It was President George W. Bush who said in his 2006 State of the Union address that America needed to end its addiction to oil. Ever since the president lined up on oil addiction, politicians have been arguing about how to rehabilitate an oil-addicted America. The private sector is pouring money into alternative energy such as flood waters on broken dams.
Meanwhile, some of the solutions have been somewhat hasty, if not misguided. An example is the ethanol rush, which drove up the price of corn along with all corn-derived items. In fact, one could argue that all food prices have gone up as an indirect result of corn-based ethanol’s solution to “petroleum” in America (petroleum addiction). In my home country of Liberia, the price of rice has more than doubled, thanks to biofuels’ solution to our energy needs. 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 vie for the oil replacement spot: wind power, solar power, hybrid technology, hydrogen fuels, and the all-electric vehicle.
Speaking of the electric car, a businessman named Shay Agassi was on The Dennis Miller Show on August 5, 2008, promoting his project to mass produce electric cars. Mr. Agassi claims to have raised more than $200 million, the largest raise for any startup in recent memory.
Previously, Shay was President of the Product & Technology Group (PTG). He stepped down from that position on March 28 effective April 1, 2007, to pursue his interests in alternative energy and climate change. In October 2007, he founded a company called Project Better Place, with a focus on architecture Green transportation infrastructure based on electric vehicles as an alternative to current fossil fuel technology” (Wikipedia).
The Best Place project will adopt the mobile industry strategy: build infrastructure first; Then build the product. The construction of the infrastructure will cost $100 billion. This amount is equal to what the United States spends on oil supplies for two months.
Unlike oil, which is produced from only one source (fossil fuels), scientists know how to generate electrons from various sources: coal, dam, solar, wind, etc. Any electricity generated from any of these sources can be used to run the electricity. vehicles.
You see how the success of electric cars could mean the end of the gasoline industry. Is this drastic or what? No, really, would such a solution be an overkill? How many oil companies and employees would lose their jobs for these electric cars? Let’s hope the oil companies are quick enough to make the switch from fossil fuels to electrons, or else we might be looking at a depression when electric cars first take over from our gas consumers. Well, of course, the global economy will bounce back, depending on how quickly the oil gorillas and oil addicts rise from their slumber to go from “big oil” to “magnificent electric power.”
Project Better Place will partner with automakers Renault and Nissan to build electric cars. They will start testing 50 cars. By 2010, they will manufacture 500 electric cars. If successful, it will enter mass production mode, with tens of thousands of electric vehicles to hit the streets.
Starting in Israel, Project Better Place will build swap/charging stations, like gas stations, where electric vehicle drivers can recharge or swap their batteries. If the plan works in Israel, Better Place will replicate the process in Denmark. The company chose Israel and Denmark as its electric guinea pigs, because these countries are, according to Shay Agassi, “islands of transportation.”
This businessman speaks with such unquestionable confidence that he makes listeners feel that his solution to oil-dependent transportation is a sure thing. He claims that making electric cars is actually the easy part; They already have the technology. He says building electric vehicle stations is really the biggest challenge. Once that is done, electric cars will begin flooding the planet in the same way that cell phones covered the Earth from Europe to Africa, and from Asia to America, as soon as satellite signals and other devices become available.
After Dennis Miller interviewed Shay Agassi, my only question was, “Where am I going to get some serious money to invest in Better Place on the ground level, so I can join the existing ranks of alternative car millionaires?”
Another question: will it cost less than half a tank of gas to swap or charge an e-car battery? It better be! What we need is not just an end to oil addiction but a sobriety plan that won’t cost us the same as our current addiction. If not, we’d be better off remaining petroleum addicts, especially if we could supply medicine from our own soil.
So, depending on the cost to the consumer, in the next few years, we might just say, “Give me that lithium-ion battery,” or, “Hand me another drink~ I mean a tank of gas, and make that plain unleaded with Techron.”
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