Compressed Gas Vehicles

I have blogged previously on the merits of compressed natural gas as a transportation fuel and how Bolivia leads the United States in the number of such vehicles on the road.  Last week I read the US energy information agency’s report on Egypt and was impressed to read that in 2010 over 133,000 vehicles fueled with natural gas were operating in this poor country.  This is about the same number of vehicles operating on natural gas in the USA.  Great the US is tied with Egypt and behind Bolivia in converting vehicles to run on natural gas.

I could not find any statistics on how many plug in electric vehicles operate in Egypt.  I am pretty sure their Secretary of Energy did not spend much of the country’s wealth on this pipe dream.  The only pipes Egypt installed were pipes to transport natural gas.  Talking about the Secretary of Energy he has been very quiet of late and is probably working on his resume that should have only two lines in it.

1997 -  Won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the manipulation of neutral particles  http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1997/chu-lecture.pdf

2012 -  Blew Mega Billions on pipe dreams in the green space via the manipulation of a non-neutral and socialist inspired energy policy

My friends at A 123 saw their stock hit 69 cents this week only to rebound a little on Friday when they claimed to have won a Chinese customer for electric grid support.  The level of sales to this Chinese customer will be 2 megawatts of batteries.  The system will be used to help regulate grid frequency.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-20/a123-surges-on-2-megawatt-china-grid-stabilization-order.html

Well my friends a 2 megawatt system may be able to stabilize the grid frequency on a system with a total load of about 4 megawatts.  This is enough to stabilize the load of a village with 10,000 people.  As the Chinese have 1.3 billion people the “smart” money on Wall Street divided the 1.3 billion by 10,000 and estimated that A 123 will sell 130,000 of these systems.  133,000 is approximately the number of compressed gas vehicles in Egypt.    

I have got news for you, even with grid stabilization sales the lights in A 123’s factory that Stevie Wonder financed will go out just after the election and the Chinese will be lucky to see one unit that stabilizes their grid.  Perhaps the folks in Michigan can use the batteries to keep a few of the factory’s lights glowing when the auction is held to sell off the equipment we all paid for with our tax dollars. 

What we need is economic stabilization!  We need the Department of Energy  to wake up to the fact that we have 80 times as many vehicles on the road as there are in Egypt and we should have 80 times as many natural gas fueled vehicles on the road as Egypt.   This means 10 million natural gas fueled vehicles. 

I reported that the DOE is now funding with approximately a million dollars a couple of project in the San Francisco Bay Area to develop improved gas storage on board a vehicle.  Maybe the folks at the companies that received the DOE grants should make a trip to Cairo and see how it is done.  Stevie Wonder should accompany them and while in Egypt he can witness what happens when people realize their government favored the projects of the crony friends and did no good for the people.   

Perhaps the folks from Kleiner Perkins, Drapper Fisher, and Khosla Ventures should also go on the trip as they benefited enormously from the waste at the Department of Entropy on gangrene startups.   Of course the VCs will fly in their private jets and Chu can fly United which is perhaps the worst airline in the world.  Al Gore should also be part of the mission as he was the Architect of the Great Pyramid Scheme.  Al will tell the Egyptians he invented Hire Old Graft and Fix the first written language.