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Wednesday, August 5, 2009

News / Green Portland Scores 1000 Electric Cars

Posted by Matt Davis on Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 2:26 PM

Oregon has been named a test market by the Electric Transportation Engineering Corporation, which today announced achieving $99.8million in federal funds to study electric vehicle usage.

The state could be getting up to 1000 Nissan Leaf cars, and up to 2,500 charging stations in 2010, according to a press release just put out by Mayor Sam Adams' office.

“This is exactly the kind of clean tech investments that Portland, and Oregon, have fought for,“ says Mayor Sam Adams, in the press release. “I have committed to making Portland a national leader in the EV industry, and with Nissan and eTec, we’re able to move our agenda forward.”

We've got a call in to get some more information on the project—yet to be returned.

Update, 3:51pm:

The mayor's spokesman, Roy Kaufmann, says the price of a Nissan Leaf includes the cost of having Arizona-based company ETEC install a plug-in station at the buyer's home, making it more practical for people to own and drive the cars.

Kaufmann didn't know the exact cost of the Nissan Leafs but said they would be priced "competitively."

"The big problem with electric cars has always been that it's hard to get parity with gas vehicles because there's this infrastructure to fill up," says Kaufmann. "The win in with this deal is that it brings not only the cars but the infrastructure, too."

"Hopefully after we've built out the charging stations in Portland and Seattle, we're going to start seeing the charging stations emerge on I-5," he continues. "That's the hope."

Portland will start seeing the charging stations being installed next summer, with the vehicles available for private purchase in late 2010. "I have a feeling it will be more of a long wait list than going to the dealership to pick one up, if the Prius is any indication," says Kaufmann.

San Francisco was not awarded one of the five target market designations, much to Kaufmann's delight. "Their application was for a battery swap model, not a battery charging model," he says.

Portland's high speed charging stations will only take a matter of hours to charge the cars, rather than overnight.

 

Comments (5) RSS

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1
This is an excellent opportunity for our state to test the viability of a new type of electric vehicle. Thank you for featuring it, Matt.

I'm very uncomfortable with part of what Sam Adams said. The credit for making this program a reality correctly goes to Art James, Project Director of ODOT's Oregon Innovative Partnerships Program, his project team members, and Governor Kulongoski.

For more information, here's their direct link:
http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/HWY/OIPP/inn_ev…
Posted by real_life on August 5, 2009 at 2:51 PM · Report
2
Sounds very cool. To clarify - those are going into the state fleet of cars? Not available for sale to the public in any way?
Posted by Reymont on August 5, 2009 at 3:43 PM · Report
3
Plug in electric vehicles are a great idea. If I could get my hands on one with a 50 to 100 mile range I would be very interested.

Problem is we need to address how the power will be generated to charge all those cars. I don't think burning more coal at Boardman is going to cut it.
Posted by Dave Lister on August 5, 2009 at 3:45 PM · Report
4
NUCLEAR!
Posted by Matt Davis on August 5, 2009 at 4:07 PM · Report
5
Well, Dave, at this point we dump a lot of energy that is generated by wind at night. There is no place to store it and not enough people are using power in the middle of the night. In the next ten years (maybe sooner) we will begin to see a smart grid system that will allow us to use that energy to charge cars at night. At this point, even without a smart grid if there was more draw at night (from cars or other things) we would use power that is not being used. I highly recommend you read the report "Bright Futures" which can be found here: http://www.lightintheriver.org/reports/bri…
Posted by pdxmom on August 5, 2009 at 4:14 PM · Report

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