Shai Agassi's Electric Dreams  

The SMH has an article on Better Place and the transition to electric cars - The reality of electric dreams. A related article looks at the recruitment of Evan Thornley to Better Place Australia - The Australian connection. I like Agassi's recommendation that Australia build a 50 GW solar power plant inland, and his "batteries are the new oil" line.

OK, so this is the future; well, maybe a future. You glide noiselessly towards what used to be service station pumps, the dashboard computer screen showing the battery at 30 per cent. Once, you had to do a quick calculation about the nearest petrol station, but now the computer performs that calculation.

If the trip is short - to the office, shopping centre or home - the computer announces the nearest points where the car can be recharged while unoccupied. If the trip is long, the computer indicates the nearest station where the battery can be replaced, free of charge. Swapping batteries takes about five minutes, and is good for another 160 kilometres. That's the future.

The car of the past runs on petrol. Its internal combustion engine blows fumes, none of them good for us. With the right engine and the right driver, it emits a sound some find sexy, or at least addictively visceral. For every 18 year-old male, it's the portal into adulthood, freedom and independence.

After a century, the curtain is setting on that transition point. The man slamming the door shut is of average height, with a handsome, open face, and a mop of dark straight hair that has a narrow streak of silver through the fringe. In the way of the Silicon Valley mogul - his former calling - he dresses down, in a black bomber jacket over a grey, unbuttoned business shirt, and off-white khaki pants.

His voice is richly, deeply American, one of several oddities about this citizen of Israel, son of an Iraqi father and a Moroccan mother, with enough money to ensure he never has to work again, which leaves him time for his other job - changing the world.

Shai Agassi's notion is to wean the world off its oil addiction. The idea is at once simple and staggeringly complicated: replace cars that run on petrol with their equivalents that run on electricity, via a quickly rechargeable, easily replaceable battery. In both execution and practicality, it's a program that owes much to the mobile phone industry, the progress of which showed that batteries could be reduced from the size of a brick to the size of a fingernail without affecting output or endurance.

It helps to think of a car - body and bits and luxury interior - as a mobile phone, the owner of the car as a subscriber, and Agassi's company, Better Place, as the service provider. In this case, the service is a power grid that recharges and/or replaces the car batteries of subscribers on demand, at home, work, or in specifically appointed car parks. The batteries have a range of 160 kilometres, and a lifespan of between 400,000 and 800,000 kilometres.

The challenges of Better Place are many, starting with consumer mindset and perhaps ending with replication, on a smaller scale, of what Agassi calls the "biggest machine ever invented" - the electric power grid.

Better Place's timetable calls for Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to be connected by 2011, with a mass launch in 2012. Adelaide and Perth would follow 12 months later. The intended result is a lighter carbon footprint. Deutsche Bank analysis - provided through Better Place - estimated the average vehicle would daily consume as much power as five lightbulbs. Written 12 months ago, the report concluded that at current Sydney petrol prices, an electric car's running costs would be less than half that of the petrol car. "Investors should be aware that motor vehicle technology has the potential to change more significantly over the next five years than it has in the past 100 years," said the report.

And here is Shai Agassi, happily shovelling dirt into the twin graves of the car industry and its dearly beloved, the oil business. "When you look at the car makers and the car markets," he says, "you've got to analyse which countries are identifying already that there's been a shift from … the first hundred years to the next hundred years. And some governments are putting money into defending the last hundred years of car makers, and some countries are basically saying, 'You better invest in the future, so that we attract the next supply chain, not the last supply chain'." ...

The topic pivots to the future. "If a government believes that the transition to electric vehicles is inevitable, it should be every government's desire to make that shift happen earlier in their country." Discussions with government had made little progress on policy, but "it's not our job to make policy but share experiences from other locations".

Batteries, says Agassi, are the new oil. If a battery manufacturing facility was built in Australia, with renewable sources of energy, "it could be an amazing new industry".

"Australia has the potential of generating tonnes of solar. There is no reason why Australia couldn't build its own virtual oilfield, much like Israel is doing, with one exception.

"Australia has tonnes of land to put solar plants [on] for all the cars in Australia. If you think about it, over a period of 10 years, Australia could build a 50 gigawatt solar plant in a heartbeat, all made by Australians, all installed by Australians. There's nothing in science or technology that's missing. It's a question of will and a question of financials."