PARIS — Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn has a new incentive to promote development and sales of electric vehicles: A significant part of his pay now depends on it.

Ghosn, who has led Renault since 2005, was formally named to another four-year term by shareholders on Friday. However, his mission has been significantly altered. Earlier this year he handed off day-to-day operational duties to Thierry Bollore, and he agreed to a 19 percent reduction in base pay, to 1 million euros in 2018. The 64-year-old Ghosn’s mandate now is to prepare the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance for a future without him at the helm.

Ghosn’s compensation has been a point of contention in France, with the government (which holds 15 percent of Renault) and significant number of shareholders arguing that he is overpaid, because he receives a separate salary from Nissan. After he lost a non-binding vote on pay in 2016 (and with this year’s vote binding), Renault’s compensation committee held more than a dozen meetings “to better understand this negative outcome.”

In addition to cutting Ghosn’s base pay, his long-term incentives will be reduced to a total of 80,000 shares from 100,000 (Renault stock has been trading at about 84 euros recently). Until this year, his performance targets have been conventional, equally divided among operating margin, free cash flow and shareholder return.

Those targets represent an automotive industry that was more focused on current performance than future adaptation. Recognizing that, the board has changed the criteria to better align with new strategic plans for Renault and the alliance, which call for doubling synergies from the alliance and ramping up EV vehicle sales.

Read more: Autonews

Some of the legacy automakers who are really serious about electric vehicles are also trying to address the issues that come with selling both electric and gas-powered cars at dealerships.

Renault is exploring electric vehicle-only stores and after a successful pilot project in Stockholm, it is now opening a second location in Germany.

It can be difficult for dealerships to sell both electric cars and gas-powered vehicles at the same time since the strengths of one are often the weaknesses of the other.

Car dealers are incentivized to sell what they have on their lots and since that’s currently mostly gas-powered vehicles, they don’t put a lot of effort into selling EVs.

That’s partly why Tesla decided to bypass the dealership model and operate its own stores.

They were proven right by a few different studies of the electric vehicle buying experience. Most recently, one found that electric car adoption is slowed down by ‘dismissive and deceptive car dealerships’.

Now Renault is trying an approach similar to Tesla’s in Europe.

Earlier this year, they opened a ‘Renault Electric Vehicle Experience Center’ in Stockholm, Sweden.

The program was apparently quite successful as Renault reports that it attracted “more than 14,000 visitors in the first three months.”

The French automaker is now announcing that it is expanding the program to a second location – this time in Berlin, Germany.

Read more: Electrek

The French automaker believes this will add flexibility to charging infrastructure.

Call it Recyclin’ Renault: The French automaker is now using old electric-car batteries to power charging stations in Europe. These so-called “second-life” batteries were integrated with energy-storage systems from British firm Connected Energy and installed at two charging sites on highways in Belgium and Germany.

Like its partner Nissan, Renault is a major proponent of electric cars. Its Zoe hatchback rivals the Nissan Leaf as the best-selling electric car in Europe – meaning a lot of used batteries. The battery packs in electric cars eventually lose too much storage capacity to be useful. But even after they’re too degraded for automotive use, these packs still have plenty of capacity left over.

By using them to power charging stations, Renault claims DC fast-charging stations can be installed in more locations, since they won’t require a dedicated high-power grid connection. Instead, the battery packs can be charged using the same electricity infrastructure as lower-power stations.

In the United States, Tesla has used solar energy to charge energy-storage battery packs, taking some charging stations completely off the grid. Nissan and Chevrolet have experimented with turning old battery packs into energy-storage units, and BMW has even discussed selling them to homeowners.

More broadly, energy storage is now being used to increase the effectiveness of renewable-energy sources like wind and solar. Energy is harvested when wind and sunlight are available, and stored for when they aren’t. Energy storage can also help balance the grid by evening out the flow of electricity through the system. California already has some large energy-storage sites, and Tesla is involved with a major project in Australia.

Large-scale energy-storage projects will require a lot of batteries, and if electric-car sales live up to the hype, automakers could end up with plenty on their hands.

Source: The Drive