California City To Change Building Codes To Allow Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure

Over the last several years, California has seen a huge upswing in the number of electric vehicles purchased, and with it a desire for more infrastructure to accommodate owners’ home recharging needs.

In California, the City of Palo Alto’s city council is unanimously supporting a proposal to change the city’s building code to require new homes to be pre-wired to support 240v level 2 chargers. Photo courtesy of Treehugger.com.

This is an increasingly important issue for the state, which found in a 2012 study conducted by the California Center for Sustainable Energy that about 1,000 new plug-in vehicles were being sold every month, and in total, Californians owned more than 12,000 plug-in vehicles at the time of the study (roughly 35 percent of all plug-in vehicles in the United States).

And while so far buying an electric vehicle has come with a lot of rebates and incentives for the vehicle itself, there really hasn’t been much cost help given for other needs, like home infrastructure.

A major stumbling block for many buyers wanting to buy an electric vehicle has been the cost of installing a home charging system. Grist reported that in Palo Alto, Calif., “to wire a new house for an electric vehicle charger, it costs under $200 – a quarter of the price tag for installing a charger at an existing home.”

To address this issue, Palo Alto’s city council is working on an ordinance that would require all newly constructed single family homes to include the necessary circuitry for electric vehicle chargers.

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Driving Electric Vehicles Set To Become A More Widespread Practical Option In Netherlands

Lots of reasons exist for why more people still haven’t made the switch to electric vehicles, and most of them have to do with cost and convenience.

Photo courtesy of The Holland Sentinel .

Even for those willing to pay the higher cost for an electric vehicle, there has always been the issue of recharging infrastructure. Owners could recharge their vehicles at home, but then they could only go for short distances for fear of running out of power.

Over the last couple a years, a number of companies have been developing public infrastructures by creating networks of electric vehicle charging stations.

Some of the most notable have been Better Place partnering with government of Ontario, Canada in an effort to develop an electric car infrastructure in the province, and the company signing an agreement with Jerusalem to develop a charging infrastructure for electric vehicles in the city.

In the United States, General Motors has partnered with a number of utilities to install over 500 Pacific Coast charging stations for public use.

Now also getting into the building game is a new electric vehicles infrastructure provider called The New Motion. It’s a fledgling company that’s only been around since 2009, but it’s already making its mark in the Netherlands.

Earlier this month, The New Motion opened its first “fast charging station” for electric vehicle at the Van der Valk Hotel Vianen (Netherlands). The station is the first of what is set to be a national network of 30 stations, with the target of having them all in place by the end of 2012.

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