Batteries Not Included

Shai Agassi is going to revolutionize the electric car infrastructure.

His two year old clean-energy company, Better Place, seeks contracts with various renewable energy sites (solar power arrays in Israel, wind farms in Denmark) and connects these to a global network of battery charging spots, the electric equivalent of a gas station.

Despite their advantage of little or no CO₂ production, electric cars have suffered from an issue of refueling. The longest-driving electric car on the market, the Tesla Roadster, can run for 250 miles before needing to recharge. Unfortunately, to recharge this battery, it takes about two hours. Not many people are going to want a vehicle that has 2 hours downtime for every 100 miles driven (it's preferable to recharge before you run out of fuel entirely). Agassi's revolutionary step was to remove the battery from the car altogether.

Why should a battery be a permanent component of a car? Shai Agassi believes that electric cars should be as cheap and as easy to use as their gasoline-powered peers. Agassi's Better Place infrastructure enables people to drive up to a charging station where a robot would slip the battery out from below the car and replace it with a fully charged one. Payment works in much the same ways as a cell phone plan - you pay for the miles (the charge) that you use. Drivers can be in and out of the charge station in less than two minutes. The down time, waiting for the robot to switch out the batteries, is 45 seconds. It's just as fast, if not faster than topping up a tank of gas.

Better Place already has charge stations throughout Israel, the first nation to adopt this infrastructure. The US could see them appearing as soon as 2012 in the Bay Area, with Hawaii shortly after. It's an exciting concept: affordable, practical electric cars. Renault has put 1.5 billion dollars into building 9 different types of electric cars that will coordinate with the Better Place charge stations and swap sites.

Agassi's talk at the 2009 TED conference gives a fantastic treatment of the numbers for refueling occurrences. If you have charge stations everywhere and if you have swap stations everywhere, if turns out that you would swap your battery fewer times than you would stop at a gas station. According to Agassi, electric cars will be on the roads soon, greatly lessening our dependence on oil and driving a market for sustainable energy.