When the Senate comes back from its summer recess on September 11th, the energy bill that was dropped before vacation will still be dead in the water.

In a conference call today Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said he and other senators will continue to modify the bill in an attempt to win votes. This may include adding a standard that would require States to use a minimum amount of renewable energy. Reid said he hopes such modifications will entice Republicans to vote for the bill after the elections this fall, when Congress is in its "lame duck" session.

"Now it's a time out period," Reid said. "We'll see if we can come up with something before the end of the year. I'm confident we can, and we should," he said.

The bill, which includes provisions to promote home energy retrofits, electric vehicles, and natural gas trucks, will not include a cap and trade system for decreasing carbon dioxide emissions. Cap and trade, he said, "doesn't have the traction that a lot of us wish it had."

Yesterday the Environmental Protection Agency released a pair of proposed fuel economy labels, which could replace the miles-per-gallon stickers now required on new cars. The stickers are needed because miles per gallon isn't a useful measurement for vehicles that run on electricity part of the time or all of the time, and several such vehicles--electric cars and plug-in hybrids--are due to hit showrooms starting at the end of this year.

There are a lot of great things about the new labels, but they can still be improved. You can comment on the proposed labels here.

The interactive website could also allow consumers to determine the carbon dioxide emissions produced by charging their vehicles, based on the power plants in their area. In some cases, where coal is the predominant source of electricity for instance, consumers might see lower carbon dioxide emissions for hybrid vehicles than for plug-in hybrid vehicles or electric vehicles. Perhaps the EPA should consider requiring car dealers to provide Internet-enabled kiosks for consumers who don't have smart phones, so they can easily get the same information.

There is already some controversy about one of the proposed labels--the one that would assign grades (from A+ to D) to vehicles. Some have argued against this approach, arguing that it amounts to the government making value judgments about vehicles. I don't like it because it's ambiguous. It's not clear at first glance what all goes into the grade. I'd rather just use numbers to compare vehicles, particularly the number of gallons needed per hundred miles or estimated annual fuel costs, both of which are included with the new labels.

Another potential problem is that the labels can make electric vehicles look better than they really are. The labels say that the greenhouse gas emissions for electric vehicles are zero, because the EPA has decided not to count emissions at power plants. As I mentioned above, in some areas of the country, users concerned about greenhouse gas emissions could be better off choosing a hybrid--but the stickers won't make this clear. Maybe the stickers could be changed depending on the region the car is being sold in.

Lightning is a powerful manifestation of the electrical charge that can accumulate in the atmosphere. New research, presented at the ACS meeting in Boston on Wednesday, suggests that it might be possible to harness that electrical charge.

Fernando Galembeck, of the University of Campinas in Brazil, has shown that water vapor in humid air can accumulate charge and transfer it to materials it comes in contact with. He says it might be possible to design collectors that exploit this behavior to generate electricity. The technology, which he calls "hygroelectricity" could provide an alternative to solar power in places without much sunlight but with a lot of humidity. It could also be used to prevent lightning strikes, he says, by draining electrical charge out of the air. He notes, however, that the research is very early stage and that such technology could be a long time coming.

Here's the abstract from his paper:

Many experimental reports associate water-air interfaces with electrostatic phenomena, from "steam electricity" recorded in the 19th century and Kelvin water drop condenser to the close association between heavy clouds and thunderstorms. However, accepted physical-chemical mechanisms for charge build-up and dissipation at water-air interfaces are still lacking. This report shows that: 1) water vapor adsorption on dielectrics or isolated metal surfaces enclosed within a shielded and grounded environment causes charge accumulation on the solid, depending on the relative humidity (RH), nature of the substrate and exposure time. 2) A steep charge increase is observed in liquid and solid insulators under the action of external fields when RH approaches 100%. These results are in agreement with the hypothesis of water acquiring charge during adsorption and condensation, due to partition of aqueous ions.