Sunday, October 26, 2008

Electric car infrastructure just four years off

23/10/2008
From





WITHIN four years, most Australians will be able to drive an electric car and recharge it at special plug-in points at home, the office or shopping centres.

The mass use of electric cars moved a giant step closer to reality today, with power company AGL and finance group Macquarie Capital signing an agreement with international group Better Place to provide infrastructure to support the environmentally friendly vehicles.

Under the agreement, Macquarie will raise $1 billion to build an electric-vehicle network in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and AGL will power it with renewable energy.

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Well I hope this is true. Let me see if I can find other references:


Yep, looks pretty convincing. I guess that isn't a hard one. Now that they spoke of "using renewable energy for fueling stations" (what does this mean) lets see if Coal fired power stations get closed. When that starts happening (and Coal exports reduce) then we're really cooking with gas (excuse the pun!).

There's no mention of the big energy companies. I wonder if they are somehow involved, will fight to the end to keep petroleum as a major source of road vehicles or will roll-over and let the change happen around them. I'm guessing its the first though it will be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Note that I haven't dug too deeply on this and leave it as a reader exercise. Wanna add in references as a comment (don't forget to wrap in an HTML Anchor tag so we can just click on it!.

Read the article.

2 comments:

National Enquirer said...

I guess I should have added that this is not the solution. Einstein said (I believe it was him) that you can't solve problems with the same system that created them in the first place. Specifically in this case, road transport is significant at around %15, but that also includes the intrinsic cost of production. Now throw in the cost of building the infrastructure. And roads will continue to be built and maintained. Its an interim solution that need to be replaced with super efficient mass public transport within the next 10 years. Or people can just stop going places so often (ie. live near where you work).

nago said...

Great thoughts you got there, believe I may possibly try just some of it throughout my daily life.




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