Ok, so we're asking the oil and gas industry, who make their living by selling us oil and gas, whether there might any problem with the supply of oil and gas. I don't know what Secretary Bodman was expecting, but in his place I would have expected to get a sales pitch for buying more oil and gas. Given that very low expectation, the report is better than one might have feared.

Before going any further, let's look at the forces driving energy harvesting, aka energy scavenging. While it would be convenient to say the technology's rise is tied directly to the "green" movement, it really results from a confluence of factors: Device output voltage is increasing, power-management circuits have lower losses and higher efficiency, and ICs that actually do the intelligent work and data transmission are operating at ever-decreasing voltage and power levels.

Unsettlingly, usually, these discussions involve more strong opinions than data. Some people believe that one of these alternative (they are not all sustainable) energy options is the silver bullet that will solve both the climate and the energy crisis. Other argue that there is no silver bullet and that what is required are a variety of silver BB’s: a mixture of technologies, along with greater energy efficiency and preservation of habitat (forests). Do we really just need to build huge number of nuclear plants or wind farms to solve the problem? If, instead, we are going to use a mix of alternative energy sources, which ones should we use and in what quantities?

A year ago, I looked back on 2007 and ahead to 2008, a year that has defied the predictions of most observers. Although I can't claim to have foreseen the possibility that oil would break $140 and $40--from opposite directions--in the same year, I worried about energy market volatility and cautioned that risk cuts both ways. That seems equally appropriate advice today, when markets are focused on the downside, and "confirmation bias" is such a powerful force. But while we shouldn't expect a repeat of the wild ride of the year now ending, the experience has provided some expensive lessons about energy markets. The following is a non-exhaustive list of those that struck me:

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.

Plug-in cars, some that rely solely on electricity and some that marry an electric motor with a gasoline motor for better mileage and fewer emissions, are slowly making their way into the mainstream. And it's not just because they replace most or all of the gasoline used to fuel the typical car with cleaner, cheaper, domestic electricity.

Today there are roughly 2 million hybrids in the global car park of 820 million vehicles—or far less than 1 percent. And there are fewer than 200 plug-in hybrids. Before we start thinking about other uses for the battery packs in such vehicles, Kjaer all but begged his audience, “let's just get the batteries driving the wheels first!”

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.

For me the best energy is the energy that we don’t use. In other words, energy efficiency. There is no cleaner kilowatt/hour than the one we don’t consume. Every cubic meter of gas we don’t burn makes us a cubic meter less dependent on foreign supplies. Every barrel of petrol that we don’t need makes our economy a barrel less vulnerable to volatile oil prices. 

Last Monday, as I was saying, they take their first decision. Being as it was a premiere, we wanted to make it big. We proposed strong measures of energy efficiency for Standby functions and Off Mode losses.

Proving once again that there is little new under the sun (or the waves) is this 1932 version of the wave power generators that we showed here and here. It works on the basis of an "inertia motor" where "When a wave starts to lift the hollow sphere, the massive weight inside, because of its inertia, resists the movement and exerts terrific pressure in the lower cylinder. Finally the inertia of the weight is overcome. Then it possesses momentum. When the sphere reaches the crest of a wave, the combined effort of the momentum and the recoil of the huge, semi-elliptic springs exerts an equal pressure in the upper cylinder. The tremendous pressure is applied to oil, which, in turn, operates a special turbine which runs a generator. The current is conducted to the shore by submarine cable."

That is, the energy in all the gasoline consumed is about 5,200 billion kilowatt-hours. So is that how much electricity we need? No! It turns out that electric vehicles are far more energy efficient! A gasoline-powered vehicle does good to average 15% energy efficiency. I know this from taking actual measurements while doing research for my first book. A plug-in electric car, however, can easily maintain 60% energy efficiency. Since the electric car is 4 times as efficient, it only needs 1/4 as much energy to go a mile. That means we can divide the total energy used by a gasoline-powered car to see how much electricity it would need to go the same distance.

Switched-reluctance motors are candidates for high-performance variable-speed drive applications. They are getting attention for uses that demand energy efficiency because of their relatively flat efficiency curve that can hit 90% over a broad range of operating conditions.