Levitt Letter Extra News

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The Renault-Nissan ( RENA.PA) (7201.T) alliance on Monday signed a deal to begin mass producing electric cars as part of an Israeli-led project to develop alternative energy sources and slash oil dependency.

Renault-Nissan Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said the cars, with a range of about 100 km in city driving and up to 160 km on the highway, will accelerate from zero to 100 kph in 13 seconds and have a top speed of 110 kph — similar to many gasoline-powered cars.

Ghosn said a key reason why the company chose Israel to launch the project is because 90 percent of Israelis drive less than 70 km a day and all major urban centers are within 150 km of each other. For Israel the cars would mean less dependency on oil imports, mostly coming from Russia.

The cars, to be made in Europe, will run on a battery developed by Nissan and Japan’s NEC (6701.T) and will be available in 2011. A prototype is already on the road in Israel and various models will be sold by Renault and Nissan.

“It will be the most environmentally friendly mass-produced car on the market,” Ghosn said at a Fuel Free Transportation ceremony at the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, adding the main appeal of the cars is that they were as “normal as possible” while operating quietly.

He said the car would cost the same or less than comparable gasoline engine autos and would have a lifetime warranty.

Ghosn said Renault-Nissan will also market the cars in yet to be determined European countries and Asia and later to the United States.

“We expect this car to be successful,” Ghosn told reporters. “We want to make sure we mass market 10,000 to 20,000 cars a year in Israel … We are determined to make it a success.”

ENERGY SUBSCRIPTIONS

Israel’s government will offer tax incentives on the cars and Project Better Place, a venture-backed company, will set up a recharging grid using electricity from renewable sources.

“The state of Israel has set itself the goal of making our lives here better and cleaner, with less dependence on gasoline and petroleum,” Olmert said. “By the end of the next decade, we will be completely free of petroleum and its by-products as the fuel which powers transportation in Israel.”

Project Better Place is headed by former SAP ( SAPG.DE) executive Shai Agassi, who said Israel’s grid would be powered by 200 megawatts generated by wind and solar power sources.

“For the first time in history, all the conditions necessary for electric vehicles to be successfully mass-marketed will be brought together in a partnership between the Renault-Nissan Alliance and Project Better Place in Israel,” the two sides said in a statement.

Consumers will buy their car and subscribe to an energy supply, including the use of the battery, on the basis of kilometers driven, similar to the way mobile phones are sold.

Israeli President Shimon Peres said he wanted Israel to push forward with the electric car plan because oil has become the “greatest polluter of our age and the greatest financier of terrorism.”

California-based Project Better Place said it will set up a network of 500,000 charging points in Israel. The car’s computer will indicate when recharging is needed and the nearest charging point.

The initial $200 million investment in Project Better Place is led by holding company Israel Corp (ILCO.TA) and includes investment bank Morgan Stanley (MS.N), venture capital firm Vantage Point and a group of private investors.

Israel Corp, which will invest $100 million, said it had signed agreements with the other investors. The Ofer family, which controls Israel Corp, will invest $30 million through a private firm while the other investors will put in $70 million.

Giant solar plants in Negev could power Israel’s future
By John Lettice The Register-Technology News

A series of solar energy power stations in the Negev could supply all of Israel’s power needs - or, if you wanted to be really ambitious, you could supply all of the world’s electricity needs with the aid of slightly under 10 per cent of the Sahara. So says Professor David Faiman of Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, man with a plan and current proprietor of the largest solar energy dish in the world.

The Negev Desert dish is operated by Ben-Gurion’s National Solar Energy Center in the Negev, and speaking at the DLD (Digital Life, Design) conference in Munich earlier this week, Center director Faiman tallied off the economics of solar power generation. Conventional solar panels are expensive, because photovoltaic cells, which combine the capability to collect energy and to convert it to electricity, are themselves expensive.

One route to cutting the cost is being pursued by Nanosolar (Nanosolar director of products Roby Stancel was speaking at the same session as Faiman), which is printing the cells onto thin sheets. Taking a different approach, the Negev plant uses large curved glass mirrors to focus sunlight onto a 10cm x 10cm area of cells. Both routes have their advantages - if Nanosolar’s price promises are fulfilled, then solar sheets could be cheap enough and thin enough to put anywhere and everywhere, while the dish approach could be applied cost-effectively to large scale power plants, up to and including 10 per cent of the Sahara. “We’re effectively reducing the cost of photovoltaic by a factor of 1,000,” says Faiman.

Cost has been a major brake on the take-up of solar power, and Faiman points out that solar has only caught on in countries like Germany, where it is subsidised. There, electricity suppliers are obliged to buy in surplus power from domestic solar systems at more than the market rate, which makes solar an attractive option for German consumers, despite Germany being relatively unattractive from the point of view of available sunlight. According a Faiman a German rooftop would produce the equivalent of one barrel of oil over two years, whereas the same roof in the Negev would do it in one.

This favourable economic climate also means that one of Nanosolar’s first contracts is for a 1MW solar power station in Eastern Germany.

Faiman explains how solar could fix Israel’s power requirements in 1 Gigawatt units. A single 1GW solar plant would be comparable in output to a large conventional power station, and would cost €1 billion to build. One plant would produce 2 Terawatt Hours of electricity every year, which would be enough to cover annual growth in Israel’s power demand. With each plant producing the equivalent of €200 million, the first five plants pay for the sixth. Assuming a 30 year lifespan for each plant, in year 29 you have to start building two per year (unless, presumably, you think you’ve got enough electricity by then, or you’ve run out of customers and/or desert).

“This works after a fashion anywhere except Antarctica,” says Faiman.

The amount of space the plants take up will depend on the efficiency of the cells - Faiman sees cells of 60 per cent efficiency being feasible, and it ultimately being possible to build 1GW plants on 5 km. sq. apiece.

Gotchas? Solar doesn’t work at night, and Faiman concedes that storage of energy is therefore an issue. But if, say, you had a country that was switching over to electric cars, then much of the power for transportation would effectively be stored in batteries. Faiman also suggests that solar power could be used to split seawater into oxygen and hydrogen, giving you a supply of clean and portable fuel. This possibly presents a snag for anybody planning Sahara plant, but hey, Libya has a coastline and seawater, and Gaddafi’s on our side now, right?