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Green will build 66 electric-car charging stations in Pa.

A San Diego start-up company announced plans Friday to build 66 electric-car charging stations in Pennsylvania, mostly around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

A San Diego start-up company announced plans Friday to build 66 electric-car charging stations in Pennsylvania, mostly around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

The $2.6 million project is expected to be finished by the middle of next year and is scaled to accommodate 33,000 electric vehicles, said Mariana Gerzanych, chief executive officer of 350Green.

There is just a small fraction of that number of electric cars on Pennsylvania roads, but Gerzanych predicted the presence of charging stations would help encourage people to buy more of them.

Locations for the 66 stations are not fixed yet, but the company plans to put them in all sorts of places: in the parking lots of grocery stores, malls, and government facilities, to name a few, officials said. The plan is to build 22 fast-charging stations, which run at 480 volts and can charge a typical car in less than a half-hour, and 44 "level 2" stations, which can get the job done in about five hours, Gerzanych said.

The project has qualified for a $480,000 grant from the state Department of Environmental Protection that the company will collect once the stations are built, she said. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have been retained to analyze electricity-use patterns at the stations, said Joel Anstrom, a senior research associate at Penn State's Thomas D. Larson Pennsylvania Transportation Institute.

Founded in 2008, 350Green is installing dozens of car-charging stations in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Pennsylvania plan was announced at the Academy of Natural Sciences, where a Tesla electric car was parked out front as a visual aid.

Joining company officials at the event was a representative from the environmental group Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future.

Bryan Collins, Philadelphia outreach coordinator for the group, agreed with Gerzanych that the stations would lead to more electric-car purchases and, therefore, cleaner air.

He acknowledged that a portion of the state's electricity comes from burning coal but pointed out that electric-car drivers can choose to buy their power from "green" suppliers.

In addition to being a green alternative, electric cars have another edge, he said: They are fun to drive.

For the moment, however, Collins uses even cleaner modes of transport: the trolley and his bike.