Better Place Dedicates First of 500,000 EV Charging Stations Planned For Israel
A company founded by California EV entrepreneur Shai Agassi has dedicated the first of what it says will be as many as 500,000 electric vehicle recharging stations in Israel, the first country to sign on to Agassi's vision of electric cars for everyone.
----------
Better Place Israel's Moshe Kaplinsky demonstrates EV charging station.
----------
The company, Better Place (formerly Project Better Place), has agreed to install 500 of the charging points in a number of Israeli cities including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in a pilot project now, and says its expects to have half a million installed by the time electric vehicles made by Renault and Nissan are ready for market in 2011.
More to Come
The Israeli EV charging network would be the planet's first nationwide commercial system, but Better Place has similar agreements with Denmark, the Australian state of Victoria, the state of Hawaii and a consortium of major San Francisco Bay Area cities.
The company also announced Monday that it has been invited by the Japanese government to build a battery exchange station in Yokohama early next year as part of a electric vehicle demonstration project involving a number of Japanese auto makers.
Israel's First
In a report in today's edition, Britain's Guardian newspaper said the first charging spot in Israel has been installed in a parking lot atop a shopping center in the coastal city of Ramat Hasharon, a suburb of Tel Aviv.
The paper quotes Moshe Kaplinsky, head of Better Place Israel, saying that the firm believes electric cars are a fundamental challenge to the ubiquitous gasoline and diesel vehicles.
"The vision is to stop this addition to oil," he told the paper.
In addition to charging stations, the Better Place network will include quick-exchange stations where depleted EV battery packs can be replaced with fully charged packs - the same sort of station the company will build in Japan.
Participants in the Israeli system would purchase an electric vehicle but the local arm of Better Place would own the batteries and lease them to vehicle owners - an electrified version of buying the car and then purchasing fuel on an as-needed basis.
Like Cell Phone Contracts?
EV customers would pay for fixed or unlimited mileage on their batteries - much as cell phone users sign up for plans based on minutes of use - and when they didn't want to wait for a recharge from the grid would go to one of the battery exchange stations for a battery pack switch.
Better Place has teamed with the Renault-Nissan Alliance for a program in which the California-based company will provide the charging infrastructure and the automakers will design and build the vehicles to use them.
So far, the automakers have only shown a concept for a Better Place car based on a Renault Megane sedan (left).
Various government partners can provide financial assistance and ease the way for installation of the charging infrastructure.
Such a system works in small, self-contained territories such as Israel and Hawaii, or in urban areas such as San Francisco, because the average automobile trip is relatively short.
Israel, for example, is 260 miles long and only 85 miles across at its widest point. It is about 75 miles from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, well within the 100-mile range of the lithium-ion battery packs Better Place says the Renault-Nissan EVs will use.
John O'Dell, Senior Editor
- Posted by
- John O'Dell December 9, 2008, 3:00 AM
- Permalink
- Categories:
- Batteries, Energy Companies, Fuels & Technologies, Nissan, Plug-ins and Electric, Renault
- Technorati Tags:
- Better Place Israel, Israel EV Program
I've been following since this initiative started and I must say that here in Israel it has a lot of critics that think that it takes to long - i believe that having electric vehicles until 2011 sounds unbelievable!
I've been following since this initiative started and I must say that here in Israel it has a lot of critics that think that it takes to long - i believe that having electric vehicles until 2011 sounds unbelievable!