Have you ever backed out of your garage, looking carefully over your shoulder to avoid running over the neighborhood children, dogs and cats, only to turn around an find a long extension cord still attached to the front of your car and to the wall socket at the far end of the garage? I have. It is embarrassing, even if no one is watching.

In Canada, this happens in the winter time, thousands of times a day across the country. The reason, of course, which may not be obvious to those of you fortunate enough to live in warmer climates, is that in winter, even in a garage (most are unheated) you need to plug in a heater that keeps your engine coolant from freezing, (they call it "anti-freeze" but it still freezes if it gets cold enough) and your oil from becoming so cold that it can't be circulated by the oil pump. Such heaters are called "block" heaters because they are designed to keep the coolant from freezing, expanding when it does freeze, and thus cracking the engine block. Actually these heaters are made in a variety of ways (or at least they used to be) including "dipstick" heaters that warmed the oil in the oil pan and because heat rises, thus provided enough warmth for the whole engine not to freeze.

Okay, I've talked enough about freezing to put a chill in the room even though the temperature outside today (March 18th, 2007) in Phoenix, Arizona is expected to reach nearly 100 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course). I have no nostalgia for the thousands of days of frostbite I experienced in the past, but I do hope that one day soon I will be able to make the similar mistake of leaving my car plugged in as I back out of my garage. I genuinely hope that the "Plugged-in Partners" of Austin (I mentioned them last week relative to having influenced Toyota to develop a plug-in option for some of their future cars) will be successful. However, while I am usually a man of infinite patience, I am also usually a man with no patience whatsoever, so here's a brief tale I heard in Las Vegas.

The story started as a failure, but turned out to be an amazing success. I was sitting here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center waiting for a conference to begin, when I overheard what I thought was a sad tale. It started out that a gentleman from the Seattle area wanted to convert a car from conventional internal combustion engine to a Prius-like hybrid. He found a company that said they could do this so he gave them his car for a week. They returned it to him in a non-working condition.

I won't try to name names, since this was strictly hearsay, but the story does get better. Frustrated by this experience he went out and found a real Prius, then he added some tricks of his own. He put a large battery in the trunk with an intelligent charger attached. He attached that battery to his Prius battery, with "instructions" to charge up the Prius battery as long as it was receiving power from the wall outlet. When the Prius' battery had reached a fully charged status, the charger was then to switch to charging the auxiliary battery in the trunk. When unplugged, it was to use the auxiliary battery as a power source to keep the Prius' battery fully charged as long as it had power to do so. The result was "significantly better" range. A simple solution that required no modifications to the Prius' electronics. Fairly ingenious. Now mind you, I am not suggesting that every fool can do this kind of modification to their electric hybrid themselves. This guy was, reportedly, a highly skilled fellow who also races electric powered dragsters. I rather imagine if you own a Prius and want to know more about how he did it, you could find out more about him on the internet. After all, how many operators of electric dragsters can there be in the Pacific Northwest?

I found an interesting video about refining "bio-oil" from algae, that is, more specifically, getting biodiesel from algae. I have put a page on my own web site to embed this Google video link in it, so I won't duplicate all of that in this column. Simply click this link to get to that biodiesel from algae page.

MORE NOTES from PowerGen Renewable Energy & Fuels

Neel Kashkari, a senior advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury, presented a slide show about the state of the energy industry to the conference in a closing "town hall" event. This PowerPoint presentation was introduced as the same as the one he showed President Bush to convince him that alternative energy was in need of additional support from this administration, and was thus a key element in influencing the President's budget proposals and his State of the Union address last month. He was the first in a series of "politicos" at this town hall meeting.

John Geesman, Commissioner of the California Energy Commission gave a rather stirring and popular speech that called for exports of biofuels. The CUC homepage, or rather, more specifically the /commission/index.html page gives one of the mandates of the commission as "supporting renewable energy", and he did. Linda Conlin, Vice Chair of the Export-Import Bank of the United States also spoke to encourage use of their credit facilities for both foreign buyers and domestic exporters. The California Public Utilies Commission was represented as were the Department of Energy, the US Department of Agriculture, and even the Nation Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

This last one was particularly interesting for a number of reasons, though not one of the "town hall" speakers this information came from one of the seminars I attended. First and foremost, in my mind anyway, was the fact that this was not all "rah-rah" optimism, it was a fairly detailed discussion on how the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab had been using B100 (that's un-blended, 100% biodiesel) in ships on the Great Lakes. They found, during the 2005 operating season that although #2 Diesel was going for about $2 a gallon, that they were paying just $1.75 or $1.80 for B100 biodiesel, and that it was, overall 17% cost savings for the year. (Hey, I didn't make up these numbers, so I don't know exactly how they were constituted, or why the math doesn't seem precise, but then I'm not exactly a PhD scientist or a weather prevaricator...ummm, I mean prognosticator, either.) Dennis Donahue, who gave the presentation, seemed to think that there was a market for lower grade biodiesel to compete with "bunker C" the traditional, dirty, and cheap fuel of large freighters. Although I am aware that some versions of biodiesel are, in fact, low energy content fuels, bunker C is actually rather energy dense, because, it is ... well, dense. So dense in fact that it usually requires heated storage and even more heating to be pumped to the boilers to produce steam to run the ship. As such, biodiesel, which also often has problems with extreme cold (or even just very cold) weather might indeed find a home from the point of view of "no special modifications" necessary.

John Rolikoff, of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), was at the same Town Hall as one of the invited speakers. The thrust of his remarks was that he is in the business of assuring access for energy producers to the national electric energy grid. That was, indeed reassuring. Local utilities are, it seems, mired in a model that reflects their protected status as monopolies. They have rather imperious attitudes toward us "little guys" from what I have seen. Regulations are heavily skewed in favor of making it difficult to get connected to the power grid. The equipment is expensive and the regulations deep enough to represent a danger to the forests of our nation (by way of the pulp and paper companies) were it not for the advances in electronic communications. Not only that, but the regulators are far more accommodating to upstarts than are the incumbent electricity providers. This is familiar territory. We have been fighting similar battles for decades with the incumbent telephone network providers to allow competitive DSL providers access to customers. While theoretically a lot of regulations have made this easier, the practical matter is that incumbent providers are masters at the foot dragging tactics in avoiding actually having to give access to competitors. I will keep you informed via this medium as to our own progress on our projects when they reach that stage, but as I said, the story being told by regulators at the PowerGen Renewable Energy & Fuels conference was at least friendly to newcomers.

That is the good news for this time. Next week I will try to remember to point you to some very interesting folks in Germany who are still in the early stages of expanding from proof of concept to scaling up to commercially viable projects. Still, their expertise and professionalism is impressive. For one thing they taught me that I have been tossing around the term "biodiesel" for any bio-sourced diesel, when in the USA, strictly speaking, the term biodiesel has been defined by the government as specifically being Fatty Acid Methyl Ester derived products that meet certain ASTM standards. Fortunately the EPA has clarified that although the term "biodiesel" has a specific definition, that other renewable source diesel shall be deemed, for most purposes to qualify for the same benefits, though it should be called, more properly, "non-ester renewable diesel". I have been impressed with them these German engineers. Stay tuned for next week.

love

Stafford "Doc" Williamson