Good news. For an obvious reason, all power companies should be interested in PHEVs and EVs. Where are the car manufacturers?

Bud,

I surmise that the managers of the new Chinese plant are awaiting a nod from on high who is awaiting a nod from Toyota and Fuji Heavy engineers testing the manganese-lithium batteries.

The problem is credibility. Dr. Alfonzo Andrew Frank may recall the last time that he paid seventy-seven cents a gallon for fuel, because he is an old geezer. Most other car drivers have never known such a time and thus have difficulty envisioning the equivalent.

We are creatures of habit. That will be $24.38, please.

Andy,
It may just be me, but the link you provided appears to be dead.
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___If they are not carefull, they might be sued by the Feds for antitrust violations. Plugins may take off, and while they are reaping the rewards, they might exhibit business practices that may be tantamount to collusion or other illegal practices.
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___If managed properly and legally, this consortium may provide the necessary environment and support to help these companies to get hybrids from the 1-10% into the 25-75% of market range.

Nicely stated, Freddy

Patrick,
A big chunk of that $400 billion is spent on, drum roll... fuel and oil products to run all those armored vehicles, trucks, rotary wing and fixed wing aircraft. A smaller chunk is used up in logistics and electricity generation. This is why the military is looking more and more towards hybrid systems and more efficient engines/powerplants.
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freddy,
While it is true Iran is reaping the rewards of high oil prices, they are suffering from acute lackof refining capacity. They must import gasoline and other refined petroleum products to keep up with surging demand from cars/trucks. They have spent much of their money from oil revenues to keep domestic prices of refined products at artificially low levels. This has led to a woefully inadequate domestic refinery production, soaring domestic fuel consumption, and thus ever increasing imports of refined products from foreign countries.
_What they do not spend on fuel subsidies, they spend on populist projects, the military, their Nuke program, and foreign ventures ie. Hezboallah. They are skimping on economic development and are not using it sensibly like Norway, or UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi).
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___One side note, Equitorial Guinea has found alot of oil for such a small country. If properly managed, the country could use the revenues, over 20-40 years, to make themselves the Singapore of Africa. They will have to sustain buffeting of lower and higher oil prices due to economic and technological shifts.
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___The consortium will have to include other companies that are concentrating on different technologies to diversify the connections. Currently they are concentrated on electrics. Thus they should include solar and other renewable energy system makers. _Hydraulic hybrid systems and ICE developers could form their own partnerships too.

Allen Z if you use www.archive.org it is a web archive, by berkley I believe, you can view the internet of the past. Future Truck was a program by the Feds and the top 11 engineering universities in the U.S. It was similar to the SAE Clean Snowmobile program. If you use the Archive.org to read the pages of the different years you will see diesel/hybrids giving Ford Explorers an average of 26mpg. The last year of the program 3 schools used fuelcells to modify the Explorer and averaged just over 40mpg equivelant.

In the clean Snow mobile contest the 2 stroke snow mobiles modified with Orbital Corp. technology got better gas milage and lower emissions than the best 4 stroke cats. Orbital was/is a company from Austalia that had some interesting port,breathing work to clean up the 2 stroke. The SAE website used to post that contest.

It seems we need more of these contests as industry follows the students as they move on and uses their learned skills in these areas.

Just a proud not my father is a retired diesl engineer. He designed and had running a diesel with no camshafts in 1995. It used fast electronic swithes and hydrolic tappits for infinately variable lift, duration and velocity to maximixe efficiency for every RPM, Throttle setting, Load, Boost And Temp range. Cool pops well done.

P.S. that was done at Jacobs Vehicle systems for locomotives but wasn't bought by their clients.