Second Interview with Richard Lowenthal, Cupertino’s Star Award recipient for 2009

Story and photos by Donna Austin
After my second interview with Richard Lowenthal , I realized that electric cars have been around a lot longer than I previously thought.Why aren’t there more of them and why aren’t there more stations? We met in downtown San Jose across the street from San Jose City Hall. One charging station is right across the street from the sparkling central dome on 4th and Santa Clara Streets. Richard Lowenthal is always enthusiastic and caring about this new clean energy. We saw the one station clearly marked for electric charging. The charge point uses the same conduits but has separate wiring from street lamps. Lowenthal showed me how the door was securely locked while in use. He also showed me his wireless router that went to his Blackberry and let him know when the car was fully charged. He opened his trunk and showed me his special battery that allowed him to get almost 100 miles to the gallon.
I asked about the affect on the electric grid of plugging in electric cars. He said that if all the charging is done off peak, then there would be no increase in the infrastructure. However, he did agree that it will require the burning of fuel to generate the excess of electricity required.
The extra battery for the Prius is a lithium Ion. See it pictured. It takes up most of the trunk space. To add a 5 kilowatt hours of battery capacity with a charging cord, the cost would be approximately $10,000. It was installed in Lowenthal’s Prius by Greengears in San Francisco. The battery is estimated to last around 100,000 miles.
Later in the garage next to city hall, I saw a row of empty stalls with two more modern electric chargers from Coulomb technologies. Besides them
were outdated charging stations from Ford and Toyota for cars that were no longer made. I could see that San Jose has tried to make electric cars work throughout the years, and we hope that this time they will be successful. I wondered what happened to the electric cars we had in Cupertino? Who killed the electric cars 10 or 15 years ago in the Santa Clara Valley?

I know Richard Lowenthal is the person to make electric car use a success. He loves green, he loves the environment and he really wants to help the community. Check out his web page on Coulomb Technologies ChargePoint Network. You can read more about this new concept on their web page and see actual demonstrations www.coulombtech.com



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Posted by donna on Feb 11th, 2009 and filed under People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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