‘Australia to build charging station network for electric cars’

The US company Better Place, which develops infrastructures for electric cars, plans to build a network for such vehicles in Australia.

Better Place unveiled the plan on Thursday, which will be implemented in partnership with Australian energy company AGL and financing group Macquarie Capital. According to the plan, a network of between 200,000 and 250,000 charging stations will be operational in the cities of Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney by 2012. Better Place plans to place the stations near homes, parking lots, businesses and shopping centers.

There will also be 150 exchange stations in the cities and along the highways, where empty batteries can be automatically exchanged for full ones. This will only take a few minutes, while charging takes hours. Motorists can choose from different ways to pay for electricity, similar to the methods that currently exist to pay for mobile telephony, such as reports AFP news agency.

The network will cost approximately one billion Australian dollars, an amount to be raised by Macquarie. Efforts will be made to use renewable energy as much as possible. Better Place has already built charging networks for electric cars in Denmark and Israel that use renewable energy. In Denmark this is mainly wind energy, in Israel solar energy.