American electric car companies prefer Project Fastr Blastr to Project Better Place

Project Better Place has been making lots of headlines with their plan to create a battery swapping and charging infrastructure in different countries. At the recently held Alternative Fuels and Vehicles conference, a panel of representatives from some American electric car makers suggested they would prefer to see a slightly different scenario for the U.S. market. Nay to the whole battery swapping thing, yea to fast-charging stations.

Here are some quotes from the participants as reported by Jennifer Kho of greentechmedia:

• Bryon Bliss of Phoenix Motorcars: "With the ability to do rapid charge, we see that playing more of a role than stations to exchange them." "There are a lot of complications [in exchanging the batteries]."

• Richard Kasper of Chrysler's Global Electric Motorcars said the investment that battery-replacement stations would require would be "very significant."

• Jeff Boyd of Miles Electric Vehicles: "Fast charging is here; it's available. You can put a station at a Starbucks for a cost of $125,000. There's no reason to wait [for something else]."

During the question and answer session after the panel, Dean Taylor, a senior technical scientist at Southern California Edison, brought up a point often raised in debating fast-charging. Specifically, that daytime charging by drivers would add to peak demand as well as put strain on the grid. That was countered by Bryon Bliss who stated that charging stations could pull the electricity from batteries, like those made by Altairnano, which could also be a boon to utilities by helping them with grid stabilization. Click the "read" link to learn more of this interesting discussion. [NOTE: AutoblogGreen's Sebastian Blanco moderated the AFVI panel]

[Source: Greentechmedia]