Electric cars are officially back

Tech council event discusses benefits, profits from vehicles

Friday, July 2, 2010

Could electric cars be the future of Charles County? Representatives of various business organizations in the county gathered last week to hear from experts and find out.

Charles County Technology Council organized the June 25 meeting with Mahi Reddy, CEO of an Annapolis company that is developing charging stations for what he believes is the new thing in transportation. Reddy founded SemaConnect after becoming interested in electric cars as a hobby and deciding they would make an ideal investment, he said.

While it might be the next big thing, electric car technology is far from new. Reddy said Henry Ford agonized about whether to bet on electric or internal combustion motors, going with the latter on the advice of Thomas Edison, who pointed out that "electric cars are great but the batteries suck, so you should go with internal combustion."

Energy storage has improved vastly since then, and the cars offer economic and environmental benefits, Reddy said, but getting the ball rolling is still a challenge.

The technology faces what Reddy called a "chicken and egg" problem: Consumers don't want to buy cars if there's nowhere to charge them, while investors don't want to build charging stations if there's no one to serve. Governments, including the U.S. Department of Energy, are trying to break the cycle, he said.

"I think we're not far from some very interesting times," he said.

Even if charged with coal energy, driving an electric car would produce about 35 percent less pollution overall than would an internal combustion engine, Reddy said. Of course, there's also the incentive of price: Fuelling an electric car would cost about 3 cents per mile, compared with about 12 cents for gas.

The explosion in use of personal electronics already has strained some energy grids, and the power demand of vehicles would dwarf this; Monica Murphy, driver relationship manager for General Motors, said charging a Chevrolet Volt battery once would take as much electricity as leaving a computer and monitor on for a year.

Much of the problem could be avoided with intelligent timing, Reddy suggested, especially by plugging in cars during the early morning hours when power demand is so low that generated power often is wasted. With perfect coordination in charging times, 75 percent of existing American cars could be replaced with electric ones without adding any infrastructure, Reddy said.

Of course, timing never will be perfect. But new "smart" chargers can help. Ones offered by Reddy can be controlled with a smart phone to start charging in the middle of the night, and some even can download information directly from local utilities to determine the cheapest time to buy power, he said.

A man in the audience asked how roads would be funded if a switch to electric vehicles made the gas tax obsolete.

"I would suggest that's a big deal," he said.

Murphy answered that "some of that is probably undetermined …"

There are several approaches to the electric car but the meeting highlighted two of them: the Chevrolet Volt, which can use gasoline if the battery runs down, and the Nissan Leaf, which must be charged electrically and does not even have a tailpipe.

The Volt's range on battery power is about 50 miles, comparable to the Leaf's 60 miles, an important figure because 80 percent of American car trips are shorter than 50 miles, Reddy said.

"If you had an electric car, that would take care of most daily trips. That would be a valuable lesson. True, you could not jump into the car to go to Ocean City or Virginia Beach, but you're not doing that every day," Reddy said.

The Volt will debut in selected markets, including Washington, D.C., in November, while the Leaf will come out next year, representatives of the respective automakers said.

For his part, Mark Czajka, tech council chairman and acting president, said he hopes to help bring charging stations to Charles County to make Southern Maryland an early adopter of the technology.

"We [want] to have some charging stations here in the county, so we'll see what happens. We have a lot of work to do," he said.

emitrano@somdnews.com