Bailout Credits Renewables

The financial bailout package signed into law today has some bonus provisions for renewable energy and plug-in vehicles.

Last year, last-minute wrangling led Congress to drop from its major energy bill significant tax credits for wind and solar energy, as well as for plug-in hybrid vehicles. The solar and wind credits were set to expire next year, which would have put some renewable-energy companies in a bind. What's more, without a tax credit for plug-in hybrids, vehicles that use little to no gasoline for short trips, few people would have been able to afford them.

This year, these credits seemed on track to be approved, until the financial crisis and Treasury secretary Henry Paulson's bailout package distracted Congress, leading some experts to worry that the renewable-energy companies and automakers would be left in the lurch.

But the credits were added to the bailout bill, which passed the House today and was quickly signed into law.

U.K. Scientists Create Human-Cow Hybrid Embryos

Scientists in Newcastle set off a media firestorm in the U.K. earlier this week by announcing that they had created a human-animal hybrid--a cow egg whose nuclear DNA had been replaced by DNA from human skin cells. (The research has garnered little attention outside the British press.)

From the BBC report:

The Catholic Church describes it as "monstrous". But medical bodies and patient groups say such research is vital for our understanding of disease.

They argue that the work could pave the way for new treatments for conditions such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Lack of access to human eggs has been a major impediment to embryonic-stem-cell research, which is why scientists are turning to animal eggs. (See "Human Therapeutic Cloning at a Standstill").

From the BBC:

The Newcastle team say they are using cow ovaries because human eggs from donors are a precious resource and in short supply.

The hybrid embryos are purely for research and would never be allowed to develop beyond 14 days, when they are still smaller than a pinhead.

The scientists have been criticized for releasing their results through a news organization rather than through the traditional medium of a peer-reviewed journal.

From New Scientist:

Other scientists working in this area of research have had difficulty in growing cybrids past the 16-cell stage, so they will be looking forward to seeing the Newcastle team's results in a scientific journal--as will the rest of us. After the Woo-Suk Hwang scandal, you would think that scientists working in this most controversial of areas would be extra cautious about their results, but not, apparently, Armstrong's team.

Perhaps they want to take greater control of the media reporting of their work, given the extreme reaction last month to the creation of cybrid embryos shown by the leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien. But is it a good idea to bypass peer-review with announcements of such sensitivity? I'm not so sure.

A backgrounder on human-animal hybrids from the Guardian outlines previous hybrid research:

What is the situation in other countries?

Chinese scientists were reportedly the first to successfully create human-animal embryos. In 2003 a team at the Shanghai Second Medical University fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before being destroyed to harvest their stem cells. Later that same year, a US scientist, Panayiotis Zavos, announced he had created "human-cow" embryos that lived for around a fortnight and could theoretically have been implanted into a woman's womb.

In 2004 researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota produced pigs with hybrid pig-human blood cells. In 2005 Parkinson's disease researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported they had created mice with 0.01% human cells by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse. Last year a Yale researcher, Eugene Redmond, led a project injecting millions of human neural stem cells into the brains of monkeys afflicted with Parkinson's disease. Many countries have banned this human-animal embryo research, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

GM's Lithium-Ion Hybrids

Toyota's Prius hybrid has been more successful than GM's hybrid offerings. Today at the International Geneva Motor Show, GM announced its intention to upgrade the battery packs in its basic hybrid system to deliver more power. Maybe that will help improve sales.

GM's basic hybrid system uses a souped-up alternator to add brief bursts of power during acceleration. It runs in reverse during braking, converting some of the kinetic energy of the vehicle into electricity. At best, the system improves fuel economy by 20 percent--just a handful of miles per gallon. But it's less expensive than more sophisticated hybrids like the Prius or GM's new two-mode hybrids, and it can be incorporated into almost all of GM's vehicles. As a result, it could be more widespread. GM plans to make about 100,000 of the vehicles a year.

The new battery pack, a lithium-ion pack made by Hitachi, combined with an improved alternator-generator, can deliver three times more power than the company's older system, which used nickel metal hydride batteries. GM claims that this system will be a perfect complement to another fuel-saving strategy: downsizing the engine and adding a turbocharger for bursts of power. The turbocharger doesn't kick in right away, and it doesn't work well at low engine speeds. But the battery and motor kick in right away, compensating for the so-called turbo lag.

The vehicles will go on sale in 2010. At about the same time, GM will offer two other types of vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries. The most notable is the Volt, an electric vehicle with an onboard gasoline generator for extending driving range.

In the past, lithium-ion batteries were thought to be too dangerous for large battery packs. But new chemistries (in some cases) and elaborately engineered safety systems (in others) are changing this. Lithium-ion batteries are lighter and more compact than the batteries currently used in hybrids.