Found a great piece (well, with some help from some Facebook friends at Beckerman PR) on the real cost of offshore wind turbines versus offshore oil platforms in Forbes.

Karl Burkart’s piece asks, “How many offshore wind turbines could have been installed for the cost of one $10 billion Deepwater Horizon?,” the platform that sank and unleashed the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history:

How many turbines can $10 billion buy?

A typical American drives 12,000 miles per year. The latest plug-in electric vehicles (like the much-anticipated Tesla sedan) use about 370 watt-hours per mile. The U.S. driver’s 12,000 miles x .37 = 4,440 kilowatts per year. Divide 33 billion by 4,440 kilowatts and you get about 7.4 million electric vehicles that could be powered each year with a $10 billion wind investment.

Now while the piece does admit that the Deepwater Horizon well would have fueled more cars … 18.2 million vehicles per year … it does it at a higher cost per mile: 13.6 cents/mile for petroleum and only 3.7 cents/mile for electric vehicles running on wind-generated power.

If you figure that 7.4 million Americans would be saving $1,188 per year, that is about $8.8 billion going back into the U.S. economy rather than into the grubby hands of foreign oil companies like BP.

And that’s not even counting cleaning up the occasional mess created by Big Oil.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that wind energy is too expensive, just ask them: just how high of a price should we continue to pay for non-renewable oil?

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After last week’s announcement that Indian automaker Mahindra & Mahindra had bought Indian EV maker REVA to form the bigger, badder Mahindra REVA, GM has now decided it’s in their best interest to pull out of a partnership with REVA that had aimed at developing low-cost electric vehicles for emerging markets.

It seems GM didn’t feel that sharing EV tech with a company that will likely be a major competitor in the years to come was a wise move.

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In a classic case of sustainability layering that borders on downright slathering, the City of Tsukuba in Japan is set to test-host a new car sharing system using electric vehicles that are powered almost exclusively by solar energy. According to a recent report on the solar electric car sharing plan, the partnership involves the Mazda2 (aka the Demio in Japan) with electric vehicle drive trains from Think, using lithium ion batteries developed by the U.S. company EnerDel, and all based on the ZipCar car sharing model.

The choice of Tsukuba as a test community is no accident, considering its moniker “Science City.” By design and population, the city is an ideal laboratory for giving sustainability concepts a real-world workout.

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