Feds to Award $5 Million More for EV Charging
By Danny King April 20, 2011
The U.S. Energy Department said Tuesday that it will spend $5 million to fund what it called "community-based efforts" to speed up installations of electric-vehicle charging stations, the latest in a string of federally funded programs aimed at promoting use of rechargeable electric-drive vehicles. President Obama has said - repeatedly - that he would like to see at least 1 million plug-in hybrids and battery-electric cars on the road in the U.S. by 2015.
In its latest program, the Energy Department is offering $5 million in grants to local governments and private companies with the best proposals for broadening the electric-vehicle charging infrastructure. Applications are due by June 13. The department also said Tuesday that it's partnering with Google and more than 80 other companies to develop web-based information that make it easier for electric-drive vehicle owners to locate nearby charging stations.
The federal commitment to plug-in vehicles is aimed at helping reduce the country's dependency on foreign oil by making it easier and more cost-effective for Americans to buy cars that use little or no gasoline.
The government in August 2009 announced $2.4 billion in grants designed to speed up electric-drive vehicle development and deployment, including about $2 billion to U.S. manufacturers for electric-drive vehicle battery and component development and $400 million for both purchases of test BEVs and PHEVs and for charging infrastructure.
As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which funded the grants, the Energy Department awarded California-based ECOtality $114.8 million as art of a $230-million, private-public project to deploy about 14,000 residential electric chargers in 18 U.S. metropolitan areas, including 8,300 earmarked specifically for Chevrolet Volt and Nissan Leaf owners. The DOE last year added $15 million to that project.
Additionally, the DOE last June awarded a $15 million to another California company, Coulomb Technologies, as its share of Coulomb's $37 million ChargePoint America project to deploy 4,600 electric-vehicle charging stations across the U.S. by the end of this year through a partnership with General Motors, Ford and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler.
The program, in which 2,600 of the stations will be in public locations, originally was slated for nine U.S. regions, including the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas; Detroit; Austin, Texas, and Washington D.C. The program was expanded last week to include three East Coast cities - Baltimore, Boston, Tampa – and three more California cities -Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Ventura. The federal government also gives buyers of cars such as the Nissan Leaf BEV and Chevrolet Volt PHEV a tax credit of up to $7,500.
"The initiatives announced today are just the latest steps in our broader efforts to reduce America's dependence on oil, improve our energy security, and save families and businesses money," DOE Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement Tuesday. The federal funding efforts dovetail with the goal Obama set in January of having 1 million electric-drive vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. Such broad adoption of advanced-technology vehicles would help automakers meet federal government greenhouse-gas emissions standards, which require automakers to boost fleetwide fuel economy by about 50 percent to 35.5 miles per gallon by the 2016 model year.
LEAVE A COMMENT