President Obama has launched EV-Everywhere, the second of the Energy Department’s “Clean Energy Grand Challenges”. This initiative is designed to bring together scientists, engineers, and businesses to make electric vehicles a viable, affordable, and convenient option. The goal is to make electric vehicles a persuasive choice within the next 10 years.
“The Energy Department’s Clean Energy Grand Challenges will engage America’s scientists, engineers and young people to solve some of the nation’s biggest energy challenges and make clean energy technologies affordable and accessible to the vast majority of American families and businesses,” says Secretary Chu. “The EV-Everywhere Challenge is focused on advancing electric vehicle technologies and continuing to reduce costs, so that a decade from now, electric vehicles will be more affordable and convenient to own than today’s gasoline-powered vehicles.”
Electric vehicles are garnering attention from facility managers and building owners as well. With the push towards green energy and sustainability, are EV-friendly parking structures on the radar? That is just one of many potential FM considerations that may arise with the shift toward electric vehicles.
Why electric vehicles? Electric vehicles can offer significant advantages over gasoline-powered vehicles, including savings on fuel costs, added convenience, and reduced maintenance costs. Electricity is cheaper than gasoline to power a vehicle – generally equivalent to less than $1 per gallon – and able to conveniently fuel up at areas both residential and commercial. Electric vehicles can also be more reliable, require less maintenance, and offer the same or better driving performance compared to today’s gasoline-powered vehicles.
The aggressive goal of this initiative is, by the year 2022, to enable companies in the United States to be the first in the world to produce a 5-passenger affordable American electric vehicle with a payback time of less than 5 years and sufficient range and fast-charging ability to enable average Americans everywhere to meet their daily transportation needs more conveniently and at lower cost.
