This is a guest post by Jeff Radtke. Jeff is an independent researcher holding BS degrees in Nuclear Engineering and Physics, and an MS in Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. He is a member of the American Physical Society and The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. In addition to recent work with electric bicycles, for the past 27 years he has been designing and building nuclear instruments for materials studies, medical, physics and educational applications. He is a longtime lurker, and recent poster on TOD as CyclemotorEngineer.

This post is based on an article published in 2008 in the peer-reviewed "Open Fuels and Energy Science Journal" as The Energetic Performance of Vehicles. The article showed that the accepted vehicle performance metric known as the Gabrielli-von Karman Limit is the same as twice the maximum vehicle kinetic energy divided by maximum motor output power. This result was not found in an extensive literature search.

This type of analysis is useful because it is easy to factor in conversion efficiencies and payload versus tare weight. Rather than use motor output power, one can use the thermal power theoretically available in the flowing fuel. EROI may be factored in, as well as GHG emissions. Analysis may be completed at the level of individual trips, vehicles, or an entire system with resource extraction, infrastructure development, manufacturing and direct fuel use.

Kinetic energy divided by required power is considered a residence time for the input energy in the utilized form. This model may provide an intuitive understanding of energy use. Residence time for anything in a container is the quantity residing divided by the flow rate. This is as true for a vehicle containing kinetic energy as it is for a mountain lake holding melted glacier, or the CO2 present in our atmosphere.

This is a guest post by Captain Michael Kellick. Captain Kellick has been serving in tall ships for fifteen years, sailing all along the west coast of North America, to Hawaii and across the Caribbean. He is presently working with the Los Angeles Maritime Institute and studies Art as Moral Action with American opera director Peter Sellars at UCLA. He attended the 2009 ASPO conference in Denver last October.

1. Introduction

This essay offers respite to all the people who confront our collective energy problems with a furrowed brow and an expression that is puzzled by the continuous stream of theoretical insights that explain our current circumstances. This essay confronts our collective energy problems in more practical terms - with an adjustable spanner and a puncture repair kit at the very least.

On 21 October the final workshop was held in Brussels (Belgium) of the integrated transport and energy baseline until 2030 (iTREN-2030) modeling project. At the workshop a final scenario was presented that incorporated likely transport and energy policies, and the effects on European transport of a continued global plateau in oil production up to 2030. The integrated scenario was generated by four energy and transport models that have been linked in iTREN-2030 to increase the forecasting power of the transport policies of the European Commission.

In this post I describe the iTREN-2030 project and the different models, covering the POLES global energy supply and demand model in more detail, highlight the conclusions of the present integrated scenario, and give my reflection on the workshop commenting on some areas of improvement to augment the potential of the models.

The iTREN-2030 project is all the more important because the resulting model set and integrated scenario will be used by the European Commission (DG-Tren) in preparing the white paper on transport policies due for 2010. After discussion with the European Parliament and approval by the council of Minister, the European Union will as a result have set out its new course for the future of transport in the period up to 2020.