The EV charging station infrastructure is getting ready to explode with an estimated 1,000,000 charging stations being installed by 2015. My company, Plug-In Vehicle Solutions is a EV charging station reseller. We also perform installation and maintenance for charging stations. Please check out GetPlugging.com for more information.

Best,

Mike Piscitelli
Plug-In Vehicle Solutions
630-248-8810

After all, the current available cars are only desirable because of past excellent marketing from the car manufacturers. So why should manufacturers not sell consumers the benefits of energy efficient, sustainable cars rather than the energy guzzling cars of today.

Ian Cleland
Toward Sustainable Futures
The Walking Man

As I mentioned to PeterRijs, if you know of any web resources on this topic, it would be very informative for you to post the links here.

Steve Puma

This is very good news. If you know of any good resources on this topic, I would love to see you post them here.

Thanks for your posts!

Steve

As Jorgen mentions, you drain the electrical charge from the liquid and replace it with charged liquid in minutes. The “gas station” then charges the liquid while in their tanks. If these could indeed be charged at home that would have some consequences for the distribution network..

If you can refuel your car this way AND are able to charge at home, you actually do not need a dense gas station network. How many gas stations would we need today if we had gasoline on tap at home? Given that proposition, you could have a viable startup infrastructure in place if only a single company builds refueling stations at a limited number of strategic locations per region. Case in point for that is the natural gas vehicles refueling infrastructure. I drive one of those cars and am able to go anywhere I want to most of the time while only needing access to about 10 refueling stations in the greater Bay Area and Sacramento area. The only limitations I face are network boundaries that make distant destinations out of reach.

For some strange reason, even the most brilliant amongst us fail to grasp the consequences of this. We seem to be almost hard-wired to ignore it, because our individual evolutionary imperative tells us to accumulate as many resources as possible, to make sure that our own descendants survive. On an individual level, the short-term far outweighs the long-term.

Therefore, it is imperative that we implement systems of economics and government that take into account the realities of limited resources, limited ecosystem services, and overpopulation. One major step forward would be for generally accepted economic theory to price resources at their true cost to society.

Steve

One nice thing about charging batteries with electricity is that it doesn't matter where the electricity comes from. While it might currently be coming from a coal-fired plant, in a few years it could be coming from a solar plant and in 50 years it might come from a fusion reactor or a space-based solar grid.

I think that a chemical-based battery might be a good option, if you can “recharge” the electrolyte with a process that uses electricity, similar to the way that hydrogen can be generated from water or natural gas.

Like I said, I am no expert on chemical batteries, so I would love to hear more about this technology.

It originally came as a surprise to me, only because I understood comparatively little about industry and efficiency from an economic viewpoint, that companies who pursue hyper efficiency by employing the strategies that Lovins et al espouse in Natural Capitalism and Factor Four, are achieving more than government and environmental organisations have with public campaigns and appropriate policy. Searching for the opportunities from hyper efficiency, sustainable technology and the policies in social, economic and environmental arenas to support and enable them, as well as monitoring, evaluating and communicating the successes and failures of these attempts seems to be a way to get the “fossil fuel monkey” of our backs and to progress towards a more sustainable future.

Unfortunately, I still have difficulty working out how to deal with the issue of “growth is good” at all costs and population growth which are as of yet not well dealt in their effect on sustainability and in the case of population growth liable to get you denounced as a Malthusian(and therefore ridiculed) or a promoter of eugenics aligned with the worst excess of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think their is no solution, I just feel it will be complex, span more than a few generations, and many people will suffer unnecessarily whilst humanity adjusts. Many people might say, that's nothing new, and I'll agree, but surely we can do better than this.

I believe that there is more than enough that we can do RIGHT NOW, with today's technology, to make a big enough dent to get the fossil fuel monkey off of our back. But we have to be willing to make huge investments, and make them right now.

The first step, of course, is hyper-efficiency for almost everything that uses energy. In the book Natural Capitalism, Lovins, Lovins & Hawken showed that a whole-systems approach can bring enough energy savings to buy us he time we need to redesign everything else for the long term.

Solar panels are already net-energy-positive, i.e., they produce more energy over their lifetimes than it takes to produce/maintain them (much more). The same goes for concentrated solar (a 70s technology, by the way.) If you take a close look at what EVIN is proposing, you can actually convert almost any vehicle to run on electricity, using current battery tech, and you don't need to worry about range, IF you have enough places where you can swap out battery packs.