Here is a back-of-the envelope analysis of how much money the US could save by converting completely all vehicles from petroleum to wind and solar.

"One way to imagine this is that we taxpayers pay for the systems each year through taxes. Meanwhile, we pay less for our electricity and gasoline, without the charge for burning fuel. By 2024, our outlay is smaller than our savings, and we then start making money and have energy self-sufficiency, guaranteed steady energy prices, no energy blackmail from the M ...

This article is promising. I've seen a couple of references to this sort of thing, also in Japan. Still, it is a fairly substantial infrastructure investment, you'd need a lot of buses to pay it back. A single charging station like in Nanobus is much cheaper, and gives most of the benefit of this approach.

"The first public demonstration of the Online Electric Vehicle, or Olev, was, however, as much about the road on which it travelled as the prototype bus itself. Electric power strips have been buried 30cm (12in) under the surface and connected to the national grid. They provide electromagnetic power to the vehicle, wirelessly, charging an onboard battery and powering the bus’s electric motor. The power strips need to be embedded in only 20 per cent of the length of a road to keep the vehicle running."

Many peak oil predictions have been made, here's another one from the UK that puts it in the future a little bit. I personally think peak oil already hit us once in 2008 and was one of the main drivers of the economic "crisis". The big spike in prices heralded the fact that there was no production reserve cushion for high demand. Of course as production starts to actually decrease, prices will spike again, no matter what is the state of the economy.

Well, it's New Years Day 2010, time for a sum up of the RCH industry. 2009 was an incredible year for RCH. First, (and most importantly IMHO), I presented a paper on RCH at EVS-24 in Norway in May. Personal triumph, global non-starter. Looking around EVS-24, I saw lots of EVs, H2 vehicles, etc, but on the highway outside the convention, not a single one.

Second - ProTerra introduces their Rapid Charged Electric bus. Huge news. Nanobus now actually exists. I think they've shipped at least one, but I'll be visiting them in March to see for sure.

Third - Ebus introduces their RCH, with less fanfare than ProTerra (apparently the CEO of Proterra used to work for Ebus?). All in all, fantastic news all around. I especially like the Ebus battery pack. I'll be ...

While roaming around the Siemens site, this article I thought was very enlightening. I especially loved the photo of the first trolleybus! However this quote disturbed me:

"That's because power plants in the global electricity mix emit some 600 g of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour, which corresponds to 90 g for every kilometer driven by an electric car. That's a lot less than the 120 to 160 g of CO₂ emitted per kilometer by a typical mid-range automobile with a combustion engine"

This actually sucks. 90g is what the Polo Bluetec will emit. So why would anyone go electric at all? Well, hopefully the grid will get greener. Also, the displacement of emissions to outside the city is generally healthier.

A tiny bit ...

Siemens has an interesting article and some nice pictures about how they see fast charging evolving. I especially liked this bit about how a lot of fast chargers might destabilize the grid. This likely won't apply to a bus system, since there will be only 10-100 chargers in a city, not thousands.

"In addition to Siemens, the EDISON consortium includes the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and its Risø-DTU research center, as well as Denmark’s Dong Energy and Østkraft power utilities, the Eurisco research and development center, and IBM. In the EDISON project, various working groups are responsible for developing all the technologies needed for electromobility. Here, Siemens is mainly responsible for fast-charge and battery replacement systems. "Siemens’ portfolio already contains many componen ...