenges facing the U.S. Most of the supposed grand solutions turn out to be half-baked schemes that pander to voters and vested interests. John McCain argues for more drilling in America. Barack Obama favors more subsidies for ethanol. Oilman T. Boone Pickens advocates retooling cars to run on compressed natural gas. These and many other big energy plans have at least one thing in common: they involve a multiyear, massive-spending, government initiative that will set America on the path toward displacing foreign oil with some kind of domestically produced liquid fuel. That may seem like a sensible idea, but in fact it merely postpones, and therefore makes more costly and wrenching, the energy transition that I -- and many other industry leaders I talk with -- believe will save America.
In the film The Graduate, Walter Brooks famously gives Dustin Hoffman a one-word piece of career advice: "Plastics." At the risk of sounding similarly glib, let me nevertheless suggest a one-word answer to our multifaceted energy problems: electrification. The basic idea is very simple. Over the next few decades, government policies should advance the aim of replacing oil and most other liquid fuels with electricity. It should also ensure that the way we generate electricity gets steadily greener and more efficient. Since about three-quarters of our oil goes into our cars, this means favoring policies that will encourage phasing out the internal combustion engine in favor of the electric engine -- a direction in which many automakers are already headed. Electrification as a rallying cry for American energy policy isn't perfect, but in my view it's the best and perhaps only way to get us to a clean and secure energy future.
More bad news for plug in transportation comes from Popular Mechanics recent article where they note Toyota representatives trying to put a damper on expectations for the plug in technology coming down the pike.
Toyota confirmed that its plug-in Prius is scheduled to go on sale as a 2010 model with an EV-only range of about 10 miles after testing on li-ion models begins with North American fleets in about a year. But amid conversations that favored compressed natural gas (CNG) as a more economical liquid fuel than ethanol and biodiesel, company executives and other alternative-energy experts made a concerted effort to bat back some of the excitement that PHEVs would dominate the market right away.
I notice that while Toyota want's to lower expectations of PHEV's dominating the market right away, they don't suggest that plug in's won't be the end game relative to personal and public transportation. I think that as consumers and voters, we need to put pressure on our representatives to make substantive debate on the electrification of transportation a priority in the next Congress and the next administration, regardless of who ends up being our next President.
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