Acting Locally and Electrically

At the recommendation of my dad, I finally saw the highly rated documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. The movie’s premise is that GM was manufacturing and had sold somewhere around 1000 fully electric cars (called the EV1) back in the late 90s. This was due to a Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate placed on auto makers for cars sold in the State of California. It’s alleged that due to pressue by auto makers California rescinded this policy and all of these electric cars, by GM as well as other makers, all but disappeared.

There’s a lot of suspicion, as to GM’s motives with the way it gathered up and and destroyed all of these perfectly functional EV1s. Though many owners pleaded with GM to allow them to buy the cars outright, GM did not allow it. It was a very informative movie and I highly recommend that everyone see it. I remember reading articles in car magazines about electric car technology back in high school (around 1993-1994) and due to the current battery technology, batteries were too massive and heavy for electric cars to be feasable at the time. I seem to remember reading that the required technology was still a decade or more off and certainly had no idea that people were driving fully eletric cars just a few years later.

Anyway, the movie started me thinking about what my home state of Washington is doing to reduce or eliminate vehicle emissions. Apparently California has a new ZEV regulation that will require auto makers to sell a percentage of zero emissions vehicles, starting in 2009. Washington is one of ten states that have adopted this policy. Click here to read to the specifics.

Along the same lines, I also found an article about the state’s largest utility, Puget Sound Energy, and it’s recent initiatives for renewable energy. Apparently it just opened it’s second and largest wind-power facility, named “Wild Horse”. Combined with another, “Hopkins Ridge”, facility, enough power is generated for 125,000 households. The article goes on to say that PSE has plans to build a solar energy facility on the same Wild Horse site. If the project stays on schedule it should be producing electricity late this year and will nearly double Washington’s total solar-power generation. To read the full text of this article click here. I think wind and solar power generation are great technologies and I’m glad to see my state is begining to rely on them extensively.