Madison Gas & Electric: Leading in Electric Car Support

[[SCUM] McPhil]

I love this f***ing town. Madison, Wisconsin, USA. MG&E - Madison Gas & Electric purchased 4 recharging stations to plug your electric car in while you're at work in Madison. This is the number one problem with the sale of electric cars in the states. You need a place to recharge it. Most people who purchase these cars install a re-charging unit in their garage that will recharge their car within 8 hours. Driving to work, your car will discharge and use the charge in the battery. While parked when you're at work the batteries may discharge to a point where you can't make it home. That's a problem for people not on the bus line or how line in the 'burbs.

Read on: http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/local/456294

On WiSconsin! :-)

[[SCUM]-Tommee Gunn]

later this year or next year, the technology for batteries will be improved significantly. extending the range of the electric car

[[SCUM] McPhil]

They already have the battery technology. The current MacBook are sporting them already. You can run the new macbooks in power balance mode for 8 hours on a single charge. The technology coming out of Japan and Korea is going to be impressive once the full electric model autos are available in mass. You can read the differences in the 1st generation Toyota Prius versus the 3rd generation Toyota Prius. Pretty amazing stuff. The sad part of all of it is the tech has been available since 1984. What tech is being sat on currently to bring us the dated tech which is seemingly making us happy for the moment...

[[SCUM]-Tommee Gunn]

sounds familiar

[[SCUM] Leroy]

And the electricity comes from renewables?

[[SCUM]-Tommee Gunn]

And the electricity comes from renewables?

of coarse it does
you just plug the car lead into the wall. and it always works

[[SCUM] McPhil]

And the electricity comes from renewables?

Whatever is putting power in the plug-in unit is where the power is coming from. In the states, you can opt-in to purchase renewal energy for your home or work building (if you own it) at a slightly higher cost per kilowatt. Currently, I purchase 30% wind power which is the maximum allowable at this time just because that's all that's available. The other 70% comes from coal-fired power plants (dirty, mercury leaking into you rivers and lakes, carbon contamination, ozone thickening contaminants, etc...).

You can purchase solar stations for your auto's recharge unit at about $800 USD. A 2.5Kwatt solar kit for your house currently runs about $30,000 USD if you shop around. You could run your entire house from that kit and even sell back your excess (at wholesale rates), unless you wanted to put the power into dry-cell storage for days with no sun or recharge your auto with it.

The state of California is offering to put solar panels on your house and allow you to pay off the expense over 15 to 30 years by adding on the amount to your property taxes or add the payments into your mortgage over the same balloon or fixed rate period. So far that's the only state doing it which goes to show you how many politicians have power companies up their ass. California needs it to avoid any further brown outs or black outs.

Wind and solar aren't the only solution but Wind and solar will always be clean until they becomes polluted by coal powered and fire powered plants. Sort of a double edged sword. The power source we've used since the early 17th century is standing strong at snuffing out quite possibly the most clean sources of energy the world has seen to date.

The only problem with Wind energy technology is it's so efficient at producing energy that the cables used to carry the energy away from the wind production sites to the processing sites is the loss of energy through the cables. Still a problem I can live with - cleanly. And solar cells don't do a good job of grabbing energy on dark or cloudy days.

So, agreeing with Leroy's point, an electric car is only as good as its power source for recharging it. As more and more electric and hybrid cars hit the roads more and more power will be necessary. If you have the option to buy clean energy please do it.