This summer, a guy named Dan Gray submitted a video to Planet Forward about the Nissan Leaf and because of that, he got to test drive the newest electric car.  This Thursday, Oct 21, the “Nightly Business Report” on PBS stations will feature Dan’s video and the test drive. In the video below you can see  the Nissan Leaf, a “pure zero emission” car.  It doesn’t even have a tailpipe, and it raises the “cool” factor of an electric car to a new high.  See it on the Nissan site here.

Interested in a new Leaf EV? I sure am. It looks like a fantastic car. Reportedly, there are big government incentives to buy an electric car right now. I don’t know the details, but according to the video, it would cost you about $25,000 in the end. Do electric cars make sense to buy? Yes, if people invest in this technology, and they become more affordable, and that will happen.  We can’t keep using oil and gas. (That’s obvious, since it’s already running out.) Here is a preview of the car.

You can see more on Thursday, October 21 on PBS.

Below is a related story from Yale’s e360:

Rising Hopes that Electric Cars  Can Play a Key Role on the Grid

Will electric cars one day become part of a network of rechargeable batteries that can help smooth out the intermittent nature of wind and solar power? Many experts believe so, pointing to programs in Europe and the U.S. that demonstrate the promise of vehicle-to-grid technology.

Yale e360 article by dave levitan

The United States now has more than 35,000 megawatts of installed wind energy, enough to power close to 10 million homes. Close on the heels of this ongoing renewable energy revolution is another green technology: By next year tens of thousands of Nissan LEAFs, Chevy Volts, and other electric vehicles will start rolling off assembly lines.

The electricity generation and transportation sectors may seem like two disparate pieces of a puzzle, but in fact they may end up being intimately related. The connection comes in the form of the vehicle-to-grid concept, in which a large electric vehicle (EV) fleet — essentially a group of rechargeable batteries that spend most of their time sitting in driveways and garages — might be used to store excess power when demand is low and feed it back to the grid when demand is high. Utilities and electricity wholesalers would pay the EV owners for providing that power.

Vehicle-to-grid, or V2G, is not a new idea. In fact, it’s been floating around environmental and green tech circles for a decade at least. But it has always had the tough-to-shed image of a utopian technology. Now, though, V2G — as well as simpler schemes based on smart-timed charging of the vehicles — is slowly becoming reality, evolving in quiet synergy with the worldwide push for renewable energy….

Those generators can handle [...]