First Charging Stations Spring Up on California's 'Electric Highway'
The five quick-charge stations were provided by Tesla Motors with grants from the California Air Resources Board. They will be maintained by SolarCity and Rabobank, which is providing the electricity for free. The California stations can be found in Salinas, Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria and Goleta; these smaller cities run along the corridor that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Each station cost between $7,000 and $12,000 to install, and the Santa Maria station gets its juice from a 30-kilowatt solar array (SolarCity is working on bringing solar power to the other four sites). Right now, the stations use the Tesla high-powered charger, so only Tesla Roadster owners can plug in. SolarCity has said it will retrofit all five sites with the universal SAE J1772 plug as soon as the standard is adopted, which they expect to happen within six months.
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of how practical it would be to drive the electric highway. The real issues are distance and charging time.
The Tesla Roadster’s 53-kilowatt-hour battery pack will take 3.5 hours to charge, which is a lengthy wait. The Mini E and Nissan Leaf with their smaller battery packs can collect a full charge in less than two hours, while the Chevrolet Volt with a 16-kwh battery will charge in just over an hour. For the smaller packs, you could easily sit down for a meal at a restaurant and be at or near a full charge when you return.
The greater problem is distance.
While some of the hops are short — Atascadero to San Luis Obispo is only 19.4 miles and San Luis Obispo to Santa Maria is less than 34 miles — most of the legs are more than 100 miles long. If you own a pure electric vehicle like the Mini E or Leaf, you’re not going to make it to the next charging before running out of juice. The Tesla has a longer range of 240 miles on a single charge.
However, range-extended vehicles — like the Volt — have gas-powered generators that can kick in until you can reach the next charging station, or you have the option to fill-up on gas anywhere. This demonstrates why early-adaptor vehicles like the Volt may have a leg up over the all-electric competition. Owning a Leaf becomes complicated if you want to take a trip as short as San Francisco to Salinas (106 miles, just over the Leaf’s 100-mile range), while the Volt maintains the range and fuel options of an old-fashioned gasoline car.
Expect the term “range anxiety” to pop up more and more as the country figures out how to adopt to the debut of plug-in hybrids and all-electric vehicles.
EV 'Charging Corridor' Links L.A. and San Francisco (Autopia)
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Theme : Addressing Range Anxieties.
1. As for long trip needs, all but Americans and many of developed nations have existing automobiles, in this regard, EVs are best suited to their daily use until the infrastructure comes into wide use. And people are already doing that.
2. With a long extension code inside, just in case, riders can get help from almost anyplace as electricity is everywhere, not to mention the stores to provide charge service, and many of EVs are equipped with a quick charger.
3. The on-board IT system shows the driving radius on a maximum range display under the current state of charge and calculates if the vehicle is within range of a pre-set destination. And the navigation system points out the latest information on available charging stations within the current driving range.
4. Unlike fuel price, as time goes by, the price of battery is expected to drop dramatically in the foreseeable future as with computer components, in that case, mounting additional battery might be not a problem. And the EVs that come in a range of 200 to 300 miles between charges are on fast-tract toward mass-market, as well.
5. Indian EV maker Reva said it has also set about addressing anxieties about e-car range, this fantastic wireless electricity/ "instant remote recharge" will be widely available down the line.
6. The vehicle-to-grid communication technology is helping the battery serve as a storage to prevent the costly blackout standing at about $90 to 100bn per year. That means utilities are shedding cost for additional storage facilities and ratepayers are selling electricity during peak demand so that EVs can make more economic sense, as we know.
It is also in the best interest of electricity utilities that EVs are going mainstream, thereby they need to put in charge stands where needed around highways, major roads with card readers or cell phone tech.
7. I'm hopeful that the charge network will extend the select districts to nation-wide scale throughout the world, and this environment can usher in active private investings in EVs. And I remain confident that investing in charge stands could give rise to multiple times as much investing effect, so to speak, some billions of investing, this simple deployment, could call into the most-sought energy independence and solid recovery around the world.
Thank You !
this is great to see, but realistically, even if they put charging stations ever 20 miles, are people going to really take their cars that have a range of only, say, 100 miles or really anything less than 200 miles on a long trip, and have to stop every 20 miles or so for an hour to charge the car. NO! You can only stop so many time for lunch. So realistically, even if there are charge stations everywhere, you aren't going to take an electic only vheicle on a longish trip, and here's the kicker, almost everone takes a long trip or two or ten during a vehicles lifetime, so that is where the Volt shines. You can use it on elecrtic only for your commuting (90% of your driving) and then when you take that long trip, you are forced into stopping all the time to recharge. If the Volt cost 10K less, it would be a major hit for GM, but it is just too expensive to reach hit status. But as I started off with, it's great to see these charging stations; we are finally accepting electricity (and hopefully from renewable sources) as a mode of powering our cars.