Economic stimulus grants by the Department of Energy boosting employment, as workers prepare the country for electric vehicles with a network of free recharging stations
DALLAS (Feb. 28, 2011) – Following a report last week that Texas is joining the lead of California with plans to install electric vehicle charging stations along its Interstate-35 corridor, now is learned plans include the entire United States. Municipalities and businesses are being encouraged to install the units, free because of grants by the US Department of Energy.
The news comes from Richard Lowenthal, inventor and co-founder of Coulomb Technologies in Campbell, California, who pioneered the manufacture of a popular brand of the units. “We were awarded a $37Million program by the department of energy and that allows us to give away forty-six hundred free charging stations across the U.S.,” said Lowenthal.
This evidence of new job creation appears to indicate the government stimulus programs are not just designed to put people back to work, but also radically buttress the country’s infrastructure. “We generate a lot of Jobs,” said Lowenthal, “every time we install one of these stations three people go to work for a day, one to make it and two to install it, so we’re a job generator.”
Lowenthal spoke by phone from his office on the ScienceNews Radio Network program, the Promise of Tomorrow with Colonel Mason. The program originates in Dallas, Texas, and is now archived at the website for its world audience.
On the same program, Mason questioned how our electric supply could keep up with massive demands of electric vehicles. For that he turned to Brian MacCleery, principal product manager for clean energy technology at National Instruments of Austin, Texas, who said deployment of advanced embedded systems technologies will make clean energy less expensive and more abundant than current fossil fuels. MacCleery also spoke of what he called airborne wind, saying it has “the ability to supply thousands of times more energy than world energy demands.”
MacCleery described airborne wind as tethering a wind turbine like a kite up a thousand or two-thousand feet where the wind is stronger and more reliable. In a wind turbine, power yield “is in proportion to cube of wind speed. If you can double wind speed you can get eight times more power.” MacCleery said the units can also be transported on the bed of a truck and get power generating in remote areas of the world.
Both National Instruments and Coulomb Technologies are sponsors of the Electric Vehicles and Personal TransportationWorkshop, produced by IEEE-USA March 4, 8am- 5pm, in conjunction with their annual meeting, Engineering in Motion both Friday and Saturday at the Renaissance Hotel, 9721 Arboretum Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78759. The public is urged to attend and register at the website.
Then April 14-15, all eyes will be on Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the 2011 IEEE Green Technology Conference produced by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), IEEE-USA, IEEE Region 5, and the IEEE Baton Rouge Section. As the US gulf coast grapples with high passions at the site of the recent oil spill, the public is urged to attend by registering at the website.
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