Taxis of the Future Soon to Hit New York Streets

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has announced the three finalists for the vehicle they will choose to replace New York's aging taxi fleet. The winning cab will replace a large chunk of over 13,000 cabs that traverse the city. Whichever design is chosen will have a major impact on which green fleet technologies get adopted - New York has the largest taxi market in the US - and which don't.

These are the criteria that will determine the winning bid:

• Meets highest safety standards
• Superior passenger experience
• Superior driver comfort and amenities
• Appropriate purchase price and ongoing maintenance and repair costs
• Smaller environmental footprint (lower emissions and improved fuel economy)
• Smaller physical footprint (with more usable interior room)
• Compliance with appropriate Americans with Disabilities Act requirements
• Iconic design that will identify the new taxi with New York City

It will be especially interesting to see how the winning cab stacks up, in terms of fuel efficiency, with the city's current crop of hybrid-electric cabs, or Chicago's CNG (compressed natural gas) cabs that I wrote about here. This is to say nothing of San Francisco's Japanese-made all-electric cabs that received a huge federal grant earlier this year. 

Here are the finalists:

Turkish automaker Karsan's entry, the only cab that is wheelchair-accessible

Ford Transit Connect Taxi

Nissan's finalist


Via: Planetizen

Feds Give $184 Million to Green Vehicle Development

Another reason to thank the Obama Administration: there is more money available for green vehicle research than there has been in recent memory.

The Department of Energy is slated to dole out $184 million for green vehicle research, with specific focus in the areas of advanced materials, combustion research, hybrid electric systems, fleet efficiency, and fuels technology.

This announcement comes on the heels of the US release of the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf, two models that mark the first mass wave of commercially viable electric cars in the American market.

The deadline for proposals is Februrary 28, 2011, so there's still time to get your ideas into the running for federal cash!

For more info, check out the DOE's Vehicle Technologies Program, which is administering the grants.

Institutional Car-Sharing Takes Off!

What do the New York City Dept. of Transportation and the BMW headquarters have in common?

Both are on the cutting edge of institutions that use car-sharing, in which drivers reserve a shared fleet of vehicles for a flat administrative fee, to save both budget $ and greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Car-sharing differs from traditional rental car agencies and carpooling in several ways:

• Carsharing is not limited by office hours
• Reservation, pickup, and return is all self-service
• Vehicles can be rented by the minute, by the hour, as well as by the day
• Users are members and have been pre-approved to drive (background driving checks have been performed and a payment mechanism has been established)
• Vehicle locations are distributed throughout the service area, and often located for access by public transport.
• Insurance and fuel costs are included in the rates.
• Vehicles are not serviced (cleaning fueling) after each use, although certain programs such as Car2Go continuously clean and fuel their fleet

In short, car-sharing is a low-cost, low-maintenance, and low-emissions of way of getting access to cars to people only when they need it. In most cases, car-sharing has thrived in dense urban areas where access to walking, transit, and biking is widespread. For urban residents who need just the occasional one-off car trip, there is a huge cost-savings versus car ownership and the high insurance, maintenance, and purchase cost it entails.

In the US, the most successful car-sharing company has been ZipCar, which claims to remove 15-20 personal vehicles from the roads for every car-sharing vehicle it puts out and reduce an average of 5,500 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for the average user. 

While individual drivers are the fuel that powers companies like ZipCar, institutions with larger user bases and even greater potential cost savings have started to catch on. This change from personal to institutional use could be the catalyst for ZipCar to become an economic engine in its own right, with a political influence to rival a Ford or a GM.

According to GOOD, New York City's Dept. of Transportation is beginning to replace its former in-house fleet with car-sharing to cut costs in the wake of the city's budget problems. About 300 department employees will share access to 25 ZipCars for work-related trips, saving the department $500,000 annually. Nearly all of the Manhattan-based cars will be Toyota Priuses. 

New York will join Washington DC and Philadelphia, where this car-sharing program has already been successful. The project will likely spread to other NYC municipal departments, further cementing the city's newfound green reputation. Mayor Bloomberg, you're all right!

According to Inhabitat, BMW is implementing a similar car-sharing program at its own headquarters in Munich, Germany. Cars will be available to all BMW employees and the general public at costs ranging from $22-45 per hour, which is not as expensive as it sounds, considering some of the available models run $100,000. If all goes well, the program could expand to all of BMW's facilities across Europe. A car-sharing platform that can rent out ANY model of Beamer any time, day or night? I could sign up for that.

What are the wider implications of institutional car-sharing? What we have long known as "the company car" may be soon obsolete, replaced with a more efficient, publicly available, and sustainable alternative.

Toyota's New Prius Hybrid Minivan Adds Green Cachet to the Soccer Mom Demographic

Capitalizing on the wild popularity of its Prius model in the US, Toyota has announced its latest model: the Prius minivan.

Using a lithium-ion battery and capable of seating up to 7 people, this model will likely solidify Toyota's dominance in the American green vehicle market. According to Autoblog and Inhabitat, Toyota has plans over the next several years to develop up to 8 new hybrid models, include a coupe, of which several will likely carry the Prius name.

Via: Inhabitat

Promising New Research on Cellulosic Ethanol

Cellulosic ethanol is one of the most promising developments in the bio-fuel arena that large fleets have the potential to cultivate. Unlike other bio-fuels, such as corn or soy-based ethanol, which according to a recent EPA report may in fact create larger carbon footprints than conventional petroleum gasoline, cellulosic ethanol has the potential to yield up to 200% more biodiesel oil than soy-based alternatives. One of the least-developed bio-fuels, cellulosic ethanol is derived from algae in a process that extracts biodiesel from the fats in the algae material. See the diagram below for a more detailed explanation of the extraction process:

This makes cellulosic ethanol one of the most carbon-efficient fuel options on the market apart from the more unlikely hydrogen fuel-cell options. According to Evergreen Fleets, cellulosic ethanol represents an 85% reduction in net carbon emissions per gallon than conventional petroleum gasoline. Unfortunately, the algae-growing operations necessary to produce commercially viable quantities of cellulosic ethanol have not been established to a sufficient scale for fleets to purchase large amounts of this new fuel.

Current research at Sandia National Laboraties (begun in 2007) has focused on breeding the optimal strains of algae that have the highest fat ratios. According to Ali Kriscenski at Inhabitat, "the biggest challenge is to make algae biocrude within a fraction of the time that nature’s biomass decomposition occurs and to do it economically, for less than $60 a barrel."

Most university research has focused on creating apparatuses that will do exactly that: create a pressure-cooker environment to extract fats from the algae and convert it to biodiesel in an economical timeframe.

One such project at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, titled "BioGrow", uses old computer parts to create such a vessel for algae production. Using an Apple G4 CPU tower, PVC pipes, acrylic panels, an Apple iMac CRT, and high density foam for insulation, graduate students modified the old computer to allow the iMac CRT to turn on different light spectrums and to adjust the temperature. The makeshift tank contains a water pump that aerates the algae for a faster energy conversion process. The byproducts can be used for feedstock, fertilizer and high-end pharmaceuticals because algae is so rich in protein and nutrients. In addition, this method helps alleviate the problem of electronic waste, which often leach toxic heavy metals into the soil and groundwater when they end up in landfills.

Another group of scientists at Stanford University attempted a slightly different method by inserting electrodes directly into algae pools, attempting to intercept the electron flow that occurs during the natural process of photosynthesis. This method is a type of photosynthetic electrolysis that produces no emissions other than oxygen, distinguishing it from the more mainstream production method of cellulosic ethanol. However, this experiment was not able to produce enough energy per algae cell to be commercially viable for mass production.

At the University of Michigan, researchers have also been experimenting with a pressure-cooker apparatus that will reduce the time and money needed to convert algae into biodiesel. According to Sarah Parsons (also of Inhabitat),

"The pressure cooker works by heating microalgae up to about 300 degrees, forming an algae soup. The high temperatures combined with the pressure breaks the plants down, releasing the native oil and causing proteins and carbohydrates to decompose, adding to the fuel yield. Cooking the “soup” for 30 minutes to an hour yields a crude bio-oil, which can then be converted to fuel."

This process has the advantage of eliminating the need for high-oil content strains of algae, allowing microscopic and less-oily species of algae to be used and removing the need for drying out the algae outdoors. An indoor production mechanism of cellulosic ethanol, rather than drying out algae in vast outdoor pools, has the potential to be widely cultivated, assuming reasonable installation costs, even by individual fleets themselves.

So what does the future look like for cellulosic ethanol? Sapphire Energy, a San Diego-based energy startup, has pioneered the first cellulosic ethanol-powered vehicle, the aptly-named Algaeus.

Claiming to reach fuel efficiencies of 150 miles per gallon on a fuel blend of 5% cellulosic ethanol, the company outfitted a plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius to run across the country on 25 gallons alone! The possible fuel economies of future cellulosic ethanol vehicles is staggering if you imagine how efficient the models would be if, instead of a 5% blend, an E85 or B40 blend were produced, as has already been manufactured for corn and soy-based biodiesel.






Via: Inhabitat, Discovery News

Chicago to Follow NYC in Embracing "Green" Practices for Taxi Cabs

The oldest and largest cab fleet in North America, Yellow Cab Chicago, has recently announced a 10-year contract with Clean Energy Fuels to provide two compressed natural gas (CNG) filling stations in the city to power its taxi cabs. These filling stations will also be available to the public. 


Chicago is not the first American city to use CNG taxi cabs, but it is by far the largest and most influential to do so. The timing of this partnership comes as a result of a $1.5 million dollar grant package from the City of Chicago and the US Department of Energy (through the Clean Cities Coalition program). 


The City of Chicago is convinced that the CNG taxi cab program will both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save cab operators money, according to a story posted to Inhabitat:

CNG isn’t a zero emission technology, but according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it emits 80 percent fewer ozone precursors and over 95 percent fewer particulates than conventional gasoline-powered vehicles. In addition to being cleaner, compressed natural gas is also 30 to 40 percent cheaper than gasoline or diesel on a mileage basis.

Although these estimates of emissions and cost reductions may be accurate, it is important to analyze new investments in alternative fuel technology from a life cycle analysis perspective. In short, this new CNG taxi cab partnership should be assessed based on whether its total aggregate emissions from every stage of its operations - construction of the filling stations, station maintenance, fuel production, procurement, and logistics, purchase of new CNG-compatible cabs, and the increased distances cabs must travel to fuel up - constitute a significant reduction from conventional petroleum fuel emissions. The City of Seattle recently suspended its own 1992 experiment with CNG vehicles for this very reason: the predicted emissions reductions did not materialize when the life cycle costs were factored in.