Electric Cars to the Masses

23 Jun 2008 Publish your eco thoughts here on EcoSignal.org Send Y!M  Email This

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

Source: Ecopreneurist

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