A coalition of automakers, smart grid, shipping and energy companies has set out an ambitious goal for an American electric transportation revolution – make one-quarter of the United States' light vehicles "grid-enabled" electrics and plug-in hybrids by 2020.

Without reaching that tipping point, the Electrification Coalition's goal of boosting the number of electric light vehicles from 1.3 million today to more than 250 million by 2040 – and cutting the country's oil dependency by about 75 percent in the bargain – will be hard to reach.

Simply put, that's because it will take a critical mass of plug-in vehicles to make the infrastructure for charging them worth building, coalition members said in a Monday press conference (see Electric Vehicles Could Surpass Grid or Support It).

To get there, the coalition is asking the government to target "electricity ecosystems," or large cities where local infastructure could be built to support from 50,000 to 100,000 electric vehicles by 2013, Reuters reported.

To boost that, the coalition is asking the federal government to offer tax credits of up to 75 percent of the cost of that public infrastructure to support a charging network. It would also like consumers to have access to those tax credits for home charging equipment (see Green Car Congress).

The coalition also wants tax credits to cover up to half the cost of IT upgrades for utilities to manage charging networks that can sell and buy power to grid-enabled vehicles (see IBM Tests Smart Charging in Denmark and A V2G Test: Pool Electric Cars for Grid Needs).

Members of the coalition include Nissan Motor Co. (see Green Light post), Pacific Gas & Electric, NRG Energy, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Coulomb Technologies (see Green Light post), FedEx Corp, Coda Automotive, Bright Automotive, A123 Systems and GridPoint (see Green Light post).