Oil Prices Spur Postal Service to Replace 90% of Fleet With Alternative Fuel Vehicles
That’s 195,000 Vehicles.
The U.S. Postal service is looking to move away from petroleum based fuels as quickly as possible since, as Environmental Leader reports, a 1-cent increase in a gallon of fuel costs them an additional $8 million annually.
It looks like USPS will be getting a free fuel-cell test-vehicle from GM’s Project Driveway, which is providing select customers around the country with Equinox Fuel-Cell vehicles.
- » See also: Biofuels Breakthrough: Making Fuel From Air With Engineered Microbes
- » Get Gas 2.0 by RSS or sign up by email.
USPS already has 43,000 alternative fuel vehicles on the road, including hybrids and engines running on compressed natural gas, ethanol, and biodiesel. It isn’t immediately clear which option will work out best for USPS, but with potential fuel cost increases of $600 million this year, the incentive is there.
Photo Credit: adobemac via Flickr under Creative Commons License
Cool! Did you hear the story on NPR last week about their research facility? VERY interesting - http://tinyurl.com/6ma9n4
USPS’s reaction to its evident need is pitifully small. Still tinkering with tiny trials.
For depot based deliveries, where the routes are compact and the mileages are low, there is no reason not to immediately switch to battery-powered vehicles. It’s a concept already tested and proven. Across the pond in the UK, two makers - Smith EV, and Modec - have already shipped over 400 all-electric trucks ranging from 3.5tons to 12tons. Check out the Case Studies page at http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com or look at http://www.modec.co.uk
Two other UK makers are now joining what is a very fast growing market for all-electric trucks and vans. Smith is working closely with Ford and will very soon be offering the Faraday Mk2 based on the Ford F-650 truck, which will carry a Ford badge on the nose but Smith badge on its side.
Japan’s postal service is switching almost all its 21,000 vans to electric, and France’s postal service has invited tenders for the supply of 10,000 electric vans.
And America is still messing about with small-scale trials?
Henery Ford’s spark ignition type gasoline engine and it’s derivatives are deeply embedded in the American psyche. The change from horses to horseless carriages was no less dramatic than the change from spark engines to electric motored cars the age is passed, we just haven’t opened our eyes to the fact - the oil is gone! If the U.S. had chosen to be a moral people, and leaving Iraqi oil alone, and following Al Gore, decided to develop the South Western deserts, with the technology of the times - solar/thermal-molten sodium - electricity installations, for the same amount of money as that war cost, ($650 Billion), today, we would be tapping into the largest, renewable, sustainable, energy source the world has ever known. It would have paid every energy bill in the U.S.A. for maintenance fees only - FOREVER! It would be equivalent to an oil field that can NEVER run dry! Low cost electric power, and storeable hydrogen gasoline replacement from the electricity, for all!
After the millions of murders, and $650 billions of dollars, borrowed from our children’s futures and pissed away, with thousands of our own and others maimed and disfigured for life, millions of families utterly destroyed, ours and theirs, we are no closer to Iraqi oil production than the Iraqis are!
The next time you hear a blithering idiot spoiled brat, drunken, drug addicted, sociopath, rich Arabic saber dancing daddie’s boy oilman, stand at a microphone and threaten YOUR safety with someone ELSE’S weapons, remember what you lost America, remember, and weep! (also see http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan)