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Dec 3, 2008 12:55 PM | 11
The alt-energy company Better Place, which has taken its vision of electric cars to Israel, Australia, Denmark and major California cities, is now coming to Hawaii.
The Aloha State and its utility provider yesterday endorsed a plan to build a network of battery-swap and recharging stations in Hawaii that would make the use of electric cars feasible, the New York Times reports. Projects of that kind are already in motion overseas and near Palo Alto, Calif., where Better Place is headquartered. It plans to start testing the program next year in Israel, where founder and CEO Shai Agassi is from, and to create a $1 billion recharging network in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland by 2012.
“We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model,” Agassi told the Times. “The typical driving plan is low and leisurely, and people are smiling.”
Better Place plans to build between 50,000 to 100,000 charging stations across the state by early 2012, and run them using renewable power it buys from Hawaiian Electric Co., according to the Associated Press. The plan will help the state cut its fossil fuel use by 70 percent by 2030, Gov. Linda Lingle told the AP.
Hawaii is an attractive test site for Better Place because of its size. Trips on the island are rarely longer then the 100 miles (161 km) electric cars will be designed to make before they need more juice, the Times notes. Renault-Nissan, whose eMegane vehicle would go that distance, is working with Better Place to deploy its e-car prototypes in Israel this winter, Wired Magazine said in an August profile of Agassi. The company is in talks with other automakers about whether e-cars they're developing could be recharged at its stations.
Several car manufacturers, including Tesla and Chevrolet, are developing electric cars, but none have become widely available. Still, global-warming carbon emissions have given the idea urgency, and Agassi has managed to raise $200 million from investors to implement his plan.
The recession doesn’t have Agassi worried that the Hawaii project won't pan out, because investors want new assets with long-term revenue streams. In this case, that asset would be the network of battery stations available only to drivers with a subscription, he told the Times.
“I believe the new asset class is batteries,” Agassi said. “When you have a driver in a car using a battery, nobody is going to cut their subscription and stop driving.”
Image by iStockphoto/Alexey Dudoladov
Tags:
shai agassi,
electric car,
better place,
climate change,
carbon dioxide,
global warming
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11 Comments
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I wonder if there are any electric car companies in California.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGee, at the rate things are happening, we should see electric recharge stations all over the USA ...by 2050.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAptera, AKA worlds ugliest car!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it's pretty neat looking.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe honda element is the worlds ugliest car. ...I take that back. The Cadillac Escalade, Ford Excursion, Chevy Superswamper etc... big black shoeboxes on wheels. Those are ugly.
Electric Cars?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo where does the electricity come from?
On the mainland some percentage comes from oil.
In Hawaii virtually all of electricity comes from oil.
Vehicles like the Toyota Prius can recapture braking energy used to accelerate.
Every conversion from one from of energy to another involves some percentage of loss; usually the percentage is on the order of 50%.
Get used to asking where the power ultimately comes from.
Even oil comes from energy related to the Sun.
The connection of oil to the Sun is moot in that the time scale is impractical for humanity to effect. Perhaps DARPA would consider this a DARPA hard problem.
What other choices are there, other than oil?
BIOMASS; quantities needed are too great to be practical.
WIND; generators that last are expensive per yearly output, less expensive generators cost too much to maintain.
ATOMIC; radioactive waste has no place to go and the inherent dangers are great.
HYDROGEN; most production schemes use oil, other production schemes have not been captured by the major business interests.
PLASMA; plants are now usually built to destroy hazardous waste, yet they can; convert bio-products or general waste to produce hydrogen and the other gasses, heat to make steam to make electricity, what ever metals put in come out purified, and a glass slag that can be used for construction material. If radioactive products are input to the system the radioactive elements become locked in the glass slag and cannot be leached out by ground water.
Philosophically, Plasma converts the results of the disposable society back into the raw materials and energy used to make the disposable items. Plasma is not a burning process. It does cause all molecular bonds to break apart leaving only elements. The DARPA hard problem is solved in one way. The energy from the Sun is stored in plants, Plasma can recapture that energy without the step of creating oil. ƠHill
Well, I'm curious about the Plasma, but it sounds like it might be a little impracticle on the large scale. I don't know, I need more info on that one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs far as the electric cars go, I say "Opa!" It's true that the majority of our eletrical power comes from one fossil fuel or another, but that will be changing in the near future. The technology for wind, nuclear, and hydrogen power are all improving on what seems like a weekly basis. The new technologies, combined with increased green investments, means that it will become increasingly easier for green sources to steadily pass fossil fuels on the energy production highway. So for now, yea, electric cars will get their energy from fossil fuels the same as it ever was. But the very fact that we will have electric cars in large numbers very soon means that we will be all the readier to move off of oil when the time com es.
Thank you for replying to my post. Thinking is good [smiles].
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do not endorse any of the sites mentioned below, they appear to be informative and real. There is a dearth of information being publicized in this area. Perhaps there is something I do not know. However, from a high level perspective this seems intriguing. I have spent a few years watching this develop. Any search engine will help anyone interested. This is not a theory, it is a currently proven technology; as shown within the web site below.
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/11/12/plasma-plants-vaporize-trash-to-generate-energy/
--notice that the Japanese are in the lead again while the U.S. seems to be missing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_gasification
http://www.recoveredenergy.com/
and a scaled view of a power plant, http://www.recoveredenergy.com/d_power.html
http://www.startech.net/plasma.html
http://www.pyrogenesis.com/
As for hydrogen, yes I too am a fan. Still the Hydrogen Economy has failed to keep its promised time table. Many technologies stumbled. This time problem can suggest that the laboratories are having trouble getting the results needed, something like the paperless office of the 60s. Water is the likely source needed, but water is not limitless. At the shorelines we could use sea water and have salt as a byproduct.
Here is a novel idea, feed the plasma waste converter some sea water as well as waste.
On another note, any system of the future MUST be carbon friendly. This is still in need of refinement, but in theory, the result of the plasma process is purely elemental. The rub is to prevent the wrong elements from recombining. This would seem to be a tractable problem in that energy is not needed, the carbon is already separated (a difficult problem in combustion processes). The plasma system is NOT an oxidation process; it is not a burning process.
On a second note, in my original post I overlooked solar-electric energy. Iron oxide has been found to be photo-electric and is potentially cheap. (See University of Hawaii web site.) Other approaches are being pursued. Bucky-ball nano-technology and other materials have some promise. Still, the fundamental rub of the old silicon approach that the currents are limited; is haunting the other solar developments.
Wood has come to the forefront lately. There is gold in that cellulite, but distillation processes of alcohols use more energy than is realized from the use of the alcohol. It might seem like Sun energy would answer that problem, but that has not proved to be a viable alternative. Plasma could use wood, as is, with no bio-engineering or other development needed.
If a Plasma plant is in our future, then it too will be ready to take over the developments of the electric automobiles. ; }
I am shocked because there are any electric car companies in California.Really cool site...
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jenny
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