Saturday, August 3, 2013

Feds spend $100 MILLION on Charging Stations for Cars hardly anybody wants

A California company was given more than $100 million in taxpayer funds by the federal government – with few strings attached – to establish a network of electric car charging stations that is fraught with problems, according to a government audit.   
All this, despite weak demand by the American public for electric cars. 
While President Obama has pledged to get 1 million electric cars on U.S. roads by 2015, a new report by the Department of Energy’s inspector general found that Americans’ aversion to electric vehicles and loose department supervision led to stalling the charging network – which cost taxpayers more than $135 million.
The report noted the project was filled with problems from the beginning, and said taxpayer-funded grants to San Francisco-based ECOtality for it were “very generous” and involved little risk by the company. 
ECOtality, which recently named Brandon Hurlbut, former chief of staff for ex-Energy Secretary Steven Chu, to its board, won a $99.8 million award in 2009 to install nearly 15,000 electric vehicle chargers throughout the country. 
The company and its subsidiaries also received about $35 million from the department’s Vehicle Technologies Program from 2005 to 2011, “for two multiyear projects to evaluate and test specific vehicles.”
[...] 
"The real problem is the policy approach of the Obama administration," said Paul Chesser, of the National Legal and Policy Center. "The department of Energy and, really ECOtality, were in an impossible situation. President Obama says, 'There's going to be 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015, so here are billions to make it happen.' And then nobody buys the cars. 
"It's a disastrous domino effect, a complication of a policy that was a bad idea," Chesser said...
Read the full story HERE.

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1 comment:

CRUZ COUNTRY said...

It's other people's money, so what do they care.