Car-friendly outlets pave way for electric driving

December 5, 2008  |  Length: 00:04:00

At the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Praveen Mandal, president of Coulomb Technologies, outlines the difficulties in finding places to plug in rechargeable cars and balancing the grid, once automakers release their new lines of plug-in vehicles. He introduces his company's networked "Smarlet" system, which that monitors usage, and can be installed in pedestals and streetlights.

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the difficulties in finding places to plug
Where does Idaho rank? We have been living in Montana for the past 5 years and I am not supri sexy shop to find it #3 on the "worst" list. Considering a sexshopmove to Idaho to escapthe high cost of living a low income in MT. There may not be a sales tax here but they get you if you own property!
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18th Jul 2011
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Transcript

Music

Male Speaker: Just about every major auto maker --

many with the exception of Honda -- has a very active or

pro active plug-in vehicle program. BMW is going to be

leasing 500 of these cars in New York and LA starting in

January. You've got Toyota who's going to be bringing

out their plug-in hybrids in 2009, and fleet -- we've

all heard about the Chevy Volt and how important that is

to the U.S. and foreign oil independence. And Mercedes

will be announcing something in Detroit next year as

well. Chevy -- Chrysler has three programs as well.

The forecast -- the graph on the right is the forecast.

Just to put it into perspective, 700,000 vehicles is

nothing in terms of new vehicle sales. Last year there

was roughly about 16 million vehicles sold in the U.S..

This year's forecasted to be about 10 to 11 million. So

-- hence, the reason why the auto makers are hurting.

So finally, these cars are coming. What's the

challenges associated with these cars. The first and

foremost where are people going to plug it in and

charge. There's the Department of Transportation

Department of Energy study that states that we have 54

million garages in the U.S. today, and about 27 million

cars, registered vehicles. You can imagine that in San

Francisco about one out of every six cars are not parked

in garages. Most of the parking structure is for

curb-side at nighttime. The second is that people want

to charge more than once a day, right? The plug-in

hybrids have 30 to 40 mile range. The BEVs have longer

range. These cars are trickle chargers. Their onboard

chargers range from 1.1 kilowatt to 6.6 kilowatt. They

take hours to charge. So you want to -- you want to

have a charging station where people normally park,

which is where they sleep, where they work, and maybe

where they play -- like golf courses or movie theaters.

Second is, you know, we don't think that subsidies can

work. The recurrent costs and the costs of these

charging stations have to be paid for. This is one of

the things that we address, and I'll get into how that's

addressed. The third is that the 3,000 or so utilities

in the U.S. are debating about at what point does it

start impacting the grid and the load on the grid. And

this is another issue that needs to be resolved. This

is our solution. It's a system. It consists of network

charging stations. That's what you see over there.

They're called smartlets. What they are, are charging

stations with networking technology embedded in them.

Version 1 is Zigby Inaudible dot four. In this

cluster, one of the studies Inaudible a Gateway. The

Gateway has a radio. In this case, shown as CDMA.

Could be shown as GSM GPRs or something else that

communicates back to our server. This is a client

server technology. A lot of the energy policy

administration, the subscription revenues, you know,

host revenue model, everything is done -- is enabled

because of this network charging system. These are some

of our systems. We did announce a standard -- yesterday

at EDTA a standardized J 1772 connector on a charging

station for 220, 15, 220 charging. There's a pedestal

version we call Ballard, and then there's a smaller

version that mounts to a street light. The reason why

we have the street light is because a lot of times there

is conduits already laid to the street poles, and it's

an easy installation provided there's spacing in the

conduits.

Music

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