Another sign of the maturity of electric vehicles on our street are projects such as California, Silicon Valley start-up Project Better Place tackling the infrastructure of accommodating these vehicles.
Project Better Place is about creating awareness and partnering with businesses to build infrastructure for electric vehicles to plug into utility grids around the world.
How do they plan on doing that? Simple! By establishing large-scale electricity recharge grids (ERGs), made up of electric cars, batteries, charging points, and renewable energy power stations everywhere. PBP wants to bring electric cars to consumers. The company was publicly announced in October of 2007 raising $200 million and squarely working on displacing gas engines in favor of electricity.
Take for instance, places where wind energy builds up at night when most cars are parked recharging, with a lower demand electricity could be stored in electric vehicles on the grid or sold to other countries. Consider solar during the day and why not, geothermic energy and you have the recipe for a successful, abundant and environmentally healthy solution.
So what have they done so far? PBP has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Renault-Nissan to build the world’s first Electric Recharge Grid Operator (ERGO) model for clean transportation in Israel in January, 2008. And in May, they presented a prototype of an electric car with partner Renault-Nissan who would invest $500 million to $1 billion in developing the swappable-battery electric cars. Now that is an interesting concept that will most likely allure mainstream car manufacturers, swappable-battery packs. Check here for a video interview with Agassi with Earth2Tech.
How serious is the project? Besides already raising $200 million and partnering with Renault-Nissan, the Israelian government is also backing them. PBP is also partnering with Denmark, and Hawaii’s Governor Linda Lingle has also announced interest as well as San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom.
What happens if I run out of electricity? The idea here is to have a swappable battery pack waiting for you at a charging station, or why not have AAA bring it you?
Obviously there is a viable business model to be grabbed for any serious entrepreneur interested in the electric car revolution.