Brightfield is proud to have forged public/private partnerships with Asheville City, Buncombe County and UNC Asheville that are resulting in publicly accessible Brightfield™ Charging Stations.  These partnerships are possible thanks to the hard work of staff and administrators within each organization who believe in Brightfield’s Solar Driven vision and championed the cause.

The result of these collaborative initiatives is the foundation of a region-wide EV charging network—a vital part of a future viable EV market.  Building off of years of work led by Land of Sky Regional Council and Advantage West, our community now has the public/private partnership templates that can be used to grow our EV capacity.  Brightfield is using these templates to engage other communities in the Asheville Metro Area to support a regional EV charging network, so EV drivers can leave home confident that their charging needs will be met.

Brightfield is working on regional EV planning with Land of Sky Regional Council through the Clean Cities Clean Vehicles initiative and the regional EV Committee.  Together, our organizations are helping to make western North Carolina a state-wide beacon for EV readiness.  Land of Sky has the capacity and state-wide network to both develop a regional EV readiness model and proliferate that model throughout NC.Brightfield is assisting the effort by installing Brightfield Charging Stations and through the use of our Transportation Infrastructure Modeling (TIM) tool that analyzes demographic, industry forecast, and EV cost and benefit data to determine the strategic location and quantity of EV chargers necessary to meet impending demand.  The TIM tool can be used on a micro level to help fleet managers determine the most cost effective way to transition fleets to electric vehicles overtime, and on the macro level to determine how much solar capacity is needed to provide renewable fuel for vehicle miles driven, how much ground-level pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are deferred regionally, and  how to make best uses of resources to get EV chargers where they’re needed most.The TIM tool is a valuable part of the EV readiness quiver.  Brightfield will continue to work with Land of Sky and the new Evolve Energy Partnerships initiative to ensure that the outcome of our collective EV efforts attains the environmental, social and economic benefits we seek including reduced pollution, affordable vehicles and fuel, and regional job and manufacturing growth.

“We can break our dependence on oil…and become the first country to have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. The future is ours to win,” President Obama said in his January 2011 State of the Union address. Some critics believe that this goal is overly ambitious, citing the fact that it took 10 years for Hybrid vehicles to reach the 3% market share, which is the same share the Obama Administration is hoping electric vehicles will reach in 4 years. But what differentiates this ambitious electric vehicle goal from Hybrids or other alternative-fueled vehicles  is that the government is investing significant resources in it.  According to a US Department of Energy report titled The Recovery Act: Transforming America’s Transportation Sector, released July , 2010:

As part of the Department of Energy’s $12 billion investment in advanced vehicle technologies, the Department is investing more than $5 billion to electrify America’s transportation sector. These investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and DOE’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program are supporting the development, manufacturing, and deployment of the batteries, components, vehicles, and chargers necessary to put millions of electric vehicles on America’s roads.

For more on sources of information visit http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/documents/Battery-and-Electric-Vehicle-Report-FINAL.pdf http://www.electrificationcoalition.org/

By integrating solar power production with EV charging the Brightfield™ Charging Station concept solves three critical issues: it moves us away from fossil fuel, it generates revenue while EV charging demand grows, and it provides locally harvested fuel.Here in western North Carolina our electricity comes mostly from coal strip mined in Virginia and West Virginia through the process known as mountain top removal.  In fact, North Carolina leads the nation in mountain top removal coal use.  Switching from oil to coal for our transportation sector provides a net environmental gain because the electric motor is much more efficient that the internal combustion engine.  But the mining and burning of coal perpetuates the environmentally destructive consequences of burning any fossil fuel namely air pollution, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.  There’s no way around the fact that coal fired electricity will play a major role in the EV transition, but Brightfield is proving that by incorporating solar power generation from the onset, we can phase in the solar capacity needed to fuel the growing regional fleet of EVs.  Doing so will reduce pressure to build new coal-fired power plants as electricity demand increase to meet EV need while increasing the amount of renewable energy deployed. As far as the revenue generation goes, The solar power generated by Brightfields is bundled and sold on the energy markets as Renewable Energy Credits (REC).  The RECs are purchased by individuals and companies looking to stimulate renewable power generation and/or offset their own non-renewable electricity use.  In North Carolina the RECs are purchased by NC Green Power.  The revenue from the sale of RECs covers Brightfield operations and maintenance costs and provides cash flow to Brightfield.  This is particularly valuable while we wait for the  EVs  the Brightfields will serve to arrive.  With integrated solar power generation, the Brightfield Charging Station is productive from day one every moment the sun is shining. The result is that abundant local sunshine is harvested by the Brightfield’s solar array and put on the grid to power your car.  Local fuel is secure fuel.  When we buy our imported oil refined as gasoline at the pump, only a few cents per gallon stays in the local economy.  The rest leaves immediately to be deposited in far away corporate and foreign-nation bank accounts.  But when we harvest sunshine and send it onto the grid and then draw off the grid to fuel our EVs, more of our fuel dollars stay local where they can serve the local economy. Integrating solar power production and EV charging is environmentally, socially and economically beneficial.   There are few products out there in the world today that enable you to improve the environment, put people to work, keep money on local communities, decrease consumer fuel costs, increase local manufacturing, and inspire us all.  That’s what the solar power generating Brightfield Charging Station does.