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It’s not the key to making renewables work

In his post on the potential of our current grid to support electric cars, John McGrath mentioned V2G in passing.

Electric cars (either hybrids or full EVs) have the potential to be a real-life silver bullet. Anyone who advocates for increased use of renewables is inevitably confronted with the problem of intermittency. With wind, the rule of thumb is that if grid energy supplied by wind grows to more than 25-30%, utilities need to spend prohibitive amounts on "spinning reserve" to even out supply.

Well, a nation driving plug-in hybrids makes for a spinning reserve of amazing proportions according to one estimate (PDF), the U.S. fleet would power the U.S. electrical grid seven times over.

What these estimates neglect is the capital costs of the batteries themselves. The assumption seems to be that since car owners have the batteries anyway, the economics can be calculated based on operating costs -- electricity and inconvenience.

Umbra on holiday gifts for young folk

Dear Umbra, I’ve read Grist’s gift guide, but I didn’t see very many ideas for youths and young children. On the other hand, I did like the idea of giving The Lorax, which was mentioned in one of your other responses. Do you have any other eco-friendly gift suggestions for my nieces and nephews for […]

Home-grown and filthy energy

Kill me. Just kill me.

Coal-to-liquids will emerge as a key player in a push by congressional Democrats next year for alternatives to foreign oil, two Washington energy analysts say in a report today.

But CTL technologies that draw transportation fuels from coal reserves are expensive and have a mixed environmental record, so they will need "additional and substantial government subsidies," say Christine Tezak and K. Whitney Stanco of the Stanford Washington Research Group.

That "mixed environmental record" is actually an unmitigated disaster. But hey, at least we won't be importing our environmental disaster from scary brown foreigners!

Say it with me, kids: Coal is the enemy of the human race.

An interview with Missouri farmer and ethanol co-op member Brian Miles

Cultivating change? Photo: iStockphoto Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, Brian Miles spends his days working the family farm. Unlike his forebears, however, he also sits on the board of Mid-Missouri Energy, a farmer-owned ethanol cooperative in Malta Bend, Mo. Grist talked to Miles about the present ethanol boom, the potential for an […]

A moment of silence

The white dolphin known as baiji, shy and nearly blind, dates back some 20 million years. Its disappearance is believed to be the first time in a half-century, since hunting killed off the Caribbean monk seal, that a large aquatic mammal has been driven to extinction.

Situation Normal, All Ducked Up

Feds won’t make livestock-identification plan mandatory Surprising exactly no one, a federal plan to track all U.S. livestock with ID tags remains controversial with farmers. Surprising some, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has given up on making it mandatory. Intended to trace disease and to combat — wait for it — agroterrorism, the National Animal […]

Terminal Killness

City officials’ reluctance may halt LNG terminal in Long Beach, Calif. The debate over a $700 million liquefied-natural-gas terminal in Long Beach, Calif., may be coming to an end. City officials have long been squeamish about the proposed facility due to its proximity to the urban center. “It’s a risk for accident and terrorist attack, […]

We’ll Be In the Fallout Shelter

Regional nuclear war could create catastrophic global cooling, say scientists Not fully convinced that a nuclear war would suck? Perhaps this will do the trick: Scientists are reviving the “nuclear winter” fears of the 1980s, portending that even a small, regional nuke kerfuffle could trigger a devastating global cooling. Advanced computer models show that thick […]

To y’all readers, that is

On Nov. 30, we published an interview with Travis Bradford, author of Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry and founder of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.

The interview was reprinted on Alternet, where it kicked up a vigorous, extended discussion. I asked Travis if he'd like to respond to some of the themes and comments there. His thoughts follow.

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I was delighted to see so much serious discussion of solar and other renewable energy sources follow my interview with David Roberts. Many of the questions and ideas readers raised are addressed in much greater detail in my book. But I'd like to take a few moments to address some specific issues.

First, should the solar revolution -- which has already happened in Japan and Germany, and is well underway in other European countries and in California -- be centralized or localized?

Watch out for scary chemicals in plastic toys for tots

Umbra offered up a number of clever gift ideas for kids in her latest column, focusing particularly on experiences rather than things. But if you still want to do some thing-giving for those wee ones, you might first want to check out "What's Toxic In Toyland," an article by Margot Roosevelt in Time.