When Hal Emalfarb bought a hybrid Toyota Prius that he converted to an electric plug-in vehicle four months ago, he was thrilled to own a car with emission-free driving and greater energy efficiency.
“This is something anybody can do,” said Emalfarb, whose 2008 Prius cost less than $25,000 including the conversion kit, and should save him more than $1,900 annually. “We need to get off foreign fuels and oil … They can’t take away from us domestically used energy.”
To even further reduce his carbon footprint, Emalfarb recently had installed the first green electric car charging station in the continental United States. Completely powered by the wind, Carbon Day Automotive’s ChargePoint Networked Charging Station now sits adjacent to Emalfarb’s law firm, Emalfarb, Swan & Bain, in Highland Park.
The charging station is the first powered by wind energy, yet not the only one around town powered by renewable energy. Brian Levin, vice president of Carbon Day, said there are currently chargers at Northerly Island and, in the downtown area, the Aqua Building at 225 N. Columbus Drive. He has also installed them in Wisconsin, Iowa and throughout the Midwest. Levin said his firm has plans for many other locations in Chicago in 2010, though they will not necessarily be wind-powered.
The stations cost around $6,000, but there is the ability to make money on them like an ATM machine, Levin said, and there is also a 50-percent tax credit. For ChargePoint Network station owners worldwide, a “flex billing” system enables them to set pricing. For example, a city with public ChargePoint stations can require drivers to pay one price per hour for access during the hours of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and a second price “after hours.”
Levin said he is working with the city, private property owners, corporations and retailers to make it happen, but says it’s a “chicken or the egg” situation as to which comes first, the cars or the chargers.
“Consumers won’t buy and dealerships won’t send if the infrastructure is not there,” he said.
Levin anticipates 1 million plug-in cars by 2015, 3 million by 2020. By 2015, Levin said, 5 million charging stations will be needed worldwide, with 1.5 million in the United States.
“Even Rolls Royce has announced an electric vehicle,” he said.
Dan Gabel, Fleet Services manager for ComEd, said the city has formed the Chicago Electric Vehicle Consortium, focusing on vehicle electrification and the infrastructure to support it, among other issues. Through a grant from the Department of Energy, 69 charging stations will be installed by 2011, 22 at ComEd and 47 in public places.
“We’re looking at a lot of different options,” Gabel said of the locations.
Gabel said “smart charging” technology will enable stations to be controlled remotely by computer. Computerized information, he said, will determine, among other things, the impact on the electrical grid.
“It’s not a big-picture impact on the grid, but at local levels we could expect to see an impact on the grid,” said Gabel. “This is exactly the right time to start looking at this. If managed properly, it could do a lot of good for consumers and society in general.”
Yet Pat Moseley, president of the North Carolina-based Advanced Lead Acid Battery Consortium, which works on the development of electric vehicle batteries, said between plugging in and having expensive batteries that take up a lot of space, “We’re not going to see a very large number of plug-ins for at least 15 years.”
Besides the expensive battery being an issue, the cars themselves cost more. The average 2010 Toyota Corolla costs between $15,000 and $20,000, compared to the average starting price of a 2010 Toyota Prius hybrid of about $22,800.
“Ask Joe Public to go into their pocket, and they’re going to buy something else,” Moseley said. “They’re a lovely idea and save energy and reduce carbon dioxide, but to have an impact you have to have a large amount on the street.”
Environment Illinois, a statewide, citizen-based environmental advocacy organization, is urging state and local officials to “fully harness” plug-ins by offering financial incentives for buyers and pass a comprehensive energy and global warming bill encouraging the electric vehicles.
Yet Jen Walling, chief of staff for state Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago), who sits on the Illinois Senate’s Environmental Committee, said regulations are in place for electric vehicles and their systems to exist. But, she added, “funding coming from legislators is not going to happen right now.”
Walling said with Illinois’ multi-billion dollar deficit, “The state itself is just not going to have funding for new projects.”
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[...] to electric car charging ports. The City uses them for its own fleet of electric cars. There are publicly-accessible stations scattered around downtown. A parking garage in River North has plug-in charging [...]
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