It was President George W. Bush who said in his 2006 State of the Union speech that America needed to end her addiction to oil. If any one knows addiction when he sees it, it is Mr. Bush, who was once addicted to alcohol or liquor. As Mr. Bush overcame his drunken ways, he wants the nation to become sober from petrol.
Ever since the president's oil addiction line, politicians have been arguing about how to rehabilitate America the oil addict. And the private sector has been pouring money into alternative energy like flood waters over broken levees.
Meanwhile, some of the solutions have been a little too hasty, if not misguided. A case in point is the ethanol rush, which has sent the price of corn soaring along with all corn-derived items. In fact, one could argue that all food prices have gone up as an indirect result of the corn-based ethanol solution to America's "petrolism" (addiction to petroleum). In my native country of Liberia, the price of rice has more than doubled, thanks to the biofuel solution to our energy need. Talk about 'the law of unintended consequences'!
As we all know by now, other alternatives besides corn or biofuels have stepped up to the plate to contend for the oil replacement spot: wind power, solar energy, hybrid technology, hydrogen fuel, and the all-electric vehicle.
Speaking of the electric car, a businessman named Shai Agassi was on the Dennis Miller Show on August 5, 2008, touting his project to mass produce electric vehicles. Mr. Agassi claims to have raised more than $200 million, the largest for any startup company in recent memory.
“Previously, Shai was President of the Products and Technology Group (PTG). He resigned from this position on March 28 effective April 1st, 2007, to pursue interests in alternative energy and climate change. In October 2007 he founded a company named Project Better Place, focusing on a green transportation infrastructure based on electric cars as an alternative to the current fossil fuel technology” (source).
Project Better Place will adopt the strategy of the cell phone industry: build the infrastructure first; then build the product. It will cost $100 billion to put the infrastructure in place. That amount is equal to what the United States spends on two months' supply of petroleum.
Unlike oil, which is produced from just one source (fossil fuel), scientists know how to generate electrons from various sources: coal, dam, solar, wind, etc. And any electricity generated from any of these sources can be used to power electric vehicles.
You see how the success of electric vehicles could mean the end of the petrol industry. Is that drastic or what? No, really, will such a solution be overkill? How many petroleum companies and employees will lose their jobs for the sake of these electric vehicles? Let’s hope that oil companies will be swift enough to make the switch from fossil fuel to electrons, or else, we may be looking at an economic depression when the electric cars initially take over from our gas-guzzlers. Well, of course, the world economy would bounce back, depending on how quickly the petroleum gorillas and oil addicts rise from the slumber to make the transition from “big oil” to “brilliant electric”.
Project Better Place will partner with automobile companies Renault and Nissan to build the electric vehicles. They will start by testing 50 cars. By 2010, they will manufacture 500 electric cars. If successful, they will go into mass production mode, with tens of thousands of electric vehicles to hit the streets.
Starting with Israel, Project Better Place will build swap/charge stations, like filling stations, where drivers of electric cars can recharge their batteries or swap their batteries out. If the plan works in Israel, Better Place will repeat the process in Denmark. The company has selected Israel and Denmark to be the electric vehicle guinea pigs, because, according to Shai Agassi, these nations are "transportation islands".
This entrepreneur speaks with such doubt-free confidence that he makes listeners feel his solution to the oil-dependent transportation is a sure thing. He claims that making the electric cars is actually the easy part; they already have the technology in place. He says getting those electric car stations built is really the bigger challenge. Once that is done, electric vehicles will begin to flood the planet in the same way that cell phones have covered the earth from Europe to Africa, from Asia to America, once the satellite signals and other hardware was available.
After Dennis Miller's interview with Shai Agassi, my only question was, "Where will I get some serious money to invest in Better Place at the ground level, so I can join the current ranks of alternative vehicle multimillionaires?"
Another question: Will it cost less than half-a-tank of gasoline to swap or charge an electronic car's battery? Better be! What we need is not only an end to oil addiction but a sobriety plan that won't cost us the same as our current addiction. If not, then we would have been better off remaining petroleum addicts, especially if we could supply the drug from our own soil.
So, depending on cost to the consumer, in the next few years, we might just be saying, "Give me that li-ion battery," or, "Hand me another booze ~ I mean tank of gas, and make that regular unleaded with techron."
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