"Electric car system planned in Denmark by 2011 using surplus wind power"
COPENHAGEN, Denmark: Denmark's DONG Energy A/S and a Silicon Valley-based startup firm on Thursday said they would install an electric car network in the Scandinavian nation with some 20,000 recharging stations.
The grid, which is set to be in place by 2011, will be operated by Project Better Place, an initiative by Israeli-American entrepreneur Shai Agassi, using excess power from DONG Energy's wind turbines.
A similar network is being built in Israel.
A fleet of battery-driven electrical vehicles will be introduced in Denmark after the recharging stations are built at parking lots and outside homes, Agassi said.
French car maker Renault will provide the vehicles and Japan's Nissan will make the lithium-ion batteries under a partnership with Project Better Place announced earlier this year. Agassi said other car makers and battery producers would join the project later.
The battery would allow a car to drive a maximum of 150 kilometers (90 miles) before recharging, he said, adding that he expects the network to expand to other European countries soon.
"We're in discussion with 30 countries — Europe, America and Asian nations," he told The Associated Press after a news conference in Copenhagen.
When Israel's network was endorsed by the government there in January, supporters hailed it as a bold step in the battle against global warming and energy dependency, but skeptics warned that much could still go wrong along the way.
DONG Energy chief executive Anders Eldrup told reporters that the grid would run on excess energy that its wind turbines generate on windy days. Windmills make up around 20 percent of Denmark's electricity production.
"The extra energy we have, we can use in an intelligent way by putting it in batteries," Eldrup told reporters.
However, on days with no wind the grid would need to use energy from DONG's coal-fired plants, he said, adding that it would still be more environmentally friendly than having cars running on gasoline.
"The cars' CO2 emission would still be half of what it is today with fossil fuels," Eldrup said.
DONG Energy operates some of the thousands of windmills that dot Denmark, a country of 5.4 million. The small Scandinavian nation began a national windmill program in 1979 under pressure from grass roots organizations demanding new sources of electricity that have less impact on the environment than conventional plants.
1 comment:
Several errors. Despite propaganda from the global wind industry, Denmark does NOT produce 20% of its power from wind. Most of the power from its windmills occurs during times in which there is no demand and the power is sold at a loss to neighboring Scandanavian countries. The following day, Denmark buys power back from those countries at a much higher rate.
Scanadanvia has the highest carbon emissions in Europe and they were not reduced in any way by the multiyear construction of windmills, which have also caused a huge govt deficits because of price guarantees that were higher than the price they could sell the unused electricity for. Denmark
has signed on to Agassi's rather stupid and costly Project Better Place in part to try to find
nighttime customers for its unsaleable windmill generated power. More recently they have given up on windpower and are now developing biofuels to replace coal where it is used in power plants. Project Better Place is not
scheduled to be operations until 2012, and its concept of swappable battery packs will be obsolete by then. It will be, in my opinion, made obsolete long before then by either vastly improved EESU's or, less dramatically, plug-in hybrids. There is no rational reason to prefer battery-only electrics at current battery price points. They simply are not viable, and swapping is far too inconvenient and costly in the number of support battery packs required. Agassi argues for his scheme (which will be a monopoly run by himself) only by comparing it to gas powered cars using very expensive fuel.
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