EV Politics

http://www.bike-eu.com/news/3714/associations-disagree-on-e-bike-regulations.html

"COLIBI and COLIPED, the European associations for bicycle manufacturers, assemblers and parts and accessories’ producers, are disputing the mandate that the European Two-Wheelers’ Retailers Association (ETRA) claims to have obtained at several meetings with e-Bike manufacturers on proposals for new e-Bike regulations. COLIBI and COLIPED are also against any changes in the current European legislation for electric bicycles."

Basically the article says COLIBI and COLIPED are against any changes in European electric bicycle regulations. ETRA on the other hand is advocating for an increase in power levels, and claims to have several electric bicycle manufacturers in agreement.

This morning I spoke with Brian Wismann of Brammo on the phone about the ride they're taking across the U.S. The goal is to raise awareness of electric motorcycles (oh, and to raise awareness of the Enertia motorcycle) etc. It sounds like a great adventure they're undertaking.

The goals include increasing awareness in the general public that electric vehicles, to demonstrate the utility of the Enertia motorcycles, to demonstrate issues with electric motorcycle charging infrastructure (see Electric Vehicle infrastructure issues demonstrated by Shocking Barack ride), and they also hope to meet with President Obama when they reach DC and present him with the motorcycles.

The route is not nailed in stone but is determined by the need to recharge. They're usually stopping at strip malls and getting permission from the businesses to plug in. Each one is turning into a mini-impromptu-town-hall on electric vehicles and whatnot.

ShockingBarack.com

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Wasn't quite sure where to post this but thought this was the closest representative forum topic...

I work for a large state educational organization in Florida. We now have a new department in our organization "Environmental Sustainability" etc. A work colleague and friend of mine is heading that up. He is currently looking for grants, resources, etc. for possibilities of converting our fleet of gasoline pickups/vans/cars to electrics. Anybody know of any financial incentives/resources/grant programs that would be available to state agencies in this regard or other organizations that would be a resource to us in helping us find out the feasibility of this? Thanks in advance for any replies...

Gus
Florida

Republished from:- http://www.examiner.com/x-14333-Green-Transportation-Examiner~y2009m9d17-Planning-for-the-coming-wave-of-electric-vehicles

Are you ready for the electric vehicles which will soon be commonplace? Maybe you're only vaguely aware they are coming, but government leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area are very aware of this and are working with a broad ranging public-private partnership to get ready. This week on Sept 16, 2009 was the third in the series of meetings involving representation from around the Bay Area. The topic of discussion was the electric vehicles being promised by the car companies, infrastructure needs, regulatory changes required, the needs of the utility companies and power grid, in short the tremendous number of changes which will be required for this to be successful. If it works out the consumer experience of buying and owning electric vehicles will be smooth and easy, if it flops it could be a disaster, and in this case disaster would be very bad.

The vision is a higher quality of live while spurring clean jobs. The SF Bay Area has some unique resources that indicate likely successful adoption of electric vehicles. The local population is very environmentally aware evidenced by the broad adoption of hybrid vehicles. There are several local organizations with national impact on electric vehicle research such as Plug In America, the Electric Auto Association, CalCars, and EPRI, not to mention the businesses making electric vehicles or electric vehicle components such as Tesla Motors, Coulomb Technologies, Project Better Place, Electric Motorsport, Zero Motorcycles, Green Vehicles and more. Hence the local electric vehicle resources to draw upon are nothing short of phenomenal.

At the meeting, the government agencies brought a message of simplifying the permitting process for installing electric vehicle charging, and other uses of government resources to improve the infrastructure. An example which repeatedly arose is the long and difficult process to legally install electric vehicle service equipment (a.k.a. a charging station). Present at the meeting was Enid Joffe of Clean Fuel Connections, the company who oversaw most of the charging station installations 10 years ago during the previous era of electric vehicle interest, and who is now seeing more business overseeing charging station installations today. Her long experience shows the existing requirements for charging station installation make the process take at least 30 days, and involve at least 12 major steps. Clearly successful sales of electric vehicles means a streamlining of the process, but on the other hand safety requires that some form of building and electrical inspections and permitting must be performed.

The message here is that buying an electric vehicle isn't as simple as buying a gas powered vehicle. While electricity is everywhere, safely recharging an electric vehicle requires equipment which isn't widely installed.

The car companies for their part brought a different message. The first message is that the cars are coming, that it is T-15 months before the Nissan LEAF launch and that success means having an infrastructure ready for the car owners to use. There has always been a chicken and egg problem between installing electric vehicle infrastructure and selling electric vehicles. Prospective EV owners are unlikely to buy a car if there is no charging infrastructure, and prospective infrastructure owners are unlikely to install electric vehicle service equipment if there are no cars. The car companies gave a list of desired enablers which includes vehicle purchase incentives, charging infrastructure, opportunities for charging, reduction of EV owner operating expenses, education of prospective EV owners, policy assistance, HOV access, and free public parking.

The utility companies for their part brought a hopeful message. On the one hand the utilities believe they can easily handle the aggregate power load increase. A statistic shown was that even with 1 million electric vehicles on the road it would represent only a 0.5% aggregate increase in electricity use. However the concern they voiced repeatedly is the neighborhood level electrical grid. For example if a given neighborhood has several people who all buy electric vehicles, they'd all be connected to the same transformer possibly making it blow up. Nobody likes it when the lights go out. Part of the 30+ day installation process outlined above is to verify with the utility companies whether the neighborhood transformers can handle the load for that neighborhood.

See also: Some Nissan LEAF questions answered, Coulomb and GridPoint unveil smart grid enabled charging station for electric vehicles, Battery industry projects in the $2.4 billion electric vehicle initiative, Nissan supports electric vehicle & infrastructure deployment project

Further information:

Alternative Fueled Vehicle Proceeding

CPUC TO CONSIDER POLICIES RELATED TO ALTERNATIVE FUELED VEHICLES

Bay Area Air Quality Management District

Bay Area Council

Silicon Valley Leadership Group

Bay Area Climate Change Collaborative

California Energy Commission: Alternative and Renewable Fuel & Vehicle Technology Program

Clean Cities

Ford: Environmental Vehicles

GM: Electric Vehicles

Nissan: Zero Emission and LEAF Electric Car

Mitsubishi: iMiev

Tesla Motors

Aerovironment

Better Place

Clipper Creek

Coulomb Technologies

eTec

Clean Fuel Connection, Inc.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)

PG&E: Electric Vehicles

Plug In America

EV Charger News

Electric Auto Association

CalCars

A commenter on my latest examiner.com post asked "Who is killing the electric bicycle" and suggests it's the electric car.

http://www.examiner.com/x-14333-Green-Transportation-Examiner~y2009m8d10-Battery-industry-projects-in-the-24-billion-electric-ve...

The story is that last week the Obama Administration announced $2.4 billion in grants to support the electric car industry in the U.S. This is big news and as an EV advocate I'm jazzed about this. The article in question goes over the $1.5 billion of the total that's going to battery industry infrastructure. There are several companies gearing up to make lithium batteries in the U.S.

But. okay. Bicycles. What about them apples?

Basically as exciting as the announcement is - the result will be to reinforce the regime of transportation==cars on highways. I think cars and highways are ugly and degrade our quality of life. On the other hand they do offer a lot of freedom of mobility, that is unless you're stuck in a traffic jam 20 miles long snaking at 15 miles/hr. We get traffic like that in Silicon Valley during "rush" hour and it certainly doesn't feel like freedom to be crawling along at that speed constantly in danger of bumping the car in front of you if you misjudge what's going on.

In an earlier article I noted that Taiwan and Italy both have government incentive programs to buy electric bicycles and scooters.

http://www.examiner.com/x-14333-Green-Transportation-Examiner~y2009m7d16-Taiwan-and-Italy-subsidizing-electric-bicycles-and-scoo...

(aside: one of the early failures of Vectrix was to close sales offices in Italy for some reason.. but if they were selling scooters in Italy today the Italian government would be giving an incentive for their scooters.. gaaaaah!!!)

$2.4 billion would buy a heck of a lot of electric bicycles, don't ya think?

Well that's not the whole story. To be effective the program would have to tie with improved mass transit systems which allow electric bicycles to integrate into the system as a cohesive whole.

It is fascinating to contrast recent statements from the Conservative Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, with a statement from Kim Carr, the Minister for Industry and Innovation in the Australian Labour Government.

London mayor Boris Johnson is speaking out again and this time has publicly committed to never buying another car powered by an internal combustion engine.

Kim Carr, the Minister for Industry and Innovation, poured cold water and scorn on zero-emission vehicles and defended his his decision to encourage local car makers to continue to invest in large petrol-powered cars."We've heard talk of some companies being able to produce plug-in electric cars or similar thingies" stated Carr, " but we're only interested in real world, not nuclear powered cars!" this last reference was to the announcements by Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Tesla. Minister Carr, went on to say"Government aid was designed to help existing car manufacturers with small changes to fuel economy, rather than redesigning whole cars."

It is especially despairing when you consider that Australian electors voted for Mr Carr's Labour Government largely on a platform of Environmental issues.

How can the ordinary voter have any faith in the competence of leaders to support EV technology, when troglodytes in position of power around the world, bleat such pathetically short sighted nonsense as Minister Carr and his curiously inaccurately named " ..Innovation Ministry??

The world turned upside down!

Does anybody know if there are tax incentives for the purchase of a used electric plug-in? I bought a used Vectrix (2007) this year and live in CO? I think the laws are for only the purchase of new machines. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
Adam

I recently attended a lecture held by a Society of Auto Engineers. The main guest speakers were the guy's from Better Place. The sales presentation was very professional, both slick and expensively prepared. I noted that it was a modified version of the presentation I heard delivered at a previous BetPlace presentation to a luncheon for Investment Bankers. this gives me reason to believe that the presentation is a fairly standard sales pitch for Better Place team of pitchmen.

At the end of the presentation, the Host opened the floor to questions from the audience. Naturally, the audience, being engineers was fairly probing with their questions, much to the discomfort of the presenters. I noticed that when ever the BetPlace speakers had difficulty answering a question, they ignore any questions from difficult looking audience members, preferring to answer carefully prepared Dorothy Dix questions from planted supporters. Since I was obviously not an engineer, they initially felt safe in selecting my questions, the exchange is roughly as follows:

Me: Has Better Place considered investing a small proportion of the Billions of Dollars in funds you hope to raise, in helping existing, but struggling EV technology, and makers, to create a market for Better Place?

BP: (condescendingly)there is no acceptable EV technology, that could help BetPlace.

Me: Well what about countries whose citizens could benefit from EV technology today if it were affordable?

BP: We are already trying to do that in conjunction with Israel and Renault/Nissan, but as we told you, we possess the only viable technology and business model .

Me; (irritatingly) But you say that you will only use "green renewable non-fossil energy, how do you achieve that from a nation grid with coal fired input, I mean how do you separate whats green and whats not?

BP: (sneeringly) We already explained, the answer is SOFTWARE!!

Me: Wow some software! But wouldn't the money be better spent on say, small island nations, where existing light weight EV'S, Vans, Buses, Vectrix, bikes etc., are perfectly suited for the low range,and speed requirements,and where Better Place could really design, and operate, guaranteed renewable power stations?

BP; (evasively) I think we had better have a question from somebody else.

Somebody else: (later seen leaving in BetPlace car) Do you think Shah Aggassi will be remembered as the 21 century Henry Ford, or simply the Saviour of the planet!

BP; I glad you you asked that important question, ... (derisive laughter from audience)

Hmmm.. I thought I smell snake oil.

I believe that my view is not without merit.The immediate challenge for EV"s is to prove they can really replace ICE. What better place, (sorry about the pun), than a Small Island Nation, where range and speed are not such important factors. These countries are usually heavily tourist oriented and this would gently encourage huge numbers of people into trying out an EV while on holiday. I have actually experimented with this concept and it works very well. Especially since the initial investment is offset by the maintenance cost.

I believe this was a flaw in the marketing of Vectrix. Mike Boyle had no real interest in such a concept, preferring to market and service Vectrix dealers in the UK and Australia. I will grant him they are both Islands, but they are just to damn big to market a low range unproven product with endless service difficulties. Antigua,Barbados, Phuket,the Cook Islands, Tonga, etc etc,,,,are the perfect proving grounds. These countries produce huge amount of surplus electricity, mostly from oil or coal fired plants. The disadvantages of alternate power technologies for the huge grid demand requirements of industrialised nations, simply don't exist in small island nations. In addition most are blessed with low output demand and ready access to various alternate energy sources.

Here is an interesting article pertaining to e-bikes in Toronto.

http:/www.electricbikee.com/toronto-facing-requests-to-segregate-e-bikes/

I'd like to hear how other places are dealing with controversies about e-bikes.

I have been wondering how the electric's would wind up being taxed. Here is a link to an idea meant for ICE's but would work for electric too :(

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/nation/story/71078.html