The logic is that 100% of the energy available at a heating element becomes heat. The amount of energy lost to get that heat out of the heating element from the energy source is hard to quantify.

Electrical energy begins as a fuel source or renewable, transformed into heat, then motion or converted (solar cells) and is pushed though wires. The efficiency rapidly deteriorates.

I was looking at the specs of a 1997 all electric Chevy S-10. The system efficiency is 73%.

Electrical energy is converted to chemical storage in batteries and then converted back to the motor. Some electric vehicle motors are liquid cooled. This is because the heat generated in the motor must be carried away and that is energy not going to the wheels.

I came across a conventional thermal electricity production efficiency table for European power plants from 1990-2004 (ims.eionet.europa.eu) The average efficiency was 38%.

Think of your home heating system that is converting heat from fuel (running at 60%-95% efficiency), only you have to heat that water to high temperature steam and push a turbine with it loosing efficiency along the way.

Transmission and distribution losses of electricity in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 (climatetechnology.gov)

My fat cat is more efficient at gathering sunlight than a thin cat. She is 100% efficient at annoying me to get out on the deck for energy capture.

None of this is really scientific, but if you started with 38% efficiency from the power plant then subtract 7.2% from transmission and distribution, then plug it into a vehicle that is 73% efficient, there isn't much of the original energy of the raw fuel to move the vehicle.

To be fair, the efficiency of a gasoline powered vehicle is about 12%, Much of the energy of gasoline is lost in heat and friction, plus we can't forget the energy exerted to refine the fuel.

The value of an electric vehicle is more determined by the energy source.

If you live in Quebec, where over 90% of your energy is produced by hydro or if you are fueled by a solar grid, inefficiency is irrelevant.

Sunshine and flowing water will release their energy regardless of whether we capture it, waste is irrelevant unless you are trying to catch more.

The efficiency (and value) of electric cars should be graded by how well we use renewable resources before electrical energy ever reaches the vehicle, otherwise we are just wasting fossil fuel by converting, transmitting and storing it's energy.

Jay Crist, of Manchester Township, let me drive the 73 year old Rutter's electric stand & drive he restored. The "Gasoline - Electric" brass logo catches your attention.

It has a fluidly like I would assume the large locomotives feel that use the same technology.

The truck was recently featured at the York Fair.

Crist said they were popular in areas where there were steep hills. The torque of an electric motor and not grinding away a clutch were a benefit.

It doesn't have batteries or computerized electrical controllers, just a simple gasoline motor with a generator attached that drives a motor on the differential.

Very few moving parts.

It wasn't designed to be green, but rather just innovative and used the resources of a company that built generators.

Bold stuff for a company surviving at the end of the depression.

Reason:

• As the economy revives transportation increases.


• Trains are more efficient than trucks and that efficiency climbs as fuel price climbs

It's 19th century green.

Three generations of a York family have gone to the polls as soon as they can vote.

Eula Ritter, age 69, Daniel Glover, age 48, and Keyon Davis, age 6, were volunteering at Shiloh Baptist Church on Election Day in York.

Davis, who can't vote yet, goes into the booth with his grandmother.

Fisker Automotive is buying an old GM factory in Delaware and it will employ 2,000 workers plus supplier jobs. The family-oriented, plug-in hybrid sedan will sell for $39K after a tax credit which could be $7,500?

The catch of a tax credit is that you have to float the amount until the tax check comes. So really you are buying (borrowing for with interest) a $45K family sedan and getting a refund later.

Funding for the deal will come from a conditional loan of $528.7 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.

That's taxpayer money going into a technology laden, hardware heavy vehicle that will compete with the other hybrids with proven track records that weren't subsidized.

If it's a plug-in hybrid then it will compete with the Chevy (vaporware) Volt which will sell in the $40K range and also pull more from the electrical grid than deserts in the Middle East.

Reality check.

People who pay taxes in this country are competing with India and China in a global economy. We are competing with people who ride scooters to work and exist on a much lower standard of living. We haven't gotten this concept yet, but it's evident in the slow job growth and eroding standard of living for the average US worker.

We need to be lean and create lean ideas for conserving resources, not convoluted tax programs for high tech limited production luxury cars.

Give me algae gasoline, give me clean diesel, give me a plug-in hybrid car if I live in Quebec where 90+% of the electric is generated by hydro.

Just give me some simple energy solutions for my tax dollar that will look ahead 30 years.

The biggest problem with producing ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soy is that from the start you have a crop that takes all season to grow and then places a demand on the food stream. It generally takes more energy to produce these fuels than is extracted. Switchgrass, when used to make ethanol, still takes a season to grow.

A promising future:

• Algae grows very quickly (doubling overnight) and can be cultivated in places where crops won't grow.


• It is not a food crop that is currently a traded commodity.


• It has an appetite for carbon dioxide


• Processing and distribution uses existing infrastructure.


• The end product is gasoline that can be burned by older vehicles

About a trillion of our yearly national debt is due to a trade imbalance created by importing fossil fuels.

The U.S. has spent
...
importing fossil fuel.(zfacts.com)

ExxonMobil expects to spend more than $600,000,000 on an algea fuel project.

With 5.0, the upgrade via the handset is no longer an option attaching us to the tether and Desktop Manager. A new option appears during the upgrade for an email alert which replaces the handset push.

The entire operation of backing up and restoring data, preferences and apps is accomplished by the desktop manager. Always do a backup first.

Blackberry OS 5.0 finds.

• A new startup screen with a status bar that measures the entire boot-up process


• Menus feather in and out with bouncy scrolls that are more responsive


• Horizontal word correction replaces the vertical making it easier to see all entries


• Larger icons in the media folder for photos


• A touch icon to send email


• Auto-focus now has a maco mode letting you focus almost down to an inch


• The camera responds quicker and the option to customize a physical trigger key is in the camera interface


• You can scale photos sent out via email. The scaled down .png files are as crisp at the full rez. Great for blogging! and direct posting


• Permission approval for apps appears before the download


• MMS/SMS is identified by a bubble instead of the email icon


• SMS has gone fancy with smiles and bubble threading - grouping a thread in the directory. MMS remains utilitarian. I'm not too thrilled with the tiny scrolling windows in the SMS. Pretty takes up too much space. (I have always wondered why if MMS costs the same as SMS and has a longer word limit, why not use MMS all the time?)


• The BlackBerry web browser has been updated


• Steaming radio volume adjusts with the physical buttons while running as a background program.


• The Alert icons have been updated so you no longer confuse medium sound with calls only

Best of all, the upgrade was flawless, free and the phone hasn't crashed or bogged down since I upgraded. So maybe the memory management has improved.

It's great to get a major upgrade just BEFORE RIM releases the Storm 2 giving Storm 1 users a taste of something new before the dulling the sting of hardware envy.

Now on to see how many programs I can run at the same time before it crashes....

While some people retire into a motor home built on a bus chassis pulling a Chevy Suburban, George Bombardier has spent the past 11 years touring the country in a golf cart.

The 68-year-old retired roofer even sleeps in the Club Car golf cart powered by a used 300 cc Kawasaki generator engine.

Taking my vacations on a motorcycle over the past nine years, I understand Bombardier's storytelling zest.

"You really get to see the country," he said, "including things you don't want to see, like tornadoes and things like that. You don't want to see one of those, I'll tell you. Not up close."

He has also been through the the Holland Tunnel into New York City, because they wouldn't let him take the cart on the Staten Island Ferry, and to Washington D.C. because he wanted to see where the president lives.

It takes him about 10-20 days to cross the United States mostly on small roads, but that seems to be the point of traveling for Bombardier.

He's had open heart surgery, and he died three times on the table, or at the hospital. And now he has a machine in his chest that powers his heart.

Bombardier will delight in his stories about facing death with the same sense of adventure that he brings to his life.

So if you see a golf cart buzzing around York that looks like a tiny red 57' Chevy that's been through a few too many adventures, its just on the way to the next adventure.

"The instrument ended up in the fireplace," he said. "Actually, I got so mad, I ended up burning it."

In a blind test at Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University many years later, one of Bluett's handmade violins competed against instruments that were 200 years old and worth $150,000.

"They all picked mine as the best instrument, and it was a week old," Bluett said.

His humble beginning came 25 years ago this month in his brother's dining room. In that time, Bluett has crafted 220 handmade violins, and a total of about 1,400 stringed instruments.

He's the artist behind Bluett Brothers Violins in Spring Garden Township, where custom violins sell for about $6,000.

His creations sing their songs in symphonies, teach students at the Peabody Institute, play country music in Nashville, and fiddle for the Irish.

For this luthier, as he refers to himself, it all boils down to one thing.

"When you string it up, and the joy of hearing it . . . that's what I live for."

The pair are near Pittsburgh right now. You can follow them at shockingbarack.com or on twitter 'ShockingBarack'

Fortunately for Honda, the settlement includes rebates for new vehicles. I get $100 cash back and a video to train me how to best use my gas and brake pedal.

The lawsuit revolves around EPA mileage estimates for Honda's hybrids and the lower than expected mileage figures some people got from their Honda hybrids.

I suggest Honda use a disclaimer sticker.

Failure to use common sense may result in lower than expected mileage figures.

Smashing the gas pedal (combining the use of electric and electric motors without the use of cylinder deactivation) and smashing the brake (not using regenerative braking) will result in lower than expected economy.

Accessories, like air-conditioning, use energy. When you shut them off you use less energy.

Very cold days and very warm days take more energy to keep you comfortable and move your vehicle.

Some days I can get over 50 mpg and some days it may be as low as 40 mpg.

All vehicle manufactures use EPA standards for fuel economy. It is the competitive benchmark for selling a car in the United States. It makes no more sense for Honda to post figures lower than the EPA testing procedure than it would be for Toyota.

Honda can keep my $100 and put it towards research and development. I am happy that there was a car on the market in 2005 (or 1999 with the Insight) with the potential of 50 mpg.

Perhaps it would be more beneficial to force the mindless, lawsuit money train toward adopting a universal standard that more accurately reflects the cost of driving. This would actually help all consumers.

It will be interesting to watch what happens when vehicles with an even greater variability of mileage like the Chevy Volt (230 mpg) or a totally electric car like the Nissan LEAF come on the scene with the same aging EPA standard.

The Australian press is buzzing with talk about the little car from a U.S. based company that beats the Prius in price and fuel economy.

How refreshing.

BMW, Mini, Audi and Volvo have special frugal models that use similar fuel-saving technology, but Ford hits the low price point.

According to the story, the car has been immensely popular in Europe, where fuel taxes promote small car use.

The U.S. Fiesta is expected to arrive in her late this year

According to the study released today by the National Hydropower Association, the U.S. hydropower industry could install between 23,000 megawatts and 60,000 megawatts of additional capacity by 2025, or enough to generate electricity for 31 million additional homes. The study also estimates that the installation of this amount of capacity could create between 230,000 and 700,000 new jobs.

There are 80,000 dams in the United States and only 3% are used to produce hydropower.

Canada is one of the top producers of hydro power in world with some provinces extracting over 90% of their electrical needs from falling water. A market perfect for electric cars!

Not all these dams are suited to produce power, but if the dam is already built the environmental impact is already in existence. York companies like Voith and American Hydro use technology to produce highly efficient runners that can extract efficiencies into the high 90% and are more fish friendly than equipment made in the past.

You have to wonder, if there were an increase in the mandate for renewable energy or if new technologies were invented to harness even 25% of the of the 97% of the non- generating dams, how much renewable energy we could produce from falling water.

The ability to create your own channels and saving music station content to the phone's memory add extra features to Pandora's core idea of grouping music types into channels.

Multitasking pushed content, email, SMS/MMS, browsers, and other programs remains in tact on the BlackBerry as with Pandora during the music stream maximizing the use of your 3G data stream and time.

A paid version offers unlimited skips, no ads, unlimited song requests and complete lyrics for songs. However, the commercials on the free version are few and short as compared to traditional radio.

Add a set of stereo blue tooth headphones and you have a mobile concert hall, multitasking office all for the price of your data plan.

Download the free version of Slacker from BlackBerry App World via your handset.

I looked at a number of ways to conserve power with the standard battery, but all of them detract from the reasons I wanted to use this phone in the first place. If I am at a news event wildly picture and video tweeting, the last thing I need is a dead battery.

My random internet choice for an extended life battery was the Seidio 2600mAh battery. It's available from many suppliers.

The company says that the battery provides 90% more battery life than the standard BlackBerry cell. The catch is that it comes with a replacement phone back to accommodate the larger size.

The battery replacement is as easy as performing a warm boot to the phone.

I found Seidio's new plastic cover a bit more finicky to latch than the OEM BlackBerry metal cover, but oddly enough it seems to go easier after it's been on and off a few times. I found that just closing the cover and slipping it into the BlackBerry leather holster seems to be the best method for latching it.

The cover only adds about 3-4mm to the thickness of the phone and doesn't impede the magnetic auto-lock/sleep feature with the leather holster. It's a tight fit, but it fits into the OEM case.

I actually like what the extended case does for the handling and desktop use of the phone. The plastic has a rubbery feel that makes the phone easier to handle and it sits more firmly on a flat surface as compared to the OEM case's touch points. As an added benefit, the case brings the external speaker away from a flat surface and maybe adds a little bass to the normally crisp sounding speaker.

I still tether up the phone for a charge while driving, but the added buffer gives me a piece of mind that I can tweet away into the wilderness at any time.