A Better Place?

I've been busy trying to save the world over the past year and so has a company called Better Place. They have been has spreading the Electric Car message - it began in Israel, then Denmark and was announced in Australia then San Francisco and Hawaii. In Australia they are looking to raise $1B through Macquarie Bank to fund a large scale electric car recharging infrastructure project. In Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane (gold coast) they are looking at rolling out 750,000 charge spots in homes, offices, shopping centres etc and a smaller number of batter changeover stations. most charging is predicted to happen at nights on a trickle charge style systems. The batteries will have a range of 160Km and cars are coming from Nissan and Renault (and hopefully a local Australia manufacturer with money some of the Governments recently announced Green Car fund) but not until 2011/2012.

They are planning to sell "mobile phone" style contracts so that when you buy an electric car you can buy a charging plan - this is because the key expense is the battery - with a petrol car and electric really costing the same apart from the battery. Basically this is going to be a good deal for you if you drive 20,000km or more a year and the petrol price is north of $1.30/litre. Fleets and Cabs seem to be prime candidates.

I'm not convinced about their business model but I convinced about the need to roll out infrastructure to allow drivers to charge their vehicles in a large number of places before take up of the cars will happen in large numbers. And I am excited that every MWh of power that is going to Better Place will be from renewable sources.

This is also great for the renewable energy in other ways as well - because as the popularity of electric vehicles increases so does the total capacity of stored generation available. This stored generation could be used to shave peak power demand - ie an electric car could be used to power your TV and aircon on a really hot day or to help utilise intermittent renewable energy generation such as wind (which blows a lot at night in Australia).