Coulomb CEO Richard Lowenthal is featured in today’s NY Times Nuts and Bolts Blog. Richard Lowenthal was one of several panelists asked to testify this week before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Energy and Water Development held a hearing on “Electric Vehicles in the Light Duty Auto Sector”. Below is the article you can also access it here.

E.V. Companies Tell Senate They Need Federal Help
By JIM MOTAVALLI

Although it was overshadowed by the Toyota drama taking place in the House of Representatives, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Energy and Water Development held a hearing on “Electric Vehicles in the Light Duty Auto Sector” this week, and the Senators heard a fairly unified message from players in the electric vehicle community. There could be a significant early gap between E.V. demand and E.V. supply, they said, and we need help getting these green cars off the ground.

Perhaps because it was such a busy day, the subcommittee hearing attracted just four senators: its chairman, Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota; Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah; Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, and Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee.

The preferred approach, the witnesses said, would be for the federal government to buy fleets of E.V.’s, thus jump starting an industry that will need some encouragement. The initial high price of plug-in cars is one barrier, and Richard Lowenthal, chief executive of charging company Coulomb Technologies, said that another is “range anxiety” because the first generation of cars is expected to travel about 100 miles on a charge. “Even though the data shows that drivers rarely travel long distances, people do express unease about range,” he said.

Mr. Lowenthal also called for a streamlined permitting process for installation of charging stations. He leases an electric BMW Mini E and said in an interview that it took a month for the charger to be installed. “I experienced buyer’s remorse because I couldn’t use the car,” he explained.

BMW MINI E

The city of San Francisco and others are working on a faster process, he added, and if electricians can also be empowered as local inspectors, then permitting could be accomplished in one day.

Mary Ann Wright is managing director of the business accelerator at Johnson Controls, which supplies lithium-ion batteries to Daimler and BMW hybrids, and will also make them for Ford vehicles. She told the senators that, based on studies, she sees a chasm by 2015 between a projected worldwide demand for two million E.V.’s (battery cars and hybrids) and what is then likely to be an installed capacity (or how many E.V.’s can be built) of four million.

“There is a very significant demand gap,” Ms. Wright said in an interview. Producing larger volumes of E.V.’s will significantly reduce their costs, she said. “Scale won’t get us all the way, but it is going to be a significant driver.”

Ms. Wright said at the hearing that the federal government operates more than a million vehicles, “all ideally suited for some level of electrification.” The Postal Service, whose trucks often travel less than 18 miles a day and return to a central depot that could accommodate E.V. charging, would work particularly well as battery vehicles, she said. “These fleet programs are a great way to stimulate demand,” she said.

The ultimate result, if E.V.’s sell, will be lower operating costs, said Frederick W. Smith, head of FedEx and a charter member of the Electrification Coalition (an advocacy group that also includes Nissan). He cited Electric Power Research Institute figures estimating that a conventional car consumes 400 gallons of gasoline per year, compared with 300 for a gas-electric hybrid and just 160 for the coming plug-in hybrids. “And the reduction in U.S. oil consumption is really dramatic,” he said.

The Electrification Coalition’s “roadmap” calls for substantially increasing tax credits for consumers to buy E.V.’s, utilities that upgrade and for companies that install public charging stations. The 50 percent tax credit for equipment and installation expires at the end of 2010, and Mr. Lowenthal said E.V. advocates want to see it extended for 18 months to two years.

Mr. Lowenthal’s company, which has sold 600 chargers, gets 37 percent of its business from municipalities that don’t pay taxes. “All of us prefer rebates,” he said, referring to a program like cash-for-clunkers, but getting them passed is a political challenge.