Used EV battery packs have 80% capacity – making them not so good for use in a car, but still very useful for other uses. Nissan is recycling used Leaf packs to create an energy storage array coupled with solar panels on the roof of the headquarters building, then using…
Robert Llewellyn drives from Oslo to London in an electric car – this is a proper loooooooong road trip.
This guy in Holland did what I’d wanted to do last year, add a CHAdeMO port to his DIY conversion EV. We see here a VW Bus (I had a Karmann Ghia) that’s been converted to electric drive (as has been done with many other VW bus’s). Working with the Orion…
All electric car drivers face a bugaboo – charging station reliability, availability and compatibility. It’s always a hit-and-miss affair whether a given public charging station will be functioning, or not. Some of us rely on public charging stations to get around (personally, I cannot charge at home) and others are…
This morning, PG&E announced a massive new charging station network of over 25,000 charging stations in its service territory. This is a departure for charging networks, in California, for direct ownership by the utility company, however PG&E says they will only own the infrastructure and will contract out the billing…
Is the primary hurdle to buying electric cars the purchase price, or the lack of public charging infrastructure? A couple weeks ago I referred to research saying it’s the purchase price, that prospective electric car buyers don’t want to pay a price premium for electric cars. New research by a…
The Kansas City metropolitan area is one of America’s Big Cities, but for some reason it’s electric car charging network has been limited in number, with very few fast charging stations. All that’s about to change thanks to a new joint announcement from ChargePoint and Kansas City Power And Light.…
Why should Tesla Model S owners be the only EV owners capable of taking long distant trips? What’s needed is fast charging infrastructure located along highways between major cities supporting cars other than Tesla’s. Existing DCFC infrastructure for the rest of us is only been located inside cities, and not…
Will the public charging networks be ready for the Chevy Bolt and other 200+ mile range electric cars due around 2017? It’s exciting that GM has unveiled the Chevy Bolt electric concept car. Assuming they can successfully get it on the market, the 200+ mile range and $30,000 MSRP should…
There are big dreams and goals for electric car adoption in California, around the U.S. and around the world. California’s goals are something like 1 million plug-in EV’s by 2025 which seems to me to be achievable, unless this dalliance with fuel cell vehicles causes the state to undermine battery…
The Sierra Club has just unveiled a “quiz” that tries to help you know which electric car to buy. While it’s a good idea, and the questions make sense, the answers they give aren’t very good. Even so it’s worth going to http://content.sierraclub.org/evguide/pick-a-plugin and seeing what suggestions they have. There’s an idea…
At the intersection of smart grid services, on-site renewable energy generation, on-site grid energy storage, and electric cars, is the new energy energy model. I’ve recently written a few posts about the stone age energy model, where we burn things to create heat, motion or light. Most cars, trucks, etc…
The question of whether Blink is gouging its customers, or not, raises a set of questions in my mind. Is that really what Blink is doing? Do the majority of EV drivers really think Blink is gouging them? What about the other charging networks? Maybe what I’m seeing is just…
