Power On!

Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 6:30 AM

Posted by the RechargeIT Team

Introducing the RechargeIT Blog

Power on! Not that we have anything against the sound of exhaust streaming out of a tailpipe, but electrified transportation is, simply, cool and better for our health, the environment, and energy security. Google.org's RechargeIT initiative (see below for more information) is launching a blog. This blog will cover an array of plug-in topics, including vehicle technology, battery technology, RechargeIT's projects and data, policy, interviews, and interesting snippets from newspaper articles and current events. Some posts will be very technical, others less so, and some not technical at all. The one binding characteristic is that we hope all posts will be interesting.

We would like to encourage you all to sign up for our discussion list here. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on our posts and the ideas they provoke. We will be signed up to the discussion list and can answer questions you have about our blog posts, but the discussion list is mainly for you to discuss the posts further.

Not familiar with RechargeIT?

The RechargeIT initiative is a project of Google.org in which we converted four Toyota Priuses and two Ford Escape hybrids to plug-in cars using the Hymotion-A123 system. We use these vehicles as a test fleet and track their data to better understand their capabilities (we will discuss the particular data in a future post). We also issued a $10 million RFP for plug-in and component technologies, engage in policy debates as with the ZEV Mandate (we will discuss this in a future post too!), we fund promising nonprofits and researchers to continue their important work, and work with the stakeholders to better understand this space and help them in any way we can.