Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

j. patrick coolican:

Clean car program gets a push from Harry Reid at energy summit

Alternative Fuel Vehicles

Steve Marcus

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responds to a question during an exhibition of alternative fuel vehicles at Aria on Monday, Aug. 29, 2011.

Alternative Fuel Vehicles

Las Vegas Sun columnist Patrick Coolican drives an all-electric Mitsubishi Launch slideshow »
Click to enlarge photo

J. Patrick Coolican

I was really hoping Sen. Harry Reid would get in one of the electric cars on display and drive around today at Aria, which is hosting the fourth National Clean Energy Summit that gets under way Tuesday.

Just the idea of Reid driving anything is amusing — he probably hasn’t driven a car in decades.

Alas, there would be no Michael Dukakis moment. (If you’re too young or don’t remember, the image of little helmeted Dukakis riding in a tank didn’t bolster his presidential prospects in 1988.)

So in lieu of Reid driving, I did instead, and I can report that the electric Mitsubishi i-miev and a hydrogen fuel-cell Toyota SUV both offer a nice, quiet ride, with solid pickup and handling. The question is whether these vehicles can reach some tipping point that will lead to the necessary growth of alternative fuel and electric charging stations. And there’s the catch-22: We may not reach that tipping point until there’s enough charging stations.

Although the vehicles have made a lot of progress, there’s still tremendous work to do in creating the infrastructure to get more people to buy them.

The Mitsubishi can go 85 miles before requiring a charge. The basic model will sell for $27,900, before a federal tax credit. The average American driver only goes about 25 miles per day, so Mitsubishi is counting on this car being used by commuters who can charge at home every night. Longer trips are a problem. Getting a “quick” charge takes about 30 minutes.

The Toyota hydrogen fuel cell is based on its Highlander platform and will sell for $50,000. It can go 400 miles with the gas mileage equivalent of 70 miles per gallon, but then requires hydrogen. At the moment, hydrogen goes for the equivalent of $10 per gallon of gasoline, though Toyota believes that once the fuel cell cars become ubiquitous, the price will drop to $3. The only emission of the Toyota is water vapor.

Both Reid and John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and head of the Center for American Progress, noted that our dependence on foreign oil is an economic drain and a threat to national security. Correct on both counts, as we import 70 percent of our oil, $1 billion per day, which accounts for half of our trade deficit.

With liberals on board with alternative energy and a move away from the internal combustion engine, conservatives are increasingly lining up against it, saying that it amounts to the dread “industrial policy,” meaning government picking winners and losers.

(Government picks winners all the time and has since the beginning of time; for instance, when it built the Interstate Highway System instead of, say, the Interstate Railway System, it picked the automakers and oil companies as the winners — big time.)

Read about President Barack Obama’s stealth industrial policy on next generation batteries in this New York Times Magazine piece that ran Sunday.

Reid was asked how massive spending cuts being considered by Congress would affect these clean energy efforts. He didn’t really answer. So I asked him again, and he didn’t answer again.

His spokesman told me afterward that Reid believes firmly that alternative energy offers Nevada some potential to diversify our economy, and that he’ll seek to protect funding for the programs.

Tuesday, I’ll have a piece on the state of the clean energy economy in Nevada, and will report from the conference.

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