A Reader Responds to Project Better Place Getting Wired : TreeHugger

shai agassi wired magazine photo

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again –– Israel’s electric car scheme Project Better Place –– needs some serious rethinking. Shai Agassi, who founded the company (pictured above), proposes new infrastructure for the swappable batteries, leased and paid for much in the same way as the cellular phone industry: you pay for use and not the device. Israel and Denmark are buying.

In August Wired magazine featured Agassi on the cover (you can it read here). The story extols the virtues of the new paradigm in electric cars that Agassi is offering. I’ve blogged my reservations about Project Better Place here on TreeHugger before and also on The Huffington Post; most recently on my own blog Green Prophet. It’s happened a few times, where I’ve received some sort of email from a PR company representing Project Better Place, or an investor in the company, who says that I don’t have all the facts. I’ve offered they do a guest post on TreeHugger to set the record straight. No takers.

Today, after posting a few pictures from the Wired story, and a few thoughts, a reader Kerry Bradshaw added their criticism on Project Better place. The comment gives us some food for thought. I’ve published it below, as well as an illustration of how Project Better Place’s scheme will work. Your thoughts and opinions, as always, most welcome.

Comment from "Kerry Bradshaw":

Shai Agassi has managed to convince the controlling politicians of several rather energy-desperate countries (Israel and Denmark)  of the merits of his battery swapping scheme (an old idea not original with Agassi) as the best way to avoid petroleum dependencies. There are  severe problems with his arguments:

1) His system won’t come anywhere close to  removing petroleum dependencies - fully 1/3rd  is used for commercial trucking, boats, etc,  which won’t be covered by his system, nor  will any of the petroleum used to make heating oil,  lubricants, etc. This will be true irregardless of which private transportation technology is adopted. 

2) His tiny vehicles will not satisfy the needs of the driving public.

3) The swapping frequency while on a trip (about every  80 minutes) is needlessly inconvenient.

4) Each highway traveler on a trip in his system requires many  battery packs in reserve every day to meet his mileage  requirements. This greatly increases the number of battery  packs the system and its overall costs. Batteries are one of  the main reasons electric cars are not practical, and his  system makes that deficiency even worse.  The battery packs must also be located in just the right  spots.

4) Agassi’s economic arguments are only directed at gas powered  vehicles, which are NOT the main competitors his system  must face:  Plug-in hybrids are his main competitors, like the 40 mile  electric ranged Volt, which can accomplish every bit as  much as his much more expensive (trillions for infrastructure),  inconvenient system of tiny vehicles.

For one thing, we can electrify a lot more vehicle types  as plug-ins (e.g. large pickup trucks, vans, etc.) than we  could using swappable battery power drive trains, which are  severely limited in their power outputs.  And we can easily demonstrate, using DOT commuter trip  statistics, that a 40 mile range plug-in fleet can avoid 94 percent of current commuter gasoline requirements (97 percent if 1/4 of the  workers can recharge at their workplace), and probably more  than 93 percent overall.

Project Better Place model car
model car project better place photo

That range will likely be 50 miles in the near  future, which would avoid 96 percent and 98 percent respectively.  Regardless, it’s clear that any liquid fuel  requirements of a plug-in fleet can be met entirely by ethanol.  Since ethanol is more carbon neutral that typical electrical  power, Agassi’s scheme is inferior in carbon emissions, although,  quite frankly, any differences between the two systems is  insignificant and unimportant –– both will achieve far more than  is required. 

Agassi has simply not produced a viable, or even defensible  technology for the electrification of the fleet. The idea of swappable batteries is old and just as harebrained now as it was when it was first suggested decades ago....And when  batteries become quickly rechargeable, Agassi’s entire trillion  dollar system becomes instantly obsolete, whereas the current system we have would simply find gas stations swapping out gas pumps for charging posts as the demand irrevocably shifts from gasoline to  electricity.

And since a very large portion of the electricity  used to fill those batteries will come from household outlets,  a great many of the gas stations today will disappear, making  the transportation fueling system even more efficient.

Illustration of fueling stations

shai agassi project better place image