Better Place Australia has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the University of Melbourne (UoM). The agreement signed yesterday by Better Place chief, ex-pollie Evan Thornley and UoM Vice Chancellor Glyn Davis, will see the EV infrastructure candidate and the respected international research institution explore research opportunities related to electric vehicles and their impacts and infrastructure.

No formal funding structure has been revealed or projects defined, but according to Davis the MoU "begins this conversation [with Better Place] and takes it forward."

Better Place will house a number of its EVs at the university and work with a number of faculties across the institution.

"We're delighted to announce the university will investigate with Better Place the establishment of a state of the art energy education centre to look at the potential this car [a modified Nissan Dualis] provides and the concept behind it and the future it makes possible," Davis stated, introducing the MoU yesterday.

UoM's Head of Centre for material Science, Professor Steven Prawer, stated the MoU presented a range of research opportunities.

"The reason we were so excited to engage with Better Place is the range of research opportunities that arise. For example there are many issues in policy that the people at the University are interested in -- how does government respond to transformational technologies that might affect many different departments and branches of government [fro example]?

"In the engineering space there are many interesting questions about how we optimise battery performance, reduce the cost of batteries... How we're going to use renewable resources to charge the batteries and, very interestingly, how the batteries might be part of the national infrastructure to put power back into the grid."

Prawer said the UoM's three institutes -- materials, sustainability and energy -- each had a "role to play in seeing this project come forward because it crosses so many boundaries".

Better Place's local boss Evan Thornley would not comment on the funding his organisation had committed to the university.

"We don't discuss those sorts of details. We're looking forward to a long term partnership with the University and we'll make investments as appropriate," he told the Carsales Network.

The UoM relationship is Better Place's first, Down Under. According to Thornley, however, it's one of "20 something significant research partnerships with universities around the world".

The MoU is between Better Place and the UoM. Thornley stated it did not involve any other automotive partners of the university.

"The heads of agreement is [between] Melbourne Uni and Better Place, but obviously the uni has a range of partnerships with a range of automotive players of various forms and we look forward to working with as many of them as it makes sense to do so," Thornley said.

No established Australian automotive companies were represented at the MoU announcement yesterday.

Better Place's singleton research EV was on-hand for the announcement -- a plug-in EV version of the Nissan Dualis compact SUV. Thornley stated the company would have battery swap-out research vehicles in Australia "shortly" but would not quantify how many trial vehicles it would put on the road locally.

"That [number] will grow over time. We're working towards the late-2012 national [charge station network] roll out, so we've got series of stages and proof points that we'll be completing on the way to that. If there were large numbers of production electric vehicles about the place you wouldn't need to be doing any of these things, but there won't be until the [car] manufacturers are confident there's a charge network in place that can make those vehicles competitive with petrol vehicles from a convenience point of view," Thornley told the Carsales Network.

"So that's a question of conducting that orchestra towards a simultaneous delivery of a large portion of vehicles and a large scale charge network in all the country markets we can do it, as quickly as possible. We'll be working with anyone who wants to make a plug-in vehicle to make sure they can sell as many as possible."

Speaking to the work UoM would carry out, Thornley said practical research would be a significant part.

"There's a bunch of practical things. That's why we're housing the vehicles here with the Auto Eng boys. Doing a whole range of practical things to understand all the elements of what a charge network interaction with an electric vehicle fleet will need to do under Australian conditions.

"We all understand that Australia is different in a whole lot of very practical ways -- in terms of the way the electricity grid and electric market are structured -- and so you need to make sure the solution is ready to roll here in late 2012.

"We're not just on the receiving end of that [international research]. As one of the earliest and largest Better Place implementations we're also very significant contributors back to the development globally and places like the University of Melbourne are globally significant research centres," Thornley stated.

"Things that we might learn here about battery behaviour and how it interacts with the charge network; things that we'll be doing with the engineering guys modelling grid impact and grid optimisation and utilising the storage capacity of the batteries are likely to be world leading pieces of research -- as are other projects we're doing in other fields around the world.

"It's exciting to be doing this at the earliest stage -- at the leading edge of what's happening globally," he stated.

Pictures: Davis (grey hair), Thornley (wearing glasses) and Dualis at Melbourne University for the signing

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