Fuel Economy Gold Standard

I've long been fascinated by the X-Prize approach of providing substantial (but not astronomical) incentives for key breakthroughs: private sub-orbital flight, lunar landers, and most relevantly for this blog, the Progressive Automotive X-Prize for a 100 mile-per-gallon car, which began in 2006. The latter competition has been won by a trio of extremely efficient cars with very different architectures, power sources, and appearances. Splitting a $10 million prize probably won't even come close to reimbursing these teams for the cost of developing their cars, but the associated visibility should lead to some valuable opportunities. In a larger sense, the competition has served another useful purpose, In addition to furthering the technology for continuing to improve the efficiency of mainstream automobiles, it provides a gold standard reference against which to gauge the lavish claims of fuel economy we've already begun to hear from the makers of various plug-in electric vehicles.

One of the main aspects that impressed me about the Automotive X-Prize was the determination of its founders to avoid the superficial approach of merely counting how many gallons of liquid fuel each competing car burned, in favor of a comprehensive energy consumption metric, MPGe, or miles per gallon equivalent, which is based on the gasoline-equivalent energy used, regardless of source or form. MPGe gave the X-Prize judges a fair and unbiased means of comparing cars running on gasoline, ethanol, hydrogen, electricity, or any other energy carrier, onboard or offboard.

Now, as long as our primary concern is reducing our dependence on imported oil, a simple view of gallons of gasoline consumed isn't all bad. Displacing gasoline with electricity or hydrogen produced from domestic energy sources provides important benefits for energy security and our balance of trade, even if it doesn't save much actual energy in the process. One of the main arguments for vehicle electrification is that we can generate electricity in many different ways, but we can only produce gasoline or effective liquid-fuel substitutes for it in a few ways. However, in the long run, total energy consumption matters, particularly because of its strong linkage with emissions. Running a Nissan Leaf or GM Volt on electricity generated from coal--as would be the case in large swaths of the country--certainly saves oil, but it doesn't do very much for the atmosphere or climate. That's where MPGe comes in, and that's why I was pleased that the EPA and Department of Transportation have proposed something similar in their new fuel economy stickers for cars.

So when you see an ad for a new plug-in car that claims that to get effectively 100, 200, or even 300 miles per gallon, you should take a careful look at it, both in terms of MPGe and the physical characteristics of the car in question. This is what a real 100 mpg 4-passenger car looks like: the 830 lb., one-cylinder engined Very Light Car of the Edison2 team--from Virginia, I might add. Or consider the 187 MPGe Wave II two-seater plug-in battery electric car from Li-ion Motors. Cars like this show what it takes to deliver that kind of efficiency on a comprehensive basis. If you're buying a plug-in production model in the next year or two, and it looks more like a normal passenger car than these do, with room for four or more passengers and equipped with all the usual accessories we've grown accustomed to, then you should recognize that while it might burn little or no fuel from petroleum, that's not the whole story.

Atmospheric X-Prize

I am a big fan of the X-Prize approach to stimulating new technology. A relatively modest sum can bring forth remarkable achievements, without the offerers of the prize needing to specify the pathways or methods, only the desired outcome. Two readers sent me links to reports of this announcement by Sir Richard Branson, establishing a $25 million prize for the first person or group to remove a billion tons of carbon from the air annually. I must have been distracted when I read it (twice!) to have missed the full significance of its wording. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol, which focuses on reducing emissions, Sir Richard's prize is reserved for a new technique for removing carbon that's already in the atmosphere, after having been emitted. This is a truly paradigm-breaking notion, and a very healthy sign of how far we've come on the subject of climate change.

As I've pointed out periodically, if climate change is as serious as all present indications suggest, then it's not going to be sufficient to reduce our emissions by a few percent--or merely to reduce their rate of growth, which seems about the most that our current approach might achieve. Averting the risks of the most serious consequences of climate change will require dramatic steps, and going beyond our focus on emissions to address the actual inventory of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere represents a significant new strategy. If successful, it would multiply the effectiveness of our efforts to reduce emissions, and put the goal of stabilizing or even reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 back into the realm of the possible.

Now, I'm not quite sure where the figure of a billion tons comes from. I've perused the Virgin Earth Challenge website and cannot find any reference to it. Instead, the goal is stated as "the net removal of significant volumes of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for at least 10 years without countervailing harmful effects (the “Removal Target”). " A billion tons of carbon per year would certainly fit that description, representing as it does about 0.13% of the total level of carbon in the atmosphere, or 14% of our current global greenhouse gas emissions. If neither of those figures sounds very impressive, consider that the net annual accumulation of carbon is on the order of about 5 billion tons. Cutting that by a fifth would be quite dramatic and meaningful, but by itself insufficient to solve the entire problem.

Kudos to Sir Richard for this great idea, and for putting his own money behind it. However, it doesn't let governments off the hook for figuring out how to reverse the current trends on greenhouse gas emissions, nor does it absolve us as individuals of the ultimate responsibility for the emissions associated with our lifestyles. And as Fareed Zakaria points out in Newsweek's current issue, we still need to tackle the unglamorous and controversial work of adaptation, because all of our efforts to reduce global warming could still fall short. Cracking this problem is going to require innovative work on may fronts, and we might need a few more clever X-Prize-type efforts along the way.