Philadelphia Phillies to Host Electric Vehicle Tour

• Susan Phillips
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  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

On Wednesday, Citizen’s Bank Park, home to the Phillies baseball team, will host a stop on a 2400-mile electric powered vehicle tour. Two employees of Sterling Planet, a renewable energy supplier, will be driving the Chevy Volt from Atlanta up the East Coast, and over to Detroit and Indiana using as much renewable energy as possible. The two will be charging up at Citizen’s Bank Park, where the “Phillies Red Goes Green” program recently announced the purchase of more than 22 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy credits from a new solar farm in Lancaster County.
One of the things holding back the development and purchase of electric and natural gas vehicles is the lack of infrastructure to fuel up. Pennsylvania is pushing efforts to get more fleets to convert to natural gas. And a GOP leader in the House recently chastised SEPTA for not planning to switch to natural gas vehicles, threatening to cut funding for Philadelphia’s mass transit system. So as the world keeps filing up with fossil fuels, Sterling Planet’s Alden Hathaway says he’s driving to promote new charging stations.

“This is the future we’re working to promote,” said Alden Hathaway. “One reason we’re making this trip is to call attention to the need for more charging stations that are fast charging, renewably powered and located at regular intervals along the interstate highway system.”

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