[UPDATE]: Video of the switching station in action and photos added below.
YOKOHAMA, JAPAN- Last night at approximately 10:30 PM PST (1:30 AM EST), electric vehicle services provider Better Place will demonstrate key elements of their battery switching station technology. This is the first public exhibition of a battery switching station—which Better Place lauds as the final piece of a “total electric vehicle solution.” The company was invited by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment to set up an exhibit in Yokohama.
“Range anxiety,” as it’s called, describes the most fundamental fear expressed by would-be adopters of electric vehicles. It’s no different than the fear of driving through sparsley inhabited parts of the United States, where it’s important to know your car’s mileage and the distance to the next gas station.
If you missed the discussion last week, we had the Mayors of two major cities—San Francisco and Portland—weighing in on electric vehicle charging infrastructure. In the coming weeks, we’re looking forward to hearing from other cities about their plans for EV infrastructure, but we also wanted to make sure the private sector had a chance to chime in.
2008 has been a year signifying economic depression culminating in the worst holiday retail season in years. However it has also been a year of entrepreneurs burgeoning a variety of exciting new green businesses. Ecopreneurist has covered many of them over the course of the year. Here is a review of our favorite Ecopreneurs of 2008.
The Better Place plan solves the current problem with electric cars, which is slow battery recharging as well as availability. The solution is to use existing electric car technologies together with an internet-connected web of recharging stations (set up in the thousands).
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has received a glut of media attention recently for his plan to develop the largest wind power project in the world. Now the New York Times suggests that Pickens might have a visionary counterpart in Shai Agassi, an Israeli software entrepreneur obsessed with making Israel the world leader in electric cars.
Agassi, along with his company Better Place, have an Israeli government-backed plan to create an electric car program that will give subscribers access to a car, a battery, and outlets across Israel. Subscribers will also be able to swap dead batteries for fresh ones in designated garages.
Better Place will run the smart grid that charges the electric cars. The company is also currently contracting for enough solar energy energy to power the whole fleet, which will roll out next year with 500 cars built by Renault.
But Agassi’s vision doesn’t end with Israeli electric cars.
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.
