Plugged In

This afternoon, I was thinking about plugs.

What brought this to mind was reading a cheerful article suggesting that the price of oil, which is currently around $128 a barrel, could easily go up to $200, and pretty quickly, too. This, I didn't find too hard to believe, as basically anything that suggests increased use of oil, a disruption in the availability of oil, or a willingness to bid up the price (those dapper young men in their crisp white shirts), even if it doesn't actually happen, has the effect of driving up the price. A couple of articles referred to the current level as a 'super spike', which I suppose means that more elevated levels would be 'super duper spike', or a 'superdy duperky spike', or something.

Whatever you call it, the articles make it sound as if we'll be paying five to ten dollars a gallon in the relatively near future -- say, within the next two years. (A couple of people pooh-pooh this, saying its equally possible that the price will drop down to a third of what it is now. I'm not willing to bet on that. ) And that got me to thinking about alternative transportation options. Where I live, there aren't any unless you're going up to the population centers. If I need to get to the store which is about two miles from here, or the mall thats about ten minutes from here, I have to drive. We'd bought the Prius on the assumption that back-and-forth driving would be better done in it, leaving my wife to drive up to work and back in the van. Then we thought 'well, yes, my commutes are shorter, but hers includes lots of braking and idling, the former of which recharges the Prius' battery'. So now I drive the van, and she the Prius -- but we're thinking that at some point, possibly sooner than we anticipate, we'll be replacing the van with something that has the same kind of engine that the Prius does.

Or better. Toyota, for one, intends to build an all-electric Prius, good for short runs at moderate speeds, and we're thinking that yes, that sounds about right to us -- keep the van (which is a minivan, but as things are going, it may soon become regarded as a big van) for heavy hauling and long runs, such as up to New York and such, and replace the Prius with a small van. Possibly an electric small van. How soon, I wondered, before service stations routinely offer a power hookup? I know nothing about what it would take to make that happen, but one thing that occurred to me is that the plug would have to be standard -- not 'this is Toyota plug and thats a ford plug' -- and they'd have to be lightweight (or reincarnate service station attendants, hmmm) because no one's going to want to haul a big honkin plug out of the trunk and jam it into some socket on the side of a service station, hoping they get it right. In theory, you can't get it wrong, but I used to have a job where I'd have to plug in the power cable for aircraft power units, and as I looked at the three by five rubber business end with six thick copper prongs in it, I always wondered if it was possible to put it in upside down -- and what would happen if you did. So, no, that can't be allowed to happen.

And when those jacks and sockets are entering the mainstream -- how exactly are you going to get them retrofitted into your house? (And thats ignoring the people who don't have houses; they live in apartments.) For that matter, I thought, if we build, or modify this house -- how will we do it?

Plugs.