evcharging
Latest
Ford partners with Leviton and Best Buy for $1,499 Focus Electric charging station
Lusting over the new Focus Electric? It's still a few years off yet, but if you're already thinking about practicalities you're wondering how you're going to charge the thing. Got 120V power in your garage? No problem, you can charge off of that easily -- if you don't mind waiting 20 hours. A Level 2 charger will drop that down to between three and four hours, but it requires some hardware installed in your home. If you want to do that for the Leaf or the Volt you're looking at $2,000 installed, and that installation is permanent. Ford is making things much easier, and much cheaper, with a $1,499 charger made by Leviton that's not only cheaper than the competition but completely modular. It hangs on the wall and simply plugs into a 240V outlet, handling the necessary electrical wizardry to quick-charge your Focus without burning down your house or singeing your cat. Ford is partnering with Best Buy for installation, which could be a good or bad thing depending on your propensity for Geeks in Squads. %Gallery-113306%
San Francisco Bay Area gets $5 million for EV chargers, Detroit will charge $40 per month
Electric vehicles are inching closer, with several already priced and rearing to go, but so far would-be owners won't have to pay for the devices to charge their cars. Free charging stations are popping up at every red dot on this map, and apparently not satisfied with the 1,600 that Coulomb's installing in California and the three at City Hall, San Francisco and neighboring cities have just approved $5 million for over 5,000 more chargers -- of which only 50 will appear along public highways, for some reason. Meanwhile, the state of Michigan has approved the first standardized rate for EV charger use -- a pilot program by provider DTE Energy will see 2,500 customers paying $40 per vehicle per month (or a variable off-peak rate) through December 2012. Gotta wonder how those grey states are feeling right about now.
Coulomb to electrify California with 1,600 shiny new EV chargers
Fret not, Cali residents. Your state government may be desperately sinking into the quagmire of its own extravagance, but cash will always be found to fund good old "private" enterprise. Coulomb Technologies is expected to today announce the rollout of 1,600 ChargePoint stations across the sunny state, aided in part by a $3.4 million grant from the California Energy Commission. The principal aim of these installations will actually be research, as the state tries to figure out EV usage and recharging habits. Happily though, once that academic exercise is over, they should still be operational and might well make Coulomb's home patch the most advanced in terms of EV infrastructure yet. Yes indeed, we'll all be driving our Volts along potholed streets with nary a public servant in sight... it'll be like Mad Max: Beyond Budgetary Deficits.
Toshiba's Charge Grid puts your solar panels to work, smartly charges your EV
Got a bunch of photovoltaic cells and a vehicle that requires electricity? Toshiba's thought up a process dubbed "Charge Grid" by which you can juice the latter efficiently. When the sun's out and the electrons are flowing, it doesn't pay to put them into the grid, so this system stores them in a rechargeable battery ready to rapidly charge your EV. For nighttime when the electricity rates are low, a bidirectional inverter lets you hop right back on the neighborhood grid, so your solar cells are put to good use and your car is always well fed. The company tells Tech-On commercialization of the system is still a few years away, so you've plenty of time to raze that roof antenna in favor of some photosynthesized electricity.
Europe gets first fast-charging EV station, hungers for more
Epyon, a small Dutch startup, is showing the big boys how it's done with its recently unveiled fast-charging station for electric vehicles. Billed as Europe's first commercially available charger of its kind, this unit will recharge anything up to a nine-seater taxi van within 30 minutes, thanks to its 50 kilowatts of power capacity. It's now installed alongside more conventional petrol and diesel refilling points in a fueling station over in Leeuwarden. That's the capital city of Friesland, a Dutch province that has set itself the ambitious goal of having 100,000 EVs on its roads by 2015. That aim is shared by the wider European Union as well, which yesterday agreed on defining a common electric recharging standard, whose universality might attract skeptical consumers and more cautious investors into the field. They've set themselves a deadline of "mid-2011," though the broad outlines and new incentives for buying greener cars are likely to appear by the end of this year.
