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Our aim should not be total independence from foreign sources of petroleum. That is neither practical nor necessary in a world of interdependent economies. Instead, the objective should be developing a sufficient degree of resilience against disruptions in imports. Think of resilience as the ability to absorb a significant disruption, bigger than what could be managed by drawing down the strategic oil reserve. Our resilience can be strengthened by increasing diversity in the sources of our energy. Commercial, industrial, and home users of oil can already use other sources of energy. By contrast, transportation is totally dependent on petroleum. This is the root cause of our vulnerability. Our goal should be to increase the diversity of energy sources in transportation. The best alternative to oil? Electricity. The means? Convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones.

Amerigon Incorporated , a leader in developing and marketing products based on advanced thermoelectric (TE) technologies, today announced that its subsidiary, BSST LLC, will partner in a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) project to develop a highly-efficient thermoelectric heating and cooling system for automobiles that will substantially reduce energy consumption, engine load and ultimately greenhouse gas emissions. The goal of the 36-month, up to $8.4 million project is to create a zonal heating and cooling system for automobiles that heats or cools the vehicle occupants, rather than the entire cabin and its components, thereby reducing the energy consumed by existing heating/cooling systems by one third.

July 21 (Bloomberg) -- Andy Grove, the former head of Intel Corp., asked students in his Stanford University business school seminar last year to determine whether an electric car market could thrive in the U.S. Their conclusion: It can't. That propelled the 1997 Time Man of the Year, now retired, on a personal crusade to reshape U.S. energy policy, take on the auto industry and attack America's leaders for risking the nation's security.

The UK does not consume significant amounts of ethanol made from corn, which has been widely criticised for using more fossil fuels in production than are saved by burning it in vehicle tanks.

The International Thermoelectric Society website reported that Volkswagen showed a prototype vehicle equipped with a thermoelectric generator, recovering the dissipated heat energy and converting it into electricity. The prototype has been shown at the “Thermoelektrik - Eine Chance Für Die Atomobillindustrie?” meeting held in Berlin in October 2008.

Appearing on PRI’s The Takeaway with John Hockenberry, Golden was asked how he would advise Congress and the upcoming Obama administration on the proposed U.S. multi-billion dollar auto industry bailout. He responded by unequivocally advocating the avoidance of “any further investments into the old combustion engine model” arguing that the country needs to quickly move past hybrids by leap-frogging “to an all-electric platform.”

Scientists at the University of Michigan, using a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), are exploring plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) that not only use grid electricity to meet their power needs, but return it to the grid, earning money for the owner.

THE dream of climate-friendly, petroleum-free motoring is creeping closer - thanks to a clutch of breakthroughs in nanotechnology. Several recently reported lab findings promise to vastly improve the safety and performance of the high-capacity batteries that electric cars will need, at last making them a viable alternative to today's petroleum-powered vehicles.

A European Union report is calling for immediate support for hydrogen energy projects, saying member states could gain an ecological and competitive edge by starting work now.

I agree with that logic, though from my perspective "mp$" could be even more useful as we enter a world in which the gallons we're using aren't directly comparable, and as electricity enters the transportation mainstream, resisting easy conversion to gallons without heroic assumptions and creating potentially over-optimistic assessments of the overall efficiency of plug-in hybrid cars.

Miles per dollar has much to recommend it, particularly for its simplicity and alignment with the priority consumers put on value. However, it also has two key disadvantages. Unlike mpg, it changes every time fuel prices do, so any comparisons based on mp$ are only snapshots at a point in time. Nor does it address the emissions associated with that dollar's worth of energy, though mpg doesn't do that, either.

LONDON (Reuters) - Lead is still in the race to make batteries for hybrid-powered vehicles, President Bruce Neil at privately-owned lead producer Doe Run told a conference on Monday.

Growth in the renewable energy industry is set to reach more than US $250 billion by the year 2017 with the electric car, sustainable cities, non-U.S.-based energy firms, geothermal energy and the greening of the shipping industry helping to lead the way. That's the prediction made by Clean Edge in its Clean Energy Trends 2008 report released on Wednesday.