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"How can we make the world a better place? One electric car at a time."
That’s the driving force (if you’ll excuse the pun) behind a partnership between a Danish energy company and Silicon Valley startup Project Better Place, announcing their plan to establish an electric car network in Denmark powered through 20,000 wind powered recharging stations. The cars will be recharged at night, when wind turbines are spinning but demand on the grid is low. DONG Energy will work with Project Better Place in the project, set to start in 2011 at a cost of $42.3 million. CEO of DONG Energy Anders Eldrup said, "With this project, we hope to contribute substantially to reducing CO2 emissions from Danish cars."
The cars will be manufactured by Renault-Nissan using advanced lithium-ion battery packs produced in a joint venture by Nissan and NEC in Japan.
Project Better Place is the brainchild Israeli-American entrepreneur Shai Agassi, whose first project in Israel was announced last January.
Writing in his blog, Agassi likens the concept to a virtual oil field, "one that will never run dry, and will not kill us in the process..."
Project Better Place has secured $200 million in its first round of funding and plans on focusing on developing a repeatable model of establishing a grid of recharging stations powered by local operating companies. The company is currently talking with several governments in hopes of creating more pilot projects.
One electric car at at time.
Agassi's scheme would more accurately be named Project My Monopoly, or Project Costly Transportation. IThis scheme rests upon
the old idea that as long as you don't make something more expensive, you can make a very large profit. Electric propulsion can be cheap, but not using Agassi's braindead idea, which maximizes the costs of batteries and their recharging. The idea of using wind is to find some way that all those useless windmills can stop running giant govt deficits and actually produce some electricity at a time when someone
actually needs it. Unfortunately for all concerned, it looks like the EEStor devices have deep sixed Agassi's attempt to become a billionaire - his scheme is now, or soon will be, totally obsolete and irrelevant. Such is the fate
of bad schemes sometimes - they come to a bad end.
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at April 8, 2008 6:29 PMI still ascribe to the approach that FDR took when he was trying to get the country out of The Great Depression.
"Bold, consistent experimentation." This does seem like one of those ideas, and there's no reason why, at the very least, groups of people that live near wind farms shouldn't be able to make good use of this technology.
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