electronrun.com

Project Better Place had its first strike of success in Israel, now Denmark becomes the second country that is definitely planning to go ahead with electric cars and the related infrastructure.

The difference between the two? Unlike Israel, Denmark has a huge wind energy generation base that on average provides 20% of the country’s needs. At night, when wind produced energy exceeds demand, the extra electricity will be used to charge the batteries of plug-in Renault cars -Renault-Nissan is the automotive partner of Project Better Place. The necessary 500,000 charging spots and 150 battery swap stations will be built by DONG, Denmark’s electricity company. In that respect, things will be much like in Israel, with drivers not owning the batteries and freely exchanging depleted batteries as necessary. Car batteries will also play the role of energy storage to take account of the fact that energy generation is unpredictable.

The plan wants 100 electric cars in Copenhagen -where the project will start- by next year and 20% of all cars electric by 2020. Given that Denmark has the highest car taxation in the EU, promoting electric cars by reducing or eliminating it might be a very attractive option. Elsewhere however lower taxes might make such strategy impossible.

In my coverage of the Israel project I have been quite critical of the decision to go all-electric and have argued that hybrids are for now a necessary intermediate solution. Apart from the source of energy -which here will be green- the same technical limitations apply for Denmark. And given that it is a small country, an electric car is not useful if it cannot be used elsewhere -in neighbouring Germany for example. This means that such vehicles could well be limited to domestic use, increasing the number of cars per family and doing the automotive industry a big favour.

Link 1: ElectronRun - Renault-Nissan and Israel go ahead with Project Better Place electric car program

Link 2: Treehugger

Link 3: Register