A friend pointed out a recent article in our local paper on a really interesting new alternative energy for homes and small offices. It’s a sculpural-looking turbine covered with solar material - if it’s windy, it spins, if it’s sunny, it sols. Or whatever Solar things do. If we’ve got anything out here, it’s wind and sun. They’re not like the big Danish windmills you see proposed every time there’s an article on a “wind park,” they’re just a couple yards tall. I didn’t dig up the exact height, but they’d appear to be between 2-3 yards or meters high, so you could probably install them on your property in a wide variety of places without violating any zoning or covenants. Don’t take my word for it, though.

Since the solar materials rotate, you eliminate many of the placement issues that come up with a solar array, and unlike bigger windmills, it doesn’t have to be shut down in heavy winds or rotated to take advantage of the wind direction. Unless it screeches like a howler monkey, the cost may be the biggest downside.

The company is called Bluenergy, it’s worth a look. The costs appear to be competitive with other small-scale “get off the grid” kinds of setups, but their cost estimates seem a bit high. Whatever.

A blog that I like called Kicking Tires had a post about a real compact pickup that an Indian company called Mahindra is trying to build in the US and sell here. It’s kinda on that ugly tip, if you know what I mean, but it’s as close to that ’80s mini-truckin’ ideal that I’ve seen in ages. The first model is supposed to have an economical 4 cylinder engine that gets about 35mpg on the highway, and a diesel hybrid with unknown specs is due out after that. It’s small, but if it’s halfway tough, I could use it on my little ranch pretty easily, don’t have to worry much about street cred when you’re hauling alfalfa. (more…)

I keep wanting to upgrade or sidegrade my busted Dodge pickup, and let me tell you, it’s not a great time for someone who thinks like me to buy a car. It’s really hard to find a family vehicle of any shape or size that gets even 30mpg on the highway; I haven’t actually kept a tally, but there probably aren’t even 10 vehicles on the market these days that can do it. When I was 17 years old, 30 or 35mpg was considered decent highway mileage, and the Chevy Sprint was getting close to 50 on the highway even then. So today, a very economical car (if you believe Kia and Toyota commercials) gets, well, 30mpg. 2 decades later, no improvement at all. My pickup has been averaging 15mpg, and there are still people out there who consider that pretty damned good for a truck. And to get close to 1988 Chevy Sprint mileage, you’ve got to cough up thousands of extra dollars for a hybrid and take on the added complexity of maintaining 2 separate drivetrains and whatever long-term liability the batteries impose. To be fair, there hasn’t been much drama about Prius or Civic Hybrid reliability, and to be even more fair, when the new diesel VWs come out this year, they’re rumored to get well into the 50s with just a normal diesel powertrain. But as fast as everything else in the world in every other area of technology is changing, fuel economy remains basically static in the US. (more…)