Coulomb Gets $37 Million from Energy Dept. to Deploy 4,600 EV-Charging Stations
By Scott Doggett June 2, 2010
By Danny King, Contributor
Coulomb Technologies will receive $37 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to deploy 4,600 electric-vehicle charging stations across the U.S. over the next 18 months through a partnership with General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and Daimler AG, marking a joint effort to make electric vehicles more affordable and easier to recharge.
The closely held San Francisco Bay Area-based company will deploy about 2,600 networked stations - starting immediately - to be placed in public areas such as parking garages, retail centers and neighborhood curbsides, Coulomb Technologies CEO Richard Lowenthal said in a Webcast today.
The other 2,000 stations will be given to buyers of GM's Chevrolet Volt extended-range plug-in vehicle, Ford's Transit Connect and Focus EVs, and Daimler's Smart ForTwo EVs.
About $15 million of the DOE money for the program - dubbed ChargePoint America - will come from last year's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, while the other $21 million will come from other grants, Lowenthal said.
Coulomb, which shipped about 600 of its ChargePoint stations last year, received funding for the rollout as the U.S. prepares for the debut of both the Volt and the Nissan Leaf all-electric vehicle later this year.
Annual global hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) and battery-electric vehicle (BEV) production will more than triple over the next six years, Boston-based research firm Strategy Analytics said in a study released in March.
With the broader adoption of both battery-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, EV-charging system makers including Coulomb will install about 4.7 million charge points for electric vehicles between from now to 2015, the clean-technology market intelligence firm Pike Research forecast last week.
In addition to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and foreign-oil dependency, the ChargePoint America program is designed to offset the higher cost associated with purchasing EVs, as electric vehicles are more expensive than their gas-powered counterparts, and charging stations cost about $3,000.
"We want to be sure everybody feels they have a place to charge their vehicles," said Lowenthal, who estimated that EVs cost about 2 cents a mile to propel, compared with about 14 cents a mile for a gas-powered vehicle. "The idea is to accelerate the accessibility of these vehicles."
The ChargePoint stations will be rolled out in nine specific regions, including the Bellevue-Redmond (Wash.) area, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and Austin, Texas, Lowenthal said.
Coulomb will work with both the automakers and local utility companies to ensure that both station deployment will be aligned with consumer demand and the approval process for station installation will be streamlined.
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