Our Friends Electric
Yes, my friends, we are officially living in the future, for not one, not two, but four vehicle charging points have been installed around the city centre, one on Adelaide Road in front of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, a second about 200 meters down the canal on Wilton Place near the offices of Sustainable Energy Ireland, and a further two across the road from each other at the ESB's headquarters on Fitzwilliam Street.
Use of the chargers requires a RFID card and preregistration with the ESB, and apparently for the rest of the year charging at these four points is actually free, with fees to be introduced in 2011. The plan is to install up to 500 charge points in Dublin, 135 in Cork, 45 each in Limerick, Galway and Waterford and at least 1 in every town in the country with a population of more than 1,500. These are all to facilitate the Government's ambitious target of having 10% of vehicles on Irish roads in 2020 be electric.
Luckily this is not the case. According to David MacKay, Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and author of the rather good "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air":
"Assume the electric vehicle's energy cost is 20kWh(e) per 100km. (I think 15kWh(e) per 100km is perfectly possible, but let's play skeptical in this calculation.) If grid electricity has a carbon footprint of 500g per kWh(e) then the effective emissions of this vehicle are 100g CO2 per km, which is as good as the best fossil cars. So I conclude that switching to electric cars is already a good idea, even before we green our electricity supply." - 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air', p131So even as we wait for the ESB to move towards more renewable sources of energy production, or to open up the charging stations to other greener producers (as it plans to do), switching to electric vehicles in an urban environment is still a much better option.
Welcome to the future; Next stop, reserved parking spaces for flying cars.
Oh, yeah!
Links
ESB Press Release on the Vehicle Charging Points
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Labels: Doing, Dublin, Photography
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