San Francisco Partners With Shai Agassi's Electric Car Scheme, a $1 Billion Project
The financial crisis is hurting Americans, but months before the hit fuel costs were already gouging into people's pockets. Some were forced to carpool to work, others took the bus or train. While creative forms of public transportation help deal with times of fiscal uncertainty, the long-term plan for preserving the American way of life, and its auto industry, may revolve around an Israeli businessman.
Shai Agassi, the CEO of Better Place, has big plans for America. Last Thursday, with the blessing of California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bay Area mayors met at San Francisco's City Hall, along with Agassi. Their intent, they said, is to make the California region, already a green beacon in the world, an early adopter of Agassi's electric car scheme. Israel, Denmark and Australia have already come on board.
Similar to "minutes" in the cell phone industry, users will pay for leasing a car based on battery use. The scheme calls for electric battery recharging ports, and battery swapping stations throughout the region, but requires infrastructure and support for the project to work effectively.
The capital of electric cars
The new $1 billion project is expected to encompass the cities of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland. Similar deals have been signed with governments elsewhere, and now California marks the first stop in the US market. The United States is set to go electric.
According to media reports, Better Place, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, will begin constructing the charging stations by 2010, with commercial sales beginning in 2012, a few short years away. The electric cars will be built by Renault-Nissan.
The recent announcement to start work with the Bay area did not come as a big surprise. In Israel earlier this year, hybrid-car driving Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco already showed great interest in the Israeli project. "This is the start of a regional effort to become the capital of electric vehicles in the United States," he told representatives from federal and state agencies, green organizations and automotive makers such as GM and Toyota, in a recent press briefing.
With factory layoffs hitting car production plants all over America and Canada, an industry revolving around the electric car may breathe new life into the crumbing American economy.
It takes a region
Mike Granoff, head of oil independence policies at Better Place, and the first investor in the company tells ISRAEL21c: "Gavin Newsom and Shai have been friends for many years. The Mayor wanted San Francisco to be a leader in this, but it was not entirely up to him because our model does not work for just a city - it needs a region. He led an effort over the last year to bring the entire Bay Area on board, and ultimately the entire state."
"We are working with third parties on capital raises for Better Place Denmark and Better Place Australia. We intend to do the same thing in California. We have been inundated by inquiries about investment continuously, even through the downturn," he adds.
"We absolutely look forward to working with additional automakers. Our goal is for all cars to ultimately be electric. The American auto industry is in shambles precisely because they have not moved toward 'Car 2.0'."
Earlier this week Granoff circulated an email explaining why he believes the US government's response to the crumbling economy should be an "auto bailout, conditional on [a] rapid switch to all-electric, and then create a jobs program in parallel to put that infrastructure in."
Plug in or swap
In order to put the vision into practice, Better Place -- already backed with about $200 million in venture capital -- will raise additional capital so that charging stations in the three main participating cities, and between them, can be built. The stations will let vehicle owners recharge with ease, or in some cases swap spent batteries for fresh ones during longer trips.
The Bay area mayors are expected to use their authority to push through permits needed to create the charging stations, and also regulations that promote and offer incentives, such as tax breaks for those who install charge stations at workplaces, or who use the cars.
At a press briefing, Newsom told reporters: "We're going to get serious about advancing our local climate action plans, about getting into the business of alternative transportation. I don't believe halfway is good enough. I'm a guy driving a hybrid (vehicle) and I don't feel too good about that. For us to get to the next level, we need unprecedented regional collaboration."
Aside from long-term environmental rewards, there are other benefits too: Better Place solves in part America's dependence on foreign oil, owned by a cartel of dangerous countries that threaten global democracy. Agassi said, "We believe this is not just a model for California, but a blueprint for the United States.
TreeHugger covers more Better Place:
The Shai Agassi Page
Better Place Expands to Australia
Making Electric Cars Sell Like Cell Phones
This article is written by Karin Kloosterman and reprinted courtesy of ISRAEL21c.
Follow Karin Kloosterman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/http://twitter.
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BEWARE OF PERPETUAL PESSIMISTS!
“Perpetual Commotion
"In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance." Goethe
Skeptics abound (and without independent laboratory confirmation, have excellent reason to be skeptical) new devices may open a door to rapidly reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and reviving the automotive industry.
Energy conversion devices that seemingly self-run are not, as is widely believed, perpetual motion machines. They are certainly converting some previously unutilized form of energy.”
Entrepreneurs are by nature optimists. Those that ultimately succeed, find without exception that everything takes much longer than one had hoped, or anticipated. They also make numerous mistakes. Anyone who does anything useful that is difficult tends to find that goes with the territory. As President Kennedy once said about choosing to go to the moon: We do it “not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
Our work has the potential to dramatically assist the utility and automotive industries and kick-start renewed growth. See http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/partner/story?id=54361&cid=7763
Utilities and auto manufacturing firms are well equipped to evaluate our claims. Two large utilities are among major domestic companies that have signed NonDisclosure Agreements.
There are those who do not believe ZPE or ambient heat can be converted into useful power.
Independent laboratory tests coupled with Demonstration Devices and toys are the cure for their condition. All three are prime objectives of our program.
Wasn't this all tried before and was killed by the auto industry??
I am all for the success of programs like this. I just don't know if it can stand up to oil interests..
I sure hope it can.
Michale.....
This program will deal with the rise in the number of EVs on the road that is now inevitable seeing the rising popularity and demand of these vehicles. What will also happen is, once the network is in place more people will be encouraged to buy and use EVs which is likely to bring about perceptible reduction in emissions and pollution levels. So this is a good move.
The irony is that revolutionary new generators are likely to replace the need for batteries about the time that the first wave of recharge stations, etc. are in place. These devices tap ambient heat and/or Zero Point Energy, both abundant and renewable sources of electricity that have never before been commercialized.
"Some of them are being developed to production quality so that such alternative energy devices will be commercially available in (the) near future." Horst Eckhardt in his recent article entitled: Space Energy.
Generators we are developing are expected to demonstrate replacement of the plug needed by a plug-in hybrid car, within a year. This will be a harbinger of automobiles that need no conventional fuel. These prototypes will open a path to mass production of entirely new varieties of automotive power plants. Vehicles powered by these technologies will never require conventional fuel of any kind.
Cars can become a source of income. Vehicle to grid (V2G) power selling electricity to the grid from future production hybrid electric cars might earn the vehicles’ owner $4,000 each year. This assumes that power will be drawn by utilities from the car’s batteries, using a two-way, plug.
In the future, cars powered by new energy conversion systems are expected to earn much more, as these generators are anticipated to replace both batteries and car engines. Therefore, they are expected to produce far greater amounts of electricity and earn substantially more. No plug will be required.
Horst Eckhardt is a founding member of the "Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies", a group with a grand unified theory they call ECE. The AIAS claims their ECE theory explains why various perpetual motion machines work. The machines they cite have been around for years and don't work: The John C. Bedini "School Girl" perpetual motion machine, and the Energy By Motion generator.
Mark Goldes has been claiming free energy generators for 20 odd years. Each year he says his company will be showing evidence of his claimed discoveries next year. He never does. He's been making the hybrid power plant "next year" promise since at least 2005.
Routinely, Mark Goldes reports that last year's "breakthrough" that was supposed to result in rapidly developed free lunch generators proved "difficult to commercialize". Snake oil always is. This statement generally comes after some number of months of promising imminent independent validation testing that never occurs, and coincidentally with announcement of some new woo-woo "breakthrough" that he promises to quickly commercialize.
For any who doubt just how brazen this fakery is, Mark Goldes claimed May 28 this year to have all:
An electric car that ran 4800 miles,
A 204HP electric outboard motor that ran full throttle in a test tank for over a week,
An electric golf cart that ran 120 miles
All powered from his free electricity generators. Any of those claims are trivial to verify. He cannot produce any of these claimed items.
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