Who Feeds The Power?

An Article Published in the Wall Street Journal on December 16, 2009 “The Surge in Electric Cars” by. Joseph B. White.

“Why should anyone buy an electric car? That's going to be a critical question for the auto industry—and the best answer may not be "Because they're green."
“The Obama administration is committing billions of your money to the proposition that electric cars can become a meaningful segment in the U.S. market over the next few years. Faith in the future of such vehicles—which run all or in part on electricity straight from the grid—has waxed and waned many times over the past century, ever since the earliest electric cars were run off the American road by cheaper, more-powerful, more-versatile gasoline-fueled cars.”

Companies such as Renault, Nissan, Tesla and General Motors are among the first companies to mass produce electric vehicles.

• Renault
• Nissan
• Tesla
• General Motors

With Renault scheduled to build over a hundred thousand EVs, a simple questions begs to be asked – who is going to feed the power to the EVs?

I researched and found the following:

• Better Place - A very nice web site, and a great source for information on EVs, and even raised a lots of money, but was unable to find locations.

• Beautiful Earth group - Web site not up, but found an article showing a EV charging station in Brooklyn.

• Solar City - This is a successful solar panel installer/vendor that has ventured into the EV charging space. According to their we site install the products purchased by end users i.e., private, business and municipality and have been quite successful in California.

• Car Charging Group Inc., the first publicly traded company (CCGI) I found in this area, is actually in the business of creating partnerships with various private and public garages. They set up, operate and service the stations. Already they have started ground work for the US infrastructure and are actually signing agreements with parking lots, municipalities throughout the US. It also does not hurt to have a business model that sticks too. According to their web site, unlike the EV charging stations vendors which sell their products to municipalities etc., CCGI places all their EV charging stations without cost to the car lot owner. In fact the private parking lot owner or municipality actually do nothing and share in the revenue with CCGI. Who could beat that?