Senator Lamar Alexander has put his money where his energy policy mouth is and shelled out the $10,000 it costs to have a Prius converted by A123 Systems to a plug-in type hybrid. The senator says he gets 30 miles out of the lithium ion battery before the engine is called upon to do some work. Having only a 5 or 6 mile daily commute, Alexander has burned about half a tank a gas since sometime last July which is just a bit less than his former vehicle, a leased Nissan Maxima, would have burned. Of course, his motivation for the innovative installation was not to save money but to illustrate what is possible.

Having worked with the TVA for many years, Alexander is well aware that the rather large Tennessee Valley region has an unused nighttime electricity capacity that is equal to the output of six or seven nuclear plants. He hopes that a lot of that energy can go to power transportation vehicles in the future and help offset imported oil. Although he believes this goal will take 15 to 20 years to achieve, he calculates that if half of our current fleet of cars and trucks had similar capabilities as his shiny black Prius, we could cut our oil imports by 4 to 5 million barrels a day - just about half. This, of course, would be great but we hope it happens a lot sooner than 2028.

[Source: US News and World Report]

The Congressional Tennessee Valley Authority Caucus is a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and Representatives from the Tennessee Valley Authority area (Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia). Today, the Caucus will hold a field hearing on electric drive vehicles in Nashville, and Toyota will be showing off the plug-in Prius prototype there. We're familiar with the Toyota PHEV Prius PR routine (we took one for a drive late last year at EVS23), but we'd be much happier about these events if certain Toyota execs didn't spend so much time downplaying the plug-in hybrid.

In any case, Toyota will also have Camry and Highlander hybrid models on display at the Caucus hearing, as well as a regular Prius. More details after the break.

It seems a stretch to find a silver lining among air pollution and wars fought over fuel, but folks over at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) have found a vein.

Researchers at UTC's Advanced Transportation Technology Institute (ATTI) are convinced that the next wave of transportation beyond internal-combustion engines is, ironically, the return of the electric vehicle. The UTC and ATTI have convinced the Tennessee Valley Authority to open up its electric vehicle test track near the Chickamauga Dam. The one-mile stretch was built 25 years ago to pursue EV research but was largely abandoned during the '80s. UTC hopes its research will attract national attention and new engineering students interested in the nascent technology.

[Source: WTVC]