San Francisco to Offer Free Electric Car Charging Stations

San Francisco announced yesterday that it will be placing free electric-vehicle chargers around the city, the SF Examiner reports. The chargers will be available in 20 city-owned garages, including the garages at San Francisco International Airport. They're not meant to be electric car owners' sole source of power, but to let them refuel when they're not at home, since the currently available electric cars (like the Nissan Leaf) can only travel 100 miles or less without a recharge. The new stations will be free to use through 2013.
Government grants are supporting the installation of the electric-car charging stations in San Francisco, as they are elsewhere: Oregon, for instance, will soon host 15,000 stations around the state, some of them public. And the first rapid-charging station in Latin America was publicly inaugurated last week in Chile--although electric cars aren't actually available in Chile yet.

President Obama announced a goal of having a million electric vehicles on U.S. roads by 2015 in this year's State of the Union address.

Source: techland.time.com