Green Options

Falcon-cams and electric-car chargers on streetlights may sound like things out of the future, but for the city of San Jose, California, the future is now.

On the first sunny day in the Bay Area in nearly a week, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced the installation of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in front of San Francisco City Hall , in another step forward in making the Bay Area the “EV Capital of the U.S.”

A featured guest post by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on the city’s important first step toward creating the electric vehicle infrastructure of the future.

2008 has been a year signifying economic depression culminating in the worst holiday retail season in years. However it has also been a year of entrepreneurs burgeoning a variety of exciting new green businesses. Ecopreneurist has covered many of them over the course of the year. Here is a review of our favorite Ecopreneurs of 2008.

The Australian government has given the green light to a plan to establish one of the world’s largest electric car recharging infrastructures, powered entirely by renewable energy.

Shai Agassi is a man with with a pretty big mission - to engineer a globally sustainable personal transportation system for the 21st Century. As the founder and CEO of Silicon-Valley based company Project Better Place , he aims to turn that dream into a reality.

The Project works by teaming up with existing players in the car industry to establish large-scale electricity recharge grids (ERGs), made up of electric cars, batteries, charging points, and renewable energy power stations. Earlier this year, the company announced it had teamed up with Renault-Nissan to roll-out an impressive network of 500,000 recharging stations across Israel by 2010. Now it has announced plans for similar electric car projects in Denmark and San Francisco, with more in the pipeline for the near future.

A key benefit of the planned ERGs will be their role in driving demand for renewable energy. In Israel, most power comes from coal or gas, but the project plans to use solar energy generated in the country’s Negev Desert to power the batteries.

By John Addison (6/4/08). With oil prices rocketing past $130 per barrel, a growing number of vehicle makers are planning to offer electric vehicles by 2010. Zero gasoline will be used.

Over 40,000 electric vehicles (EV) are currently used in the United States. [...]