Is Honda’s new Prius-fighter the one for me?

Much to my surprise, at 110,000 miles, my 1997 Dodge Intrepid is still humming along. But winter is approaching. I need four new tires, the front windshield has a crack on the lower right passenger side and the brakes occasionally send back funereal tones.
It could be time for a new–or at last newer car–and I need advice on which way to go.

As one who wishes to limit his own personal contribution to the oil companies’ excess profits, the idea of driving a hybrid is appealing. One that’s caught my attention is the Insight (pictured above), which Honda unveiled last week at the 2008 Paris International Auto Show.

The C-Questor blog posted an interesting piece today on the five-door hatchback which will go on sale here in the spring at prices that may be $2,000 less than the Prius’s MSRP.

These days, I spend much more time in front of the computer screen than behind the wheel. Last year, I probably didn’t drive more than 7,000 miles. So I wonder how much gas I’d actually be saving with a hybrid and whether that savings in gas would offset the added cost of a hybrid vehicle.

What do you think? Does a new hybrid, like the Insight, make sense? With my limited driving needs, would buying a used hybrid be a better move? Maybe I should be looking for a standard car that gets better than average gas mileage?

Or, with the GM Volt and other all-electric vehicles only a year or so away from production, should I turn my 18-mpg Intrepid over to a good mechanic, make the necessary repairs, buy new tires, and hope to coax another year or more out of it?

Let us know by clicking on the tiny “comments” link below. Tell us what vehicle you’re driving (or would like to be driving) and why.

And thanks for your help!

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Timing so bad it’s downright nuclear

Talk about bad timing!

While outraged taxpayers across the nation on Monday watched Congress tie itself up in knots over the Bush Administration’s proposed $700 billion banking industry bailout, a giant energy company in Pennsylvania was asking Uncle Sam for a multi-million-dollar loan guarantee so it can build another nuclear plant on the Susquehanna River.
Hard to believe–and basically unreported in the mainstream media–but true.
PPL Corporation on Monday submitted a loan guarantee application to the U.S. Department of Energy. The company also is preparing an application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a combined license to build and operate Bell Bend. That’s the name PPL has given the new nuclear plant it proposes to build on a site near the company’s existing two-unit Susquehanna nuclear power facility.
In a news release reporting on its application, PPL fails to mention the size of the guarantee it is seeking. But you know the number can’t be a small one, because the company adds:

“Without federal loan guarantees companies like PPL will not be able to secure financing for the substantial cost of building new, advanced-design nuclear energy plants that will help this country achieve challenging limits on carbon dioxide emissions, as well as energy independence.”

PPL notes that, in authorizing the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress appropriated $18.5 billion for the federal loan guarantee program “to support projects that avoid greenhouse gas emissions and employ new technologies” and that Congress “intended that all costs of the program be paid by the industry at no cost to taxpayers.”
The last six days of near chaos in Congress raises the question, however, of whether any such appropriation can now be counted upon, as the nation’s spending priorities shift under the crushing burden of the anticipated banking bailout, a continuing economic slowdown and the war in Iraq for which $600 billion has been appropriated through FY 2008–and which could total as much as $1 trillion by the time it ends, according to Congressional estimates.
As ill-timed as the loan guarantee application might be, PPL probably had no choice as the second part of the loan guarantee application faces a Dec. 19 deadline.

Duke Energy also filed on Sep. 29 for a federal loan guarantee for the William States Lee III Nuclear Station which it proposes to build in Cherokee County, S.C.

What do you think of this development? Click on the comment link below and let us know.

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NJ wind-energy bidder plays ‘jobs’ card


One of the companies competing for state approval to install wind turbines off the coast of New Jersey today claimed it alone was in a position to deliver ‘green jobs’ to the state as part of the package.

Fishermen’s Energy said in a press release that it is “committed to build its construction, manufacturing, and assembly port facilities in New Jersey, likely in the economically hard hit port facilities of the South Jersey Port Corporation, bringing needed new jobs to New Jersey’s waterfront – including homeporting Fishermen’s Energy planned 340 foot special purpose construction vessel.”

The company says the two leading rivals for the New Jersey project–Bluewater Wind and Winergy Power–have committed to locate their manufacturing support facilities and the ‘green jobs’ that these facilities will create outside of New Jersey.

“Bluewater Wind and Babcock & Brown (its parent company) have pledged to the Governor of Delaware to locate their ports, staging areas, and jobs in Delaware, making Delaware their hub for construction and jobs for the entire Mid-Atlantic, including New Jersey,” says Fishermen’s Energy, while “Winergy has committed to base its corporate manufacturing headquarters in Rhode Island.”

Later this week, Governor Jon Corzine is expected to announce New Jersey’s choice to receive a $19 million grant to develop a 350 megawatt, ocean-wind pilot project. If the project demonstrates that wind energy can succeed without significant environment damage, the state likely will ramp up its demand for ocean-wind power to as much as 3,000 megawatts.

For more, see yesterday’s: DE, RI pick ocean wind firms, NJ’s on deck

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DE, RI pick ocean wind firms, NJ’s on deck

The states of Delaware and Rhode Island have selected companies to develop offshore wind farms to help each state reduce its energy dependence on foreign oil. Later this week, New Jersey is expected to dip its toe into the offshore wind waters.

We reported in June (‘First State’ in offshore wind energy, too? ) on the 25-year power contract in Delaware that will enable New Jersey-based Bluewater Wind to sell 200 megawatts of wind-generated electricity to Delmarva Power from a wind 600MW wind farm it plans to construct 11.5 miles off the coast of Rehoboth Beach.

On Thursday, Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri announced the selection of another Jersey-based firm, Deepwater Wind, (formerly Winergy), a Bluewater Wind competitor, to develop a privately financed project that would provide 1.3 million megawatt hours of offshore wind power per year.

At left, Governor Carcieri signs a contract with Christopher Brown, CEO of Deepwater Wind, whose company will construct a wind energy project off the coast of Rhode Island.
(The Providence Journal / Steve Szydlowski)

Deepwater Wind’s major investors are FirstWind, an on-shore wind project developer, D.E. Shaw & Co., a capital investment firm with experience in the energy sector, and Ospraie Management, an asset management firm with a focus on alternative energy markets.

One of the apparent reasons why Deepwater beat out rival Bluewater (and five other bidders) for the Rhode Island contract was its pledge to invest $1.5 billion in a regional facility that would manufacture support structures for the company’s wind towers and turbines. The facility is expected to create up to 800 direct jobs, with annual wages of $60 million.

Later this week, Governor Jon Corzine is expected to announce New Jersey’s choice to receive a $19 million grant to develop a 350 megawatt, ocean-wind pilot project. If the project demonstrates that wind energy can succeed without significant environment damage, the state likely will ramp up its demand for ocean-wind power to as much as 3,000 megawatts.

Bluewater Wind is one of five contestants for the state grant. Deepwater Wind also is in the competition, teamed up with New Jersey’s largest energy company, PSEG, in a partnership called Garden State Offshore Energy.

Also seeking the grant are:

– Environmental Technologies of New York, and
– Occidental Development & Equities of Bayonne

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Bear hunts: Expanding in NY, Frozen in NJ

In New Jersey, the possibility of a renewed bear hunt, like the fellow pictured on the left, is still up a tree.

The strength of the annual controversy surrounding the hunt belies the fact that New Jersey has held only two such events (in 2003 and 2005) over the past 38 years.

Those forays (328 bears were bagged over a single weekend in 2003 and 298 in 2005) caused such a fuss among animal advocate groups that the Department of Environmental Protection, encouraged by Democratic governor Jon Corzine, has blocked all attempts since then (including legal challenges from hunters) to repeat the event.

But calls for a renewed hunt are echoing again this year throughout rural areas in the state’s northwest where residents and police report increased numbers of “bear incidents,” including the bear who temporarily closed down a high school in Paramus and others who have wandered into back yards, strolled through the drive-through lane at McDonald’s and even entered homes in search of food.

The Pocono Record reports that New Jersey wildlife officials have killed 18 bears through Aug. 25, compared with 13 problem bears euthanized for the same period last year.

Reacting to public complaints about troublesome bears, Republican legislators from the heart of bruin country on July 20 issued a letter to state environmental officials demanding the release of population estimates they suggested are being suppressed for political reasons.

Expect the bear-hunt debate volume to rise

What’s likely to encourage New Jersey hunt supporters this year is news that the Department of Environmental Conservation in neighboring New York is expanding their bear hunt this year.

The DEC estimates the state’s bear population at 7,000, including 2,000 in the southern range that encompasses western New York. Hundreds of bears, according to the DEC, are now living outside what used to be the primary ranges of the Adirondacks, Allegheny and Catskill mountains.

The Black Bear Blog has already noted the difference a state can make in a September 19 post entitled: New York Does What New Jersey Won’t About Bear Problems.

We suspect it won’t be the last word on the subject until the bears all head off for hibernation this winter.

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Getting energy from ocean wind and waves


For anyone interested in alternative energy, we recommend two

new and very interesting articles.
In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, writer Mark Svenbold’s
Wind-Power Politics profiles Peter Mandelstam and his New Jersey-based BlueWater Wind, a tiny company that’s making giant strides in bringing ocean-based, wind power to the East Coast.
Svenbold describes Mandelstam as a “47-year-old native New Yorker who is capable of quoting Central European poets and oddball meteorological factoids with ease” and one who had “committed himself — and the tiny company he formed in 1999 — to building utility-scale wind-power plants offshore, a decision that, to many wind-industry observers, seemed to fly in the face of common sense.”

Indeed, BlueWater Wind has overcome formidable political and public opinion hurdles in winning its opportunity to build a wind farm off the coast of Delaware.

Part of the company’s success can be attributed to a fortuitous combination of soaring oil prices, a growing public awareness of the folly of yoking the nation’s economy to sometimes hostile foreign energy sources, and a rising public interest in alternative energy.

But it’s also due, in no short measure, to what Svenbold describes as the “Bluewater touch” — a “crisp, informative, ever-helpful, a supercharged, Eagle Scout attentiveness” that is part corporate style and part calculated public-relations approach. That style would pay off tremendously ” in the company’s barnstorming campaign of Delaware town meetings and radio appearances to capture what Mandelstam had reason to believe would be the first offshore-wind project in the country’s history. “

One of the reasons why Bluewater Wind’s off-shore wind park is being viewed as economically viable is because its turbines will be close enough to big power markets in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington to avoid construction of expensive and politically unpopular transmission lines.
The fact that about half the world population lives within 50 miles of coastline also may prove to be a selling point for “wave-power,” a technology that’s being explored by several alternative energy pioneers in Europe and America, including Ocean Power Technologies of Pennington, NJ.

In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, staffer Sandy Bauers writes about the company and its co-founder, George W. Taylor, a 74-year-old engineer who learned the power of waves as a young surfer growing up in Australia.

Above, George W. Taylor, founder and CEO of Ocean Power Technologies in Pennington, N.J., wants to moor buoys off the world’s coasts and pump electricity ashore via underwater cables. A test buoy is located five miles off the southern tip of Long Beach Island, N.J., where it makes enough power to run its onboard computer and send periodic progress reports. Photo credit: Clem Murray/Inquirer Staff Photographer

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