Newsmaker: Getting charged up over service stations

Swap and go.

That's the business plan behind Project Better Place, an electric-car infrastructure effort headed up by former SAP executive Shai Agassi. The organization wants to set up service stations where electric-car drivers can pull up, replace their batteries, and then drive another 150 miles or so before needing a recharge.

The plan ameliorates two big problems for electric cars: the long charge time and the limited range. Drivers wouldn't have to buy their batteries either, according to Agassi. They would lease them for a fee that would come to about what they would ordinarily spend on gas. That solves a third problem: the high cost of batteries.

But the service station model also depends on the cooperation of car and battery makers, component standardization, the willing help of governments and utilities, and a desire among consumers to buy electric cars. Some of these goals will be easier than others. The world will see how it works when the first stations open up in 2008.

In the meantime, Agassi this week announced $200 million in private venture capital from several backers, including Edgar Bronfman Jr. Agassi spoke with CNET News.com about his new career, cutting down on greenhouse gases, and rolling up his sleeves to look under the hood.

Q: In your own words, what are you trying to achieve?
Agassi: Well, we're trying to achieve a world that does not depend on oil, does not pollute cities, and does not change the climate on the planet. I think we have a situation today where we've run out of oil and we're running a very uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we've figured out how to live on.

We're trying to achieve a world that does not depend on oil, does not pollute cities and does not change the climate on the planet.

We think that if you do it correctly, this is probably the biggest economic opportunity of the century. We're looking at about $6 trillion to $10 trillion a year spent around that problem, and our investors are very excited about getting into this opportunity at the beginning of what would probably be the next generation of personal transport.

People have tried electric cars before and the results haven't been great. When you look back at those earlier electric cars, even some of the ones coming out now, what have the chief problems been?
Agassi: I think the attempt to try and solve the entire problem by only working within the car itself is the fundamental problem. That was the fundamental element that was breaking the business of these corporations. If you think of putting a battery that only lasts for 200 charge cycles and goes for 70 miles on the charge--which is where the EV1 failed--that's not economically sustainable. If you have a battery that costs $10,000 and lasts for 14,000 miles, your cost of the battery is now 70 cents per mile.

You're trying to get a market where it's 5 cents a mile on gasoline. Why would anybody want a battery that costs 75 cents per mile? Luckily in the last 10 years, two things have happened. One, the price of oil went up from $10 a barrel to $93 a barrel today. Two, the technology in batteries allows us now to go on the same battery for 200,000 miles, not 20,000 miles. So the same $10,000 now actually takes you at 5 cents a mile, which before it took you 75 cents a mile. So, suddenly we've got an interesting situation: this technology that was more expensive before is actually the saner, cheaper, and cleaner solution.

You're also getting around the charge time issue too. Right now, electric cars take a few hours to charge. You're proposing building service stations where you go in, the spent battery gets dropped out, and a new battery gets popped in. You're charged right away with a new battery. It's similar to what they have in some municipal bus services.
Agassi: That's absolutely right. You've seen it in mini buses, but we suggested dual model. In the normal mode, you will charge your car when you stop it and park it, and go do whatever you do and you do it. I mean you come home at night, you park your car. You don't care what it does at night, right?

Then what's your infrastructure plan?
Agassi: We're looking at a number of transportation islands around the world as the first places to test. We're coming in and putting infrastructure, which is this combination of the charging spots in parking lots and buildings as well as these battery switch points where you're able to, as you said, drop a battery and put a full one back in. In our model you never own the battery, you never buy the battery, you never pay for the battery. It's just part of the infrastructure and you basically pay for it just like you do with gasoline.

What we offer you is something that other people cannot, which is I can give you a fixed price contract for your energy for driving for the next any number of years. I bet you that if we went down on the streets in San Francisco and you asked 10 people on the street, "Do you think the price of gasoline will go up or down in the next five years?" I know what they would say.

Oh, You could go anywhere and they say the same thing: up.
Agassi: That's the point. That's the price you're going to pay for a month, that's it.

Do you have islands lined up where you will go first?
Agassi: We've talked to about 15 countries so far, and we're getting great reception. We haven't announced the countries. Some of these are virtual islands, some of these are physical islands, I mean if you think about it, Hawaii is perfect...You've got places like Denmark, Israel, Hong Kong. I mean, there are a variety of different places around the world...If you look at these places, they are virtual transportation islands. Most of them are already set up in a way that will let you come in and plug into the grid. We don't need to start in Texas; we can start in Manhattan.

More Newsmakers

[Manhattan2]

Batteries are not the answer. We have been working on this for a decade.

The answer will be Hydrogen (H2). This rapid change type of system has been part of our system from the beginning. We must be careful with batteries on the landfill dilemmas and dangerous metals? Our Solar Transfer solution solves this problem with H2. We have the energy, we have the mobile fuel carrier. Now all we need is someone to understand our work. To get our Energy Manifesto when it is released email us at [e-mail] . or visit solartransfer.com

[jlfelder]

Hydrogen NOT the Answer

Hydrogen is just a poor, difficult to handle energy transportation device. It is not a fuel. If you have a megawatt of electrical energy you can use that energy to generate hydrogen or you can use it to charge a battery. If you pick to generate hydrogen you will only get about 32% of that energy actually to the drive motor in the car with hydrogen. The rest of the energy is lost in electrolysis (70% efficient), compression of the H2 (90% efficient), and fuel cell losses (50% efficiency).

But take that same 1 megawatt of electrical power and use it to charge a battery, you get 85% of that energy delivered to the drive motor in the car. The only losses are charger losses (92% efficiency) and charge/discharge losses in the battery (93% efficiency).

It doesn't matter to the drive motor in the car where the electricity came from. The electricity coming out of a battery is just the same as what comes out of a fuel cell. And it doesn't matter what the original source of the electricity is, be it solar, nuclear, or nasty ol' coal, once you have generated electricity, keep it there. It make absolutely no sense to store and transport that energy as hydrogen gas.

And none of this even touches on the fact that the infrastructure for hydrogen generation, transportation and storage will take billions to build out while we already have the electrical distribution infrastructure already in place.

85% overall system efficiency for batteries versus 30% for hydrogen, which would you pick.

[bschmidt25]

Power Generation

What about generating the power? It's all well and good to say you're going to put up power charging stations all over so you can promote clean air, etc. But power (in most places) is still being generated by coal. Are you really helping the cause if you're increasing coal emissions because of this?

Same thing with hybrids. Sure - you're saving gas and lowering emissions. But what happens when these cars are at the end of their life and we have to start worrying about disposing of 500 pound batteries?

Sometimes these kinds of ideas are very short sighted.

[Clouseau2]

Slow down there cowboy

The battery pack weight on the Prius is just 45 kg, which is 100 pounds. And they haven't switched to lithium ion yet, that will reduce weight even further.

Note that's just a little over twice the weight over a standard car battery, and both can be recycled.

And the Toyota battery lasts 150,000 miles, which a standard car battery does not.

So, what's the problem again?

[jlfelder]

We have to decouple cars from a single energy souce

We need to decouple our cars from a single souce of energy. Right now our cars are completely tied to fossil fuels to power them. Run out of oil and we stop driving. Biofuels are just a small assist to try to stretch out the time before we run out of oil. There is no way we could grow enough biofuels and still have any farm land left over to grow food.

So we need to power our cars with an energy source that can come from lots of sources so that we can move them from one to the next without having to completely reinventing and reinvesting in our cars and fuel distribution infrastructure each time we change the base source of our transportation energy.

Electricity meets that requirement. If we went with battery electric vehicles, it wouldn't matter what the source of that electricity is. Our cars would be decoupled from the original source of energy.

It is true that coal generates a lot of the electricity in this country and as such CO2 emissions could actually go up with electric vehicles, at least in the short term. But by decoupling our transportation from the base energy source, we can gradually replace coal with more environmentally friendly sources without any having to reinvent our transportation infrastructure with each change in energy source.

Eventually it would be nice if we had fully sustainable sources of energy and didn't have to burn coal, oil or natural gas, but we don't have to totally get there before we start transitioning our transportation infrastructure.

[FRE0]

It's about time

I thought of this years ago. It's so obvious that I don't
understand why it has not been proposed before.

Cars and batteries would have to be standardized to make it
possible. If the number of standardized battery types were kept
to 6 or so, it should be practical. The batteries could be
recharged at home except when taking a trip beyond the 100 -
200 mile range of the batteries, in which case the batteries
would be exchanged at a service station.

This would reduce pollution since, although pollution would be
produced at the power plants, it could be better controlled there
than at individual cars. Also, the over-all efficiency would be
much greater since internal combustion engines are much less
efficient than the combination of electric motors, batteries, and
power plants, even if the power plants burn coal. Because the
batteries could be recharged off-peak, when surplus generating
capacity is available, our present electrical generating capacity is
sufficient.

We currently import about 60% of our oil, much of it from
nations not especially friendly to us. That is driving our foreign
policy to a considerable degree. Moreover, if a significant
portion of that oil were cut off, we would be in real trouble; it is
a considerable threat to national security. Electric cars would
solve that problem by reducing our dependence on imported oil.

There are those who say that we could eliminate our dependence
on imported oil by developing more domestic oil fields. That is
not true! Even if we developed all our potential oil fields, they
would last for only a very limited period of time. Moreover, new
oil fields are much more difficult to get to.

Hydrogen will not be practical for the forseeable future.
Producing hydrogen is not energy efficient. There are serious
problems transporting and storing it. Also, current fuel cells are
extremely expensive and have a very limited life. Much of this
could possibly eventually change, but probably not for at least
20 years.

Battery electric cars can be made practical now and will improve
in the future as battery technology advances. In fact, as battery
technology improves, older batteries could be replaced by the
newer batteries without making significant modifications to cars.

This proposal should be implemented.

[DatabaseDoctor]

Perfect solution

We've been discussing an idea like this at work for a while now and think its the future and an easy future at that.

Gas stations are retrofitted/converted/enhanced into Battery stations. Think propane exchange tanks. You "own" the tank but wouldn't it be nicer/easier to trade it in for a full one and not deal with the purge/fill process where you don't know the condition of your tank/quality of gas/quantity of gas? Just choose from one of several exchange depots and you're off and cooking.

Now its electric batteries. The Battery Station has the investment of hardware to safely charge over time, fully charged inventory to exchange on demand and test each battery for safety. No more gas spills, hazardous fumes, etc. We produce energy much cheaper in the form of generating electricity than your car does burning fossil fuels. So switch to an exchange model and everyone wins.

Key to making this work is standardized batteries so that every car can go to any battery station and exchange. You don't have to decide on gas stations because your car doesn't run on their type of fuel. We expect the same for the batteries. Standard size will help make this succeed.

Also, we might not want to think about one big battery. Why not many small ones so that you eliminate the single point of failure? This also affords you the ability to "top off" the tank by exchanging one or two cells instead of the entire tank? Think about running out of juice on the highway and having to lug a fifty pound battery to your car. Why not bring back a five pound cell that will get you to the next battery station and then fill up all the way.

This is the future! Electricity is the source of power to move us as it moves our data/information. Hydrogen cells have safety/delivery issues that this model avoids entirely. Besides, hydrogen cells are there to generate electricity... let's just have the electricity straight up!

Good job!

[inachu]

This is so bad!

Water has a much more brighter future than any other fuel in the world put together and no rainforest needs to be knocked down to do this!

Splitting water into hydrogen is so simple!

The refuseniks refuse to publish any real scientific reports as it scares them that this would mean free energy for the world and BIG OIL does not want this at all.

[Clouseau2]

No it's not

Electrolysis to generate hydrogen is much less efficient than direct electric.

We already have an electric infrastructure.

Fuel cell cars cost $1,000,000 each and we don't have enough platinum to make a big fleet of them.

Battery technology is improving so rapidly, much faster than fuel cell technology, and with electric cars we can put solar panels on our homes and never go to a gas station again!

[jlfelder]

Remove Charging Rate Limits, Not Avoid Them

This is an interesting concept, but it might already be moot. This approach is predicated on side stepping the slow recharge issue of current batteries by simply swapping them out. But the slow recharge issue may have already been solved.

The AltairNano Lithium-ion battery replaces the recharge rate limiting portion of current generation Li-ion batteries, the carbon anode, with a Lithium-Titanium-Oxide anode that can take a charge 20 to 30 times faster without damage or fire risk.

A ten minute recharge time has already been demonstrated on a 35 KWh battery pack. If I can bring my car into a recharging station and only spend 10-15 minutes there, that would be acceptably close to the 5-10 minutes most people currently spend refueling their cars.

And this battery recharges without the distortion that causes carbon anodes to crumble after 500 or so cycles. AltairNano has cells that have gone through 15,000 cycles and are still above 80% capacity. That is 1.8 MILLION miles on a battery pack in a car with a 120 mile range. So rather than lease a battery pack from this company and have the right to swap it out daily at one of there battery exchange station, I might invest in a set of AltairNano batteries and have that set installed in each new car I buy for the rest of my life.

So the infrastructure that I would rather see being considered is one that deploys the very specialized high power rechargers in places like a long interstates where I might drive further than in a day than one battery charge. True there are safety issues with these rechargers that have to be addressed. They might not be something that can be self-service. It might require trained personel to safely recharge a car at these voltages and current levels. But then again the battery swapping idea isn't something that I am going to be doing myself either.

[texaslabrat]

Mistake?

While it's true that a field full of parabolicly-concentrated PV arrays is more efficient than arrays put on rooftops on a watt/square meter basis...what you (and the good folks at Solar Transfer) are missing is the fact that having such a dedicated swathe of land for said field of concentrated PV cells is not free. Rooftops, generally speaking, are "free" land with which to place PV panels (ie no upfront cost is required to secure access to the rooftop with exception to the cost of the panel and the labor for installation). In addition, there are very large efficiencies to be realized by having the power generation at the same location as consumption, which the field of concentrated PV will lose out on (power transmission lines typically lose something on the order to 30% to Ohmic heating). So, couple the huge upfront capital cost of securing large chunks of land with the inefficiencies of transporting the power over long distances..the roof top plan doesn't look so bad after all. Not only that, but a properly designed rooftop panel actually provides a measure of "shade" for the underlying house, further reducing its air-con requirements and thus contributes to conservation (conservation being a 100% efficient form of energy production on the balance sheet).

[texaslabrat]

wrong thread

my previous comment was addressed to this post:
http://www.news.com/5208-11392_3-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=32490&messageID=328646&start=0

[jlfelder]

After More Thought, This Is A Bad Idea

I thought more about this idea of swapping out batteries rather than recharging them and I think this is a bad idea. The primary negative is that you are only leasing your batteries and that ties you to this one particular company. It would be like signing a contract with Shell and being able to only refuel at Shell stations whenever you needed gas, even if it meant driving past numerous other gas stations to do so. Here you could only exchange batteries at one company's exchange stations. You can't pull into Bob's Battery Exchange and give Ol' Bob the batteries currently in your car in exchange for Bob's batteries because those batteries actually belong to Mr. Aggassi.

So you become dependent on this one company. I suppose that if batteries installations become truly standardized, then I could return Mr. Aggassi's batteries and lease a new set of batteries from Bob so I can use his battery exchange stations. But that is a very different proposition than just driving past Shell to the Sunoco station because Sunoco has gas at 5 cents less a gallon today, but going to Shell next week because they are now the cheaper.

Very much the same business model used by SAP. Get companies to enmesh SAP onto their most core business process and then use the investment in custom programming required to adapt SAP to a particular business to make the exit cost so high that it is prohibitive to switch, thereby guaranteeing a steady revenue stream. Great for SAP, bad for those who would like flexibility to change. So it isn't terribly surprising that this battery exchange idea is being proposed by a former SAP executive.

[bluemist9999]

Has its pros and cons

I think it's good to get us past relying on gas for transportation. There is only so much oil in the ground, and I don't see it getting cheaper to get more.

However, this only shifts the pollution and energy generating burden to the power companies. It doesn't reduce it.

But it is a good first step---it will make replacing our energy sources that much easier, assuming we live long enough to accomplish it.

[Steve Jordan]

Actually, it does reduce it.

Electric generating plants, even those run on coal, are far less polluting as a unit than an equivalent number of cars producing the same amount of energy from gasoline. The more vehicles we convert from gas to electric, no matter where you get that electric from, we're better off.