Now that's what I call forward thinking. Why couldn't CA done something like this years ago?

Oh ya, not in my back yard it looks hideous.

Hey, I just came up with a brilliant idea!

Cities place solar panels (which also shade your car from the sun) over parking spots and convert existing parking meters to sell you electricity when you plug-in your EV or PHEV !!!!!!! (it would be a heck of a lot better than what we have right now)

lets keep in mind that tru charging stations will be one of those new quick charge stations that are being developed and trialed in Japand and UK right now, which can pump 40-50 kwh, something that solar woud never be able to do... Tokyo is going to get 200 stations by 2010 that can charge "40 miles range PHEV in 10 minutes".

can solar store energy into a main battery which then can be used to recharge cars as quickly?

Congratulations, NJ! Way to step up to the plate. For those who think it looks hideous, how do you like the din of smog over your city? Or over your national parks? Or pretty much over any vista anywhere nowadays? Like that better?

Quick charge stations may still be needed, but any power you generate from renewables is still more power than you had before and less power you need to generate from coal and other unclean sources. One step at a time....

How can you tell if it looks hideous? The picture looks like it's made for a cell phone!

Besides it's a parking structure... how hideous could it really look? San Francisco has quite a few square feet of solar panels on some city buildings, just use google maps and search for the moscone center you can see the solar panels from space (or wherever they take those photos from )

I've though about that before. It's an excellent idea and I hope someone implements the concept on a broad scale.

Nah, almost impossible... cost would tripple and it would still be able to recharge very limited number of cars daily (2-3).

Having more solar plants, and wind plants, and all other kinds of renewable energy sources in general is much more efficient than this.

That's not the point of solar ... to ramp up exactly to high peaks of power usage during mid day. Solar acts to offset high usage times during mid day. So rather than take the position of the Oil industry (why soloar will "never work), consider that while one high usage power drainer is on line, many other solar sites are putting power back onto the grid. So how is that a "never work" plan? This all supposes some need to re-charge during mid day ... and a need to "quick charge" during mid day at that. Such a scenerio doesn't have to be the rule. But incentivising nite time EV refills will further keep the grid humming along.

I believe the point of solar chargers in these parking garages is so that the cars can be charged while people are in their office working. The assumption is that the car would sit there for at least a few hours at a time.

This is a different use case than the metered fast-charge stations being trialed on the streets of Tokyo and elsewhere.