electric utilities

While workplace charging is still a work in progress at most companies, a few progressive corporations and nonprofits now offer incentives to employees to commute in plug-in electric cars. One example is PSEG, the publicly-owned New Jersey electric and gas utility, which has seen employee usage of...

The rules for vehicle gas mileage are pretty much locked down from now through 2025. The math is complicated, but vehicles in 2025 will have to reach a fleet-wide average of 54.5 mpg by 2025--or about 42 mpg on their window stickers. So what's the next battleground over reducing emissions? It's...

Stricter limits on new power plant greenhouse gas emissions and a weak export market have put the American coal industry on the ropes.

Every so often, electric-car skeptics will attack the idea of using grid electricity to power a car by bringing up coal. "Yeah," the argument goes, "but you're just burning coal instead of gasoline in your electric car--so how's that any better?" There is, of course, a fair amount of science that...

One of the long-standing concerns over electric cars is just how much demand the electricity grid would have to cope with should millions of people start plugging in every night. California will be a good test-bed for such concerns, with as many as 350,000 electric cars expected on the state's...

Does the supposedly clean, green Tesla Model S really pollute more than a gas-guzzling Jeep Grand Cherokee sport-utility vehicle? That's what one analyst has claimed. In an exhaustive 6,500-word article on the financial website Seeking Alpha, analyst Nathan Weiss lays out a case that the Model S...

Technology can be a real drag. CDs killed cassettes. MP3s killed CDs. Video killed the radio star. Bummer. Now, a new threat looms in the dark pit we call progress: solar power. According to Grist, utilities are worried that wiring up photovoltaic cells to human ingenuity will soon upset the...

One of the reasons people make the switch from a gasoline car to an electric car is to benefit from the reduced running costs. With some careful planning -- and special time of use tariffs that make night-time electricity cheaper -- charging an electric car can be pretty cheap. But what if you...

You'd think that $100 million of electric-car charging stations in California would be a good thing, right? While an agreement announced last month may disturb California utility customers--the injured parties whose high power bills led to the deal--the state's electric-car drivers may benefit from...

GM is working with ABB Group to develop new ways to use partially depleted Volt battery packs. One promising idea involves using arrays of battery packs to feed power to the grid in times of need.

While early adopters won't need many public charging points for their electric cars, conventional wisdom has it that the public at large probably will. And according to a May report by Pike Research, that's exactly what will happen. The clean-technology market research firm predicts that by 2015...

Last week's heat wave prompted another eruption of that perennial question: Won't electric cars that recharge from grid power overload the nation's electricity system? Or put more bluntly: Will electric vehicles bring down the U.S. power grid? The answer, equally bluntly, is: No. They won't. (And...

This story, written by Camille Ricketts, was originally posted on VentureBeat's GreenBeat, an editorial partner of AllCarsElectric. Nissan continues to beat the electric car drum. Last week, it started taking reservations for its all-electric Leaf, and beat its own expectations with more than 6,600...

New York City often startles people, and it stayed true to form in a recent analysis done by McKinsey & Company for the city's PlaNYC planning group, "Exploring Electric Vehicle Adoption in New York City." In particular, one of the report's conclusions may come as a shock to many...

Over the next 12 months, carmakers will introduce several new plug-in electric vehicles. One question that's frequently asked of GreenCarReports: Does recharging electric cars pose a threat to the electricity grid? The 2010 Fisker Karma and the 2011 Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrids, among other...