The Green Car Congress reports that DaimlerChrysler will release a Smart fortwo electric vehicle this November as part of a commercial trial in the U.K. that will be limited to corporate customers. The car will only be available for lease, unfortunately, and only 200 vehicles will be delivered for the trial.

The car will be powered by a Zebra sodium nickel chloride battery, the same energy-storage system being used in the Halton Hills Hydro load-shifting demonstration that I posted about last week. The battery will have a 30 kilowatt output and the car will be able to reach a top speed of 120 kilometres per hour. The range on full charge is 116 kilometres and the battery can charge from 20 per cent to 80 per cent in four hours. Full recharge takes eight hours.

Seems interest is growing for the Zebra battery. If volume production is the only thing keeping this technology from being economical, perhaps it is a good idea to open up a North American manufacturing facility with 100,000-unit-a-year capacity, as the folks at Halton Hills Hydro would like to do.

Delivery firm Canpar Transport LP is using a system from Ottawa-based Netistix Technologies to monitor the idle times of its 650 delivery vehicles, a lion’s share in Toronto. The company hopes to use the information to alter drivers’ habits with a goal of reducing idling time on each vehicle by an average of 30 minutes a day, leading to savings of $250,000 a year for its fleet. The system transmits vehicle data wirelessly, and the application can run over municipal Wi-Fi networks such as the one being deployed in Toronto.

I wrote about Netistix last November regarding a telematics project it’s leading. The company aims to provide vehicle diagnostic data and other information to project participants via wireless networks at local gas stations. The goal is to eventually introduce a mass-market product that will help drivers adjust their on-road habits and in the process get better fuel economy — and lower emissions — from their vehicles.

Jordan Gold has a great Q&A in Corporate Knights magazine with energy expert Amory Lovins, who goes into great detail explaining why Ontario — or any jurisdiction for that matter — should avoid committing itself to nuclear power plants. Among the several interesting comments from Lovins: “I think the saviour of the Ontario electric system is likely to be the private capital market, which will wisely decline to put its money where the government’s mouth is.”

Lovins says micropower — combined heat and power plants and distributed renewables — is a better bet than nuclear and has the backing of the private markets. He adds that micropower is more reliable, resilient, politically acceptable, costs less and has lower financial risk. “The only market actors professing any enthusiasm for new nuclear build are those who get transactional rewards—but none of those who would put their own capital at risk,” says Lovins. “Nuclear power has died of an incurable attack of market forces and is way beyond any hope of revival, because the competitors are severalfold cheaper and are getting rapidly more so.”