France to spend €2.5 billion to jump start EV deployment
Peugeot iOn EV - click above to enlarge
The French government has announced a ten-year, €2.5 billion program to jump-start vehicle electrification in the country. Energy minister Jean-Louis Borloo said that the money would be disbursed for incentives for the production and purchase of plug-in vehicles as well as upgrading infrastructure. The hope is to have one million charging points in place by mid-decade and four million by 2020.
About half of the charge stations are planned to go into private homes with most of the rest going to offices and businesses to provide employees with charging ability to during working hours. Only about 75,000 charge points are planned for public locations which seems to low.
Borloo expects EVs to account for about 16 percent of new car sales in France by the end of the decade, rising to 27 percent by 2025. Some of the funding would also be used for incentives to build advanced batteries, with Nissan already having announced plans to build a factory for its AESC joint venture in the next few years.
Gallery: Peugeot iOn EV
[Source: Reuters]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
gintonics 7:08PM (10/02/2009)
Makes a lot of sense for France, a country which imports virtually all of its oil and get nearly 90% of its electricity from Nuclear. The later point is pretty important point here as today France has a fairly low capacity factor for their electricity and has to idle many nuclear plants on the weekend, as well as throttle down others in the evening. Adding EV's would help smooth out demand in the evenings and the weekends.
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Laurens 5:25AM (10/03/2009)
Interesting country that, part of the EU...
The surplus nuclear electricity goes to the neighbouring countries, we throttle down our gas powered plants. No doubt there is a link to France's strong nuclear power plant construction industry.
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hsr0601 10:02PM (10/03/2009)
1. Batteries will become more efficient on the whole and their price will drop, whereas the oil will simply go up and up as it becomes more scarce. As simple as that.
2. The range of noticeable EVs are sufficient to meet the daily driving needs of more than 95% of drivers ((The vast majority of people (95%) drive less than 100/km a day, 82% of the respondents said they drive 40 miles or less a day, with an average daily driving distance of 27 miles.)).
3. I'm hopeful that the charge network will extend the select districts to nation-wide scale throughout the world, and this environment can usher in active private investings in EVs.
4. It is also in the best interest of electricity utilities that EVs are going mainstream, thereby they need to put in charge stands where needed around highways, major roads with card readers or cell phone tech.
5. The vehicle-to-grid communication technology is helping the battery serve as a storage to prevent the costly blackout standing at about $90 to 100bn per year. That means utilities are shedding cost for additional storage facilities and ratepayers are selling electricity during peak demand so that EVs can make more economic sense, as we know.
6. I remain confident that investing in charge stands could give rise to multiple times as much investing effect, so to speak, some billions of investing, this simple deployment, could call into the most-sought energy independence and solid recovery around the world.
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