Green Daily

If you're into electric car news, than you'll be excited to hear that Renault is throwing some major financial resources -- $1 Billion -- into an ambitious electric car project. Teaming up with a California company called Project Better Place, Renault plans to roll out a swappable-battery electric car and hundreds of thousands of charging stations in Israel and Denmark. Renault -- which owns a 51% stake in Nissan -- will provide the actual cars while Nissan will be installing its Li-ion battery packs.

The goal for Better Place is to have these vehicles charge off of completely renewable energy sources. In Denmark, that's not too unrealistic -- since 20% of Denmark's energy comes from wind turbines and 7% goes unused, enough to power all of the country vehicles. Israel's a different story. Their power is mostly generated by coal and other fossil fuels, so Better Place hopes to charge the cars from solar panels in the Negev Desert.

The thing that worries me is the ambitious scope of a project like this. Instead of just producing a long-range electric vehicle, Renault-Nissan is helping to set up electric grids and swappable-battery depots throughout these 2 countries. Supposedly, they plan to put 500,000 charging stations in Israel alone -- that includes private homes and businesses.
The other somewhat unknow part about this Renault concept is the swappable-battery idea. While it does solve the problem of driving distances over the car's 200km range, the batteries weigh no less than 200kg -- about 440lbs. I wouldn't call that a "swap" as much as I might call it a "replacement" that needs to be done "professionally." Anyway, hope it works out.