Power brokers for your car

SCI-TECH | Firm sells 27 plug-in charging stations for hybrid vehicles, including at Northerly Island

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June 20, 2009

It's still a rare sight, but electric-hybrid cars and trucks will soon be revving up at a plug-in station at Northerly Island, the former site of Meigs Field.

The charging station was sold to the Chicago Park District by local start-up company Carbon Day, which has the exclusive rights to distribute them in the Midwest, including at movie theaters, parking garages, office buildings and shopping malls (carbondayautomotive.com).

The station, which stands at Douglas Park on Chicago's South Side where it was part of the 2016 Olympics Committee tour in April, is powered by a solar canopy.

The canopy's solar panels capture the sun's rays and turn the heat into electricity. The electricity goes into the ComEd electric grid when the plug-in station sits idle, and otherwise plugs into a hybrid car's socket to charge the car.

Electric-hybrid cars have two motors: One requires electricity. When that gets depleted, the second, gasoline-powered motor kicks in.

The Chicago Park District is still working on exactly where to put the charging station to ensure it's accessible to the public, said Park District spokeswoman Zvez Kubat. The station's move to Northerly Island is expected in the next few months.

The plug-in station is part of Carbon Day's effort to do its part to save the planet from itself.

Carbon Day has sold 27 plug-in stations, including six for the Aqua building parking garage at 225 N. Columbus Drive and six for a "green" parking garage under construction on Clark Street between Hubbard and Kinzie.

Four twentysomethings with high ideals to reduce pollution are not only selling the plug-in stations, but retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient, and launching a national Carbon Day on Sept. 15 to get out the news.

"The message is to reduce your carbon footprint," said Scott Emalfarb, whose uncle, Brad Emalfarb, started the company. "It seems like a pipe dream, but we are installing the plug-in stations now in public places."

The result will mean a change in demand patterns to ComEd's electric grid.

ComEd is keeping an eye on the potential of such plug-in stations -- essentially electric-powered 'gas' stations without the gasoline -- to make sure it can handle the electric load demanded when a car charges up, said Dan Gabel, fleet services manager for ComEd.

To use the Northerly Island charging station, drivers must subscribe to the Coulomb Network (mycharge point.net) because California-based Coulomb Technologies makes the stations.

ComEd is working with the Chicago Area Clean Cities Coalition to decide where to put more of the charging stations so that the public can find them. The utility is figuring out how best to manage the system load by using "smart charging" technology that enables the plug-in stations to be monitored and controlled remotely.

"A vehicle's charging could be managed based on a fixed schedule, say from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., or car owners could manage the charging of their own vehicles based on real-time price signals for electricity," Gabel said.

Each of ComEd's plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) -- Toyota Prius hybrids converted at $10,000 apiece to PHEVs -- uses 1,200 to 1,500 watts of power, or about 10 amps at 120 volts, to recharge. A car with a depleted battery would take six hours, or 7.2 kilowatt hours, to fully recharge. By comparison, a hairdryer requires 1,800 kilowatts to be powered but isn't usually powered for six hours at a time.

ComEd also is working with iGo to study the charging patterns of a car-sharing fleet of vehicles.

President Obama has pledged to put 1 million plug-in vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015. Toyota announced June 3 it will start leasing by year's end 150 plug-in hybrid cars that are greener than its Prius model. Toyota for the first time will use lithium-ion batteries in the plug-ins.

That's all good news to the Fox Valley Electric Auto Association (fveaa.org), a 34-year-old group based in Naperville, which counts about 35 of its 220 members as electric-car drivers. The drivers converted regular cars into electric ones themselves, said Association President Ted Lowe.

At Carbon Day, six twentysomethings work in a 10-by-5-foot "war room" at 800 W. Huron, where they "are able to really kill ourselves day in, day, out," said Emalfarb.

Scott, 26, and Elliot Offenbach, 27, friends since kindergarten, quit their jobs a year ago at a real-estate development company to run Carbon Day. Scott grew up in Deerfield, and Offenbach in Highland Park.

Offenbach runs the construction division.

They are joined by college friends Ben Lachman, 27, the operations manager, and Brian Levin, 26, who has a sales and brokerage background and runs the automotive division.

Said Emalfarb of working in close quarters with friends, "There are good days and bad days."

While they can "rip each other's heads off," they can also trust each other and work to be successful together, he said.

While 44-year-old uncle Brad Emalfarb put up the initial seed capital, the principals at Carbon Day are looking for $50 million to $100 million in venture-capital funding to realize their dream of being the leaders in plug-in station distribution.