The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) is behind the development of the plan

Nine cities and towns in the UK are to have charging points for electric and hybrid fuelled vehicles under an £11m development plan.

Birmingham, Coventry, Glasgow, London, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Oxford, Newcastle and Sunderland will be the first to benefit from the scheme.

The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) is behind the development of the plan.

It will eventually go national with the aim of creating a compatible network of recharging points, a spokesman said.

The new plug-in facilities and the attitudes of users to the network will be monitored to assess location of sites and costs of charging.

A number of trials are already under way across the UK with the largest involving 340 vehicles some of which are totally powered by electricity and others with carbon fuel engines charging on-board batteries.

Most journeys in cities and larger towns are about 40 miles on average and the government believes electric cars are ideal.

The aim is to have 50,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2015 but present technology limits even the most advanced units to 150 miles from a two-hour electric charge.

The aim of ETI is to develop a self-sustaining market through offering incentives to drivers.

Developing mass market

Their scheme is called the Joined-Cities Plan and was unveiled at Low Carbon Vehicle Show at the Millbrook vehicle testing ground in Bedfordshire.

ETI chief executive David Clarke said: "Enabling plug-in vehicles to compete effectively in a market alongside petrol and diesel vehicles with their extensive infrastructure is a challenge.

"These plug-in vehicles are currently unknown to most consumers, who will want to know if they will be versatile, will they be affordable and will they be as easy to refuel/recharge.

"Through the Joined-Cities Plan we will help to enhance the versatility and ease of recharging.

"Other aspects of the ETI project will determine what it will take to reach a self-sustaining mass market."

London mayor Boris Johnson, who was at the show, said: "Moving to using electric vehicles which emit zero pollution will have a major impact on cutting carbon emissions, improving air quality and reducing noise pollution.

"I want to make it much easier to go electric which is why in London we are planning to roll out 25,000 charging points.

"So I'm delighted that the capital is part of the joined cities network helping to speed up the electric revolution across the country."

aterham is buying in a hybrid drivetrain from another manufacturer, which it can fit to its existing engines

Caterham has begun development of hybrid and electric powertrains for its cars, and will unveil a prototype by the end of this year.

Speaking at the Tokyo show, where the firm is one of only three foreign manufacturers exhibiting, Caterham boss Ansar Ali said that the EV programme was live, and would begin with a motorsport application.

“We’re looking first and foremost at motorsport, which we see as a testbed for the technology,”he said.

Caterham is buying in a hybrid drivetrain from another manufacturer, which it can fit to its existing engines. The electric drivetrain is also supplied from an external source, although Ali would not reveal the origin of either system.

The firm wants to start a one-make race series in 2011 using the electric/hybrid car, and it will use the findings from the competition to develop a road car for around 2012.

“We’ve been told by our suppliers that the Caterham layout is good for an electric car – there’s a lot of space under the bonnet,” said Ali. He also revealed that an electric Seven shouldn’t suffer any weight penalty, as the system under consideration should weigh the same as a petrol engine, gearbox and rear axle, and that its performance should be equal to any other Caterham.

Ali also admitted that Caterham is unsure whether or not an alternatively-powered Caterham would be a success. “We don’t know if our customer base will be receptive, but by 2012 things may have changed.”

Leno suggested the idea on his first-ever 10 p.m. show, explaining that he’d spent the off-air summer months going to comedy clubs, checking out new t

It’s hard not to root for the underdog, and Jay Leno - despite his massive salary, his fleet of cars, his ownership of five prime hours of network TV - is the underdog. Knocked prematurely off his top-rated “Tonight Show’’ perch. Mocked for being a nice guy who appeals to Middle America. And now, hated by Hollywood for dominating prime time real estate, and pilloried for drawing the same number of viewers in his 10 p.m. slot as he routinely drew at 11:30.

I like Jay Leno, fundamentally. I don’t want his network career to end in failure. I don’t really need another cop or medical show at 10. And so I want “The Jay Leno Show’’ to go on.

Just better.

So far, alas, “The Jay Leno Show’’ has been a disappointment, too somnambulant for prime time. Leno is low-energy in his monologues, listless in his interviewing chair, a little bit bored reading the headlines, overwhelmed by his vast set. His booking agents are equally lax, bringing on a series of veteran comic guests that make his show seem like an ’80s and ’90s reunion. His “Ten @ Ten’’ segments, in which he quizzes celebrities in remote locations, seem to go on for hours. His “Green Car Challenge’’ racing segments are . . . circular.

Leno seems to know this. Recently, he has mocked his own low ratings. Arsenio Hall led an amusing romp through Compton, Calif., in which he asked black people what would make them watch the show. (Add jerking dancers, one of them explained, and in a brief clip, Leno obliged.) Last week, Leno introduced a faux TV show called “Cops and Doctors,’’ complete with “Law & Order’’ dum-DOOM sound effects, to soothe network executives who wanted more excitement at 10 p.m.

Those have been among the best segments of his show; self-awareness is useful for daily TV. But Leno could use his time slot to do something more distinctive and enduring. He could be a comedy curator.

Leno suggested the idea on his first-ever 10 p.m. show, explaining that he’d spent the off-air summer months going to comedy clubs, checking out new talent. He has collected a stable of lesser-known comics, but he generally uses them in filmed sketches that feel like second-rate “Daily Show’’ knock-offs. When comedian Liz Feldman taught senior citizens to use Twitter earlier this month, no one in the room had good material.

Leno should have just given Feldman the floor and let her spin her stand-up routine. He should do that every night, expand his talent pool, and make prime-time stand-up comedy a deliberate, stated mission of his show. Bring in celebrities, sure, if they have something new to say or something timely to promote. But Dana Carvey gave a plug for a hair salon last week - and “earned’’ it in part by doing his George H.W. Bush impression. It made Leno look irrelevant.

There was one moment in the Carvey interview, though, that gave insight into what Leno’s show could be.

Leno reminisced about judging a comedy competition in San Francisco in the late 1970s, then showed a clip of ’70s-era Carvey, fresh-faced and young, with Leif Garrett hair. Imagine what comics, with what hairstyles, are toiling in bars in different corners of the country. They could use a break and a prime-time forum. Leno could use a legacy.

And “The Jay Leno Show’’ could use a purpose, beyond being a way for Jay the car enthusiast to simply spin his wheels

Organiser Greenpower has just announced the top teams who have qualified for the national finals

The highlight of the electric car racing calendar will once again be hosted at the Goodwood Motor Circuit on Sunday when Seaford College will be hoping to regain the championship title.

Seaford College won the coveted title two years ago and will be keen to make it a double.

Organiser Greenpower has just announced the top teams who have qualified for the national finals. This signifies the culmination of a very busy race season where more than 150 teams have competed at the ten qualifying heats held around the UK earlier this year.The top 94 teams, consisting of students from 11 years upwards, will be showcasing their design and engineering expertise when their single-seater cars take to the track at Goodwood.

Each vehicle is powered by the same 24-volt electric motor and two 12-volt batteries around which the teams have designed a car capable of competing in a four-hour endurance race, complying with Greenpower's specifications.

There is sure to be plenty of action on the track during the two races which will take place.

The first race is the Formula 24+ class for teams aged over 16 which will take place over a fast-paced 90-minute sprint.

Then at 1pm the Earl of March, patron of Greenpower, and MP Nick Herbert will be dropping the flag for the start of the Formula 24 endurance.

It will mark the start of much frenzied activity, not only on the track, but also in the pits with frequent driver and battery changes to be factored into the race plan.

It is now established in scientific literature that recent years rises in atmospheric CO2 concentration have not been matched by rises in temperature

The Association of British Drivers has responded to a report from the government’s Climate Change Committee, who have suggested the introduction of road pricing with drivers paying up to £1.50 per mile to combat ‘global warming.’

ABD Environment Spokesman Paul Biggs commented: “The UK’s unilateral Climate Change Act (2008) sets targets for reducing the UK’s tiny 2% contribution to global man-made CO2 emissions, with no plan for how they might be achieved. Indeed, the act has been criticised in a peer reviewed publication as “on course to fail.” The Climate Change Committee, which was set up to give advice on how targets might be met, is loaded with New Labour cronies and ‘Green Alliance’ members, so driver bashing in the false name of climate control comes as no surprise.”

Biggs continues: “It is now established in scientific literature that recent years rises in atmospheric CO2 concentration have not been matched by rises in temperature, adding yet more weight to the significant body of scientific opinion that believes factors other than CO2 drive climate change. The missing 0.2C rise in global temperatures over the past decade was not predicted by the computer models on which the climate scare is based.”

It is interesting that this call comes shortly after the launch of a £6 million government commercial aimed at scaring families on an impending climate disaster. Apparently such extreme alarmism is needed because the public have not been convinced by sexed-up documents from lobby groups.

It is well known that the government welcomed road pricing in response to proposals from the EU, which wants it as a means of paying for its Galileo satellite extravaganza. As an excuse for road pricing, that might not go down too well with voters, though.

Unfortunately, it seems that the Conservatives have also been looking favourably at road pricing. While making a driver-friendly speech at the party conference last week, shadow transport spokesperson Theresa Villiers took a different line at a fringe meeting. She stated that her priorities included reducing carbon emissions and car use, and favoured road pricing initiatives.

The driving public knows it has already been taxed several times over for using a neglected road system, while their money is wasted on costly wind turbines, eco-towns and other green indulgences.

Surveys repeatedly show 3 out of 4 people oppose road pricing. Any politician thinking of adding to the public’s pain will put their party in the fast lane to electoral unpopularity”

"Who Killed The Electric Car"

Historically, the United States loves change. Through our perfection of mass production, agricultural shifts due to the cotton gin, and even our very rise as a world power, punctuated with our usage of the atomic bomb, the country has embraced new technology and new direction to help us climb up the world's ranks. President Barack Obama was elected, functionally, on a platform of change. The Republicans were painted as the party of the status quo, and the Democratic party was painted as the party that would lead us in a bold new direction that would fix our ills. However, once the rubber met the road, it became very obvious very quickly that we have little stomach for sweeping change anymore.

I recently saw the documentary "Who Killed The Electric Car". The documentary functionally says that everyone: The state of California, the car companies, the federal government, the oil companies, etc., had a hand in ensuring that the electric car model EV1 was a failure. This seems to be the opposite of the attitude expected by the country that invented the light bulb. The question became "Why were all of these people so scared of an efficient electric car?" My hypothesis on the answer is that the amount of sweeping change that would occur because of the EV1 was not worth it to all parties involved.

Let's pretend for a moment that the EV1 was mass produced an offered in our current market. The vast majority of people do not travel a hundred miles in a single day, so unless you have an exceptionally long commute or are a professional driver of some sort (trucker, taxicab driver, etc.), the EV1 could service your needs without requiring any gasoline. I would like to repeat this statement for emphasis: For most practical usage that does not involve a road trip of some sort, you can effectively stop buying gas. I can't see the EV1 and cars like it not overtaking the market. Who wouldn't love that?

Oil companies, as an example, are the main answer. Whereas it is easy to dismiss their concerns as "big business", let's realistically think about this: How many Americans are employed by oil companies, either directly or indirectly? Could we really handle that many job losses due to a lack of demand for oil? I can only imagine how that would affect the Gulf of Mexico region and Alaska alone. As well, the movie bragged about how the EV1 required such little service – you just need to rotate the tires, and change the window wiper fluid. The difficulty here is that the standard internal combustion engine is far more inefficient than the EV1's engine… and entire industries have been built around the repair and maintenance of this inefficient engine. Now we've also put a large number of mechanics, car shops, etc. out of business. Let's not even begin to go into the "strategic partnerships" with other countries to provide us with the oil we "need".

Now, I do not want to say the electric car would plunge our country into chaos. We would adapt, just as we always do. When we began using robots on assembly lines rather than humans, massive jobs were lost but our country has managed to survive. However, I think it is obvious that we have little stomach for those "growing pains" anymore.

Let's apply this same reasoning to health care. Conservatives argue that any sort of public option would lead to a single payer health care system. I personally do not believe that a single payer system is problematic. We worry about government inefficiency, comparing the USPS to FedEx. However, the "alternatives" are very few in that scenario: FedEx and UPS. It is easy to maintain high levels of efficiency when you only have two other options. How many different health care insurance companies are there in the United States? I don't know the answer, but I know it is more than two. The administrative efficiencies of having a single place where all of the money comes and goes would be tremendous. This does not even begin to go into the power the government could have to lower prices since everyone would be negotiated together. However, as President Obama cited, this will never happen. We already have a system in place that utilizes private companies for insurance, and, as he says, it would be overwhelming to totally switch gears now. I would cite that it would not be "overwhelming", but it would indeed be a "revolution" – we would have to learn a new system, and entire industry would be gone, etc.. Does our country really have the stomach for that?

It is easy to be brave and move in "bold, new" directions when you are not on top. When your country is searching for the edge to surpass other countries, it is easy to take risks and reap the rewards. However, we have spent the last seventy-to-a-hundred years on top of the mountain, and it takes a lot more to move us now. Is this the best direction to move in? I have always been inclined to say that the cultural and technological advances we embrace can only help the nation move forward into prosperity. However, do you want to be the one telling that to the offshore driller that has found his skill set reduced to a totally unmarketable state?

Of course, there is always the chance that "the market" will always prevail no matter what. Coming this year (according to their website): The Aptera 2E, an "electric" car that gets the equivalent of 360 mpg. In early 2010 we will see the hybrid Aptera 2h, which will use have a tank of up to 5 gallons and a range of around 600 miles because of it. I personally think that, whenever it comes out, we can begin the countdown for the retirement of the internal combustion engine – we may still have hybrids, but I simply can't see a standard car surviving against that sort of competition - unless they greatly inflate the price. On the one hand, at a rumored cost of between $25,000 and $45,000, I'd give regular cars another twenty years or so. On the other hand, I didn't hear about the Aptera until I stumbled upon it in a web search. That doesn't exactly sound like a good start for marketing success (assuming I'm not VERY out of the loop in car technology, which may be the case)

The cost of building a net-zero energy home is now about 20 per cent more than building a conventional home

How well-positioned is your roof? It's a timely question for home and business owners because a roof outfitted with solar panels can generate enough clean electricity to provide power for your building and recharge your electric vehicles. And if it's located in Ontario, it can also turn a profit.

Energy self-sufficiency is not pie-in-the sky speculation. It is prevalent in Europe, specifically in Germany, and it seems to be moving closer to urban Canada with every passing month. But Montreal might have to take a back seat to Toronto on this one. More on that later.

For the moment, we'll go to the leafy suburb of Hudson, where the Alstonvale Net Zero Energy House is being built, as part of the federal government's EQuilbrium initiative to showcase carbon-neutral sustainable housing. Incorporated into the home's roof is a photovoltaic/thermal system that should generate about 8,700 kilowatts of energy annually, enough to meet the needs of a household of four as well as charge the family's low-speed electric car.

The home, which should be ready to receive its family this summer, will be monitored and its energy patterns scrutinized by Hydro-Québec, CMHC, Natural Resources Canada and Concordia University, said architect Sevag Pogharian, who discussed the home's attributes and challenges at the Plug-In Hybrid and Electric Vehicles conference in Montreal.

Meanwhile, in an industrial sector of Toronto, Solera Sustainable Energies Co. is preparing to install solar panels on the roof of client Toronto Electric. Those panels should generate sufficient energy to support a fleet of 35 small highway-capable electric vehicles each travelling about 20,000 kilometres a year for the next 25 years, Solera president Leonard Allen told the conference.

Buildings consume between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of all energy produced and are major contributors to human-induced global warming, said Solera who, like Pogharian, contends that roofs could be - and should be - power plants of green energy.

We shouldn't have to review the environmental sense of green energy; it's as clear as ice-melt. But quickly: every kilowatt of solar photovoltaic installed means that 17 tonnes of coal doesn't have to be burned and that 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide isn't being emitted into the atmosphere.

What is still subject to debate in some quarters, alas, is the economic sense of green energy and green buildings. That is still going on because mainstream economists don't yet factor in the true cost of carbon or clean water or other finite resources while the mantra of the Western world is economic growth and the consumerism that it implies.

Pogharian has given many presentations about the super-smart building in Hudson. He said he is always asked about the "payback period" for the home and the question: "How long will it take to cover the investment?" always comes from a man.

A man who, Pogharian figures, never calculated the payback period of his big flat-screen TV or his power boat, or keeping a mistress, the latter two items having "a pay-back time approaching infinity."

"We are just hardwired to overestimate the value of present pleasures and underestimate the odds of our future pains," he said.

Currently, the cost of building a net-zero energy home is now about 20 per cent more than building a conventional home, he said. Those "incremental" costs will be dropping fast as solar technologies become refined and production costs decrease.

One sure method of dropping the cost and payback time of structures like Pogharian's and Toronto Electric's is building them in Ontario.

If the Hudson home had been built in a Toronto suburb, it would be generating revenue as soon as the sun shone on it, under provisions of Ontario's Green Energy Act that came into effect last week.

Ontario is the first jurisdiction in North America to have a so-called feed-in-tariff which pays producers of green energy - including solar and wind - a guaranteed premium for the power they produce. One can sell self-generated solar power to the grid at a high rate and then buy back the power one needs at much lower rate.

In Quebec, that same energy producer could sell power to the grid but would receive only a credit equivalent to the basic power rate. If you export to the grid more than you use, there is no financial benefit to you.

Had Pogharian built the Hudson house in Ontario, it would have had more solar panels along with a shorter payback period.

"I would have made the house a net exporter of energy and not stopped at zero," Pogharian said.

At Toronto Electric, "the feed-in-tariff is the enabler to making solar rooftop work financially," said Allen who pegged the cost of the project at about $750,000.

"It creates a significant revenue stream" because the energy generated by the roof will be sold to the Ontario grid for 71.3 cents per kw/hr to the grid and returned to Toronto Electric at a rate of about 11 cents, he said.

So, currently, the best position for your solar roof is facing south and in Ontario.