If anyone is generous enough to allow fellow EV drivers to charge up at their house there’s now an app for that.
If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you can create an account with your phone number and address so a fellow ev driver in need can get enough electrons to get home.
As of this moment, there are 5 standard plug locations in the twin cities area!
Categories: Community Support, DIY, EV Charging Stations, IT meets EV Tags: app, Charging Station, Community Support, Donate Electricity, DYI, iPhone, iPod, IT, PlugShare, Software
February 25th, 2011
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Swiss win round-the-world electric race
A Swiss team riding a futuristic two-seater electric motorbike has won an epic 80-day round-the-world solar race that ended in Geneva on Thursday.
The Zero Race, organised by Swiss teacher Louis Palmer who in 2008 circumnavigated the globe in a solar taxi, was intended to raise awareness about climate change, mobility and renewable energy.
“We made it,” shouted Swiss globetrotter, Tobias Wuelser, team leader of the victorious Zerotracer bike punching the air while riding up the “Aisle of Flags” at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva.
“The vehicle runs; it was really amazing we didn’t have a single breakdown, there is electricity everywhere. It was a great adventure,” his teammate Frank Loaker told swissinfo.ch.
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The race involved 80 days on the road, each day covering 500km, and two months on the high seas, as the vehicles were shipped between continents.
Palmer is already planning his next electric race: a two-week event across Europe in September 2011 with around 20 participants.
Read more: http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/news_digest/Swiss_win_round-the-world_electric_race.html?cid=29577916
Read more…
February 22nd, 2011
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RMI’s Project Get Ready partner cities already ahead
On the heels of President Obama’s reiteration of his 2008 goal to put more than 1 million plug-in cars on the road by 2015, Vice President Joe Biden recently announced a plan to make this commitment a reality.
Most notable is a proposal for a competitive grant program offering 30 communities up to $10 million each to become early electric-vehicle adopters and ramp up infrastructure investments.
Luckily, some U.S. cities have had a significant head start, due to initiatives like Project Get Ready and others that connect communities to put them on the EV fast track.
“Thanks to big investments by automakers and local leaders, we’ve helped drive significant advancements in EV readiness in more than a dozen cities across the U.S.,” said Matt Mattila, a Rocky Mountain Institute transportation consultant. “Now, attention is shifting towards capturing data and lessons learned from these early rollouts.”
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To find a chargePoint charging station go to www.mychargepoint.net , choose “Find a Station” under the Drivers tab, type St. Paul, MN in the address field and hit filter.
Click on the pin displayed on the Google map and it will show you the address, the type of station, whether it is in use, and give you directions from your current location.
The same holds true for all Coulomb stations located throughout the US and Europe.
Minnesota has it’s first real electric vehicle station that charges EVs in 20 minutes, not 8 hours. The public stations are a quick charge at 440V. A home 240V station will take 6-8 hours to recharge the LEAF while a std 120V outlet will take 14-16 hours.
Gas prices in Minnesota is practically $3.0/gal now.
Electric Charging Station
November 30, 2010 5:51 PM
(credit: CBS)
By James Schugel, WCCO-TV
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Minnesota is getting ready for the newest trend in cars — electric.
General Motors and Nissan Motor will be releasing their electric cars within weeks, in the auto industry’s most prominent attempt at mass-producing vehicles that shift away from petroleum.
With new cars comes the need to fill them up, and not fill them up with gas.
Minnesota’s first electric charging station just went in. It is in downtown St. Paul, inside the parking ramp at the First National Bank Building.
“We’re going to plug in the vehicle first,” said Paul Axt, whose company, ElectriCharge Mobility out of Bloomington, owns this charging station.
The pump looks dramatically different from what drivers are used to.
Read more…
November 28th, 2010
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Utilities thrilled and worried about electric cars
Published: Sunday, 21 Nov 2010 on CNBC.com
NEW YORK – The first mass-market electric cars go on sale next month, and the nation’s electric utilities couldn’t be more thrilled — or worried.
Plugged into a socket, an electric car can draw as much power as a small house. The surge in demand could knock out power to a home, or even a neighborhood. That has utilities in parts of California, Texas and North Carolina scrambling to upgrade transformers and other equipment in neighborhoods where the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt are expected to be in high demand.
Not since air conditioning spread across the country in the 1950s and 1960s has the power industry faced such a growth opportunity. Last year, Americans spent $325 billion on gasoline, and utilities would love even a small piece of that market.
The main obstacles to wide-scale use of electric cars are high cost and limited range, at least until a network of charging stations is built. But utility executives fret that difficulties keeping the lights on for the first crop of buyers_and their neighbors_could slow the growth of this new niche.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” says Mike Rowand, who is in charge of electric vehicle planning at Duke Energy.
Auto executives say it’s inevitable that utilities will experience some difficulties early on. “We are all going to be a lot smarter two years from now,” says Mark Perry, director of product planning for Nissan North America.
Electric cars run on big batteries that are charged by plugging into a standard wall socket or a more powerful charging station. A combined 30,000 Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts are expected to be sold over the next year. Over the next two years, Ford, Toyota and every other major automaker also plan to offer electric cars.
Read more…
From an email I received from the Rocky Mountain Institute :
Some cities in America have prepared for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) for years, but the PEV transition will soon affect much of the U.S. With the first wave of vehicles shortly upon us, initial PEV fleets will hit specific areas where, for a number of reasons, readiness and appetite is highest.
The path of the subsequent nationwide rollout of PEVs will be driven by a “chicken-and-egg” dilemma of city readiness and charging infrastructure.
Luckily, pioneering cities are helping make the roadmap to PEV readiness much clearer and shorter for those who are less prepared. It is not too late for newcomers to the game to join the next wave of PEVs by learning from the leaders how to more rapidly “get ready.”
In the report, “Electric Vehicles in America,” Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and Rocky Mountain Institute’s Project Get Ready identify which of America’s 50 largest metro areas are currently most prepared for PEVs.
Report findings were shared last week by RMI’s Matt Mattila at The Business of Plugging In conference in Detroit.
Learn how your city measures up.
More electric vehicle charging stations projected.
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A total of 4.7 million electric vehicle charging stations will be installed worldwide over the next five years to support the transition to plug-in vehicles, says Pike’s “Electric Vehicle Charging Equipment” report. The United States alone is likely to be home to almost 1 million charging points by 2015.
Pike Research forecasts that annual revenue from EV charging equipment will reach $1.8 billion (US) in 2015.
That need will be fueled by the more than 3.1 million electric vehicles (EVs), including both hybrids and all-electric cars, expected to be sold worldwide during the next five years,
Read the full article here
I was very excited when I read a news article on March, 12 2009 about a new battery technology developed at MIT. Basically, these new battery cells can charge up very very quickly.
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The EV1
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This technology enhances Lithium Ion energy storage and speeds up charging to just a few seconds. The news was released in a letter written by Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder of MIT. The letter described their work on enhancing lithium iron phosphate electrodes. The letter was published in Nature.
With li-ion batteries it normally takes hours to fully charge. This new technology means that EVs (Electric Vehicles) that take all night to fully charge can now fully charge in only one hour. Further, cell phones could be charged in a few minutes.
Apparently charging this fast requires high levels of power that could require wiring changes at homes.
I was thinking WOOHA! Now we will finally have Electric Vehicles, they can no longer claim that battery technology is not good enough for 100% Electric Vehicles. But, it seems I might be wrong.
Later on, I found that batteries that can fully charge in a few minutes are not really news, they’ve been around for a while and have been used in EVs that are allegedly nearing commercial usage. Read more…
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