How fast to shift in the direction of Pickens' Plan on energy?
Friday, September 26, 2008 at 2:05AM ARTICLE: "Surge in Natural Gas Cars Has Utah Driving Cheaply: Cleaner Than Gasoline, but Shortcomings Remain," by Clifford Krauss, New York Times, 30 August 2008, p. A1.
Neat article that details the rather rapid but underground shifting toward cars that run on natural gas in Utah, reducing their driving cost to something like 87 cents per gallon equivalent.
Utahans are hunting the Internet and traveling the country to pick up used natural gas cars at auctions. They are spending thousands of dollars to transform their trucks and sport utility vehicles to run on compressed gas. Some fueling stations that sell it to the public are so busy they frequently run low on pressure, forcing drivers to return before dawn in the last few months.
Energy independence around the corner? Hardly. But a clear sign that people will react to higher prices and that assumptions about the difficulty of switching over to new, alternative technologies is overblown. Amory Lovins' vision of the future seems a lot less fantastic when you see change pursued like this by ordinary people.
And no Manhattan Project was required!!
Reader Comments (3)
The program was so successful that it had to be ended since the tax credits were cutting into state revenues so deeply.
Utah has an interesting record in dealing locally with national problems. During the Depression when the primary economic problem was deflation and the Federal Reserve kept shrinking the money supply, Utah banks issued a local currency, "Valors" which were used within the state although they were not accepted elsewhere.