The EV Infrastructure chicken-and-egg problem: Resolution

Coulomb Technologies was founded in 2007 with the mission to ensure that anyone who is considering the choice to buy an electric vehicle will have adequate access to fuel for the cars.

In the US there are 247 million cars but only 53 million home garages, meaning that a lot of electric vehicles will need to be fueled outside the home garage. Exacerbating the situation, according to studies at UC Davis, 80% of owners of electric vehicles will want to charge more than once a day.

It comes to this: we need charging opportunities where our cars are parked when we sleep and when we work. Since Coulomb’s founding, much as been written regarding the “chicken and egg problem” with infrastructure and vehicles. Will people buy electric vehicles if they don’t have a place to charge them, and conversely, will anyone buy infrastructure if they don’t see cars?

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Last week alone, Coulomb announced infrastructure deployments in California, Oregon and North Carolina. In California, the County of Sonoma is located less than an hour north of San Francisco and includes the beautiful Pacific coastline, award-winning wineries, majestic redwoods, historic towns, fine dining, and a wide variety of entertainment and cultural activities. Sonoma County unveiled two of seven new electric vehicle (EV) charging stations. Six of the stations, which will be used to charge county fleet vehicles at night, will be available for public use during daytime hours. The stations represent a major step in Sonoma County’s long term goal of establishing a viable public infrastructure for EV charging.

In Oregon, the City of Hillsboro is the first in the State of Oregon to announce plans to deploy Coulomb’s ChargePoint™ Networked Charging Stations for plug-in and electric vehicles. The 16 charging stations will be installed in downtown Hillsboro including their new “green” intermodal transit facility to be built in 2009. The charging stations, available for public use, are part of the city’s large-scale sustainability and green movement, designed to showcase conservation, environmentalism and eco-friendly design.

In North Carolina, McDonald’s Corporation and Coulomb Southeast distributor, NovaCharge, announced that McDonald’s will open the first “green” restaurant, built with eco-friendly materials and technologies, including ChargePoint networked charging stations for electric vehicles making it the first of its kind in the United States.

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