Free plug for a toaster that goes like the wind

Daily Telegraph
Friday 1/2/2008 Page: 15

IT will provide Australia's first petrol-free, guilt-free drive to work. But what's really exciting about the electric car parked in the basement of the University Technology Sydney (UTS) is it can also make toast. That's when it's not earning money by putting clean electricity back into our overstretched power grid. Like its doomed predecessors, the plug-in electric car project promises a lot.

Engineers at UTS say it will deliver, with plans to have the converted Toyota Prius on the road by March for its first trip to Melbourne. The project, headed by UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures researcher Josh Asher, pre-empts the first mass production fully-electric cars of Toyota and General Motors, due on the market by the end of 2010.

The UTS car will achieve up to 50km a day of fully-electric driving before the standard petrol-electric hybrid engine is called upon. If the car is powered overnight by wind energy, an average 40km commute will be totally carbon-neutral. For $15,000, Sydney electric expert Stan Baker will add the extra batteries to hybrid vehicles like the Prius.

With the financial backing of green power entrepreneur Peter Szental, Asher's team has pushed further into the future by modifying the battery pack to direct unused power into running household appliances. Excess power can also be fed back into the electricity grid.