If
electric cars
have any future in the
United States
, this may be the city where they
arrive first.
The
San Francisco
building code will soon be revised to require that new structures be
wired for car chargers. Across the street from City Hall, some drivers are
already plugging converted hybrids into a row of charging stations.
In nearby
Silicon Valley
, companies are
ordering workplace charging stations in the belief that their employees will be
first in line when electric cars begin arriving in showrooms. And at the
headquarters of Pacific Gas and Electric, utility executives are preparing
“heat maps” of neighborhoods that they fear may overload the power grid in
their exuberance for electric cars.
“There is a huge
momentum here,” said Andrew Tang, an executive at P.G.& E.
As automakers prepare
to introduce the first mass-market electric cars late this year, it is
increasingly evident that the cars will get their most serious tryout in just a
handful of places. In cities like
San Francisco
,
Portland
,
Ore.
, and
San Diego
, a combination of green consciousness and enthusiasm for new technology
seems to be stirring public interest in the cars.
The first wave of
electric car buying is expected to begin around December, when Nissan
introduces the Leaf, a five-passenger electric car that will have a range of
100 miles on a fully charged battery and be priced for middle-class families.
Several thousand Leafs
made in
Japan
will be delivered to metropolitan areas in
California
,
Arizona
,
Washington
state,
Oregon
and
Tennessee
. Around the same time, General Motorswill
introduce the Chevrolet Volt, a vehicle able to go 40 miles on electricity
before its small gasoline engine kicks in.
“This is the
game-changer for our industry,” saidCarlos
Ghosn, Nissan’s president and chief executive. He predicted that 10 percent of
the cars sold would be electric vehicles by 2020.
Utilities are gearing
up to cooperate with the automakers, a first for the two industries, and
governments on the West Coast are focusing intently on the coming issues. Price
and tax incentives need to be worked out. Locations must be found for charging
stations. And local electrical grids may need reinforcement.
The California Public
Utilities Commission, whose headquarters are in
San Francisco
, has brought together utilities, automakers and charging station
companies in an urgent effort to write the new rules of the road.
Much of the attention
on electric cars has been on the vehicles’ design, cost and performance. But
success or failure could turn on more mundane matters, like the time it takes
car buyers to navigate a municipal bureaucracy to have charging stations
installed in their homes.
When the president of
the California Public Utilities Commission, Michael R. Peevey, leased an
electric Mini Cooper, he said, it took six weeks of visits by installers and
inspectors before he could plug in his new car at home.
“It was really drawn
out and frustrating and certainly is not workable on a mass basis,” Mr. Peevey
said.
Such issues are being
hashed out here first. The San Francisco area is home not only to a population
of early technology adopters but to companies like Coulomb Technologies and
Better Place that are developing the networks and software to allow utilities
to manage how cars are charged.
Tesla Motors, a
Silicon Valley
company that
makes electric cars, says it has already sold 150 of its $109,000 Roadsters in
the Bay Area. One customer bought the sleek sports car on the spot after a test
drive.
“We asked him how he
heard of Tesla and why he bought the car,” said Rachel Konrad, a Tesla
spokeswoman. “He said, ‘Well, three other guys on my block have them.’”
In Berkeley, a town
known for its environmental sensibility, one out of five cars sold today is a
hybrid Prius. If electric cars are adopted that broadly in the next few years,
problems could ensue.
“If you just allow
willy-nilly random charging, are we going to have neighborhood blackouts?” asked
Mr. Tang, the utility executive. He said a single car could consume three times
as much electricity as a typical
San Francisco
home.
Mr. Tang is working to
make sure that does not happen by monitoring where electric cars are sold in
Northern California
.
And later this year P.G.&E. will lead a “smart charging” pilot project,
connecting 200 cars to special charging stations that let utilities control the
electrical demand at a given moment.
Robert
Hayden, the clean transportation adviser for San Francisco, said the city hopes
to have 60 charging stations installed in public garages by year’s end, with a
thousand more available across the Bay Area in 2011. And in
Oregon
, an advisory group is working on
charging stations and related issues.
To avoid problems in
areas with high car concentrations, utility executives said they would
encourage people to charge their vehicles at night or to use smarter electric
meters that help control demand.
“We are trying to be
proactive about how to make sure that the transformers that serve these homes
and neighborhoods are robust enough,” said Doug Kim, an executive at Southern
California Edison, which serves
Los Angeles
.
Mr. Kim said the
popularity of electric vehicles “will be a function of a lot of different
things: the state of the economy, how many people can actually afford to buy
the cars and the price of gasoline — how high does it have to be?”
Some transportation
experts are skeptical that electric vehicles will catch on anywhere in the
country, in large part because the batteries and the installation of home
recharging units are expensive.
Dan Sperling, the
director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at theUniversity of California, Davis,
estimated that a typical electric car battery would cost the automaker $12,000,
and a 240-volt charging unit would cost a household at least $1,500.
Without huge
subsidies, “the reality is, these electric vehicles are not going to sweep the
industry and become a major share of the market for a very long time,” Mr.
Sperling said.
Despite such
skepticism,
Washington
is putting considerable money into the effort, including billions of
dollars in loans toFord, Nissan
and Tesla Motors.
Under last year’s
stimulus package, nearly $200 million will support Nissan’s introduction of the
Leaf by permitting the installation of 13,000 charging stations around cities
in
Oregon
,
Washington
,
California
,
Arizona
and
Tennessee
in the next year or so. (Nissan plans to build the Leaf in
Tennessee
eventually.)
If electric cars do
take off, consumers and society could benefit. Battery-powered motors are more
efficient than gasoline engines. They cost drivers on average only 2.5 cents a
mile for fuel, less than a third of the cost for a highly efficient gasoline
car, according to proponents.
The Energy Department
says electric cars produce less of the emissions linked toclimate changethan traditional vehicles, though how
much less depends on the source of power on the local electricity grid.
Before the first
Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts reach the show room, an electric car
infrastructure is getting a test drive in the Bay Area, in a limited way.
Google, which is
talking to automakers about using its PowerMeter energy management software,
has already become something of an electric transportation hub. At Google’s
Mountain View
headquarters, a handful of employees drive to work in Tesla Roadsters,
and more drive a fleet of modified Priuses that Google owns. The employees pull
into carports that are covered with solar panels and plug their cars into the
100 available charging stations.
Nearby, in downtown
San Jose
, the city has reserved street parking for electric vehicles and
installed charging stations. Nearby, atAdobe
Systems’ headquarters, an executive showed off a dozen charging stations in the
parking garage. Eighteen more will be installed this year.
“No one wants to be
left behind,” said Richard Lowenthal, chief executive of Coulomb Technologies. “We’re
preparing for an onslaught of demand.”
(
from the N.Y.Times)