Green Options

Last week, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom reported for us that the city had just installed 3 charging stations for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Yesterday, the News & Observer reported that Raleigh, N.C. plans to install eight plug-in charging stations over the next few months, under a program called Project Get Ready.

Like the San Francisco-based program, drivers will access the charging stations through key-cards. In Raleigh, this means simple credit card access at a cost of about 2.5 cents per mile, while the SF-based program uses chargers provided by Coulomb Technologies at no cost, but are only available to members of the car-sharing programs City CarShare and Zipcar.

Raleigh, NC is experimenting with LEDs, or light emitting diodes, to see how much money - and energy - the city can save.

So far, based on initial results from a bulb swap-out in a downtown parking garage, city officials determined that the pay-back of the replacement will be two years.