what happens—and what needs to be done—as electric vehicles become a bigger percentage of the cars on the road. Matching funds provided by utilities, automakers, and other corporations, along with an additional $15 million the DOE gave the company last month to include Los Angeles and Washington D.C., have brought overall funding to roughly $230 million for the effort, which is known as “The EV Project.”
Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt owners who qualify to participate in the project can get a free EV charger installed at their home for little or no cost. (They’ll still have to pay for the electricity, of course.)
In a separate announcement today at the Plug-In 2010 conference in San Jose, Ecotality unveiled “Blink,” the company’s flagship EV charging station, available in two models—a wall-mounted unit for residential installations and a commercial, stand-alone charger for public locations. Ecotality plans to offer a subscription plan to enable EV owners to charge their cars at any Blink charging station.
“Blink’s simple, smart approach to charging allows consumers the real-time monitoring, command and control they expect while leveraging renewable energy generation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” Ecotality’s CEO says in the statement issued jointly with Qualcomm. “Cellular networks will play a critical role in connecting the charging stations with Ecotality’s control systems so we can make all these benefits possible.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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