Electric Cars, Electric Companies

General Motors announced today that in a few months its much talked about electric car, the Volt will be in dealer lots. The car is set to cost about $41,000 to start, but according to a clip from National Public Radio , a fully loaded Volt will set a person back about $45,000. While it's not clear how many of the Chevy dealers in Virginia will carry the Volt, but the Washington, DC-area which includes Northern Virginia is expected to have inventory.

The Volt is the American electric car, but the Japanese manufacturer, Nissan, also has

an electric car, the Leaf.

I don't know which name is sillier, the Volt or the Leaf. Both are attempts by marketing types to describe their cars, but neither has me singing their praises.

That said, both cars and the ones that hopefully will follow are a big step toward the greenhouse gas emissions from cars. Or is it. Demonstration cars are being delivered to area power companies, Dominion and Pepco, according to a GM press release.

Remember, the Leaf and the Volt run on electricity and most of the electricity from Dominion or Pepco is created from the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal.

While the experts are saying that owners of electric cars are likely to recharge during the night when power costs are cheapest, electric utilities in the long run will do pretty well if the electric car catches on.

In fact, electric utilities are doing pretty well right now, according to an article in Forbes. The overall stock market has been either in the tank or down for most of 2010, yet utilities have done remarkably well.

Here are some of the earnings numbers for our local power companies.

Dominion Power won't release earnings for a couple of days if their schedule holds, but in the first quarter ended March 31, the company earned $174 million, or 96 cents per share, higher than what the smart Wall Street analysts had anticipated.

American Electric Power also won't release earning for a few days. It's first quarter results were $365 million or 76 cents per share. American had some MBA-type issues in the period, and thus had lower earnings, although its revenue was higher.

Cooling off In and Near the James

The heat that's been baking much of the mid-Atlantic and northeast since the late spring has sent a lot of us to the beaches, lakes and rivers nearby to cool off. A few days ago I was in Richmond, VA and hiked along Belle's Island's trails and took a refreshing dip in the James River that encircles the island.

I wasn't alone. While there were probably more than fifty people hanging out on the rocks along the river's shore, a few folks stood out.

The first one is this guy who decided that it wouldn't be a good idea to bring

his iPad to the river, instead brought a book and just plopped down on a rock in the middle of the river flow and read. With the water level no higher than five feet, he had a great spot to stay cool and catch up on his summer reading list.

A little further downstream, where the river frothed across a smattering of rocks, a group of rafters tried to navigate the open spaces into the wider and flatter parts of the river. One group of rafters didn't quite make it through without a hitch, catching themselves on the rock. Above the roar of river I heard the expedition leader string a few choice curse words to the group. Eventually he had to get out of the raft and push them from the rocks, but not before another raft in the group slid past, waving at the stranded team.

But the real highlight of the afternoon was the group of kayakers. They paddled skillfully down the river and through the rapids, although one of them decided that the best way down was to just let the river do all of the work.

And while the river was the coolest place to be that hot July afternoon, the most fun was probably had by a group of girl scouts from Williamsburg, VA who made their first attempt at rock climbing.

Water Wisdom

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality issued a state-wide drought watch as the Old Dominion suffers under one of the driest summers in years. The announcement comes as a shock to most of us here in Northern Virginia who remember how much snow fell only six months ago, shutting down the region. But while the snowfall made for some spectacularly green lawns and farms in the spring, the relentless heat that's covered much of the state has made the ground and the crops in it begin to shrivel, and sent the rest of us to cranking our A.C.

The plight of Virginia's farmers as they face what they have to consider to be a drought, no matter that the state hasn't made the official designation, brings to mind our own everyday efforts to conserve fresh water. When it comes to water there really is no substitute. OK, all of you joking beer or wine fans face reality: without water there's no beer and no grapes. So whether you drink the clear and pure stuff or the crisp and golden, or take it as coffee practically intravenously like me, we all need to keep water and its wise use top of mind.

But how to do that when in 99.99 percent of the time, water is just there -- right at the tap, on the supermarket shelves or in the five-gallon water cooler. What's common is taken for granted, even if it is the most precious thing on.

One way to begin to value water is to actually begin valuing it, or placing a real market price on the use of water. Most of us do that every day when we're in the convenience store and slap down about a buck for a one liter bottle of water. But when it comes to the water that flows into our homes, the water is a lot cheaper, but actually no less clean. In fact, the Washington Post reported last month that water that comes into our homes costs pennies. No wonder we waste so much of it.

I'm not saying that the water that comes into our homes should cost four bucks a gallon; that would give real meaning to the phrase "flushing your money down the toilet," but what I am saying is that if we're a country that believes in the power of the free market and the market prices that come with it, then we should begin applying those principles to water.

Doing so won't reverse Virginia's drought watch or flood the parched farms across the state, but thinking of ways to more wisely use the water we do have just might be the best thing that we can do on our own behalf in the long run. I for one don't want to live the song lyrics ... 'you never miss the water until the well runs dry.'

Independence

Nature is the true independent. If I were to choose a personality adjective for the environment, I think that I'd choose "independent." Nature doesn't need us, but we sure need it. We need its water, its air... a whole bunch of stuff from it, but this weekend we need its energy.

This July 4th holiday weekend, a lot of us still are watching and reading the news about the gusher of oil spewing off the Louisiana coast and flowing toward the shores of some of America's best beaches. The beaches where we go to take a break, exercise our right to "kick-back" and relax and do just about whatever we want because, "Hey, we're on vacation!"

But while we stroll along the beach, head to the park... whatever it is that we do, we ought to keep in mind that as independent we think we are, actually we're very dependent. When it comes to the environment, our top of the food chain, 'do it my way' kind of thinking really is a mirage. It's a mirage because we're living in Safetyland, a term coined as far as I can tell by the writer Laurence Gonzales in his book, "Why Smart People Do Stupid Things."

In a nutshell, Safetyland is where we live when we think that we've conquered our environment, molded it to our liking and bent it to our will, Safetyland. But really we've done something kind of stupid. How else to explain the ignorant comfort we have with the idea of drilling for oil one mile beneath the surface of the ocean? What if something goes wrong all the way down there? The answer: we really haven't a clue.

The environment doesn't want to be tamed by us. It wants to remain independent. Nature may lull us into a sense of calm and help us create our Safetyland, but eventually it reminds us that no matter how much we think we have it under our control, nature reminds us that it is really in control, that it is independent.

Realizing this can really shatter a person's view of what's safe. But running scared isn't the point. The point is not to do anything stupid in the meantime, anything stupid that could make things worse when nature decides to exercise its right to do what it wants to do, when it wants to do it, how it wants to... in short, when nature decides to declare its independence.

So, back to the BP oil disaster (does anyone call it a spill anymore?). Because of our dependence on oil, we allowed a company to drill about one mile under the water. If something goes wrong there's really not much that can be done about it before the disaster spreads. Stupid, but we were living in Safetyland.

Becoming less dependent on foreign oil is often cited as the reason for drilling off our shores, and recently because of the BP accident there have been increased calls for oil independence. Foreign oil dependence and oil dependence are both pretty bad in the long run and we need to declare independence from them one day.