“Successful demonstration of the [Ovonic NiMH] battery’s capabilities have resulted in numerous commercial developments: … General Motors has entered into a joint venture with Ovonic…. Honda and Toyota have announced that their new electric vehicles will be introduced with NiMH batteries….”
– Business Council for Sustainable Energy (1996)
The new US/global reality of supply-over-demand oil economics spells big trouble for electric vehicles, which were not economic at formerly high gasoline and diesel prices at the pump. The latest setback will, once again, reveal government subsides and related crony business as an economic fail.
Batteries are a big problem, just as they were in a few years ago when competing petro prices were higher — and back in Thomas Edison’s day despite the best efforts of Henry Ford.
I recently ran across this study from November 1996 from the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, “Changing Tide: Tomorrow’s Clean Energy–Today.”…
Continue Reading“PV rooftop solar is a bad investment, and a bad use of taxpayer money. Google’s Project Sunroof is now helping to confirm this. Money wasted on a bad investment isn’t available for a good investment.”
Google has recently unveiled a project to help homeowners determine whether they should invest in PV rooftop solar to save money. Inadvertently, Project Sunroof is demonstrating that PV rooftop solar is uneconomic.
Project Sunroof is being rolled out across the United States, but is currently only available in a few cities.
The Project Sunroof website uses a few specific examples to demonstrate the viability of PV rooftop solar at those locations.
The book Nothing to Fear provides similar information by state, using a program supplied by an installer. Google’s evaluation’s are probably more accurate because the satellite images of rooftops used by Google can discern shading by trees or other obstacles.…
Continue ReadingPrevious posts at MasterResource have documented the lack of open intellectual inquiry at Resources for the Future (RFF) regarding the physical science of climate change and the case for government-led transformation of energy sources.
A third post yesterday documented RFF’s buy-in to resource pessimism and gapism (more government intervention in place of price and allocation decontrol) in the pivotal 1970s.
Trends can change. They should change. RFF as a scholarly organization should:
… Continue Reading1. Recognize the physical science of climate change as highly unsettled and thus open to contrary public policy positions.
Implication: Consider ‘global lukewarming” as a base case for economic analysis.
2. Recognize the benefits, the positive externalities, associated with the anthropogenic influence on climate.
Implication: Open a research program on the benefits of carbon dioxide emissions/concentrations, not only costs, as has been the case with RFF’s analytics to date.