Do you need to green your fleet, but you’re not sure how to start? Have I got news for you. This Friday, October 3rd, is the date of Odyssey Day 2008, a nationwide alternative fuels education and information event. If you know you need to make changes in your fleet fueling strategy but don’t where to get answers, this event is for you.

At 88 different sites throughout the country, Odyssey Day events will bring together alternative fuel experts, educators, trainers and end-users to share their knowledge and advice with the public. Interested in biodiesel? Curious about ethanol? Wondering about natural gas? Chances are, there will be someone at an Odyssey Day event near you who will be able to tell you what you need to know.

This is the fourth Odyssey Day (the event is put on every two years by the National Alternative Fuels Training Consortium), and this year’s event promises the previous three in the number of host sites and the number of participants. To find out if there’s an event close to you, go to http://www.nationalafvdayodyssey.org/ and click on the map (Note that, although Odyssey Day is officially Friday, October 3rd, some sites are holding events earlier or later in the week).

I can’t say enough good things about this program and the people who run it. I urge you to go to an Odyssey Day event, learn all you can, and then get back to work and start making changes! Oh, and come back to this blog and tell us what you learned!

From the very start of Fuel Advantage magazine back in 2005, we’ve believed that fleets needed to take a closer look at what they can do to achieve better fuel economy with the resources they have on-hand. For instance, if you can’t afford to install APUs on your trucks, maybe you can start saving fuel by lowering your fleet speed limit, or teaching your drivers more fuel-efficient driving behaviors. The point is, you don’t always have to make a major investment or raically change the way you operate to realize new efficiencies.

That’s why I’m encouraged to see that Ford is now going to offer a “Superior Fuel Economy,” “or SFE,” version of its new 2009 F-150 pickup truck. According to the Detroit News, the F-150 SFE “incorporates low-rolling resistant tires, a six-speed transmission, rear axle improvements and other technology upgrades to reach 15 mpg in the city and 21 mpg on the highway for the V-8 pickup.”

Of course it’s not a new idea (does anyone remember when Ford brought out special high-mileage “mpg” models of the Pinto, Maverick and Mustang II models in response to the 1973 Arab oil embargo?), but it’s a sign that the vehicle OEMs are now taking a kitchen sink approach to improving fuel economy: new, fuel-efficient models are still months or years away, so what can we do with what we’ve got now? I hope the new SFE F-150 is a sign of more good things to come.

My recent blog about tax incentives for plug-in hybrids elicited a number of supportive comments from readers, but there was an undercurrent that I think needs to be addressed: if we become a nation of plug-in hybrid drivers, where is all that electricity going to come from, and won’t it be just as expensive and environmentally harmful as the fossil fuels it replaces? I was surprised to see some commenters even bring up the specter of nuclear power to charge our millions of plug-in hybrids! Will it really come to that?

A recent article by David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, appearing in EV World, puts the electric vehicle/electrical infrastruture issue in perspective. Morris claims that, while generating 100% of our country’s electrical gereration from renewable fuels would be difficult, and perhaps not even desirable in the short-term, converting 100% of our transportation system to renewable electrical power (i.e, solar and wind) is feasible:

“To electrify our transportation system, on the other hand, we could displace rather than shut down the existing system, and we would be replacing a physical stock with a relatively short life expectancy. Given the average seven-year life expectancy of existing vehicles and the high probability that we would offer an incentive for owners of older gasoline-powered vehicles to trade them in, new electric vehicles could constitute the entire fleet within a decade, and that doesn’t take into account the potential for conversions of existing vehicles.”

“Powering 100 percent of our transportation system would require about 30 percent of the electricity generated in 2006. With a massive effort, using a combination of solar and wind power, we could generate about that much electricity by 2020.”

What he’s saying is, we don’t need nuclear power to drive electric vehicles, so we can put that idea out to pasture right now. There are other ways to power plug-in electric vehicles. I am reminded of an exhibit I saw last year at an electric vehicle show, in which a beautiful new Tesla electric roadster was parked inside a small carport whose ceiling consisted of solar panels… the car was charged by its own garage. Will that work for everyone? Possibly not, but the point is that we are starting to exploit new ways to generate electrical power, and now that plug-in vehicles are on the way those electrical generation technologies are racing to be ready.