Peter Day's Comment

Power Steering

Shai Agassi is anything but shy. He's another of the people from Silicon Valley California who think that there is big money to be made out of sustainability.

My email in-box is abuzz with new supposedly sustainable startups. Entrepreneurs who've already made several fortunes seem to think (like the fabulously successful venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers) that greentech is (in his words) "the mother of all markets".

People like him are putting big money into tiny start ups working on wind and solar power, on bio fuels using waste crops, and on electric cars.
At least two of the new electric car companies are based not much of a spin from Stanford University, whose shuttle fleet of buses (all called Marguerite) includes two diesel-electric hybrids.

The new Tesla electric sportscar has already been delivered to a few dozen rich American early adopters.

Shai Agassi (also based at least some of the time in the Valley) has a larger view of battery power. He is an Israeli-born entrepreneur who sold his software company to the giant SAP, and was then spoken of as CEO in waiting until he left the group two years ago to embark on a much riskier enterprise.

It happened after he was asked by the founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Klaus Schwab, what he was doing with his business skills and his millions to make the world a better place?

This spurred Shai Agassi into Big Thoughts. The result is his new start-up called (of course) Better Place, based in Palo Alto. He wants to make electric cars that attract a mass commuting drivership, ideal for his native Israel.

Infrastructure

It is a vision with a strong Israeli political purpose, a striving to reduce the world's dependence on oil and the oil producing nations.

Renault-Nissan has already been signed up to provide the cars that Shai Agassi will reorganise to put his batteries in, but his ambition is to transform the auto industry, not just a single manufacturer. In fact he is not so interested in car production, but in creating the infrastructure that would make his electric auto vision possible.

This is when it gets revolutionary. Despite the work that is going into it, battery power still refuses to deliver the distance a petrol engine will go on a tank of petrol. The Better Place cars will go about 160 kilometres on a charge, 100 miles.

Electric cars have to find a way of getting over this limiting threshold. Shai Agassi is planning to build a series of charging parking points where cars can plug in and top up their power, plus swap forecourts where a driver with an almost spent battery drives in, and a machine quick changes the heavy battery in a matter of minutes.

He also wants to sell not cars, but mileage, or kilometre-age. This is another revolutionary idea.

The first recharge parking lots are already being built in several places, including (I think) some parts of the USA. The ideal country is fairy small and circumscribed, like Israel. Denmark is another one. Canada, Australia and Hawaii are also getting involved.

Practicalities

Shai Agassi is a wonderful persuader, and is promising to launch the Better Place system within a year or two.

But changing the internal combustion regime is a tough job. Sceptics think that changing heavy batteries in a hurry will be a difficult thing to do, even if drivers accept the uncertainties of driving electric.

For example : can the engineers design reliable contact points in the vehicles and the batteries which will withstand being slid in and out of vehicles on a daily basis ? On such basic practicalities the whole Better Place project could founder.

The company says it will roll out a demonstration of "elements of the battery switching technology" at a demonstration in Japan this month.

There is of course nothing new about battery-powered cars. They were widely used in the USA at the start of the automobile age 100 years ago, but faded after the invention of the starter motor, which reduced the need to swing the petrol engine on a heavy handle in order to start it.

There was even a plan to do something similar to the Better Place system, rolling out a series of battery replacement stations all the way from New York to Boston. Not sure it was ever carried out.

Electric cars are quieter but not necessarily much less polluting (of course) if you take into consideration how electricity is made. Israel, though, is planning large solar generation plants. Storing electric power is one of the problems of non 24-hours (solar) production. But Shai Agassi has an answer to that.

Instead of needing vast new artificial electricity "reservoirs" to store generated power, Better Place will be able to store electricity in the batteries waiting in the swap stations to recharge almost exhausted vehicles.

It is a neat idea. Is the electric car an idea whose time has come..again?