Want to find out where to charge your electric hybrid or fill up on hydrogen or compressed natural gas in the Coachella Valley?
The Department of Energy has a map for you at its Alternative Fuels Data Center.
Looking at the Coachella Valley, you can quickly find out that there are electric vehicle charging stations at the Hilton Palm Springs, Palm Springs Nissan, J.W. Marriott Desert Springs, Renaissance Esmeralda and Torre Nissan.
If CNG — compressed natural gas — is your fuel of choice, the ARCO on Date Palm in Cathedral City can fill your tank, along with Sunline Transit and the Mission Springs Water District.
The site also has a pile of interesting charts, so you can look at how prices for alt fuels are measuring up against traditional gasoline and diesel — not bad from the looks of it — or find out how hybrid vehicle sales are doing — down from a peak in 2007.
You can also find tips on more fuel-efficient driving.
The big drive, it seems, is to reduce idling by commercial fleets.
A few factoids for thought –
- Medium-duty trucks use about 2.5 billion gallons of fuel to idle each year, or 6.7% of the total fuel they consume.
- More than 650,000 long-haul heavy-duty trucks idle overnight for required rest stops at least some fraction of the time, using more than 685 million gallons of fuel per year.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration notes that we emit 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gasoline we burn and 22.34 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of diesel.
Gentlemen and ladies — please — turn off your engines.