Define Success

I can’t really take credit for this one – I was directed to the idea from the What If site, which was created by the genius behind the XKCD web comic – but as I followed up across the related sites a question popped up in my rather idiosyncratic thought process: When can you reasonably describe a crowdfunding exercise that brings in over $1.4 million as a failure? Just as important, though, is the counterpoint question: When can you reasonably describe a project that receives just 0.0000025% of the necessary funding (that’s one dollar for every 40,000,000 you actually need) as a success? Well, it depends on the how you define success – and on how big the project really is, I suppose…

If you haven’t seen any of the Solar Roadways video or text presentations you can find a good selection of them on You Tube, but the basic idea is to replace the asphalt and concrete surfaces of all of the roads (and highways and parking lots and so on) in America with solar panels. Since that’s somewhere around 29,000 square miles, we could conceivably generate three times our current total energy requirements just using current solar cell technologies, with more to come as the state of the art improves. There are a number of technical issues involved, which you can read about on the Jalopnik site here, but there are also some offsetting advantages, such as using the same roadway-mounted solar panels to house programmable LEDs, making the roads reconfigurable in real time. Unfortunately, when we look at the business side of the concept the whole thing gets murky with amazing speed…

Project estimates provided by the Extreme Tech website put the total cost of conversion for 29,000 square miles of roads at around $56 trillion USD – or about four times our current National Debt – using the cost figures provided by the Solar Roadways company’s own projections. And that doesn’t even consider the costs involved in developing the clear outer layer of the roadway – there isn’t currently any form of super-glass that can handle all of the operational requirements for such a substance. There are also issues like the proposed LED lane marker system costing more than the solar cells themselves, the cost of transmitting the generated energy to customers who can use it (which dwarfs the rest of the project), and operational concerns like cleaning the glass tiles (roadways get dirty a lot), replacing broken elements while traffic swirls around you at highway speeds, and hackers getting into the LED lane markers and configuring the roads into one giant death trap…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that there is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of widely dispersed solar collectors, assuming there is some economical and technically feasible way of connecting them to the power grid. For that matter, even if a continental-scale project isn’t possible, there’s no reason you couldn’t have single streets or individual parking lots built this way that can power their surrounding buildings. If creating a self-cleaning glass strong enough to stand up to truck traffic while still collecting sunlight isn’t feasible, then what about roof tiles made the same way? Or simple parking-space carports, which are common in the sunny parts of our country, that use the same technology to turn entire parking lots into giant solar arrays? Of course, that would require further research and development, since the current solar cells are still a bit too expensive for this sort of mass use. If only somebody were to come up with seed money for such a program – say, using crowdfunding…

It remains to be seen if the Solar Roadways people will get anywhere with their more advanced designs; as previously noted, they still need 40,000,000 times more money to complete the project. But between crowdfunding and Department of Transportation grants they now have around $2.2 million USD in research funds, which isn’t exactly small change. I don’t know if we will ever drive on continuous bands of solar collectors, but it’s possible that we might park under them, work under them, or live under them sometime soon. Even with a funding percentage of 0.0000025%, it’s hard to call that a failure…

The Ethics of Window Stickers

In the court cases we considered this week where Honda was being sued by various customers who had purchased hybrid Civic models, only to find that the cars didn’t quite live up to the promised miles per gallon, one of the most surprising facts to come up was that the company had never anticipated being sued at all, let alone by classes of thousands in Superior courts and clever individuals in Small Claims. It turns out that like most auto makers, Honda has just printed the EPA estimates for its car’s average performance on the window sticker without further comment. Since those ratings are sanctioned by the U.S. government, and since there is no law requiring any further elaboration, the company had just reasoned that they had no responsibility to offer anything more…

In the event, neither court saw things that way; it remains to be seen if future court decisions or appeals will concur with Honda’s position. But in reviewing the story, I thought it brought up an interesting question in ethics. The use of EPA ratings as a basis for comparison on car window stickers is accepted as the industry standard, and complies with the relevant Federal laws; most auto makers assume that this makes them bulletproof and that anyone who is harmed by the assumption that those estimates are correct will have to sue the EPA first. But even if that is correct, and even if the company is safe from legal actions (a supposition not supported by the facts of the case), there remains the question of what the company’s ethical responsibility was in this case…

On the one hand, the fact that the hybrid Civic does not actually get 50 miles to the gallon under many common operating conditions (e.g. running the air conditioner, driving in city traffic, playing the radio) could have a serious financial impact on the owner. While it is true that EPA estimates are intended only as a basis for comparison, and all purchasers need to be aware of disclaimers like “your mileage may vary), the fact that the company knew there were major discrepancies (40% less than the window sticker under some conditions) and made no effort to disclose them sounds questionable. This is especially true in cases where the withheld information would have affected the purchasing decision. Since there were many alternative vehicles that could out-perform the hybrid Civic under those conditions (including, we should note, the regular non-hybrid Civic), the withholding of that information could be seen as fraud…

On the other hand, the EPA itself cautions users that its performance numbers are not intended to be absolute measures of any car’s gas efficiency, and should only be used for comparison. If Honda had printed lower fuel efficiency numbers on its window stickers, or even added warnings about efficiency under specific conditions, they would have been accepting a massive disadvantage in marketing their product versus the competition. The company has a responsibility to its stockholders (to make money), to its employees (to maintain their jobs) and even to its vendors and creditors (to maintain their businesses) – and there is no indication that printing such information would help the consumer anyway. All of the other auto makers could continue using the EPA estimate numbers, even if those numbers were just as bad as the ones on the Civic hybrid, and go on making money at their customers’ expense…

So the question appears to be, does the company’s ethical responsibility to provide complete and correct product information to potential buyers outweigh its responsibility to its stockholders to make a profit, or its responsibility to its other stakeholders to stay in business? Especially if doing so would bankrupt the company and damage all of the people who depend on it without giving any benefit to potential buyers, who would probably still be getting incorrect information from all of the surviving car companies? I’m sure that we all agree that honesty is the best policy, and that every company has a duty to provide the most accurate consumer information possible, but what happens when fulfilling that duty will destroy the company and all of the people associated with it and do no good whatsoever?

It’s worth thinking about…

If This Goes On…

Every once in a while you run across a story about an event that has almost no importance on its own – for example, a bill passing in the U.S. Senate that has no hope of passing in the House, and even less chance of being signed by the President – which is, nevertheless, a landmark occurrence in terms of its potential. Reporters and publishers love stories like these, because if you break them first, and especially if the competition misses them or fails to recognize their importance, you could gain the exclusive rights to the biggest news item of the year. Most of the time, however, all you get is the premiere coverage of a non-event. One such story hit this week when a bipartisan majority of the Senate voted to end the Federal subsidies for ethanol…

You can pick up the Wall Street Journal coverage of the story if you want to, but the basic idea is that 33 Republicans broke ranks to join 40 of their Democratic counterparts in voting to end the subsidy for produces of ethanol for use as a motor fuel. For more than 30 years, ethanol has been at the heart of the “renewable energy” movement – or, at least, the parts of it that involve huge companies increasing their profits by taking government funding to produce something for which there was already a high demand. But the problem with ethanol, either as an additive for gasoline or as the major component of the “E85” motor fuel you see sometimes here in the Midwest, is that so far no one has been able to produce the equivalent of a gallon of gasoline without spending more than the equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to make the ethanol – and the ratio is occasionally much higher than that. Far from saving natural resources, ethanol is actually taking more petroleum to make than it saves, and that doesn’t even count the petroleum-based fertilizers that are used to grown the corn from which the ethanol is made…

Even worse, in my opinion, is the fact that the increasing demand for corn has created massive increases in food prices in many communities that rely on corn for food – and the fact that, despite these problems, the Federal government is also still providing subsidies for corn production and paying some farmers not to grow more corn, in addition to the ethanol subsidy. Providing subsidies to gasoline producers and agribusiness corporations that are already obscenely rich is bad enough, but when doing so causes financial hardship (and occasionally famine) in poor populations and does nothing to provide the affordable motor fuel it was supposed to provide in the first place, someone really does need to call shenanigans. This is jus the first time anyone in Washington has actually done so…

For the moment, of course, it’s still a non-issue. The bill would have to get through the House of Representatives, which is apparently gearing up to protest that since legislation is supposed to start in the House, and this measure didn’t, the whole thing has to be thrown out and start over. The repeal would also have to be signed by the President, which is not likely to happen this close to the 2012 election, when the support of corn-producing states might be critical. And even if some miracle were to occur, this would still be only one set of government spending that drains our resources and does absolutely nothing for who doesn’t own stock in oil companies or agribusiness corporations; a cut of only $6 billion in a multi-trillion dollar deficit. But the system as it stands is broken; the reform politicians are not wrong when they say that the United States must embrace radical change, and soon, or go down in bankruptcy. And if legislative reform ever does occur, then it’s just possible that we saw the first stages of it this week, in a meaningless non-story in the back pages of the newspaper…

Stay tuned, folks. This could get interesting…

It’s a Gas

There’s been a lot of chatter on the Internet – and over the airwaves – for the past few days, as various pundits have be chiming in on the new version of the “Pickens Plan” in which T. Boone Pickens appears to be backing off of his previous stand on wind power (he spent $80 million of his own money pushing it in television ads and online) and is now concentrating on natural gas to decrease America’s dependence on imported oil. Environmentalists appear to be gnashing about how disappointing it is that Mr. Pickens is backing another fossil fuel over clean, renewable wind power, while anti-business types and anyone else who hates billionaires who like to throw their weight around is howling about how Mr. Pickens owns several of the companies that would build the infrastructure for a natural-gas-based transportation system, and how all of this is just another attempt to line his pockets. As a life-long environmentalist and business pragmatist, I have to ask, why does anyone care?

You can check out the story on MSNBC.com here if you want to, but I think we should note two facts about the situation before reaching any conclusions. One is that Mr. Pickens isn’t abandoning wind power; he’s relocating the wind farm he was going to build in the Texas Panhandle to Canada, where local utilities have a mandate from the national government to purchase electricity from renewable sources (like wind farms). It’s hard luck on the small town in Texas where the wind farm was going to be, but the local infrastructure couldn’t have handled (or transmitted) the output from the wind farm even if it did get built, and it’s really hard to blame anyone for taking their product to a market that will pay more for it. The second is that Mr. Pickens isn’t trying to conceal his interest in natural gas or his financial stake in getting the infrastructure in place; he’s just touting it as an alternative to imported oil – which, in fairness, it is…

In addition, it’s probably worth noting that the wind turbine industry seems to be doing just fine, and that if giant wind farms are built in Canada using American-made equipment, there should still be a major lift to our economy. But the real point here is that a businessman with an interest in natural gas infrastructure campaigning in favor of natural gas is in no way different from the petroleum industry commercials I called to your attention earlier this year, which claimed that this country could fulfill all of its own energy needs with the resources found within our boarders. If we agree that an improved foreign trade ratio and a decreased dependence on several countries that actively hate us for oil is a good thing then these new natural gas-powered vehicle programs are probably worth the effort, and if these initiatives turn out to be cheaper or more practical than wind power (at least in the short run), then we all stand to benefit. The real question is what are we going to do when the world starts running out of natural gas?

It’s possible that the new energy policy that will come out of Washington in the next two (or four) years will include increased support for alternative sources of energy. And if we can buy enough time to develop those new sources, build the infrastructure to sustain them, and educate our people on how to use them by using the respite that the Pickens plan could quite possibly gain for us, then I don’t see why anybody should complain if the guy who had enough foresight to figure out which way the bandwagon was rolling and get in front of it makes another fortune or two in the process…

Range Anxiety

I haven’t really be following the growing competition in hybrid and plug-in hybrid car systems, since at the moment I don’t need a new car, and even if I did I’m a graduate student, which means no one is going to give me a car loan anyway. I believe that there is a great deal of potential in this product category, especially if some of the new technologies to provide electricity generation at home pan out. Imagine having a bank of solar cells on the roof of your garage to charge up your car, which you then use to commute. Once you’ve paid for the basic systems (possibly including a battery in the garage to store energy gathered when you’re not home), your fuel costs would be effectively zero for however long the car lasted, and your carbon footprint would be effectively zero also. But for the moment, hybrids are expensive, and the plug-in hybrids are even more so, while the pure electric vehicles have issues of their own…

Consider the case of the new Nissan Leaf, as profiled by The New York Times website. The Leaf is a pure electric vehicle, which means it does not have a gasoline motor and has no emissions whatsoever. There’s some debate as to how much it would actually cost to operate, but the EPA lists the Leaf’s annual energy costs as being about $561, which is less than the Toyota Prius and less than one-third what it would cost to buy gas for a conventional mid-sized car. Unfortunately, the EPA also lists the Leaf’s range as being just 73 miles – much less than the 100 claimed by Nissan, and significantly worse than the Prius (which can, theoretically, reach 600 miles on a full tank under optimal conditions). Even more to the point, recharging stations can be hard to come by on the open road, which means that you probably shouldn’t ever go more than 35 miles from home unless you know ahead of time where you can plug in the car…

This particular worry is known as “range anxiety” to the industry writers, and it has always been a major drawback to electric cars. If you use them exclusively for short trips – such as a short-range commute like mine, or running errands around a small town – they’re reasonably effective, but once you consider a road trip to anywhere you start having problems. In my case, even the run to Detroit to see a baseball game is out of range, and going to Ann Arbor would be impossible unless there was a public charging station I could use there – assuming I’d be there long enough for the Leaf’s battery to charge back up. This limits the utility, and therefore the desirability, of the product, and removes a significant number of customers from the potential market for this vehicle, and who’s even mentioned long-term issues like figuring out how to dispose of the car’s battery yet?

Of course, similar objections apply to bio-fuels, ethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and even “clean” diesel engines (you can’t get low-sulfur diesel fuel in many larger cities), while hybrid vehicles (including the so-called “plug-in hybrids”) have the drawback of still using gasoline for fuel, albeit in smaller quantities. It’s possible that one of the various technological fixes, such as a network of public charging stations, recharging facilities at existing gas stations, larger storage cells for electric car batteries, or portable solar power panels will solve the problem, and in a few years you’ll see pure electric cars on the road the way we’re starting to see hybrids. On the other hand, it’s possible that some other new development is coming, and all of these alternative power sources will someday seem as quaint as the steam-powered cars of the late 19th Century…

I’m just grateful that for the moment, at least, my commute is only eight minutes each way…

Was That A Goat?

What do brush clearance in Southern California and electrical energy generation in Coastal New Jersey have in common? Well, other than appearing in this blog post together, they're also examples of controversial attempts by local government to "go green" -- that is, to promote ecologically responsible operating strategies. The amazing part, at least from where I'm sitting, is that either of these things is actually controversial. I suppose we should keep in mind that nothing is simple when it really is happening in your metaphorical back yard...

First, let's consider the New Jersey wind farm proposal. We've been hearing a lot about wind farms, or large wind-turbine arrays, since the T. Boone Pickens ads started running earlier this year. It's an appealing idea; harnessing the power of the wind to generate absolutely clean energy in a completely renewable manner. As wind turbines become more common the price for building one (and for the equipment that makes it work) is coming down, and the break even point is getting closer and closer. With the relatively high cost of fossil fuels, the idea of a power plant that you don't have to buy fuel for -- ever! -- is only going to become more and more popular as we go on. In fact, the same market forces will probably bring solar power plants online before much longer, as well...

So why is this controversial? In a word, NIMBY. Alright; technically that's an acronym that stands for Not In My Back Yard, and not really a word. But it's an accurate description of the reaction from the resort communities along the New Jersey coastline, all of which are convinced that they will lose tens of millions of dollars each year if there are a bunch of giant windmills anchored into the sea bed three miles offshore. The commercial fishing industry isn't happy about it, either, but it's mainly the resort operators who think the windmills will be an eyesore who are screaming...

I'm not sure that a bunch of tall, white wind turbine towers three miles away constitutes an eyesore, but then I rather enjoy watching windmills spin. In any case, there are conflicting reports of how much actual business would be lost because of the windmills, but most of the experts agree that it would be in the tens or hundreds of thousands, not the tens or hundreds of millions, and only for a few years until everybody concerned calmed down and forget that those white things on the horizon are windmills. The experts also agree that this would remove over 400,000 TONS of particulate from the air over New Jersey each year...

I know that Los Angeles would give it's (metaphorical) eye teeth for that kind of per capital smog reduction, so let's shift over to our other story of the week: the City of Los Angeles is employing a flock of about 100 goats to clear the brush off of Angel's Knob, a hill adjacent to the famous "Angel's Flight" tramway. This is saving the city about $4,000 over employing human workers with gasoline-powered weed whackers and chainsaws and such. It's also saving gasoline, noise, and air pollution, all of which my birth city already has quite enough of. So why is it controversial? Well, apparently the goats smell bad -- and this project is only creating work for a single goatherd for a few weeks, not for a dozen or so laborers for the rest of the year...

Some days, you just can't win, can you?