energy

  • Oil well (photo by John Hill)

    With increasing energy efficiency in cars, homes, and industry, plus a surge in domestic natural-gas production, U.S. demand for oil is widely said to have tapered off and in fact begun a structural decline. Except that, as it turns out, last year it seems U.S. demand for oil actually rose by 390,000 barrels per day, according to the International Energy Agency. That represented fully one-third of the total global increase in demand. An article in today's Financial Times from London notes that global energy analysts have been startled by an apparent increase of 4 to 5 percent in U.S. oil...

  • Electric power plant outside Ithaca, New York
    Pricing Carbon Emissions? Bring It On, Say Some Large Companies

    Several large companies are prepared to pay for carbon emissions in the near future.

  • Two BNSF locomotives hauling coal trains meet near Wichita Falls, Texas
    TVA To Cut Coal Use For Energy Generation By Half

    The Tennessee Valley Authority will shut down eight electricity-generating units, which account for nearly a fifth of its yearly coal use.

  • Natural gas flaring from oil well [licensed under Creative Commons from Flickr user Sirdle]
    Why North Dakota Is Like Iran, Iraq, Nigeria & Russia: Wasted Natural Gas

    Natural gas flaring in North Dakota may be wasting revenue and harming the environment.

  • 2013 Honda Fit EV drive event, Pasadena, CA, June 2012
    The Five Greenest, Most Energy-Efficient Cars of 2013

    What cars available in dealers today make the most efficient use of energy? The answer turns out to be four battery-electric vehicles and one plug-in hybrid. Gasoline and diesel cars don't even come close; internal combustion engines waste two-thirds to three-quarters of the energy in their fuel on...

  • 2000 Chevrolet Silverado used car
    Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Average Vehicle Now 11.4 Years Old, Oldest Since WW2

    How old is your car? Are you still driving a mid- or late-Nineties model, or maybe one (like us) from model year 2000? You're not alone. The cars on U.S. roads have continued to age, meaning that the average vehicle is now older than at any time since the aftermath of World War 2, when U.S...

  • Offshore Oil Rig

    Love or hate it, oil is an incredibly useful product. Used to create everything from plastics to pharmaceuticals--and of course, fuel for transportation--its environmental credentials might be low, but it's been an essential substance in creating the world we live in today. So too have other energy sources, such as gas, coal, and uranium. But just how much--or little--do we have left to keep us going over the next century? It's a subject of huge debate, and one covered in great detail in a feature published by the McClatchy Newspapers chain. As with many other resources, oil, coal, gas and...

  • 2012 Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid - production model
    Electric Cars: Are They Really A Dire Emissions Threat?

    This seems to be our time for debunking dumb stories about plug-in electric cars. First, we had to educate a Forbes columnist (and oil-industry consultant) about how the auto industry works. Now, it's time to offer some gentle guidance to all those journalists who covered last month's release of a...

  • 2011 Chevrolet Cruze Eco Quick Drive and Live Photos
    Active Shutter Grille Vents: How They Help Improve MPG

    Over the past few years, more automakers than ever have started to promote something called active shutter grille vents. Essentially a way to boost fuel economy at higher speeds, active grill shutters are now being used by GM, Ford, and Chrysler--among others--to give gas mileage boosts to their...

  • BMW i3 Concept MkII
    BMW Experimenting With Infrared Heating For Electric Cars

    Just how do you keep occupants of an electric car warm? That’s the question that automakers have been tackling for many years, as they bring mass-produced plug-in cars to market. Now BMW thinks it has the solution to keeping occupants warm in the middle of winter: infrared heating. The use of...

  • 2011 Toyota Prius
    Five Reasons Buying a Hybrid Prius Won't Save the Planet

    The 2012 Toyota Prius gets the best EPA-rated gas mileage--50 miles per gallon combined--of any non-plug-in car sold in the U.S. But the Prius hybrid sometimes gets a bad rap. At least some of it is due to the notorious (and very funny) South Park episode in which a deadly attack of Smug afflicts...

  • 2011 Chevrolet Volt
    DoE Says Electric Cars Crucial To Cutting Dependence On Oil

    Electric-car advocates spend a lot of time touting the advantages of driving on plug-in power rather than burning gasoline. Sometimes, it can be a lonely battle. But now the U.S. Department of Energy has weighed in on the side of electric cars, with a conclusion that may startle some: It's more...

  • Robert Llewellyn Nissan Leaf Solar Panels

    If you’re a homeowner with a suitable home and enough money to invest in a set of photovoltaic solar panels for your roof, you can easily power your home cheaply and cleanly. But while some states offer Feed In Tariff (FIT) schemes to let you sell back any excess power your solar panels generate to the local utility company, payback times on solar panels remain pretty high. FIT schemes are also known in some areas as "reverse metering" after older installations where the electricity meter spins backwards when power is fed from solar panels back to the utility grid. Now a U.K. utility...

  • Electric power plant outside Ithaca, New York
    For Your Consideration: A Handful Of Energy Facts To Ponder

    It's pretty clear that the United States has absolutely no energy policy at the moment. Attempts at long-term planning to reduce energy use are largely stalled in the toxic atmosphere of no-holds-barred politics, with the exception of tougher gas-mileage rules for 2017-2025 vehicles that were...

  • 2011 Tesla Roadster Sport. Photo by Joe Nuxoll.
    Tesla Electric Car Plus Solar Power Equals Zero-Cost Driving (Video)

    Mike Koenigs is also a true Tesla and clean power activist

  • Michael Jackson
    Michael Jackson Solves Energy Problems From Beyond The Grave

    Reginald Garcia believes he's invented an engine that generates more power than it takes in. Perhaps more incredibly, to help turn his pet project into a reality, he's harnessing the star power of the late Michael Jackson. Garcia was a freelance shutterbug in 1978 when a friend asked him to take...

  • Traffic in China
    China In 2050: 350 Million Vehicles, Many Electric Cars...And Gasoline Exports?

    The big unknown in global efforts to reduce carbon emissions is China. It is industrializing at a rapid pace, and a burgeoning middle class has savings galore to spend on its first automobiles--including luxury European brands. By some estimates, the world's current 800 million vehicles will grow...

  • Traffic Jam
    Bill Uses California Traffic To Fuel EVs Instead Of Road Rage

    It's ironic that as the world becomes more interconnected, America is trying to become more independent. Nowhere is that more obvious than in our energy policy, where we talk a lot about the dangers of depending on foreign oil and the importance of generating our own energy. A new bill moving...

  • wind farm

    We approach energy policy with care here, since GreenCarReports is largely about ... well, cars. But a recent article claims it could take just 40 years to convert the bulk of the world's global energy usage from fossil fuels to renewable energy, primarily wind and solar power. That's not only vehicle fuel, but also electric-power generation, home heating, and the many other global activities that rely on the remarkably high energy density of the hydrocarbon molecules in coal, oil, and natural gas. Researchers from Stanford University and the University of California-Davis published their...

  • Ford Rouge Assembly Plant, Michigan, where Ford F-150 pickup trucks are built
    Greening The Rouge: Ford's More Sustainable Pickup Plant

    A green roof is not at its most photogenic in a Michigan winter. In fact, it's hardly green at all--more like gray and brown--though it still insulates the building below just as well. But while some of the green aspects of Ford's showcase Rouge assembly plant have succumbed to the January weather...

  • BYD, at Detroit auto show
    2011 Detroit Auto Show Video: BYD On Renewable Energy Generation

    Where is Noah's Ark to save human beings? People pass their eyes drilling into the Earth up to the sky. Each loop of human civilization is closely linked to the exploitation of solar energy—even coal and petroleum. Since sunshine is vital to everything, why human beings don't obtain energy...

  • Energy classroom, courtesy of USACE Europe District
    Things We Read, And Like: 'Why We Need Energy Literacy'

    Many readers on this site are concerned with miles per gallon, or how much fuel their car uses. And while any site called Green Car Reports is bound to have an environmental tilt, most car buyers are far more concerned with saving money than saving the planet. Nonetheless, we're all about making...

  • Stuck in traffic, by Flickr user SMercury98
    Why Texas May Be A Better Electric-Car State Than California

    When power plant heavyweight NRG Energy announced yesterday that it would invest $10 million in the rollout of the nation’s first privately-finance electric vehicle charging network it also revealed that the city it would debut in would be … Houston, Texas. Um, what? Houston (pictured)...

  • Tires
    How Burning Rubber Could Help You Be Greener 

    Tirediesel? Don't laugh out loud; it could be coming to a biodiesel pump near you someday. And it could at lat be something to do with used tires. Except for sandals, playground equipment, and the like, there aren't many products that use them. In the past tires were hauled miles away from cities...

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