When I wrote my first column on the electric car early in 2007 it was triggered by the announcement that GM was going to bring the Chevrolet Volt to market in 2010. As stated then, this was a significant event in that this was going to be the first plug-in car produced in significant volume and at an affordable price. GM was underscoring this by putting the Chevrolet name plate on the car. Plug-in cars are important as they have the potential for transportation with no heat and emission generating combustion. Significant volume is important because anything less will not lessen use of fossil fuels and resultant greenhouse emissions.

The reason that the Volt cannot be produced prior to 2010 is that there is no current battery technology that will work for the consumer auto market. The drive train battery must be able to last for 5,000 charges, not generate excessive heat, be able to function from -10 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and have a charge last for a minimum of 40-50 miles. Since the battery technology of choice for GM is lithium ion, the type of battery used in laptops, the challenge is clear to anyone experiencing the heat and short length of use of a laptop on battery power. Think of bundling a hundred such batteries to power a car. I have written two columns in this space and in my new book “The Shift Age” about the quest for the …

Well, it finally has happened. The price of gasoline has increased enough to cause pain to Americans so that they are changing behavior. The approach of $4 a gallon gasoline has, in the last month produced two positive results. First, after gasoline consumption increased 1.4% in March over the same month last year, it declined 0.6% in April. Second, ridership is up on mass transit systems around the country, in some cases by double digit amounts. The Minneapolis-St.Paul light rail line has increased ridership of 16% year to date over last year, and the Miami rail ridership is up 13% year in first quarter but an impressive increase of 28% in April

As regular readers of this column know, I have long predicted current oil prices. In April 2006 I predicted $125 a barrel price for February 2008, so I was off by two months. Also in that month I predicted $137 a barrel price for April 2009. I now think that might be low. In a recent column I predicted that the trading range for oil for the next 18 months would be an unlikely low of $95 and an elastic upper range of $135. I see many trends and market conditions that point to a trading range of $125-175 between now and the end of 2009. In other words, get used to today’s prices being the normal or the low normal.

America has 5% of the worlds’ population but consumes 25% of its energy. The numbers are even worse when …

One of the technological innovations I have written about here and here in this column has been the reduction in size and cost of computer storage. It is one of the more significant developments in computing over the past two decades. It is part of the foundation that has allowed the explosion in mobile computing to occur. It is an integral part of the massive media files we can all now assemble and of course in the ability for all of us to become ever more productive as individuals.

Seagate, the largest producer of hard drives recently announced that it had just shipped its’ one billionth hard drive. In 1979 the company was an early trailblazer in the manufacturing of hard drives small enough for the early PC’s that were just being produced. Their first product was the ST506 which held just 5MB of storage, was 5.5 inches wide and weighed 5 pounds. This was revolutionary compared to the 14 inch and 8 inch drives that were standard at the time. This first innovation of size reduction has, of course continued to this day. A similar sized external hard drive today would hold not 5MB of storage, but 500 Gigabytes of storage, an increase of 100,000% in terms of capacity to weight and size.
What is even more revolutionary is the reduction in cost of hard drive storage. The ST506 was priced at $1,500 for a cost of $300 per megabyte. The most recent Seagate hard …

Growing up as part of the baby boom generation, a distinct memory is the air raid siren tests.  Every Tuesday, if I recall correctly, at 10a there was the test of the air raid siren blaring across the entire city of Chicago.  This was to prepare us for the possibility of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union (so we could crawl under our desks as instructed by our teachers).  Since it happened each week at the same time we knew it was a test.  If it had happened on any other day, I might not be writing this column today.

The other thing I remember were those times, while riding in the family car, of listening to the testing of the national alert system via the AM radio airwaves: “This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system”.  What examples of communicating to the populace; sirens that pierced the air of every population center in America and the then ubiquitous AM radio band.  The air raid siren being the industrial age amplification of the town crier and the AM radio being the most widely distributed form of electronic media at that time.

All this came back to me a couple of weeks ago when I read that the FCC had approved a plan for an emergency alert system that would send text messages to cell phones. This system is expected to be in place by 2010. Now that 75% or the population have cell phones and we carry them every …