It is a shame that the only serious producer of electric vehicles in the USA is Tesla Motors; at $100,000+ per car, even the government cannot afford to buy a fleet of electric vehicles from Tesla. Government agencies are purchasing european Smart Cars and Chinese "Miles XS500" mini cars instead of cars from domestic manufacturers. It would be nice if the big 3 automakers re-opened some factories to produce electric vehicles instead of exporting out our manufacturing base to overseas competitors.

Mr. Norquay points out that Tesla is producing capable electric cars. What is missing however appears to be the typical evolutionary cycle of technological advancements. Cell Phones used to be $5000, weigh in at 3 pounds. Now they are available to the masses. Laptop computers used to be 35 pound suitcases, now they are a few pounds and the size of a common business folder. Tesla is the leader and producing new technology at the premium price, like all new technologies, usually only affordable to the very rich or NASA and the Military. As the technology matures the price will fall. Look at Big Screen LCD and Plasma TVs. The debate is whether the natural economic cycle can be survived due to the rapid escalation of fuel costs. That's an entirely different debate.

Good questions Alex,

The good part about the new advanced battery plug-in hybrids and full electrics is they can charge at night when the grid has excess that fgets dumped and they vehicvles can use V2G Vehicle to grid connections to sell back during the peak when energy is needed most and the highest cost.

With new non toxic lithium battereis electrics can now go well over 200 mileas on a charge. They can go even in sub zero or very high heat. The batteries are being tested to last 100,000 miles and more. The altair nano lithium battereis were tested by aeroenviroment and said to last 500,000 miles even witrh rapid 10 minute full recgarges.

It's a whole new world for advanced battery vehicles. Imagine 1 million vehicles helping the grid. Imagine using almost no oil, imagine clean skys and water. It's an EVworld.com

Some additional benefits alluded to above but not clearly spelled out: 1) With a real-time electric market system, the (PH)EV chargers could be used to flatten the peaks out of present load curves, allowing high-efficiency baseload generation to replace much of the present low-efficiency simple-cycle peakers used for mid-day start-stop operation. 2) As in one, they could substitute for costly grid-level storage likely required in order to allow intermittent renewables like wind to capture any significant portion of grid demand. 3) With modern combined-cycle baseload turbine plant efficiency approaching 60%, even with the 5% loss in transmission and 15% lost in battery charging and power conversion onboad the car, a car can get more mileage from a gallon of gasoline if the gasoline is used to fuel a generating station and the resulting electricity used to charge battteries than to burn the gasoline directly in inefficient Otto cycle reciprocating engines. 4) Can potentially shift a lot of auto miles from gasoline imported from questionably reliable foreign states to locally generated (natural gas/wind/nuclear) electricity, see 3) above. 5) several others.

Given modern battery technology (eg. i do a fair bit of work in carpentry / metal work etc. and my only skill saw, recip. saw and drill are battery operated), the switch to battery vehicles esp. for comuters is a no-brainer and should be encouraged (or even mandated) ASAP.

There is growing lobby of Engineers who think that solar is actually basic which is what in reality it is !After all all energy do come out of solar- it was solar which produced the vegetation which became fossils in the end! The peaking of energy use in mid day tallies with the activity of the sun on most days.So if you connect the solar devices at the point where energy peaks it will flatten the normal demand curve because the production will cut the peak out of system.It is also the time one is in office and can charge his car.Is it not fitting in the scheme of things!Why wait till sun is down!