California Based Ecopreneur Aims to Bring Electric Cars to the Masses
Shai Agassi is a man with with a pretty big mission - to engineer a globally sustainable personal transportation system for the 21st Century. As the founder and CEO of Silicon-Valley based company Project Better Place , he aims to turn that dream into a reality.
The Project works by teaming up with existing players in the car industry to establish large-scale electricity recharge grids (ERGs), made up of electric cars, batteries, charging points, and renewable energy power stations. Earlier this year, the company announced it had teamed up with Renault-Nissan to roll-out an impressive network of 500,000 recharging stations across Israel by 2010. Now it has announced plans for similar electric car projects in Denmark and San Francisco, with more in the pipeline for the near future.
A key benefit of the planned ERGs will be their role in driving demand for renewable energy. In Israel, most power comes from coal or gas, but the project plans to use solar energy generated in the country’s Negev Desert to power the batteries.
In Denmark, wind energy accounts for around 20% of installed capacity. However, at night, strong winds coincide with lower demand, meaning that 7% of capacity is either unused or sold to other countries at a knock-down price. Since night-time is when most cars will be parked and charging, Agassi plans to make use of the surplus to power recharging stations. In this way, batteries can be used as distributed storage devices for surplus wind energy, currently enough to power every car in Scandinavia. Even with coal-generated electricity in the mix on windless days, overall CO2 emissions are still expected to be around 50% lower than conventional petrol cars.
According to a report by Deutsche Bank, the Project Better Place approach has “the potential to eliminate the gasoline engine altogether” and “could cause massive disruption to the auto industry as it exists today.” Perhaps in the short-term this might sound a little ambitious, but looking ahead it’s likely that the prospect of peak oil can only enhance the business case for electric cars. Agassi reckons that “by 2020, fuelling a combustion car for a single year will cost more than charging an electric car for its entire life.”
Image credit: Project Better Place
It’s always fun to watch a con in action, and that’s pretty much what Project Better Place amounts to. Agassi cons the public by first claiming that driving range is the only obstacle to a viable electric car,
then claims that his 100 mile recharge interval is sufficient for the traveller and further, he piggybacks on the public belief that electric transportation is cheap. That’s all a fairly transparent lie to anyone with even a passing knowledge of electric propulsion. Aside from limited driving ranges, the other big obstacle to electric cars is the high cost of batteries. By leasing the batteries and hitting the consumer every day or month, Agassi’s scheme, in comparison to Israel’s $8 gasoline, looks cheap. But it’s far from that. His scheme requires that there be far more than one expensive battery pack per vehicle. Every car driving all day on a trip will require a reserve of 4,5 or 6 battery packs to support him. This adds up to one hell of a lot of battery packs that the system (i.e. consumer) must pay for. In Israel it isn’t that big a deal because no one there can physically drive for more than an hour or so before they run into the border and barbed wire. Israel is more like a small Pacific island than like the U.S. This transparently obvious difference hasn’t apparently sunk in to those vote hungry politicians in San Francisco, who also apparently believe that none of their residents will ever feel the need to leave the city. That must be their logic, since if they adopt this mammoth infrastructure of swapping stations, etc. they must know that they will end at the city limits. Their residents will be essentially slaves to the crappiest city in the country. The only good thing here is that it will take so long to build this white elephant that by then : 1) either plug-in hybrids, which actually do make not only economic but environemtal sense, will have become prevalent and educated the public of the stupidity of battery-only electrics, or 2) the EEStor devices will have proven themselves, and the deficiencies in batteries that project Better Place so ignorantly tries to solve, no longer exist, thus Better Place has no valid reason for being, not that it ever did.
It’s always fun to watch Kent Beuchert in action. Whether it’s cursing electric cars or windmills, moments spent reading his vehement comments are never dull. Google is your friend.
Agassi’s scheme, which is not original with him, a fact he always fails to point out, was never a viable one for all of the reasons given in the response to this article, which is mostly a shill for his scheme.
A plug-in with a 40 mile plus range can easily eliminate over 98% of any need for gasoline in a place geographically similar to Israel. Even in the US, such a car can allow for all of the elimination of gasoline, and liquid fuel requirements easily met by ethanol production. In neither country will Agassi’s sheme have any effect on the 1/3rd of the total crude oil required for tractor traileors and small trucks, which cannot be converted to electri using Agassi’s scheme. So any claim that his scheme, even if it worked perfectly, could come anywhere close to the elimination of all crude based fuel, is transparently false. At least a third would still be required. This is but one of the many misrepresentations and fraudulent claims being made, if not by Agassi, then by his shills. They are conning the public and producing an exorbitantly expensive alternative mode of transportation, one that has no conceivable advantage over a plug-in hybrid technology. These plug-ins will be available long before any of Agassi’s EV roll on the highway, and will demonstrate conclusively to the affected populations (Israel and Denmark) the outlandish inefficencies of his system. Or, alternatively, the EEStor devices will work as claimed and make his technology even more obviously obsolete. I will bet anyone that Agassi’s scheme will be quickly discarded and forgotten.
Kent Beuchert has posted against any viable electric car implementations for many years now. He posts under names that are similar to this one at other times. I used to wonder how he has so much time to scan EV sites and post such inane responses to some really viable Ev alternatives. Then a very trusted and seasoned poster pointed out all of the pseudonyms used by this “Kent” over the years. I figure that he has lots of time to post anti EV things because that is his job.
Since Deutsche Bank thinks that Agassi’s plan is solid, I think that their analysts probably are more astute than this oily fellow.
we must be less co-dependet from the arab world and away from the israel-palestinian conflicts,
we must stop been the target of manipulation by the arab countries.
goverment should be resistent to chevron, shell lobbyst companies interest. Both companies have spent billions of dollars in gulf of guinea and caspian sea with the purpose of getting more crude.
We must place the money toward our electricity companies, it is time for nuclear plants, instead of spending american money abrad in foreign oil.
We need an electric car that has a comparable price to present cars.
Some just don’t get that only initiatives like Agassi’s will allow to continue driving around like some used to.
I would rather enjoy an expensive battery pack vs. a cumbersome, complicated series of poorly engineered systems and subsystems that an internal combustion engine offers for commuting purposes. With all the $$ & time I will save in parts, tools & maintenance, it will pay for the oh-so expensive batteries over and over again.
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I think he is a genius trying to help us all!
We need to get off imported oil ASAP!!!
700 Billion dollar could really help america weak economy.
I am sure the price for the batteries will go down in time.