Today Thomas Friedman takes from Texas to Tel Aviv.
What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of “Dallas” and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club? You’d get T. Boone Pickens. What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin? You’d get Shai Agassi. And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world’s leader in electric cars?
You’d have the start of an energy revolution.
The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power. Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai.
I could do without Friedman’s cute characterizations of each. I’m also not impressed by his premise that government ought to be doing more or his characterization of us being “addicted” to oil. (Agassi uses the term too.) In fact rather than looking at alternative energy technology as “the only good thing” to from rising oil prices, look at it as a sign of the entrepreneurial spirit. I realize that the effect is the same, but the vantage is different. Friedman sees this as a sign of a failure of government; I see it as a (possible) triumph of private initiatives.
Still Shai Agassi would likely approve of the comparison to T. Boone Pickens as indicated in his blog.
Electric cars and windmills are the most complementary products in the green world. Windmills generate a lot more energy at night, as wind picks up when the air cools down. Unfortunately, when you get a lot of wind most people are asleep and the electricity needs to be rerouted elsewhere. Cars are parked at night waiting to get electricity into the batteries – which is a perfect match to the electricity profile of wind generation.
Business Week has more on how Project Better Place got rolling:
The high-risk plan came together through an unusual collection of business and government leaders. Former software executive Shai Agassi, chief executive of Better Place, conceived the plan. He was formerly a top executive at German software giant SAP (SAP). Israel President Shimon Peres got behind it. Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert initiated policy and tax changes to favor green vehicles. Carlos Ghosn, chairman of Renault and Nissan, saw it as a stepping stone into alternative-fuel cars. And Idan Ofer, chairman of holding company Israel Corp., the largest oil refiner in Israel, backed the project with more than $100 million of the $200 million in the first round of funding for the project.
Until now, Nissan and Renault had been among the laggards in alternative-fuel research. While rivals Toyota and Honda pioneered hybrid technologies, Nissan and Renault held back. Now, the two companies are placing bets on all-electric technology. In fact, Ghosn says that as a result of this project the Nissan-Renault Alliance has made electric autos its top priority. The companies expect to initially produce electric cars for Israel and other countries by adapting some of their current models, and to eventually introduce new models designed from the ground up to run on batteries. “This is a unique situation,” Ghosn says of the Israel project. “It’s the first mass marketplace for electric cars under conditions that make sense for all the parties.”
Israel sees a shift away from gasoline engines as vital to its economic and security. To encourage the purchase of green vehicles, the country just boosted the sales tax on gasoline-powered cars to as much as 60% and pledged to buy up old gas cars to get them off the road. “I believe Israel should go from oil to solar energy,” says Peres. “Oil is the greatest problem of all time–the great polluter and promoter of terror. We should get rid of it.”
OK, so it’s not all private initiative.
Anyway for more on how Project Better Place views themselves, check out their website and/or promotional video.
For more on how electric cars would work and the technical issues that need to be resolved check this out.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
