March 18, 2009 at 11:28 am
The International Energy Agency on Friday lowered its estimate for global oil demand in 2009 as the crisis curbs demand in the United States, Russia and China.
The agency said demand would drop for a second consecutive year for the first time since 1982-1983.
In its closely watched monthly survey, the IEA cut its forecast for demand this year by 270,000 barrels a day to 84.4 million barrels a day — 1.5 percent lower than a year earlier.
The Paris-based agency said demand for oil last year was estimated to have slid 0.4 percent to 85.7 million barrels a day.
To put that into some kind of concrete yet still unimaginably large and therefore abstract terms, the IEA estimates that the world will consume 270,000 fewer barrels of oil every day. On a related not, a professor at Cambridge University is predicting a 40-50% drop in greenhouse gas emissions due to the global economic downturn.” reports GreenDaily.com
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February 22, 2009 at 1:19 pm
(Source: Google.org)
RechargeIT is a Google.org initiative that aims to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. We have a demonstration fleet of plug-ins at our headquarters in Mountain View, and we’re collecting and posting data on plug-in performance, investing in innovative technologies, and advocating for the passage of important legislation. Our vision is that one day thousands of cars will be plugging into a greener grid.
We’ve had our RechargeIT plug-ins on the road for about a year now, collecting data when driven by Google employees in our free car-share program. But we wanted to see how they would perform in a controlled test. The results of our seven-week driving experiment are in – and the plug-ins did great, getting as much as 93 MPG average across all trips, and 115 MPG for city trips! See the full results to explore detailed data from the experiment. (And check back often as we’ll be posting even more comprehensive data from our test over the next few weeks.)
RechargeIT Driving Experiment
Electricity usage for plug-in vehicles:
Ford Escape Plug-In 133.2 Wh/mi, Toyota Prius Plug-in 139.6 Wh/miClick here to explore this on-going Google Initiative.
