Bike rental at SXSW

At SXSW there are lots of events that are a 10-20 minute walk apart. It takes longer to stand in line for a cab than to walk. Parking is a pain in the neck. Solution? Rent a bike. The Bicycle Sport Shop people were out of city bikes. All they had was a purple ultra-mountain bike with fancy shock absorbers. Working great so far. Hopefully someone with a camera can snap a picture of the bike for a blog. I’m a little sore today from the narrow seat.

Tree maps and bike paths

Spinning Crank is 12-page newsletter published by the Silicon Valley and Peninsula bicycle coalitions. Town by town, the newsletter reports on actions to build bridges and bikeracks, expand trails, and improve intersctions for cyclists and pedestrians. The members attend meetings, dog the details, and make sure that cyclists are represented in road design.

Another artifact of local culture: this map of a neighborhood I bike through on the way to work has native Redwood, Coast Live Oak, Alder, and adopted Hawthorne, Magnolia, and Mayten trees.

Coast Redwood (Native) Mayten Tree (Chile)

The city of Palo Alto clearly values its trees enough to have a complete inventory of them; residents value them enough to go on “tree walk” tours, and there was enough interest to publish the tree walks on the net.
Hmmm… this really wants to be a Google mashup for a walking map or gps tour, with added photos…. So many hacks, so little time.

Welcome to camellia country

I’d never noticed Camellias, because I’ve never lived in Camellia country before. The northeast got too cold and austin was too hot. Camellias are pretty, hardy, and popular garden flowers have networks of fanciers like roses. It’s february, which is the local season for apple and cherry blossoms, magnolias, dogwoods and camellias. The magnolia blossoms are already past their prime.
Yesterday, I cycled to the Elizabeth Gamble gardens to see how Palo Alto interpreted the February spring. Turned out that Camellias were the main attraction.

TXU buyout painted green

Bloomberg reported yesterday that KKR, the LBO firm bidding to buy out Texas utility TXU, would abandon plans to build 8 of 11 coal plants, the New York Times gives more background on KKR’s courting of environmental groups. This is excellent. TXU had been pulling strings and bending rules to get the plants — with the most polluting design possible — rushed through the regulatory approval process before anti-greenhouse policies closed the door on maximally polluting plants that would double TXU’s carbon pollution, not to mention smog and various other poisons. TXU had been garnering opposition from the mayors of Houston and Dallas, and members of the Texas business oligopoly, in addition to local residents and environmental groups.
Tom Evslin takes a contrarian approach, arguing that Texas needs the energy, and this is a sign of a buyout firm getting green cred for their selfish interest in treating the buyout property as a cash cow. Still, there isn’t any good reason to build power plants with the dirtiest possible technology. Texas faces an energy shortage, but the 11 polluting coal plants were the worst of all possible ways to address the shortage.

Ethanol skepticism reaches mainstream media

Since the State of the Union speech proposed an energy policy high on ethanol, the mainstream media has started to cover the flaws and risks of corn-based ethanol.
In the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago SunTimes, and Albany Times Union, to take an anecdotal sample, news analysis and op-ed pieces notice that:
* even if the entire US corn harvest were dedicated to ethanol production, it would replace only 20% of current gasoline use
* ethanol production doesn’t save much, if any fossil fuel. Pessimistic estimates say that corn ethanol production is net negative; it takes more energy to produce then you get in return, while optimistic estimates are only about 1.3-1, compared to 10:1 for oil.
* corn for energy cuts into the amount available for corn flakes and pig feed.
Hopefully the conflict between food and fuel will cause the ethanol fad to flare out. Once the cost of food raw material and cattle feed cuts heavily enough into the earnings of food producers, there will be a powerful industrial lobby counterposed against the corn processors who are currently buying US policy.

Speaking of followup, muni wireless

installations have been around for long enough to come back and test which ones are working. Novarum, a consultancy specializing in wireless broadband, has gotten behind the hype and the skepticism, and tested muni wireless networks by coverage and speed. The best rated system were Saint Cloud Florida and Mountain View (which worked when I was there). The first thing to note is that according to the study, some of them actually do seem to work. Second, reasonable performance depends on more transmitters; early estimates recommended 20 transmitters per square mile, but it appears as though 40 are needed for adequate performance.

Novarum also ranked the cellular broadband networks, and included them in an overall ranking with the wifi nets. The Saint Cloud net came in first overall, and the Google Mountain View net came in number ten on the combined list. The cellular nets rank better because they have better coverage. Wifi nets, when you can get them, are faster than cellular.
One puzzlement is that Palo Alto appears on the wireless list, ranked number 8, at 2.45 on a scale of 5. On the University drag, there are plenty of locations offering free wifi, but what is the muni offering? Is it the lame Anchorfree service that has poor connectivity and a horridly annoying registration system? If that’s the case, then it’s below the cutoff where a rational person would consider the system to “work.” Santa Clara is above it, ranked at 2.65. A field trip may be in order for some anecdotal testing. I wonder where in the Santa Clara sprawl the network is to be found?
What was the population in the survey? Hard to say. To build that top 10 list, how many citiies did they visit. Ten? Fifty? They don’t say on their website. This makes it impossible to draw conclusions about the overall state of muni wireless investments.
Novarum plans to come back in six months to test again.

Battery high tech and the need for news follow-up

A model helicopter hobbyist validates the claims of the A123 advanced lithium ion batteries. Eager to find light-weight, high-powered batteries for his remote controlled helicopters, Gary Goodrum disassembles battery packs designed for DeWalt power tools and rebuilds them for airborne use. He found that the A123 batteries live up to their billing, providing good power and fast charging at low cost. Also, they lack the tendency to burst into flames found in competing lithium polymer batteries.
What’s really cool about this story is that Goodrum is a hacker using the batteries for his hobby. He doesn’t have the same incentive to optimism that infects the manufacturer, their funders, and vendors of vaporware electronic cars like the GE Volt. He just wants the batteries to fly his toy helicopters.
It’s easy to find a stream of announcements about cool new energy technology on blogs like Renewable Energy Access and The Energy Blog. It’s harder to find follow up to the press releases. What happened to the Green Fuel algae cogeneration technology pilots, intended to use CO2 emissions from smokestacks to grow algae, which is converted to biofuel? How about the wave energy pilot off the cost of Washington State? The press releases, verbatim or lightly rewritten, cover the initial optimism, but what happened then? It would be great if there were more stories that covered follow up and validation to the enthousiastic product announcements and pilot deployments.

Why shouldn’t Toyota foster a Prius users community?

TechDirt has a snarky article about Toyota’s effort to create a web community with Prius owners, referring to previous flops: a failed Walmart customer community, and an “anti-social software” application that let people sms others based on license plate number.
Toyota’s implementation sounds flawed, but the idea has merit. Walmart shoppers have little in common other than they like cheap stuff and are willing to drive to get it. Prius owners, on the other hand, may have more in common, including maintaining a fairly new product, as well as interests in other green purchases and green policy.
The Toyota site, by news report, allows toyota owners to create profiles of themselves, and search profiles of other people. But what Toyota owners have in common isn’t the desire to date or hire other Toyota owners (the motivation in MySpace and Linked In sites with this format. It’s to share information about owning a Prius, and being generally interested in responsible household energy use.
The need would be better served by a traditional blog/wiki setup, where owners could tell stories about their Prius use, Prius products, and other experiences using and seeking green products. A profile might be a feature for the system — and individuals could choose how much to disclosed about their personal identity — but it wouldn’t be the first thing that a user would do. There are other features more important than profile detail and profile search — the ability to create local “prius club” events, for example. A built-in wiki would help Prius users build information about hybrid technology.
There are reason for Toyota not to host the site themselves, as TechDirect suggests, but to sponsor an independent site. Prius owners might be interested in third party modifications, such as plug-in conversions, that would void a Toyota warranty. Toyota might not be willing to foster plug-in mods under its own roof, although they would certainly benefit from learning from those early adopters. It would be useful to have a ratings service for mechanics and third-party products, and Toyota might not want to sponsor this directly, either. Prius owners might be interested in organizing to advocate green policy at a local or national level. Toyota might or might not be interested in being directly assocated with this.
So, the best solution might be for Toyota to be a sponsor in a third-party hosted community, rather than hosting itself. And, while profiles could be a useful part of the tool set, it wouldn’t be the place to start. Prius owners are probably more into their shared interests than personally interested in each other.