Better Place: Cars Running on Renewable Energy
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In the face of depletion of oil resources and transportation being one of the biggest contributors to the climate change problem, American-Israeli company Better Place has found a sustainable – and profitable – solution: Electric cars that are powered by renewable energy. |
The Hummer, a gas-guzzler with vast consumption of gasoline per kilometer, has become the icon of an environmentally unfriendly car industry. Emissions emanating from private transportation are beyond doubt one of the biggest contributors to climate change. And, surely, more cars like the Hummer will appear in the future.
But with oil prices that have doubled since the beginning of 2007, and with increasing concern over energy security and the future fossil fuel supply, car sales and car demand seems to have moved in the direction of more fuel- and economy-efficient vehicles. This is also visible in the way the most of the world's major automakers are showcasing new and greener cars at auto exhibitions in Detroit, Paris, and everywhere else around the globe. General Motors have even made an HX model that can run on bioethanol.
Now, American- Israeli electric vehicle (EV) company, Better Place, is taking this green surge a step further. Not only will it introduce new cars entirely run by electricity. Better Place also intends to help the world become greener by inducing its energy suppliers to deliver renewable energy.
Rechargeable cars
The electric cars (also called EV - Electric Vehicle) are produced by French and Japanese auto makers Nissan and Renault, with whom Better Place has made partnership deals. The technological evolution making it possible comes from recent improvements in lithium ion batteries. These batteries store energy better and give the cars at least 100 miles of driving capacity (around 160 kilometers).
All that the electric car owner will have to do is to recharge his cars batteries at charging spots that will be placed at home, and in parking lots at work, at the restaurant, or by the shopping mall. Further, the plan is to build battery exchange stations so that the electric car drivers can quickly (three minutes or less) replace depleted batteries with fresh batteries for trips longer than 100 miles.
Like a mobile phone
The business model of Better Place is intended to replicate the one used by mobile phone operators. Like mobile subscribers pay to access cell towers and phone networks, so will drivers pay a subscription fee to access a network of re-charging spots and battery exchange stations. And like many cellular phone users who pay per minute, electric car owners will pay for miles driven.
In that way, Better Place aims to attract car purchasers by appealing to their environmental conscience and to their wallet – as the electric cars are planned to be more economical than any petroleum based car. And in this case, economical also means environmental.
Better than fossil fuels
But how do the fossil-free cars benefit the environment if the electricity used to power them comes from coal-fired power stations? Here, Better Place's answer comes in two stages. First, according to Better Place, there are presently around 700 million cars on the worlds' roads, which together produce some 2.8 billion tons of CO2. If these cars were instead all powered by re-chargeable batteries, the amount of carbon emitted would be lowered by 10 % worldwide.
Further, according to Better Place, the recharge process of the batteries will also contribute to generating a new and larger market for renewable types of energy. Since the batteries can and do recharge at any time of the day, it does not matter at which time of the day the electricity is supplied. This means that Better Place can buy the the electricity it needs for its battery stations from wind mills or solar cells that usually produce their electricity in unpredictable patterns that do not necessarily coincide with ‘normal' energy flows of the rest of the economy.
In this way, the energy demand of electric cars fits well with renewable energy production, and this will create incentives for energy suppliers to invest in clean energy. So, maybe some time in the future, all energy consumed by electric cars could in principle be from renewable energy sources.
The future starts in 2011
One of the biggest challenges for Better Place is to help develop a comprehensive infrastructure that supports the launch of a market of electric cars. So far, better Place has joined partnerships in Israel and Denmark to start selling the first EVs in 2011; and on October 22, Better Place announced its new plan to deploy EVs in Australia's east coast by 2012.
And there seems to be growing interest in electric cars elsewhere in Europe too – the latest being France where President Nicolas Sarkozy has now committed to supporting Renault and French utility EDF in building a nationwide electric car recharging network by 2011.
So, if the pilot cases are successful and more countries join in electric car production, the future of infrastructure might be one freed from fossil fuels. As stated by Israeli-American CEO Shai Agassi at the press conference unveiling the project, "This could be the future of transportation."
Lasse Skjoldan, Copenhagen Climate Council
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Comments feedGood documentary to watch is the death of the electric car. I love the idea of car sharing when i lived in philadelphia they has zipcar and it was awesome.
Electric Cars in Copenhagen Already Before the World Business Summit As I understand it, and I am very excited to start seeing it happen here in Copenhagen, Better Place would start implementing the first 500 electric cars before the Copenhagen Business Summit on Climate Change.
I suggest following: Implement partly a car sharing model not only a car ownership model. For a few reasons:
1. With only 500 cars initially, using a car sharing model on for example half of these, you could reach as many as 10 different subscribers per car or perhaps even more with a very progressive car sharing strategy.
2. What you need to do, is have as many people try the electric car as possible without it being too much of a privilege but more of it feeling like a regular replacement to public transportation or a replacement to car sharing.
3. Sure you want to have the infrastructure before you sell the cars. But the thing is, why not try to already kick-start faster and faster mass adoption of the electric car while only a very small part of the infrastructure would be put in place, perhaps as little as 5% of final infrastructure deployment, I would imagine, that with a clever Internet assisted GPS system, finding the few electrified and reserved (blue colored) car parks would be perfectly possible. And then just progressively increase coverage from there. No so much for a chicken and egg thing. But my main interest here is to see many of these cars on the streets right away. Something like even 500 or 1,000 cars in Copenhagen, and just as little as 2,000 or 4,000 electrified and reserved car parks spread out throughout Copenhagen, as little as that, I would think, should be enough to make sure that most people are aware of it, interested by it. What you may create is a generalized auction among all the citizen in trying to buy a few minutes with the car using totally effective car sharing mechanisms.
So, for example, what I would like to see, is an Android OS assisted and web-based system where people log-on to electric-car.dk, they setup an account and register, they pay as little as 50kr on an account, which could provide them an hour or a couple hours with the car (depending on a dynamic supply and demand algorithm depending on demand at specific time of the day). This way, the guy has tried it from one electrified car park somehow close to his home, to another, he knows it works great. There is not only one very potential customer for the later to come and he could sign-up and get in queue for a car-to-own, but you then earn someone who will make sure to ask the politicians to maximize the speed in which this revolution has to happen. It's more then just a customer, it's more then a believer, it's a militant that you then automatically get.
4. During the conference, you can be sure all the cars are reserved to be used by the delegates and the visitors of that conference. Which also would be registered and in the same way would have credits they can use to get to use those cars and not necessarily just be on the back seat.
5. You need a back-seat car sharing software like Android OS based http://www.piggybackmobile.com/ This way you not only have potentially 5,000 drivers sharing the initial 500 cars. You could also have another 5,000 or 10,000 Copenhageners trying to sit on the backseat of an electric car, sure it's as a replacement to public transportation, or as a replacement to the taxi, but still, you earn more supporters by getting as many as possible to experience the revolution in its initial few months of the deployment.
I don't think that many Danish people know about this project yet even though it's a few times being talked in the Danish media. I think you could use some very much expanded public support for the project during the initial Infrastructure and initial pilot project deployment phase.
6. This could be kind of like the principal of the telephone cabine, everyone can try it even though there is only one in the street for every 1,000 citizen. When people can try it, bid in a regular car sharing dynamic time auction system, you can potentially reach the whole population very quickly already with the initial pilot quantities and very initial infrastructure that you deploy. Many could try it, people would know someone who tried it. Copenhagen has only a population of 1 million people, you could quickly possibly with as little as 500 to 1,000 cars, already reach to convince nearly all of them in the initial first few months without even having to rely on full engagement by the politicians and the media which you may or may not get at a level which could make it so that your Electric cars amount to 100% of all new cars purchased in Denmark within 3 years.