The Greener Grass: Electric-powered cars: Only two years away?

Forbes has a provocative and very well-done article that suggests electric vehicles could be here sooner than we think thanks to the efforts of auto and utility companies to create a new, networked grid. We've all read a lot about electric vehicles, but this article has a lot more depth than most, so it's definitely worth a read:

The technology already exists to turn electric vehicles, households and businesses into one huge battery that sustains all energy needs; users would draw power from the collective pool when needed, and give back accrued power they don't use.

Experts who champion this new energy paradigm call it "smart garage," a metaphor for combining homes, buildings and utilities into eco-friendly energy networks.
"A single car battery at a single person's home might only represent 10 kilowatts of electricity, which is not particularly much," says Andrew Tang, senior director of the smart energy lab at Pacific Gas & Electric. "But a parking lot full of electric vehicles may actually aggregate up to one megawatt, which suddenly becomes interesting, and at that level of aggregation, it actually makes sense to make investments in the grid to support the bi-directional power flows."