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How to Build an Electric Car Charging Infrastructure
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by kferaday | July 25, 2008 at 08:32 pm
349 views | 2 Recommendations | 5 comments
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There's been alot of talk about hybrid and pure electric cars lately -- largely due to the price of gas. There's already some great cars on the road already (Th!nk, Tesla, Zenn). One issue that hasn't been addressed is how to provide enough charging stations to service potentially millions of electric cars.
That changed this week as Coulomb Technologies and V2Green announced a partnership to create an intelligent charging infrastructure for plug-in vehicles. The really innovative part of the partnership is that it will provide a bi-directional connection to the grid so allowing you to buy electricity from the grid when you need it and sell it back once you're at home. So for example, you charge your car when you get to work and then sell it back (at peak hours and prices) when you get home. This will mitigate some of the demand from the cars and help to flatten demand. It's a brilliant idea if it works.
There are 54 million garages for the 247 million registered cars in the US, meaning that the majority of cars are parked overnight in parking structures, parking lots or curbside.
As a result, most potential plug-in vehicle consumers do not have an adequate place to charge their vehicles. This problem is even more pronounced in urban areas like San Francisco, where only about 16% of cars are parked in garages overnight and the rest end up curbside or in parking lots.
Also, although the US power grid probably has enough overall capacity to supply energy to a nation of plug-in vehicles, it may not have the ability to charge them when they all plug-in and demand energy at the same time — say 6 pm every weekday.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (5)
at 21:15 on July 25th, 2008
Yups but will it really help as hydro-fuel is getting more as it's cheap and more result oriented. It cheap and only need water to be add on and No more cashing out. 1 time payment it only needs.
http://gadget-junction.blogspot.com
at 21:24 on July 25th, 2008
Sure. I don't think we exclude any viable technologies at the moment. I just think this idea has some potential and it would be embraced by consumers as they could reduce fuel costs by selling back to the grid. I haven't heard of any commercially available vehicles powered by water but if it can be done it might be good. The only concern I would have would be how do find water resources when water is becoming increasingly scarce? This is especially true in arid and semi-arid environments (California, Arizona, Georgia etc.)
at 12:15 on July 26th, 2008
kferaday, I like this story. Popular science, key fact buy and sell electricity at peak points, means you are developping the smart power grid or popular the "Electronet", google Jeremy Rifkin the consultant of the european energy agency. The car or the building becomes the storage place for de-central energy. It needs awhile to get the picture of this revolution it's like Internet energynet. Multipower smart grids
at 12:37 on September 16th, 2008
Look at these sweet EVs that are on roads now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_laBPi9wbA
at 21:54 on November 12th, 2008
Oh well.. Hybrid is really a good idea coz they are highly fuel-efficient and have very low emissions, it saves a lot of money and a fuel saving additives.