Chicago Gets First Solar Powered EV Charging Station

San Francisco and Portland might be engaged in some electric vehicle pissing contest, but I think both cities just got seriously spanked by Chicago!

Yes, Chicago!

The Windy City just unveiled the first solar-powered electric vehicle charging station during the IOC tour. The Solar Plug-In Stations will be used daily by the City of Chicago Department of Fleet Management to power the city’s electric cars. “Carbon Day and the City of Chicago are demonstrating true innovation, ingenuity and initiative,” said Richard Lowenthal, CEO of Coulomb Technologies. “Solar energy and electric vehicles are an inevitable partnership that is one more step to reducing our dependence on foreign oil.”

Carbon Day Automotive’s Solar Plug-In Station(TM), built by Carbon Day Construction, was designed by the world renowned firm of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. “Without these stations it would be like driving around in traditional cars without the availability of gas stations,” said Scott Emalfarb, CEO at Carbon Day. “The day of true plug-in electric vehicles will be here sooner than most people realize and the world needs to be ready to accommodate them. Carbon Day will build them and they will come.”

Wanxiang America Corporation manufactured the solar panels that form a tree-like canopy built by Residential Steel. Pure Energy, LLC, Northbrook installed the sculpted piece and interfaced it with the concealed underground battery pack enhanced to store solar energy, specially designed and developed by ALL CELL Technologies. “Chicago is that most American of American cities,” Obama said. Well, I hope other American cities follow suit.

Carbon Day Automotive hopes the technology will catch on, as they hope to have thousands of these stations nationwide by 2011. I hope so too!

Green Options Media is a network of environmentally-focused blogs providing users with the information needed to make sustainable choices. Written by experienced professionals, Green Options Media’s blogs engage visitors with authoritative content, compelling discussions, and actionable advice. We invite anyone with questions, or simply curiosity, to add their voices to the community, and share their approaches to achieving abundance.

By Jerry James Stone, Gas 2.0

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

KS G.

11:25PM PST on Feb 3, 2012

Thanks for the article.

send a green star

Ruth R.

10:03PM PDT on Oct 1, 2010

Yes, way to go ! Go Solar and plug in vehicles. Thanks.

Monica D.

7:34PM PDT on Sep 29, 2010

This sounds like good news. Even better to encourage people to bike, perhaps.

Roxana J.

12:17PM PDT on Sep 10, 2010

Bravo, way to go Chicago!

NO EMAILS P.

7:56PM PDT on Aug 29, 2010

thanks for post

Cindy C.

12:10PM PDT on May 26, 2010

blimey well lets hope something positive will happen and we will be able to run cars on extra nothing.

Frank M.

3:09PM PDT on May 9, 2009

Great thoughts. Ultimatly we may become the final energy sorse. As we overpopulate and consume everything axcept ourselves. Ever see Soilent Green?

Andrew W.

8:40AM PDT on May 9, 2009

Yes I think that our flying will have to be increasingly curtailed, unless they can efficiently produce synthetic aviation turbine fuel that is roughly as energy dense as kerosine and that is produced using some renewable source of energy and non-fossil carbon. I don't see it happening overnight but I think that air travel will tend to reduce over time, and that the over-land parts of journeys will be replaced by large efficient trains and maybe coaches, and that just the trans-oceanic parts of voyages will be made in aircraft. I think that the energy of the future will come from a variety of sources, not a single source. My guess is that in hot places like mine a lot of buildings will double as solar collectors, and we will generate more of our electricity from the sun and less from coal, but you guys with snow drifts to plough through will be among the last to abandon fossil fuels. I absolutley agree that we should use our oil coal and gas as efficiently as possible in the meantime. I think that there is a clear trend to using smaller, more efficient cars but again I think that they won't all use the same power source. During WW II's petrol rationing they converted a lot of cars to run on "gas converters", coking ovens that sat on the boot of the car and used a fire to drive combustible gas out of waste material. People crossed Australia just burning dead wood from the roadside.

5:35AM PDT on May 8, 2009

Sooner or later both oil and coal will run out and yes we will need to make electricity without fire. My point is to use what energy we have wisely as we prepare for that day. Personal transportation and air travel will go because there is no portable fuel to replace oil. If we begin now to adjust using our last energy resource electricity we may survive at some new level. We might have warm homes, electric trains, trolleys. We lived 100 years ago without oil and will need to learn to do it again. At least we might still have laptops. Electric cars will simply exasperate the situation.

8:49AM PDT on May 3, 2009

Thanks Frank. Yes, British electric vehicles (EV's)really did fail waiting in traffic with their heaters & lights on. And yes, if the 47% efficiency of coal-fired supercritical turbine power stations falls to 12% at the garage wall then an EV running off that grid releases more CO2 than a diesel car at 38%. Agreed, at first sight, not the way forward. But if running EV's off a purely coal-fired grid today is followed by boosting the grid by non-fossil energy tomorrow & substituting some grid power with locally produced power the day after that, then we still reduce longer-term CO2 emissions. A thought- what really is wishful thinking in some places can be already working well elsewhere. In our sunny flat city you can already buy enough rooftop photovoltaics to run a house & car and still sell more electricity than you buy, for about the cost of a standard family car. It takes about 7 years to pay for itself. Another opinion- getting our total CO2 emission down to a sustainable level is fundamentally more important than the efficiency with which we emit it. It is the main game. Less [coal + oil +gas]. The costs should be compared with the costs of doing nothing (See Stern Report). I say bring on Jerry James Stone's "EV 'pissing competitions'" (Go Chicago!) and give Arlene back her Larkstone charging stations.