Energy Adviser: Promise of e-cars is expanding

They go by the names White Zombie and Zombie 222, and peel from the starting lines, tires smoking. One, a 1972 Datsun 1200, sprints from zero to 60 miles per hour in 1.8 seconds. The other, a 1968 Mustang fastback, zips along at 174.6 miles an hour. Like all e-cars, their electric motors have tremendous torque. Although customized and enhanced, they show how rapidly the world of electric car technology is changing.

While you can’t find such road-burners in any car dealer’s inventory, these cars prove one dimension — sheer power — that a plug-in electric vehicle, or PEV, can offer. Another is the PEV’s potential for lowering carbon emissions. Gas-powered vehicles create most of the carbon emissions, especially in our area where the majority of power generation is from clean, renewable hydropower, and Washington state sees electric cars as a way to cut those emissions.

For commuters traveling 50 to 60 miles a round trip, electric cars make sense, especially as a second car, or the one you buzz around in running errands. By owning one, you can shift the expense of gasoline to a PEV payment and come out ahead, even with low gas prices. With the average cost of gas floating around $2 a gallon, you can still drive an e-car for the same gallon’s worth of mileage, for less than a dollar. (Compare the cost for yourself at http://energy.gov/articles/egallon-how-much-cheaper-it-drive-electricity.)

Locally, you’re well-covered. The Vancouver-Portland area has many stations. At its Mill Plain location, Clark Public Utilities just added its first level-3 rapid charger. Its other three there are level-2 chargers and its Orchards location has two more level-2s. A level-3 charger fully charges a typical PEV depleted battery in about 40 minutes, but it does cost more to use. Level-2s take about four hours to recharge a drained e-car battery fully.

The I-5 corridor between Vancouver and Vancouver, B.C., is closing in on the West Coast electric highway goal of spacing PEV charging stations every 25 miles. Mostly e-stations are bunched up in metropolitan areas, but stationless stretches are filling in. A few gaps remain. Between the I-5 Bridge and Canada, two gaps are noticeable. The stretch between Ridgefield and Olympia and another north from Arlington have the fewest stations. With planning, however, you needn’t worry about running out of e-fuel. That’s not the case traveling east or west along the Columbia Gorge, where you’ll still find stations much farther apart.

Range a concern

Range remains a concern for many potential owners. PEV enthusiast John Wayland of Portland is working on a solution. He has built custom e-cars since 1994, and built the White Zombie. Now he’s building one he calls the “Silver Streak” using the body of Honda’s first hybrid, the Insight. Wayland is outfitting it with special batteries he believes will give his ride a 400-mile range on a single charge — about the range of gas-powered midsized cars.

As garages fill up with e-cars charging all night, some utility companies want to explore how e-car batteries might not just take from the grid, but give back to it. For them, PEVs could become a resource for managing peak usage. And so they are looking at ways to make our electrical grid run in two directions.

“There’s some early talk among utility companies about setting up a two-way grid that might draw from electric car batteries at night,” said Matt Babbitts, energy services project manager for Clark Public Utilities. “It’s still a new concept, but one idea is that bidirectional grids could pull electricity from PEVs plugged in during peak times of the evening and in return utilities could give customers energy credits.”

For now, electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity in Clark County as other benefits are explored.

Energy Adviser is written by Clark Public Utilities. Send questions to ecod@clarkpud.com or to Energy Adviser, c/o Clark Public Utilities, P.O. Box 8900, Vancouver, WA 98668.