Electric Vehicles – The Business of Plugging In
As the name suggests, “The Business of Plugging In” conference in Detroit this week was about business — the profit motive — and there is nothing wrong with that. Yet, though there is widespread agreement that the world should migrate to electric vehicles, there is considerable disagreement as to exactly how this should happen and who should profit as a result. There are a great number of directly competitive strategies in terms of products, business models, and charging infrastructures…..and guess what happens when you put their representatives on a stage in the hopes of calmly and dispassionately discussing these issues? Can you say “rabid dogs?”
I’m kidding; it’s all been fairly professional here, but generally, this is a forum for the presentation of ideas that serve the speaker’s ultimate profit-making agenda, so one hears some pretty wild, and, in my way of thinking, unsubstantiated ideas.
George Patacki, Governor of New York from 1995 – 2006, moderated the opening panel, and made what I thought was the single most important point of the day on Tuesday: we live in a country that has wind energy in the plains, solar energy in the southwest, and geothermal in the mountains — but no infrastructure — physical or regulative — to enable our nation to provide all this wonderful capacity to consumers. He’s supporting legislature that will bypass the boundaries of the literally 2000 local and regional utilities and upgrade the grid at a national level and make possible the sharing of renewable energy.
