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.

America's First "Electric Highway" Takes Shape Along Highway 101 in California

Commuters between San Francisco and Los Angeles, along Highway 101, will no longer have to worry about the lack of electric vehicle charging infrastructure along this key California artery. 


While innovators like Shai Agassi of Better Place are still testing large-scale electric charging networks in a few prototype locations, Solar City, a Foster City, CA startup, has already created approximately 2,500 charging stations across the US, five of which are arrayed along the famously picturesque Highway 101, in what is now being dubbed "the Electric Highway." 

According to a story on the green technology blog Inhabitat, SolarCity's charging stations along Highway 101 are each located at Rabobank locations, one of their key patrons. Part of the reason Solar City's efforts have not garnered more public attention is because their stations, for the moment, are only compatible with the Tesla Roadster. The Roadster is a gorgeous driving machine whose starting price tops $100,000, making it in many ways a status symbol of the environmentally-conscious elite. The charging stations also have limited practicality, taking up to 3 hours to fully charge up a Roadster, though thankfully for Roadster owners, the vehicle's battery has a 300-mile range, meaning that intermittent stops along the Electric Highway need not be anywhere near three hours long. 

Three of the five charging stations - the Salinas, Atascadero, and San Luis Obispo locations - along the Electric Highway are solar-powered, offering a challenge to up-and-coming charging station providers to ensure, for publicity's sake, that their stations draw their electric energy from renewable sources. Currently Solar City has been offering its charging station services for free, although that may change as soon as it adopts a universal electric plug that any electric vehicle can use. As soon as that becomes a reality, the idea of "electric highways" and "green commuting corridors" may become the new status quo of transportation planning.