Charging station

Indiana has been slow to install electric car chargers, but the Hoosier State is now going to give eight electric utilities, including Duke Energy, NIPSCO, and AES Indiana, more than $5.5 million to set up 61 EV fast charging stations. The money will come from the Volkswagen settlement over its Clean Air Act violations.

Seven out of 10 Americans plan on taking road trips this summer. Electric vehicle drivers can, of course, use navigation systems, apps, and websites to find places to charge up, but utility company National Grid, which serves New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, today launched EV Road Trip plans featuring fun destinations with charging stations in the three Northeastern states.

German electric utility company EnBW has announced it is implementing a flagship charging station at the Kamener Kreuz autobahn interchange. When complete, the 52 charging points will make it the largest public fast charging station in Europe, according to EnBW.

Six utilities today announced the formation of the Electric Highway Coalition. It’s a plan to ensure that electric vehicle drivers have access to a network of charging stations on major highway systems on the Atlantic coast, in the Midwest and South, and in the Gulf and Central Plains regions.

The UK’s first electric vehicle service station, known as the Electric Forecourt®, has been opened by GRIDSERVE today near Braintree, Essex, in southeast England.

Nevada launched new incentives yesterday from Nevada Energy’s (NVE) annual Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Demonstration (EVID) program that will help accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and EV charging stations across the state.

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BC Hydro, a utility actively supporting EV infrastructure, is thinking about how its charging station can accommodate trailer-towing electric SUVs and trucks, as well as disabled drivers.

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BMW says that it’s now on the verge of completing a project it announced a little more than two years ago — installing 100 EV chargers at US national parks.

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Today, Shell announced the acquisition of Greenlots, an EV charging solutions company based in Los Angeles.

Greenlots will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the oil giant’s “Shell New Energies US LLC,” an arm of the company which focuses on finding business opportunities in low-carbon energy sources.

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Currently, there are two new separate ‘ultra-fast’ electric car charging networks with charge rates up to 350 kW coming up in Europe right now.

The first station was brought online today – making it the first “public ultra-fast charging station in Europe.”

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As part of the BMW of North America and the US National Parks Services event we wrote about earlier, we had a chance to take a look at Thomas Edison’s garage in Llewellyn Park and his Detroit Electric Model 47 that is on display there. This is the actual car the Thomas and his wife Mina used about one hundred years ago when electric vehicles were quite popular. Around the turn of the century only 22% of vehicles on the road were gasoline powered, 40% were powered by steam and a whopping 38% (= 33,842 vehicles) of all the vehicles on the road were EV’s. Imagine 38 percent of today’s vehicles being electric vehicles and what an impact that would make on emissions and noise pollution…

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The first ‘GOFAST’ fast-charging station, which has been marketed as ‘Supercharger for all’ in reference to Tesla’s proprietary charging network, opened in Airolo, Switzerland this week. As previously reported, the Swiss company behind the project, GOtthard FASTcharge, is planning over 150 of these fast-chargers at 100 locations by 2018.

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The Obama Administration announced today a new set of executive actions to directly accelerate electric vehicle adoption in the US through the expansion of charging infrastructure. The main announcement is the unlocking of up to $4.5 billion in loan guarantees for charging stations, but also an important collaboration between the Federal government and private companies, including some major electric utilities, automakers, charging station manufacturers and operators.

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While the Tesla Model S grabbed much of the attention today with its redesign and a few new features, the automaker also quietly released a new ‘Tesla Wall Connector’ on its equipment website, which went virtually unnoticed.

The new charger is rated at up to 80 amps, just like the previous version, but it’s now significantly cheaper starting at $500 instead of $750, and it now features a “power sharing” function.

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On a recent electric road trip to upstate New York, I realized that, with the cold weather, my snow tires and a car full of kids who like to be warm, I would need over 30 more miles of electricity than my batteries could hold to make it home. Hitting one of Tesla’s speedy Superchargers would require me to veer across the Hudson River twice and add over a half hour to my trip.

Along the fastest route, according to the helpful Plugshare App, there were a few Level 2 charging stations. I can get 30 miles per hour of charge from my default Tesla cable so I figured that I could get most of the extra miles I needed while we stopped for lunch. There was also a highly rated Level 2 charger within a mile of our destination we could use as a backup (it is good to have backups!). I figured we were all set…

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Tesla had an incredible year for sales and deliveries in 2015. The California-based automaker delivered 50,580 vehicles last year, which represents a 60% increase over the previous year. It’s hard to find any weaknesses with such an incredible sales performance. Yet the company increased its deliveries in almost all markets but Norway, where according to registration data, Tesla delivered the exact same number of Model S’s in 2014 and 2015: 4,039 units.

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Five days ago a Tesla Model S caught fire while plugged-in at a Supercharger in Gjerstad, Norway. When we first reported on the event last week, Tesla said that nobody was harmed and they are undergoing a full investigation.

The investigation is not over, but today we learn that local police released the scene of the Supercharger after not being able to find a problem with the fast-charging station.

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BMW and Nissan jointly announced today an important partnership to deploy DC fast charging stations at 120 locations across 19 states. The locations are equipped with Greenlots-networked charging stations, which include both CHAdeMO and CCS (Combo) connectors, suitable for all DC Fast charging-capable electric vehicles in the U.S.

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Nissan announced that it will unveil the “Fuel Station of the Future” in partnership with Foster + Partners, a British architecture and design firm. Interestingly, Nissan features the all-electric LEAF in a short preview video for the station.

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