Another AltCarExpo in the Books

I functioned as the moderator of the “Charging Infrastructure” panel before a full and enthusiastic audience at the 4^th annual AltCarExpo last Friday, October 2nd. For the first hour, AC Propulsion’s CEO Tom Gage, Plug-In American’s Paul Scott and Clean Fuel Connection’s Enid Joffe did a wonderful job with the questions I had prepared. At that point, I turned the questioning over to the audience for the last 30 minutes, and was pleased to see a steady slow of clear, solid questions that got at some really good issues that I had not built into my dialog with the panel.

As one might have expected, the content was mostly technical: Exactly what are the challenges that the utilities face in preparing for the coming ubiquity of electric transportation, and how are they going their work? What does the advent of V2G (vehicle to grid) mean in terms of both the quality and quantity of power available on the grid at any point in time? What type of planning needs to occur such that charging stations provide adequate opportunity to ensure that motorists feel confident that they won’t run out of charge in their day-to-day driving?

I knew in advance that Tom Gage would be impossible to stump with questions like these (not that I was trying), insofar as he’s one of the best-informed people on the planet in this regard. But I was blown away with the expanse of technical knowledge that Enid and Paul had brought to the table as well.

I made sure we addressed the political issues too, and I’m happy to say that no one pulled any punches. Apparently, the oil companies are not going to take this without a fight. “You’re about to see a campaign of lies like you’ve never witnessed before,” Paul Scott intoned solemnly. “In the last wave of hearings that could have threatened their monopolies, they hired hundreds of people to show support for their positioned who had never even heard of the issue the day before and didn’t know the first thing about it. They have absolutely no concept of fair play – and that was just a warm-up for what is about to come.”

I closed by thanking the panel — and the audience in particular, with my reference to Henry Kissinger that readers may have seen in other posts. “Henry Kissinger said recently,” I reminded the group, “that if it weren’t for the intensity of the opposition to the war in Vietnam of the common American, we’d still be there. That’s an utterly amazing thing to admit, isn’t it? It shows me several things, but the most obvious is the raw power of people like you, who take their time to come together and stand up for something you believe in. I thank for you that. And I ask you to give yourselves a hand.”