On Feb 15, 9:01*am, "Bill" wrote:
Is your garage electric car ready?

Seems these cars can be charged with a regular 15 amp outlet, any 240 volt
outlet (50 amps best), or a 90 amp "4 hour charge" connection...http://www.teslamotors.com/electric/charging.php

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) describes a system in which electric or plug-in hybrid
vehicles communicate with the power grid to sell demand response services by
either delivering electricity into the grid or by throttling their charging
rate...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

Cities Prepare for Life With the Electric Car...http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/bu...5electric.html


Yeah, what you have to plug it into is one of the key facts the green
folks promoting electric cars as a big solution fail to mention.
Aside from the installation cost of an appropriate circuit, it's not
exactly that awful either. True, it takes a 90A circuit to fully
charge the car in 4 hours. But if you look at the table there are
other very viable options:


90A 4 hours
60A 5 hours
40A 7.5
30A 10

That gets you to fully charged with a range I guess of about 225
miles. If you use the car mainly as a second car for short drives
around town, driving to a commuter lot, etc., it sounds viable.

The second big omission is that you always hear the media gushing over
this cars as "zero emissions". Which is true only if you
conveniently ignore that all this power still has to be generated
someplace. In some small amount of cases today, it could be green, eg
where the car is charged at night using excess hydroelectric. But
for most of the country, the power today still has to come from
conventional fuels and all you're doing is moving the pollution from
one place to another. And possible introducing more, as I'm not sure
what the total energy/emissions balance looks like, ie burning a
gallon of gasoline in a car vs burning say coal to generate the
electricity, then sending it over a transmission system with losses,
etc.