Green Energy News | October 8, 2000

October 8, 2000 – Vol.5 No.28

ENERGIES... week of October 8, 2000

DRIVEN BY SOLAR. Evercel has signed an agreement with Oxygen and Eurosolare to build solar powered electric vehicle charging and maintenance stations in major cities in Italy. To be available for the charging of large electric scooters, electric bicycles, even electric foot scooters, those powered by Evercel’s nickel-zinc batteries will have the option of fast, 15 minute charging.

For its part in the project, Oxygen will assist in the design of charging systems as well as the commercial and marketing aspects of the venture. Oxygen’s line of two-wheeled electric vehicles are primarily powered with Evercel batteries. Eurosolare, a complete raw-material-to-finished-product solar photovoltaic and system manufacturer, will provide power components to the project.

Though the construction of the solar charging infrastructure is a sales and marketing opportunity for the three companies, the stations can be used to charge any brand of small electric vehicle. Three stations (2 in Rome, 1 in Palermo) are to be complete by the end of the year. The companies hope to have at least 250 stations open for business by the end of 2002.

SHARED CARS. The challenge of providing the independence of personal vehicles while encouraging people to commute by subway or light-rail might be solved by the use of station-cars - shared vehicles which use rail stations as a home base.

Culminating its successful station-car pilot project in San Francisco, Hertz has opened a station-car facility at the Fremont, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) subway station. The facility will provide fully-fueled, clean and maintained cars to home-end users (those who need cars to travel from home to rail station) and corporate work site users (those who need cars to travel from rail station to work place). Home-end users will pay $375 per month, corporate users $325 per month. The California Automobile Association estimates the cost of owning, operating and maintaining a typical family vehicle in California - without insurance - is about $600 per month.

For the most part, vehicles provided in the program will be small gasoline fueled cars, but Hertz will have a limited number of Ford TH!NK electric vehicles available for both station-car program participants and regular rentals. TH!NK vehicles can also be rented at Hertz’s Fisherman’s Wharf location in San Francisco.

ELECTRICITY TO HYDROGEN TO ELECTRICITY. Stuart Energy Systems has introduced another version of its Stuart Personal (tm) Fuel Appliance. According to the company the Model 200 is designed to be a safe way to provide hydrogen for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The Appliance is plugged into a standard 220 volt electric outlet and splits water into hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. The Model 200 can make hydrogen fuel for 5 cars at a time and is a third smaller than the previous model.

Analogous to electricity from the power grid charging a battery electric vehicle, the energy source that would really be powering the fuel cell electric vehicle is, in this case, the energy source for the power plant generating the electricity for the Appliance. Stuart encourages the use of renewable energy for the power grid and distributed generation.