Revisions/extensions (9:42 am 1/31/2008) – This will be up at the top of the blog until the Senate is done with it (originally posted at 7:43 am 1/31/2008); look for fresher posts below. Also, just as a reminder of how important you the citizen can be, I went back into the NRE archives and found my thanks to, among others, the 17 Senators that killed the previous attempt.
My Senator, Jeff Plale, has an e-mail waiting for him urging him to repeat his rejection of this mandate. Does your Senator have a fresh reminder? If not, make it happen now, they’ll be in session in under 1 1/2 hours.
Revisions/extensions part 2 (5:52 pm 1/31/2008) – They’re two votes short, so they sent it back to committee for a vote hunt, and will bring it back immediately should they find 2 votes. Since they’re going to keep up the skeer, we’re going to have to keep up the skeer. Also, I got too fancy in my math in the second half of the article (thanks for the gentle reminder, Dad29).
Charlie’s all over this attempt to drive Wisconsin-based Briggs & Stratton and Harley Davidson out of Wisconsin’s marketplace for the benefit of the corn-a-hole lobby by eventually requiring 25% of all fuel in Wisconsin come from “renewable” sources in the form of Senate Bill 380. The bipartisan P-I-G fast-tracked this, passed a couple of meaningless amendments, and it’s on the floor of the Senate today.
What, the federal mandate, as odious as it is to the driving public, is not enough for the corn-a-hole lobby? Historically-high prices for corn is not enough? I believe you know the phrase I have for them, and the last part is “…and the combine you rode in on.”
Related to that, Marcus Aurelius has some numbers in his great corn squeezings experiment. While he didn’t provide a specific mileage for driving with regular E0 gas (he’s outside the Algore/Whitman Memorial E10 RFG mandate hell I have to deal with), and the estimated price for E85 in Appleton (based on his calculation on cost per mile, it’s $2.31/gallon) is a heck of a lot lower than it is in Milwaukee (I semi-regularily pass one station that offers E85; it was going for $2.60/gallon during that time frame and now it’s up to $2.85/gallon), I have enough to start running with. Given his rough estimate of mileage on E0 of 15-17 mph, I’ll assume that, just before he began this experiment just before Christmas, he was getting about 14 mpg with his flex-fuel Chevy Suburban. He got 11.1 mpg with 3 fill-ups on E85, and though most of his driving was what the EPA would consider “city” and in and out of 4WD, he did have an extended highway run.
That, my friends, is about a 27% drop in fuel mileage from E0. Given my historic estimate of a 5% drop in fuel mileage between E0 and Algore/Whitman E10, that’s about a 19% drop between that and E85. For one to break even, E85 would need to be about 21% 27% cheaper than regular gas and about 17% 19% cheaper than Algore/Whitman E10. Given E0 gas went for about $3/gallon during that time frame, and Algore/Whitman E10 went for about $2.85 in that time frame, E85 would need to go for about $2.36/gallon during that time frame to be as cost-efficient at the pump as either E0 or Algore/Whitman E10 $2.19/gallon to be as cost-efficient at the pump as E0 and $2.30/gallon to be as cost-efficient at the pump as Algore/Whitman E10 during that time frame. It didn’t even get close to that in the Milwaukee area. Hell, it didn’t even get there for Marcus.
FWIW, I did an experiment with E-10/E-85 that was just about scientific. Drove to Iowa on a tank of E-10, returned on E-85. Same roads, same speeds, same cruise control (for practical purposes, anyway.)
E-85 gets 15% less mileage on my flex-fuel FoMoCo than E-10. So if you want equal price/mile, price of E-85 would have to be 15% (or greater) LESS than E-10.
Good luck with that, even with the Federal subsidies–and guess who pays for THOSE?