Ecotality's EV Project Gives Coulomb's ChargePoint a Run for Its Money

Last month I wrote about how Coulomb Technologies' ChargePoint America program plans to install 4,600 EV charging stations across nine metro areas in the next several years. So far, however, the EV stations have been geographically limited, especially in the Puget Sound area. Long story short, it's going to be hard to ease questions of "range anxiety" that many potential EV buyers will have if the only available ChargePoint stations are at Bellevue City Hall, UW Bothell, and a high-end condo building in Downtown Seattle (residents only). That's hardly the way to expand a network and create the necessary perception that plugging in your electric car will be as seamless and convenient as filling up at any gas station.

Luckily, that necessity breeds invention, and Ecotality's EV Project has filled in to give Coulomb's ChargePoint America program a real run for its money. The EV Project has a much larger budget, having landed a $99 million grant from the DOE - nearly three times the size of the grant awarded to ChargePoint.

The EV Project began in August 2009 and will be completed by the end of 2012 and takes a markedly different approach to the implementation of EV infrastructure than Coulomb. Rather than focusing on installing public charging stations, the EV Project is assisting customers who bought the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf by providing then with over 8,300 home charging systems. Not to be outdone in terms of public visibility, Ecotality is also installing 15,000 public charging stations. The project spans six states - WA, OR, CA, AZ, Tennessee (odd choice, although they've installed some of Ecotality's charging stations at the Cracker Barrel!), and DC.

Courtesy of The EV Project

Ecotality's EV Project also has the advantage of having major funding outside of the federal government. Swiss power grid corporation ABB just agreed to invest $10 million in the EV Project.

The bulk of the 15,000 plus residential and commercial charging stations will be primarily on the West Coast, as well as Texas and Tennessee. Just where will you be able to soon find your Ecotality charging station? One of the coolest things to come out of Ecotality's EV Project has been the official maps it has released showing station density in several cities.

OREGON

According to a September press release, Ecotality plans to install 1,100 charging stations in four Oregon cities: Portland, Euguene, Salem, and Corvallis. The stations seem to be logically aligned along Portland's major arterials, like Burnside Street, Sandy Blvd, MLK, and the downtown core.

Map of Portland charging stations

WASHINGTON

The EV Project plans to install 1,200 charging stations in Washington State, which will be a great complement to plans already underway to create an electric highway on I-5. With the help of planners at the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC), Ecotality has finally released a detailed map of charging station density in the Seattle area.

Via: GigaOMElectric Vehicles

ChargePoint Launches EV Charging Stations in Bellevue, WA and Washington, DC

One of the latest and most promising developments in EV charging station technology has been launched right here in the Seattle area!

ChargePoint America, a $37 million grant program run by Coulomb Technologies, has recently opened public charging stations in Bellevue, WA, as well as Washington DC. The program was funded in part from a $15 million Department of Energy grant from the ARRA stimulus package of 2009. Thank you, Obama!!!

The ultimate goal is to set up 4,600 stations across the country, in nine regions: Austin, Texas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, Fla., Sacramento, Calif., the San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area, Bellevue/Redmond, Wash., and Washington DC and is a strategic partnership between Coulomb and three leading automobile brands: Ford, Chevrolet and smart USA. If ChargePoint succeeds, maybe we won't be so apt to relegate such dinosaur status to our dying Detroit brands. 

Already ChargePoint has set up stations at the UW Bothell campus, Bainbridge Island, and the ultra-pricey Aspira condo building in Downtown Seattle (sadly, for Louis Vuitton-toting residents only). 

These latest two stations have been installed at the Bellevue City Hall and are open to the public. In order to promote ChargePoint stations for EV drivers in the Northwest, they established a sub-contractor, ChargeNW, where subscribers can get discounted home charging units and even find the nearest station on their Smartphone app. 

Via: Inhabitat

Proliferation of Private Electric Vehicle Initiatives Shows Need for More Government Leadership

Amidst the current proliferation of electric vehicle initiatives, funded privately through venture capital, is an astonishing lack of government leadership of green fleets policy nationwide.


The State of California already has Better Place, Solar City, and Coulomb Technologies competing to provide residents with an electric vehicle charging station network. So far, however, Coulomb Technologies is the only firm of the three to explicitly provide resources to form partnerships with local governments, for both city planners and fleet managers. Coulomb has provided distinct resources for each set of stakeholders in the process, a key concern that has not received enough attention in earlier enterprises. Coulomb has begun to operate electric vehicle charging stations in San Jose, CA, out of streetlamps. With fierce competition coming from Better Place and Solar City, it should be interesting to see which of these firms has the most successful implementation of electric charging grids. As California is the nation's largest commercial market, success here means a great deal of transferrability to other regions and will attract significant international attention as well.

Currently (as of March 2010) Evergreen Fleets remains the only regional Green Fleets certification regime in the United States to follow the conceptual model of LEED, with set benchmarks for emissions reduction and alternative fuel investment. Evergreen Fleets is a pilot project of the Puget Sound Clean Cities Coalition, one of over 70 similar programs in metro areas throughout the US that are administered by the US Department of Energy's Clean Cities Program. However, due to limited national and state funding, similar programs are difficult to coordinate and maintain in many areas. Evergreen Fleets, for instance, has no full-time staff or even a dedicated office, like the LEED program. Important national initiatives like Obama's stimulus package are an important first step in spurring innovation, as their $200 million grant to Better Place has shown. Without adequate regulatory enforcement at the state and local, however, there is no guarantee that this investment is publicly accountable or even financially sound.

Further, while it is true that the venture capital and startup sectors have far more innovative capacity to offer in terms of green fleet solutions than any public agency initiative, public agencies play an important role in shaping the commercial markets by their sheer size and visibility alone. By creating economies of scale, public agencies can make certain vehicle technologies more affordable (and therefore more successful) simply by increasing the demand for them. 

Instead of blindly "recommending" that candidate agencies invest in electric vehicles and awarding points for those that do, Evergreen Fleets (and any certification regimes that emerge elsewhere) should specify in greater detail which applications of this technology are most appropriate and for whom.