Even the locally famous bear is excited about EV + PV, which is getting plenty of attention at the World Renewable Enegy Forum at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colo.

Solar-charged driving might not be taking off as quickly as I’d hoped back when I started SolarChargedDriving.Com nearly three years ago.

But there’s plenty of evidence that EV and solar PV are coming together in the U.S. and that more and more solar folks are getting fired up about EVs and more and more EV folks are getting fired up about solar.

I saw, and experienced, some of the significant enthusiasm for EVs in the solar world today at the American Solar Energy Society’s (ASES) World Renewable Energy Forum here in Denver, Colo., where I attended one panel on EV + PV and led another panel on solar-charged driving later in the day.

Each session on EV + PV attracted about 60 WREF conference goers. That was enough to come close to filling the rooms in which the sessions were held at the Colorado Convention Center.

Several thousand people are attending the American Solar Energy Society's World Renewable Energy Forum in Denver, Colo. [Photo by Christof Demont-Heinrich]

I’m attending, and presenting at, the American Solar Energy Society’s World Renewable Energy Forum (WREF) in Denver, Colo. this week along with thousands of other renewable energy experts and enthusiasts -- I’m definitely part of the latter group, not the former ;-)

To get to WREF, I hopped on the Denver RTD light rail and zipped from the University of Denver, where I teach journalism and communication courses, to the Colorado Convention Center, which boasts a 300 kilowatt solar system which covers about 15 percent of its annual electric use.

As the light rail train sped northward from DU to downtown Denver on yet another beautiful, blue-sky perfect-for-solar Colorado day, we passed a long train going the other way pulling dozens and dozens of cars full of – you guessed it – coal.

Broomfield County (Colorado) Republican Chairman Erich Feigel claims solar doesn't work, but it's sure worked well for us: We've produced more than 15,000 kWh of local, clean solar electricity in less than two years with our 5.59 kW system here in Aurora, Colo.

Mitt Romney was in Colorado a couple of days ago campaigning and, perhaps not surprisingly given the oil and gas drilling boom underway in parts of this state, he put himself in front of an oil drill – and took aim at the Obama Administration’s support for renewable energy and green jobs.

To the applause and whoops of an adoring drill baby drill crowd, Romney poked fun at Colorado’s 51,000 green jobs – a total that accounts for a small but respectable 2.3 percent of total employment in the Rocky Mountain State. He egged on the crowd with a, “Have you seen those jobs anywhere?” a set up to which, according to a story in the Denver Post, the supporters on hand shouted a gleeful, “No!”

We at SolarChargedDriving.Com are very much for safe driving and therefore very much against texting and surfing while driving. There are plenty of sobering stats to show that texting or surfing while driving is incredibly dangerous and that we, in the U.S., are in the midst of a distracted driving epidemic, the proportions of which we’ve never seen.

Take the nearly 200 billion text messages sent or received last year in the month of June alone in the U.S. and you get the picture.

Not only is texting while driving a qualitatively different form of distraction than, say, talking to someone next to you in the car, it’s quantitatively different than, for example, putting on make-up while driving.

It's hard to imagine anyone applying make-up hundreds of times a day while driving. In contrast, there are surely thousands and thousands who send and receive hundreds of texts a day while driving.