Chattanooga charged up over electric car trial

Chattanooga will be among the first cities to participate next year in a test of America’s biggest electric charging network for battery-powered cars.

The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $99.8 million grant Wednesday to help pay for 2,500 charging stations in Tennessee — and another 10,000 in four other states — for Nissan to test its new battery-powered hatchback car.

Nissan Vice President Scott Becker said the government-sponsored test should “jump-start the electrification” of America’s motor fleet and help boost Nissan’s plans for its all-electric Leaf car unveiled earlier this week in Japan.

“This is a major step in promoting zero-emission mobility in the United States,” he said.

A Phoenix company, Electric Transportation Engineering Corp., or eTec, will install 220-volt and faster 480-volt charging stations in Chattanooga, Nashville and Knoxville by late 2010, when Nissan will launch sales of at least 1,000 Leaf cars in Tennessee.

General Motors also is planning to soon introduce its first electric car, the Chevrolet Volt. Other car markers also are preparing rechargeable, battery-powered vehicles.

Nissan’s Leaf is a medium-size hatchback that will go 100 miles on a charge. The car initially will be produced at its Oppama plant in Yokohama, Japan. But car and battery production will crank up at Nissan’s Smyrna, Tenn., facility by 2012, helping to create more than 5,500 U.S. jobs.

The charging stations will be installed in homes, businesses, parking garages, stores and gas stations, officials said.

To extend the range of the Nissan Leaf and other battery-powered vehicles, eTec will install faster chargers along transportation corridors.

People or businesses that buy the Leaf will get a free model charger. Those vehicles can be recharged during the night when power demand is lower.

TVA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Electric Power Research Institute, local distributors and equipment manufacturers are matching DOE’s grant to pay for the initial test of the charging network.

Mark Perry, Nissan North America director of product planning, said Nissan’s Leaf will be priced comparably with other subcompacts but should enjoy both cheaper power costs and a federal tax break of up to $7,500.

Although it will have less than a third the range of a typical gas-powered car with an 18-gallon tank, electricity will cost of about 3 cents a mile, compared with 12 to 13 cents a mile for most gas-powered cars, officials said.

“I don’t think anyone expects oil is going to get any cheaper and a growing number of Americans are interested in cleaner, renewable energy,” said Don Karner, president of eTec. “These chargers will work for any plug-in vehicle and by studying lessons learned from the vehicle operations and infrastructure in this test, we hope to be able to streamline the deployment of millions of more electric vehicles.”

Nissan officials said they decided to add charging stations in Chattanooga after visiting in February and seeing the electric-powered downtown shuttle and talking with battery researchers at UTC and the Advanced Transportation Technology Institute.

“We were most impressed and knew then we wanted to be in Chattanooga with our initial test,” Mr. Perry said.

Details about where and how the charging stations will be built and funded are still being worked out, officials said. If the chargers are divided equally among the three Tennessee cities, Chattanooga could get more than 800, or about half as many charging locations as the city has downtown parking meters.

Jim Frierson, executive director of the Advanced Transportation Technology Institute, said Chattanooga has been at the forefront of electric-powered vehicle tests since TVA built a test track for such cars in the 1970s.

“This community has been talking about electric vehicles for as long as most any community in America and it’s encouraging to see us be a part of this important test,” Mr. Frierson said.

Also on Wednesday, President Barack Obama said that the federal government would spend $2.4 billion in stimulus money to build batteries and get the first batch of thousands of U.S.-made electric vehicles onto the roads.

Most of the money — $1.5 billion — will go to U.S.-based companies to make advanced batteries and battery components. The remainder comprises $500 million in grants for companies that build parts for electric-drive vehicles and $400 million in grants to buy and test electric vehicles, install charging stations and train workers for electric transportation.

Despite many years of battery research, manufacturing in the United States is still in the early stages. Most of the battery cells for vehicles are made in South Korea, Japan and China. The federal funding will make more U.S.-made batteries and components available for the vehicles that manufacturers are promising to build in the next few years.