Driving the Chevy Volt

I test-drove the Chevy Volt today. I've been following the story of this car and its technology on the gm-volt.com web site for about three years now, and am excited to have the opportunity to finally see it in person.

The Volt is an electric car with a gasoline engine. It's not like the gas/electric hybrids currently available; the gas engine exists to charge the battery, not to drive the car. It's more properly known as an Extended Range Electric Vehicle. The battery will drive the car for about 40 miles before the gas engine kicks on into "charge-sustaining mode." The electric engine is still driving the car; at some higher speeds, the rotations from the gas engine help drive the car a bit, but never on its own. With a full tank of gas, the total range of the car should be about 250 miles.

The car itself was pretty nice looking; it had that new-car appeal. Under the hood there are what look like individual modules; the gas engine is in there, as well as a computer system, and containers for various fluids (brake, coolant, wiper, etc.). The back is a hatch-back, with a small open space behind the back seats; I worry a bit that things might fly forward out of there if you stop suddenly. Lifting up the "floor" of the hatch space, you see access panels for the battery terminals, and space for a charger cord. Not until later did I realize I hadn't seen the spare tire; there may be one under the vehicle.

There are four bucket seats in the car; the two seats in back are separated by what I believe is part of the T-shaped battery. The back seats fold down, to allow more cargo space. Someone remarked "that's plenty of room for camping gear!" but I thought "only if you don't take your kids with you." This is not a cargo car; it'll move groceries around, and take you and a friend to the airport, but maybe not more.

Overall, this is a practical electric car to have. It will take you around town on the electric charge, and take you on a longer trip with the gasoline engine as an extender. If you have a family, your second car should have some hauling space, and probably seat at least five. Houston won't likely have any available until next year or so; I just hope the $7500 tax break is still around when I'm ready to buy my Volt.

Curbside recycling

Our neighborhood has recently improved its curbside recycling program. We used to have a small open green bucket to put our paper and other recyclables in; this bucked lived outside, and got put out every other week next to our giant, closed trash container. We would never remember which week was recycling, and we didn't want to keep the materials outside in the bucket to be waterlogged by rain. Therefore we rarely used the curbside recycling; I'd occasionally take our saved materials to the recycling center, but not on a regular basis.

Now we have a giant, closed container for recycling as well. It's just like our trash container, except it's bright green, and it has a handy sticker on the outside which describes what's appropriate to put in the container. It's so easy now to just toss recyclables in the container outside; much better than trying to manage them inside in the small space we can spare in the kitchen. Paper, plastic, cans, glass - it all goes in together, as soon as it's clean.

Our family tries not to have too much to recycle or dispose in the first place; the best policy is to eschew things with so much packaging. Nevertheless, we do generate trash, except now our trash container is rarely full. Instead, the recycling container has been almost full every two weeks, as we are more disciplined about putting in the newspapers, junk mail, cans, and even plastic clamshells from berry and tomato containers. I think this new program, with its bigger, closed containers and its automated pickup, must be drawing a lot of material out of the garbage stream. I'm looking forward to seeing the numbers when they're published.

Sarah Palin has a new job

When Sarah Palin recently announced her pending resignation as governor of Alaska part way through her first term, we wondered where we'd see her next. A clue came from an op-ed piece she recently wrote for the Washington Post (no link, look it up), where she argued vigorously against the current Waxman-Markley cap-and-trade proposal wending its way through Congress. Perhaps she's lining up a career as a pundit or lobbyist?

Painful as it is to say it, although I disagree with almost everything in her piece, I do concur with her overall conclusion the bill is a bad idea. Here are some of my observations about her writing:

1. Her first purpose seems to be to conflate energy with oil. It appears she'd even prefer to make that Alaskan crude but is forced to concede later down that coal and nuclear power are acceptable alternatives. She omits any mention of renewable sources of energy; apparently we can't power our economy with those.
2. She uses a provision of the bill, which offers funding to retrain displaced workers, to argue that the bill will have an overall negative effect on employment. However, retraining workers to land new jobs is a responsible response to a shift in energy production from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. Is the better alternative to leave the displaced employees out in the cold? I guess she's not one of those compassionate conservatives.
3. If electricity prices do go up as a result of this bill, that implies the current bill is the wrong approach, not that cap-and-trade in general is a bad idea. As far as I can tell, one fatal flaw in the current bill is the giveaway of a huge amount of emissions credits to polluters - a provision offered to them precisely to avoid price hikes in the consumer sector. If producers are going to spike prices even with free emissions credits, then Congress should consider going back to candidate Obama's original proposal, which was to strictly auction off all the credits and use the auction proceeds as a per-capita refund. That's not a perfect solution either but at least it mitigates the claim that "with cap-and-trade your bills will go up".

4. Palin throws in a reference to outsourcing our energy decisions to China and Russia without apparently developing the idea further in that piece. I wonder if that meme has propagated enough yet for her to just mention it to make sense.

   What she's referring to is the very real effect the current bill may have on the domestic/import mix of oil. Basically, if energy refining is more expensive here (because of emissions controls and costs) then refiners will shut down plants and import more finished goods; according to Bloomberg, they're already making this threat. It seems from the Congressional testimony of Joost Pauwelyn (a good read, and thanks to Paul Krugman for the reference) that the WTO would be fine with Congress responding by imposing an equalizing tariff at the border on imports from countries which don't impose the same taxes we do on carbon processing; however, the Obama administration has ruled that out for some reason, leading to this perverse potential effect and leaving the bill's authors open to the assertion that we'd be end up more dependent on foreign oil (in the short term, we hope) not less.