Electrified! Cars with plugs get a boost

Electric cars have been getting all kinds of boosts lately.

Not long ago, I wrote about two charging stations that were installed at King of Prussia Mall, outside Nordstrom's.  For now, the juice is free. At some point in the future, there will be a charge for the charge.

Since then, eight charging stations that can service two cars each have been installed at the Convention Center garage at 11th and Arch streets.  Parametrics Associates LLC did the work.

Josephine Wang, executive vice president of Switzenbaum & Associates, which is an affiliate of Parametric, said this is the first public garage in the city to have chargers.

IBEW Local 98 - the electricians' union - also has installed two electric charging stations in its parking lot at 1719 Spring Garden Street in the city. They're open to the public. The union is in the process of buying electric cars for its business agents to use.

Seems they're popping up everywhere. I was on vacation recently, and when I stopped at a state-run rest stop in Virginia, I noticed it had two charging stations.

The Department of Energy maps charging stations nationwide here.

Meanwhile, ten Northeast states -- including Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware -- have formed the Northeast Electric Vehicle Network, aimed at attracting public and private investment for electric car infrastructure.

Some of the things they're contemplating include putting charging stations at commuter rail stations.  Drivers can use their cars to get to the station, then plug in while they take public transportation the rest of the way to work and back.

"Diversifying the types of vehicles that people in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic drive to include more electric, hybrid and alternate-fuel vehicles is a very important part of improving our air quality," said New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Bob Martin. He added that the network "will provide the planning needed to develop and spur the construction of infrastructure that will drive market demand for these vehicles. At the same time, this effort will lead to job creation and economic growth."

According to the DEP, gasoline-powered vehicles are responsible for about half of the state's air pollution.  Also, about 40 percent of New Jersey's greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation sector.

The DEP says that a recent study by Pike Research forecasts that the New Jersey-New York-Pennsylvania region will be among the top five metropolitan areas for electric vehicle purchases between 2011 and 2017.

President Barack Obama has set a goal of having 1 million plug-in vehicles on the road nationwide by 2015.   According to the Associated Press, the network hopes to account for 200,000 of those vehicles.

The industry has wrestled with which comes first, the car or the charger. Clearly, both have to have parallel growth for this idea to work. Plug In America, an electric car advocacy group, estimates that 90 percent of all car-charging occurs at homes.

But with thousands of charging stations expected to be installed in the next year, that could change.

More information about the network, an outgrowth of the Transportation and Climate Initiative, is here.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 22 the weekly TV news magazine, energyNOW!, took a look at the state of electric vehicles in America, trying to answer the question, "Are they accelerating into the fast lane, or could they run out of juice in the race against internal-combustion cars?"

That and several related videos are posted here.