Better Place to charge up Australia

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Better Place is going big for its next project, with the electric car charging company announcing a deal to set up a $660 million network in Australia.

The well-funded startup, formerly called Project Better Place, is teaming up with Australia's AGL Energy and financial advisor Macquarie Capital Group on the giant undertaking. AGL, the country's major electricity retailer, will provide electricity from renewable resources to power the electric cars, and Macquarie will assist in business development and helping to raise the cash needed for the network build.

Better Place has already made deals to set up networks in Israel and Denmark (see Electric cars are coming to Israel and Project Better Place goes to Denmark), but CEO and founder Shai Agassi said Better Place was always asked if its model would scale to go bigger.

"We figured out it's time to pick a bit of a bigger island to demonstrate our ability to scale," he said at a press conference in Melbourne, Australia.

"And what better island than the sixth largest country on Earth."

Better Place said Australia has the world's seventh highest per capita rate of car ownership, with nearly 15 million cars on the road after adding over a million new cars last year.

AGL's power generation includes a number of renewable energy sources, including wind, solar and landfill gas, and said that since electric vehicles charge primarily at night, they can maximize the potential of intermittent renewable energy such as wind.

Take a look at AGL's Wattle Point Wind Farm here >>

The electric cars for the project will come the Renault-Nissan Alliance, which is also working with Better Place in Israel and Denmark.

The alliance, comprised of France's Renault and Japan's Nissan Motor (Nasdaq: NSANY), has made some moves without Better Place, signing deals to bring its electric vehicles to Portugal, the state of Tennessee in the U.S., the Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan, and, most recently, to France (see Renault-Nissan, EDF in electric car partnership).

But that doesn't mean Better Place won't get in on those projects. At the time, Agassi said his company would closely review the developments in France and look to partner with Renault, EDF and others to develop a European network.

Better Place said it expects the first mass market electric vehicles from Renault-Nissan to be available in Australia by the 2012 model year, a year after its launch in Israel and Denmark.

"We picked Australia to show that the model works regardless of how far the urban centers are from one another," said Agassi.

"And we believe that Australia could be a demonstration project and proof-point for the U.S., as well as the U.K. and the rest of the developed world."

Better Place plans to start with setting up charging stations in the urban centers of Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, and then connect them with "electric highways," with stations set up every 25 miles.

Better Place launched in October 2007 with a $200 million first round of funding, led by Tel Aviv chemical, shipping and technology company Israel Corp. (see Electric car charging startup raises $200M), but Better Place has some well-heeled competition.

Last month, Stuttgart, Germany's Daimler (NYSE: DAI) announced that it was teaming up with Essen-based utility RWE (OTC: RWEOY) on a pilot project in the country's capital (see Berlin to charge up Smart cars). The alliance plans to put more than 100 electric Smart cars on the road in Berlin, with a network of 500 charging stations.

Daimler currently has a pilot project in London, where a test fleet of about 100 first-generation Smart Fortwo electric cars are being used by corporate groups and municipal authorities, including the London Police.

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