Pecha Kucha Event - Monday Night Imagine “design karaoke” you’ll have a good sense of what this entertaining event is about. Enjoy appetizers, refreshments, cocktails, and lively presentations as luminaries and surprise guest designers take the mike to share the inspiration behind their creative process. Your conference badge is your admission ticket, but be sure to arrive early to get a seat. Monday, November 26, 6:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m. Venetian Ballroom D, Level 2 1. This is a story of a perfect storm and of a grass-roots groundswell that may just put a dent in it. No doubt everyone here has seen these images of global warming; glaciers melting and atmospheric CO2 concentration suddenly leaping far above pre-historic levels. And every day the news keeps getting worse... 2. Next is Peak Oil. Just as China and India's economies are accelerating oil use, we're finding production limits. Oil prices are already flirting with $100/barrel, and perturbations like Katrina can increasingly cause fuel disruptions. Transportation is dependent on oil, and 2/3 of the U.S.'s oil is now imported, which leads us to... 3. Energy security. The middle east holds the world over a barrel, so to speak, as the rest of the world's oil production has already peaked. Former CIA Director James Woolsey says that via our petrodollars we're funding both sides of the Iraq war. And a lot of these dollars go to repressive regimes that directly fund schools teaching hatred of the West. 4. Archimedes said, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. But, with such an intractible-seeming storm and minimal though growing public commitment, we need to look for changes and activities that provide the best leverage. It seems that transportation is a good place to look. 5. Renewable energy, too, is an obvious choice. Renewable energy basically comes in just two forms: electricity and biomass. For a while I sold solar photovoltaic systems (that's my roof). Our transportation system, however, is unique among energy sectors in that it uses almost none of either. It uses 97% oil, 2/3 for automobiles, and cannot be quickly changed! 6. Adding flex-fuel ethanol acceptance to new cars costs only $150, but billions of dollars worth of ethanol refineries have only replaced 6% of our gasoline. On the other hand, over half of our electric capacity is idle at night, enough to power more than 85% of our cars. And electricity is cheaper and cleaner than gasoline -- its <$1/gallon, 60% lower CO2 emissions, and by law in many states getting cleaner every day. 7. Around the turn of the last century, there were more electric than gasoline cars, And early Fords were designed to run on ethanol. So why have all our cars run on gasoline since anyone can remember? Two developments turned the tide: The electric starter made gasoline cars easier to start and drive, and oil refining made gasoline dirt cheap. XXXXX 8. Here is a picture of energy pathways from source to wheels, including efficiencies and CO2 emissions. Note that though both H2 and batteries can use electric renewable energy, batteries are 3-4 TIMES more efficient in doing so. Also, hybrids still use gasoline, just 20-50% more efficiently, which is ultimately not enough. Electricity is where the leverage is, but how to make electric vehicles practical. 9. Back in the late 60's, smog was our biggest transportation-related problem. Electric vehicles could have filled certain roles like that of commuter cars and reduced air pollution much faster than only by slowly cleaning up ICEs. Many of us tried unsuccessfully to get the auto companies to build them. Here Caltech and MIT students raced electric vehicles across the continent, and the three of us on the Caltech team became the first to cross the continent electrically. This was the grandfather of today's collegiate clean-air races. 10. Next, during the Opec oil embargo in the mid 70's, we tried again. I worked for Sebring-Vanguard, which built hundreds of what we now call electric town cars, limited by law to 25 mph. But oil disruptions soon ceased, prices subsided, and everyone went back to business as usual. Such vehicles are now taking hold in retirement communities, college campuses, etc. 11. In the 1990's, the state of California's Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate briefly got all the major auto manufacturers to build electric vehicles, ??? but they absolutely didn't want to and "proved" that there was no demand, then, after eviscerating the ZEV mandate, not only stopped building them but crushed all they could before being stopped by a very vocal outcry by the drivers. 12. So what went wrong? Yes, batteries were still heavy and expensive, and had limited range, slow recharge, and few away-from-home charge stations. But also, the auto companies remain deeply conservative, and avoid investing in change even when it is in their long-term best interests. They instead embraced the bandaid of the catalytic converter to reduce emissions and smog. Others said correctly that electric cars don't address other pressing problems like traffic jams, loss of life from accidents, etc -- issues for which we have not yet found similarly effective leverage. 13. The auto companies are still very, very conservative, but there are now some new pressures and possibilities. The japanese auto companies, locked out of the U.S. government's Freedom Car initiative, created their own hybrids, but, unlike their U.S. counterparts, took them into production. The wildly successful Prius was the first of these to be capable of pure electric operation some of the time, proving the economic viability of electric propulsion components. NiMH and Li-ion battery development and mass production has exploded due to laptop computers, cell phones, and power tools; energy is up and prices have plummeted. 14. In the 1970's, Dr. Andy Frank at the University of California, Davis, invented the modern plug-in hybrid. The idea is simple: though an ordinary hybrid ultimately gets all its energy from gasoline, by increasing the size of the battery and adding a wall-outlet-powered charger, the first few miles each day -- usually 10 to 40 miles -- can be powered from electricity instead of gasoline. With a relatively small, less expensive battery, 50-90% of U.S. drivers' average 30 miles a day can come from electricity! This is tremendous leverage! If E85 is used as the range extender, a gallon of gasoline can be stretched to go 25 times as far -- 500 miles instead of today's average of 20. In 2002, Felix Kramer founded CalCars to create grass-roots customer demand for auto manufacturers to build plug-in hybrids. 15. The japanese car companies were all advertising hybrids as "You don't have to plug it in" and saying that no one would want to plug in their car, and the U.S. manufacturers saw even hybrids as too expensive to bother with. I led a team of CalCars volunteers that added batteries, a charger, and controls to my 2004 Prius, to prove that at least one mass-produced car is capable, with minimal modification, of being an effective PHEV: that the technology is already here. My car became the world's first plug-in Prius. We got tremendous press coverage, starting with a front page article in the NY Times' business section. 16. After fielding innumerable requests, we joined with the Electric Auto Association to publish our knowhow and host a do-it-yourself plug-in Prius conversion project at eaa-phev.org. We also began doing public conversions across the country, and have recently begun turning the conversion project into a Linux- and Mozilla-like open source project at priusplus.org that people all over the world can contribute to. 17. Many other organizations have now joined our rallying cry. A series of boutique conversion companies have also been inspired to gear up to sell kits and/or do complete conversions. Many are using and contributing to our open source materials. There are now over 50 converted hybrids around the world; in a year there may be thousands. 18. All this activity and the potential of PHEVs have now gotten the attention of government officials. Provisions for them are included in the upcoming national energy bill. National labs are doing research. The CA Air Resources Board is beginning to modify policy. Even our anti-environmental President is talking up PHEVs! And now Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has just proposed $10,000 per car incentives for PHEVs, as well as government fleets of over 100,000 of them. 19. And the auto companies are beginning to respond. In January, GM announced the Volt serial plug-in hybrid. ??? Public response was so overwhelming, and gasoline issues to clearly increasing, that they have made it their highest priority project. Other companies, including Toyota, Ford, and VW, have also said they to build them, but are being more cautious and have so far only built one or several concept vehicles to test. All this has been achieved on a shoestring budget with an only-recently-paid staff of two -- Felix and myself -- and a handful of volunteers! 20. Though this is already a success story, we have a lot more to do. PHEVs will only make a dent in our perfect storm if they not only begin to be built by the major auto makers, but become the default propulsion system for all light vehicles. Perhaps someone will discover how to economically convert non-hybrid existing vehicles, too. At the beginning of WWII, the U.S. auto makers switched from making cars and trucks to tanks and airplanes in one year. To solve our perfect storm, we need to build similar worldwide urgency. Check out calcars.org. Spread the word. If inspired, become a sponsor and/or a volunteer.