A few weeks back Cheapflights told you about new electric car charging stations in the parking garages of Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. Innovative stuff, the kind of infrastructure installation that could make electric cars really work in a work-a-day world.
Now comes word one of the country’s top hotels is installing electric vehicle charging stations. It’s The Peabody Memphis, the property made famous by the flock of ducks that regularly waddle through the lobby.
The historic hotel just installed a quartet of charging stations, making it the second hotel in Tennessee to do so. The Level 2 charging facilities can accommodate all-electric Nissan Leaf and hybrid-electric Chevrolet Volt models. The stations are located in the hotel’s parking garage. They’re available to guests and locals alike. No extra fee’s involved. Just pay for parking as you’d normally do at a downtown Memphis hotel.
“We recognize that electric vehicles are the future,” says The Peabody’s general manager, Douglas Browne. “We’ve already had requests from individual guests and from meeting planners.”
What just happened at The Peabody is part of the EV Project, billed as the largest deployment of electrical vehicles and charging infrastructure in history. ECOtality, a clean energy transportation and storage company, got a $99.8 million grant from the Department of Energy to administer the EV Project.
It will be instructive to see how many other hotels and airports across the country follow The Peabody’s and BWI’s lead and put you in a position to properly plug in.
Story by Jerry Chandler
(Image: PilotMKN)
