Costco, the big box retailer, has for over a decade been the business with more electric vehicle charge stations in more places around California than any other. Put in service during California's Zero Emission Mandate between 1997 and 2003 when about 6000 EVs roamed the streets, these charge stations have continued supplying power to the RAV4 EVs and other electric vehicles saved by Plug In America when it was known as DontCrush.com, a struggle chronicled in the film Who Killed the Electric Car. Costco's own magazine proudly reported in 2006, just as the film was being released, that 64 stores had a total of 90 charge stations.
Plug-in cars are being delivered at long last. Yet there remains confusion about the necessary infrastructure and its expense. Electric Vehicle Service Equipment (EVSE) home wall units are priced at between about $1000 and $2500. Plus installation. Need it cost this much? Is it as complex and time-consuming a process as has been experienced by many new owners of plug-in cars?
All plug-in cars these days come with a 120-volt charge cord. This will actually be sufficient for many if not most Volt drivers, and quite a few LEAF drivers. An empty Volt pack will take 10 hours to fully recharge; an empty LEAF about 20 hours. That may seem like a long time, but the relevant questions are: How long will the car be sitting anyway? Until the next morning or just an hour or two? How full is the battery when it gets parked? And where are you going next?
For most folks most of the time, chances are the battery isn’t near empty when it gets plugged in, perhaps at work, perhaps at home after work. Recharge time will usually be much less than what it takes to go from empty to full.
And the cost to the consumer to enable the 120V cordset? If you’ve already got a grounded 120V outlet in the garage or carport, zero. If you need to put an outlet in a convenient place, it would likely cost about $100.
Surprising to many, including I suspect Tesla Motors itself, they found that about half the charging of Roadsters at home in the U.S. is at 120V. Despite the fact that it takes 38-60 hours to charge a Tesla from empty to full at 120V. One can’t presume the peculiarities of a Roadster tell us too much about plug-in cars with much less range, but I think we shouldn’t write off 120V charging just yet, as many involved in readying infrastructure for EVs would have us do. The cord that comes with the car just might suffice for many, especially plug-in hybrids which have smaller battery packs.
Still it remains true that most will want the ability to charge their car at a faster clip at least some of the time, which is what 240V charging stations provide. With the 16 amp charger both cars have today (the actual charger is located in the car, not the box on the wall,) a 240V EVSE takes about four hours to fill an empty Volt pack. It takes about seven hours to fill a near empty LEAF, ensuring a complete charge overnight. If a complete overnight charge is the goal, 120V will still suffice for a Volt, but a 240V EVSE will be essential for most who buy an all-electric car.
Nissan and GM have each had their preferred provider for home charge stations in an attempt to streamline the process, but many customers have had complaints about the cost and scheduling. Dozens of manufacturers seem to be selling equipment at a range of prices, but few actually are available now. The situation for new owners has also been complicated by the various government infrastructure programs, including the DOE-funded EV Project (Ecotality) and ChargePoint America (Coulomb,) which have differing requirements and benefits depending on one's vehicle and location. If eligible, most people accept a free 240V charge station, of course, as I did. My installation was pretty simple, so it cost me nothing. But government support for infrastructure won’t last forever. Coulomb and Ecotality sometime soon won’t be able to leverage taxpayer money to keep other manufacturers at a disadvantage. Quite likely not beyond the current programs.
I am pleased to participate in the EV Project, which came late to the San Francisco Bay Area, and happy to get my tax-payer funded charger and DC Fast port. I believe in government support for electric vehicles (and many other things also on the congressional chopping block at the moment.)
However, for the last month my Blink has been on the blink. Something about firmware, they said. An email on June 8th said they’d get back in touch to schedule a visit. As I write on July 13th I’ve recently been contacted by the contractor who installed the unit, but I’m still waiting for the service call. However, I remain unconcerned. Not because I always charge at 120V mind you. Rather, because I’ve had the 120V cordset provided with the car upgraded to 240V. EVSEupgrade.com offers the upgrade, which allows the Volt or LEAF to charge at their maximum 240V capability of 16 amps. Cost of upgrade: under $300. (For this to work in place of a wall-mounted unit, you still need a dedicated 240V 30 amp circuit and outlet, which would cost a few hundred dollars of an electrician’s time and perhaps $50 in parts.)
The point isn’t simply to plug the good folks at EVSEupgrade.com, although I’m happy to do it. They’ve kept my LEAF juiced, after all. Something Ecotality couldn’t do even with $100 million in federal grant money.
I am not alone in my concern that there is some level of unnecessary complication, excessive cost, and unhelpful mystification going on around electric vehicle infrastructure. It isn’t helpful to the “cause,” those picking up their new plug-in cars or those who are considering it.
For the electric vehicle project, broadly speaking, to be successful, we need to be mindful to keep it simple and keep it cheap. This is not rocket science. We are adding yet another electrical appliance to our ever increasing array of devices, from light bulbs and cell phones to refrigerators and HVAC systems. It needs to be done safely, of course. But it needs to happen. To do it right, the focus needs to be on consumers’ interest. The result will be simple, safe and cheap. Thank you evseupgrade.com for pointing the way.
I’m sure I’m not the first to say it. China is electrifying.
When I was studying China and Mandarin Chinese 35 years ago, “Red” China was unrecognized by the US, literally, and dark in a way difficult to imagine now. Who knew what was going on over there? Was “reality” that the world’s oldest civilization was throwing off the shackles of Western domination and its own past to offer a new vision of civilization, or was it bodies floating downriver to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution?
Just as today we can look at a nighttime satellite image and see the black void that is recalcitrant, unelectrified North Korea, once that was China. Today China is as illuminated as the rest of the world, and they are carrying electrification further. I can’t cite the government decree, but having just returned from two weeks that took me from Beijing to Changsha, Hunan to Shanghai, it is evident that a national transportation system is being implemented, and electrification is at its core. From two-wheeled scooters, a mainstay of urban mobility, and urban mass transit, to high-speed inter-urban rail, China will soon see the day most people move about most of the time on electricity. Fifteen years ago Shanghai was a city of diesel busses and bicycles. It had few private cars. For a while, gas scooters held sway piled high with people and products. It had no subway system. Today Shanghai has the world’s largest. Smoother and quieter than any I’ve ridden anywhere. And three types of electric busses - legacy trolleys with catenary wires, battery busses, and super capacitor busses. And most of
the scooters are now electric. (And they are headed directly at you, at night, with no headlight.)
Not very many years ago, tens of millions of Chinese packed themselves regularly into unairconditioned, slat-seatted box cars to get to work and visit family during holidays, enduring trips of more than 24 hours. I’m sure there are still plenty of old-school trains about, but today Chinese are boarding comfortable, high speed electric trains coursing on unimpeded raised trackbeds at over 200 MPH between cities large and ever-larger. Last year it took 24 h
ours to go from Beijing to Guangjou. Next year it will take 6 or 7.
With these dedicated high speed electric rail lines crisscrossing the nation, and the huge, attractive new train stations being opened to serve these inter-urban lines, it becomes clear China has decided most long distance passenger travel will be by electric trains. And these trains are being integrated with existing and new subway systems. Step off one system right onto the other.
Cars will undoubtedly be the last piece of the electric transportation matrix in China. The week I was in Shanghai, the Electric Vehicle Test Drive Center opened to the public in Shanghai Automobile City, a far suburb still reachable by subway. Plug-in cars from a half dozen Chinese automakers were on display along with charge stations in an attractive setting amidst a winding course for test drives. The BYD plug-in hybrid I drove performed well. I have no doubt we will see Chinese brands in the US when they are ready to make a move. While I think selling gasoline cars by the tens of millions to the domestic market is perceived to be of prime economic importance, I hope they choose to forgo following the Japanese and Korean model of aggressively competing on the low end in the export market. We really don’t need more cheap gas cars. With some attention to fit and finish, the Chinese could use their low-cost advantages (labor and a huge battery industry) in a market segment that sells at a premium outside their borders. Once EVs are cool in the West, the Chinese domestic market will follow.
China is very much a work in progress. As progressive and foresighted as they seem to be on the transportation front, they’ve got huge challenges ahead regarding electricity production. Largely dependent on domestic coal, cities are smothered in smog. Beijing, which systematically restricts automobile usage and moved a lot of factories out of town for the Olympics, had clearer skies than I expected. But it is an anomaly. Shanghai and Wuhan are enshrouded in poison.
Factories, including a solar panel plant I know of, have had to curtail production because coal can’t be shipped fast enough to supply electricity generation plants. Transportation of freight, including coal, will be relieved by moving passengers off the freight path and on to the growing high speed rail network. But that only postpones the reckoning that will come with the growing power demands of a burgeoning consumer culture.
China may end up with the world’s most efficient electric transportation system powered by the world’s most toxic electrical generation.
We, in contrast, may end up with an efficient, relatively clean, partially renewable electrical grid, while still burdened with a transportation “system” dependent on trucking freight and moving passengers on petroleum.
Four electric vehicle charging stations were unveiled today at a new parking structure in downtown South San Francisco. The Coulomb J-plug/120V units were installed under grants to ChargePoint America (DOE and CEC money). For the time being, there is no charge for either the parking or charging for vehicles that plug in. 
delayed opening of this large project for 
remote connections not only add a barrier to usage they present another point of potential failure. For now, drivers and the EV project broadly speaking, would be better served if one could confidently arrive and simply plug-in, as you can at some charge stations - public chargers upgraded to J-plugs, for instance. Like the one I used yesterday at the Vallejo Ferry Terminal. Once The EV Project (the other DOE-funded program) charge stations begin to appear (hello Ecotality, anybody home?), will Coulomb cards work, or will drivers need to collect every network's proprietary card?
The Norwegian energy company Ishavskraft yesterday unveiled its plan to make the stunning vistas of Norway's isolated fjords accessible to vacationers in electric cars with a 2500 mile network of DC Fast Chargers using the CHAdeMO connector. 
...last year, 98 percent of cassava chips exported from Thailand, the world’s largest cassava exporter, went to just one place and almost all for one purpose: to China to make biofuel.
...It can be tricky predicting how new demand from the biofuel sector will affect the supply and price of food. Sometimes, as with corn or cassava, direct competition between purchasers drives up the prices of biofuel ingredients. In other instances, shortages and price inflation occur because farmers who formerly grew crops like vegetables for consumption plant different crops that can be used for fuel.
China learned this the hard way nearly a decade ago when it set out to make bioethanol from corn, only to discover that the plan caused alarming shortages and a rise in food prices. In 2007 the government banned the use of grains to make biofuel. [emphasis added.] ...Although a mainstay of diets in much of Africa, cassava is not central to Asian diets...
“For Americans it may mean a few extra cents for a box of cereal,” she said. “But that kind of increase puts corn out of the range of impoverished people.”
Higher prices also mean that groups like the World Food Program can buy less food to feed the world’s hungry.
Greater support for mass transit and appropriate land use policies that make mass transit accessible are essential. They are essential for more livable communities and more efficient use of resources, including energy. However, we have created a nation that is dependent, for the foreseeable future, upon the automobile. And many of the rest of the world’s inhabitants aspire to automobile ownership. China has opened up high-speed rail lines while the United States fiddles. Yet simultaneously, China has overtaken the United States in the number of automobiles sold annually.
City of San FranciscoSan Francisco recently became the first city in the country to mandate plug-in charging stations
for all new buildings.
Despite billions of dollars of investment, in most of the United States only a tiny percentage of people use mass transit regularly. The latest report by the American Public Transportation Association documents a 3.8 percent decline in ridership overall in the first nine months of 2009. Designing our cities and regions around mass transit is something we must do, but it is a multi-generational project.
In other developed countries – in Europe and Asia, for example – clean, electric public transit is the principal means of transportation. In most of the developing world, public transit remains the only viable means of getting around. But the commuters in poorer nations usually travel in a haze of pollution created by petroleum-powered trains and buses. The basic problem that faces transportation today isn’t whether people travel on mass transit or in automobiles, but rather the technology and fuel employed.
The question that faces us is how to ensure that our mass transit and private cars minimize the negative environmental impacts of travel. To do that we must set our nation, and the world, on a path to eliminate petroleum as the predominant fuel for transportation. To continue to rely on petroleum is to accept as inevitable the immense political power of the world’s wealthiest corporations and the resultant pollution, climate change, and war. There is no catalytic converter that can fully scrub the toxics that result from burning oil. And there is no way to democratize the production and distribution of petroleum.
There is, however, an alternative path: Electricity. It’s been around a long time and powers just about everything we use except transportation. It’s ubiquitous, relatively price stable due to government regulation, and is created in many ways, increasingly including renewable – such as solar, wind and geothermal – sources.
Of course we need energy to create electricity, and just as we’ve been burning petroleum for a century to move us and our stuff around, we’ve been burning oil and coal and natural gas to create electricity. While burning all those fuels has caused pollution just as surely as gasoline cars and trucks, we have options. As aging, filthy coal power stations are retired, they are often replaced with cleaner-burning natural gas generators. And now we are making a commitment to renewable electricity generation. Multiple sources of electricity generation make the grid reliable. In contrast, there is no effort to protect our transportation “grid” from vulnerabilities to petroleum’s monopoly.
While our electricity generation is becoming cleaner and more renewable due to state and federal mandates, switching to electricity for transportation immediately lowers emissions. On the existing US electric grid, half of which is powered by dirty coal, an electric car already is less polluting and emits fewer greenhouse gases than the average gasoline car. In the worst cases, like some nearly 100 percent-coal-powered states, the emissions profiles may be a wash. In others, like California and Texas, which use a preponderance of natural gas, it’s truly a slam dunk for electric transportation. Given our commitment to ever more solar, wind, and other renewables, electric transportation will only get cleaner.
Only with an electric car could you aspire not only to zero-emission driving, but to making your own zero-emission electricity to feed it. Putting solar PV panels on one’s roof is not rocket science, nor out of reach for millions of homeowners. With renewable power and plug-in cars, we can begin to get control over our energy destiny.
A central goal of the twenty-first century must be to bring the revolution of electrification to transportation – and that will include both mass transit and personal vehicles.
The Coast Guard is investigating reports of a potentially large oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico not far from the Deepwater Horizon site. According to a knowledgeable source, the slick was sighted by a helicopter pilot on Friday and is about 100 miles long. A fishing boat captain said he went through the slick yesterday and it was strong enough to make his eyes burn.
[Source: Huffington Post]
For years we've been hearing there's a chicken/egg situation with EVs. Consumers, it's often suggested, have rejected plug-in cars because there is no charging infrastructure. No, I've always said, we have a chicken problem. No plug-in cars. The infrastructure, ubiquitous electricity, exists. 
Near-term monetization also threatens needed expansion of charging infrastructure, as the early installations become underutilized. It is already ironic enough that the two companies pushing monetization as the necessary component for a successful rollout of public charging infrastructure have taken the lion’s share of the public funding in order to develop their “free market” solution. It would be doubly ironic if low usage caused by early monetization resulted in insignificant amounts of revenue suggesting a poorer profitability picture than projected creating an impediment to necessary further expansion of both public charging stations and their own business.
The federal funding should have come with strings attached. For a certain period, say two to five years, the electricity should just flow. No connecting to a network, no payment. The host - the city parking garage or shopping mall - would agree to cover the cost of electricity in exchange for the charging unit and all the green cred and good will they can muster. After a few years, with lots of experience, let the hosts decide if they want to monetize. At that point hopefully there will be enough plug-in cars around that they will no longer be a novelty needing explaining, and we will actually want to discourage purely opportunistic public charging to ensure their availability when someone really needs the juice. At that point, we'll all be willing to pay.
But if PlugShare catches on, we may not have to.
After nearly a decade of mismanagement, theft and fraud, the U.S. military still hasn't found a way to staunch the flow of what is likely hundreds of millions -- if not billions -- of dollars in lost fuel in Afghanistan, some of which is sold on the black market and winds up in Taliban hands, a TPM investigation has found.
[Source: TalkingPointsMemo.com]
It's about time. If there's one country that ought to have long ago developed a domestic electric car industry it is Israel. No oil of its own should be reason enough. Every drop purchased on the international markets propping up its sworn enemies should be reason enough. Not very far to drive in this very small country should be reason enough. Lots of high tech brainpower should be reason enough. Dayenu.The beginnings of Better Place, of course. Also, one could hope, the beginning of the transformation of Israel from a vulnerable fossil-fuel deficient and dependent nation into a 21st century renewable energy beacon.
"The beautiful vision evaporated in the bureaucratic grinders, and the prime minister fell into the very trap against which he had warned. When money flows from the ocean floor, who has time to think about correcting the world?"Read the interesting tale here.
