Why CarbonTakedown?
As a mechanical engineer with over 40 year’s experience, I have designed, built, researched and taught in the field of renewable energy systems, technology and policy since 1982. Now I give talks on decarbonizing through using electric vehicles, living with an EV and how society can reduce GHG emissions. This website distills years of experience with low-carbon energy systems into how we can and must act to decarbonize our personal lives and society. No energy system is without negative impacts, but electricity from renewable energy sources (with appropriate storage) to power our transport and buildings is the most rapidly deployable and lowest cost and environmental risk path for now. Will there be other commercialized energy sources in the future, almost certainly, but not in time to address the looming worldwide goal of zero carbon by 2050.
After graduating as a mechanical engineer from Queen’s University in 1980 I worked for two years in the steel industry as a junior engineer at the blast furnaces of Stelco in Hamilton. Through that experience of seeing huge amounts of energy in action, my passion shifted to the environmental side of mechanical engineering and I went back to school and completed an M.Sc. in solar thermal processes in 1985. Over the next 20 years my career covered design and lead engineering roles for transit vehicles with the Urban Transportation Development Corporation (UTDC); fuel cells and batteries for electric vehicles with Alcan; and as an independent consultant designing renewable energy systems for on and off-grid in Ontario, British Columbia, Lesotho, India and Jamaica.
After teaching part time in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Queen’s University in 2003-2004, in 2005 I joined St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ontario to develop and teach a program in Sustainable Energy Systems Engineering and Technology, the first such program in Canada, and third in North America. Fourteen wonderful years, dozens of new courses developed and hundreds of students later, I retired from that role in 2018. Since then I have given hundreds of lectures about EVs and using electricity to decarbonize our society. I am passionate that we must get to a low-carbon future ASAP. This website helps to disseminate focused objective information on EVs and low carbon electricity.
Decarbonization:
Over 30 years ago, I installed solar hot water on my home. The house also has 9 kW of grid-connected photovoltaics with a solar-thermal-assisted heat pump space and water heating system. In 1989 I bought an electric car (too early, not a great car!), and since then have owned a 2001 hybrid Prius (great car, sold at 430,000 km to a friend), a 2012 Nissan Leaf EV (140 km range, just recently sold after 6 trouble free years) and more recently a 2019 Chevy Bolt EV (383 km original range with a 60 kWh battery, but over 400 km now with the recall replaced new 66 kWh battery pack as of Dec 2021). By investing in these systems over the past 30 years, I have reduced my home and car direct GHG emissions to near zero and also saved many tens of thousands of dollars in fossil-fuel energy costs - about $2,000/year in gasoline savings using hybrid cars alone for 19 years (approx. $38k saved). Now with a long-range EV I spend about $500-$600 for electricity annually to go 20,000 kms. See the pages on long distance EV trips for how easy and cost effective EVs are for longer distance trips.
As of March 2024 I have installed a 3 head mini-split cold-climate air to air heat pump. A necessary upgrade as my 20 year old self built solar hybrid heat pump system was getting long in the tooth. The old system still contributes heat, but can't be relied upon if there is no one home for weeks.
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I value feedback and if you want a new topic covered or have a criticism, or fact check to share, please let me know.
Steve Lapp