3:00 pm Jun. 13, 20121
Electric-car drivers may be risk-taking early adopters, the sort of people for whom hybrids are old hat. But many of them are also afflicted by something called “range anxiety”: the fear of stranding by depleted battery, without a charging station in sight.
“All drivers are afraid of being stranded, even though it’s not actually happening,” said Roger Anderson, a senior research scholar in Columbia Engineering's Center for Computational Learning Systems.
AAA is tackling the issue with electric-vehicle charging trucks that can be dispatched to stranded drivers.
Governor Andrew Cuomo and the federal government recently took a small step toward making electric-car ownership in New York less frightening, and more feasible, with the funding of 325 new electric-vehicle charging stations statewide.
That’s not a huge number. California has more than 1,200, according to the San-Francisco-based charger manufacturer ECOtality. So does Paris.
Nor, at an initial outlay of $4.4 million, is it a particularly large public commitment.
But it does represent the sort of infrastructure investment that’s going to be necessary to popularize electric cars, or at least make them more commercially feasible for manufacturers and, in turn, cheaper for consumers.
That's particularly true in the northeast, where electric cars have been slower to catch on than in what Colin Read, ECOtality's vice president for corporate development, calls the "Birkenstock Belt," from Oregon down the west coast to California, and then east through Texas to Florida.
ECOtality won more than $100 million in federal grants to manage the EV Project, which is deploying more than 12,000 chargers nationwide, none planned for New York.
"The more chargers you put out there, the more comfortable people are with driving their vehicles longer range," said Read.
But, he also said, "In reality we need cars on the road to justify putting chargers out there."
Today, most electric cars come with home charging stations. But their range is, obviously, limited, and most require more than six hours to recharge.
Which is why charging stations are generally located in places like parking garages and shopping malls.
Right now, there are about 200 charging stations in New York State, about 70 of them in the five boroughs. The Cuomo initiative will bring that up to more than 500.
Soon, his administration will begin a second round of funding, totaling $4 million.
“He’s taken away the obstacle of where do you charge up," said Lou Riccio, a professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. "And if you’re going to go distances, do you feel comfortable."
Why are we even discussing plug-in charge stations in NY? Are people really going to stop on the side of the road for 6-10 hours to re-charge their battery if they drive over 100 miles in a given day? Are we really going to install a charging station at every parking space in America, including along city streets and at every space in mall parking lots that are sized for peak holiday demand? Yes, there are rapid charge technologies out there to reduce re-charge times, but each rapid charge seriously impacts a battery's life span (vs. a conventional "slow" charge) and should only be used in rare circumstances. Unlike Cuomo, someone has thought this through. Several entrepreneurs, for example Better Place, have developed robotic car battery swap stations that look like gas station car washes. You drive in, a robot takes out your depleted battery, it then installs a fully-charged battery, and off you drive in about the same time it would take to fill up the tank with gas. They keep multiple batteries charged and in stock, so it doesn't matter what kind of car you drive or what battery you need--they have it. They can even sell electricity to the grid during times when there's little demand for fully-charged batteries, and then charge them up again when they know people will need to swap out their batteries. It's a great model, and one we should be subsidizing, not this half-baked roadside charging station concept.