We first looked at Project Better Place back in April, when the Silicon Valley startup announced a partnership with Danish DONG Energy to establish an electric car network in Denmark.
The idea of Better Place is to provide a network of wind-powered recharging and “switching” stations for electrics cars – building an “electric car infrastructure”. That infrastructure consists of three key components other than the electric cars themselves (which will be manufactured by Renault-Nissan):
With successful partnerships reached earlier this year to launch the program in Denmark and Israel (for cars on the market by 2011), Better Place CEO Shai Agassi has announced a deal with Australia’s AGL Energy Ltd. and Macquarie Capital Group to raise A$1 billion ($670 million US) to develop the program in Australia, with the first mass-market cars expected to be available for the 2012 model year.
The virtual oil field
Agassi thinks of his concept as a “virtual oil field”, envisioning a transportation system free of fossil fuels and a business model based on a triple bottom line – plus one:
These “four pillars” represent the idea that a world free from oil is possible, and that in the process Better Place can help create a carbon free economy on a healthy and thriving planet.
The devil is, of course, in the details, and the there are bedeviling details to work out – not the least of which is the scalability of the concept.
But Australia, the 6th largest country in the world with 15 million cars on the road, is a good next step in assess the viability of the Better Place model.
The whole idea is crystallized in the name: Better Place.
Agassi has his skeptics, but he, his team and partners, work on the belief that creating a better place is possible.
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