Summary: Houston now has some charge stations. Free for now.
A rather remarkable thing happened in a week of 11/09. There was the announcement that Nissan and Reliant Energy, were teaming up to install charge stations in Houston. Afterall, Nissan is bringing the Leaf to Houston in early Feburary. The charge stations are available for EV'ers to use, free of charge. (No pun intended.) At the same time, there was an announcemnt of a new coalition in Washington called the Electrification Coalition. It turns out that 2 of the members of the coalition include the CEO's of Nissan and the parent company of Reliant, NRG. Here is a downloadable (digital or hard copy) document, outlining the plan to convert 75% of miles driven to electrical miles in 30 years.
What is a charge station?
At home, I have a charge station, that consists of a meter, and a switched outlet. Switched, because you do not want too use the plug as the switch.
Improvements include:
1. Being able to meter the kWatt-hours, either through a readout or remotely. A new product called TED (The Energy Detective ) has come out, allowing you to monitor the watt-hr usage, via the i-Phone, or the web.
2. Being able to schedule the time of charge, in order to take advantage of a multi-tier rate structure. This implies adding a timer.
3. Being able to control charging remotely. This implies a cell phone connection, aka GSM.
4. Being able to provide power from the EV battery pack, back to the grid, aka V2G, for a fee. This is coming, because a large EV fleet represents a large electricity storage bank. Peak demand in the afternoon, is expensive to genetate by the power companies. Being able to store energy during the night, and sell it back to the grid in the afternoon is in the works. Reliant Energy, in Houston, is going to demonstrate the concept in early 2010.