Estonia becomes the first to open a nationwide electric vehicle charging network

Support for start ups that create long term jobs and values might be a better use of the carbon credits they sold to Mitsubishi.

They have executed well in the building. Financing is kinda easy for a country of only 1.3 million people heavily subsidized by the European Union (which Estonia is a part of).

During the 2008-2009 crisis (which is not done yet but I digress), the Estonian GDP took a gigantic hit: -20% of the GDP. That's what you get when you're taxing the private sector like crazy: the private sector, in usual circumstances, can barely survive. If any crisis happens, then the private sector dies and the economy crumbles (thank you socialism for the crazy high confiscatory tax rates on the private sector).

It's like Poland, for example: I love this country and it feels incredibly more "new" and even sometimes more "hi-tech" (e.g. in big cities malls) than western europe... But Poland is receiving crazy funding from the EU to get up to speed.

As an EU taxpayer, that said, it's good that at least some of money is used to invest in technologies that are bound to become very important in the future...

Apparently that's part of the game with capping the emissions... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading#Emission_mark...

As far as I see - way to go :-)

Mitsubishi needs to purchase these credits to stay within regulatory requirements pertaining to emittance of CO2 probably in the EU. Given that Mitsubishi is a large manufacturer they probably produce above their alloted quota of CO2 and therefore must purchase credits from someone/some organization (in this case Estonia) that does not use their full quota.

Estonia is using the income from this agreement to fund the fast-charging network.

This is all educated speculation as to its meaning. Apologies for no links to references to back up my understanding. I am sure a quick search will provide more information.

Mitsubishi are giving this network for free to Estonia in exchange for a right to some of their pollution allowance under the kyoto protocol.

Estonia has a lot of allowance spare because quotas were based upon the amount of polluting you used to do, and Estonia used to have a lot of heavy industry which fell apart in the 90s.

So really, they got lucky and they got this network for free thanks to a quirk in the Kyoto protocol.

I could beat the US in Internet speed if I setup a neighborhood network.

Mind you I was talking to their sales team in London, who probably needed to offload unsold Roadsters.

Not to mention, solar is rapidly approaching the point where it will be cheaper than coal, so it's only a matter of time before coal will start getting phased out anyway.

Moving to electric makes you reliant on current means of energy production, but to move to cleaner tech you replace 100 power plants instead of 10,000,000 cars.

Secondly, the electrical grid acts like a technology buffer. In the future, those coal plants can be replaced by water, wind, solar or something else, without changing the grid or the vehicle charging network.

Plus the electric cars can only buy renewable energy, it would nullify the point of selling CO2 quotas if they used fossil fuel to produce that energy ;)

How much energy can a car have with a "full tank of hydrogen", and what would that tank look like? Remember, a bucket of gasoline contains more hydrogen than a bucket of liquid hydrogen, and the gas kan be reasonably safely kept in the bucket, but the hydrogen requires very special equipment.

How will you get the hydrogen into the car? Gas can be poured into the gas tank, how would you transfer liquid hydrogen safely? Remember, chain-smoking stressed out soccer moms with three screaming kids in the car have to be able to do this without blowing themselves up.

How will you get hydrogen to the gas stations? How will you manufacture the hydrogen? You can't mine it or collect it, so you would have to create it by splicing water, a process which consumes a lot of energy. Where will you get that energy from? And if you're going to use electricity anyway, how much of that energy is lost in the process?

What's the "well to wheels" efficiency of a hydrogen vehicle? I'm pretty sure it's smarter to just charge a battery in the vehicle directly, through the electricity network, rather than going the roundabout way of creating volatile hydrogen at special plants, transporting that hydrogen to gas stations, having equipment for allowing people to fill up their cars, and finally combust the hydrogen in the car to make it move.

So what happened? Someone did the math on the whole chain, instead of just handwaving the massive infrastructure problems away.