Car makers, electric car chargers, two mayors and one prime minister all made the call for more electric, hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars and an infrastructure to support the vehicles.

Campbell, Calif.-based Coulomb Technologies came out of stealth mode with a deal today to install electric car charging stations in San Jose, Calif., while Detroit's General Motors (NYSE: GM) announced that it would work with the Palo Alto, Calif.-based Electric Power Research Institute to help integrate electric vehicles into the grid.

And the Renault-Nissan Alliance made its first electric vehicle move in the U.S. with a deal to promote zero-emission cars in the state of Tennessee.

The news from Renault-Nissan comes on the heels of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom putting out an official request for information for an electric car charging network in the city. He's been said to be looking for a deal with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Project Better Place, already working with Renault-Nissan on deals in Israel and Denmark.

Earlier this month, the Renault-Nissan Alliance, comprised of France's Renault and Japan's Nissan Motor (Nasdaq: NSANY), announced a deal for its planned electric vehicles in Portugal (see Renault Nissan to bring electric cars to Portugal). The alliance has not yet said if it will be working with Project Better Place in Portugal or Tennessee.

Coulomb, which is named after a unit of measurement for electricity, already has some electric vehicle cachet in the form of Tesla Motors co-founder and former CEO Martin Eberhard, who sits on Coulomb's technical advisory board. The company is currently operating under angel financing.

"We are going to be the testing site for Coulomb; this will be the first demonstration on the ground," Laura Stuchinsky, the sustainability officer for the San Jose Department of Transportation, told the Cleantech Group.

"We have a contract to demonstrate them for two years on the streets, so we're going to be installing them on city lightposts, on parking meters, and possibly in parking garages."

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed announced the deal at the Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose. The deal is for up to five smart charging units in the short term, with an option to expand to 10 in the future.

The city also has the option after six months to consider purchasing five units at a discount rate of $5,000, including the communications systems for the charging units.

There are four units on display around city hall right now, part of a larger Green Mobility Showcase in the city, which includes four LED streetlights from Oxford, Mich.-based Relume Technologies.

Stuchinsky said it's "a demonstration of a technology that actually is available and is just starting to get more widely used."

GM also made its announcement at the Plug-In conference, organized by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and others. GM joins Ford Motor (NYSE: F), which agreed to work with the institute in March. GM said it joined with the EPRI, which represents a majority of U.S. power utilities, to work on standards for vehicle charging, promoting plug-in electric vehicles, and lobbying to support the technologies.

The news from GM comes a week after the automaker announced more layoffs and cuts in truck production as consumers in the U.S. move to more fuel efficient vehicles (see Cleantech cars advance as old guard stumbles). On that same day, Irvine, Calif.-based Fisker Automotive said it picked Finland's Valmet Automotive to build its first plug-in hybrid.

In London, another auto show was the site of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's move to kick-start the green car revolution in the U.K. At the British International Motor Show, Brown called for removing barriers in the planning system to enable an electric charging network to be set up as quickly as possible, and collaboration with other countries, including Germany, France, Denmark, and Portugal, on international industry standards.

Last week, the prime minister pushed for the EU to set tougher fuel emissions standards, such as cutting the average car's carbon dioxide output per kilometer by 40 percent by 2020.

Provo, Utah-based Raser Technologies (NYSE: RZ) and Scottsdale, Ariz.'s ECOtality (OTC: ETLY) also released electric vehicle news today, with Raser announcing that it is developing a 100 mile per gallon plug-in hybrid light truck, and ECOtality launching a government funded grid interaction project.

California's PG&E will test and demonstrate one of the first E-REV pick-ups from Raser. In February, PG&E signed a deal to purchase two plug-in hybrid SUVs using Raser's electric drive system for early testing and demonstration.

ECOtality said the grid interaction project will demonstrate and evaluate bi-directional fast-charging operations in conjunction with smart grid technologies. The project is backed by the U.S. Department of Energy through the Idaho National Laboratory, and supported by Seattle-based project partner V2Green, a smart grid technology developer.