Replacing Oil Blog

An electric car network in Hawaii

Nothing renews my faith in the America’s ability to move forward more than an individual state’s move forward instead of waiting for someone in D.C. to fix everything. It’s state autonomy that allows a massive country like the U.S. to move forward despite a lumbering behemoth in Washington, case in point Hawaii’s plans for building an electric car network to reduce reliance on foreign oil and reduce CO2 emissions. Earlier this week Hawaii Governer Linda Lingle unveiled a plan to bring the Better Place electric car network to Hawaii.

Shia Agassi and project better place

Project Better Place began more than a year ago as a concerted effort between automobile manufacturers and power grid operators to provide a chance for electric cars to make a real impact. A solution that Israeli Shai Agassi came up with for his home country that effectively solves the biggest problems with electric vehicles, price and range. While a large state like Montanna might never be able to make much use of the Better Place model, denser populated urban centers are going to be hearing a lot more about electronic vehicle networks in the very near future.

Not just a car but a service network

Cheap to operate EVs are exactly what the majority of people in urban centers, but who wants to spend a fortune on a car that only gets you to work and back? EVs have been around for nearly a century (really they have) but their limited range compared with combustion engines has kept them a novelty instead of the transportation standard.

What if you could fully charge your EVs battery every time it got low in the same amount of time it took to fill up with gas?

That’s the question Shia Agassi floated around and the response was overwhelmingly positive. Instead of waiting for better battery technology he adopted the business model that works so well for cellular phone service providers. Instead of building antennas the Better Place electric car network intends to have battery swapping stations in evenly spaced locations throughout urban areas. Limited range and charging time problems are solved.

For example: You charge your vehicle overnight at home and leave for work or a weekend holiday the next morning. After 70-80 miles when the battery is low you stop into a swapping station and in minutes you’re back on the road with a fully charged battery.

T. Boone Pickens has already met personally with both presidential candidates to discuss the Pickens Plan. For those of you yet unfamiliar with the plan the main points are 1. replace natural gas used for electricity production with wind turbines and 2. use natural gas for transportation. It is a solid, well thought out plan that can save America hundreds of billions on foreign oil imports.

One of the main points T. Boone discussed with Sarah Palin was the huge impact alone that could be made by converting over the road trucks to run on natural gas instead of diesel. Simply converting one million trucks to natural gas would reduce our imports of foreign diesel by 40%.

Boone says he spoke with Palin for nearly an hour, but she of course gave no commitment. She appeared impressed that the Pickens Plan has nearly reached it’s goal of 1,000,000 supporters. I’m surprised she wasn’t more enthusiastic about the project to replace oil with natural gas. After all Palin’s pipeline project sounds like it needs all the help it can get!

While Replacing Oil would like to see us move entirely away from fossil fuels altogether we are a big supporter of the Pickens Plan for one very important reason. It’s is the only plan that can significantly reduce America’s dependance on foreign oil quickly. Allow T.Boone himself to elaborate:

I’ve hardly given half-a-turd’s notice to Keith Olbermann since he left soprtscenter half a lifetime ago. Mostly because I haven’t been living in the US. In November 2000 I held a ticket to S. Korea in my hand and vowed, albeit half heartedly, never to return if W. was elected. Well he was and I haven’t.
I grew up in Detroit and I can tell you that anybody who claims, “U.S.A. is the greatest country on Earth” has never lived outside of it’s borders or doesn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Thank you Keith for deciding to end your career at MSNBC on such a high note:

If you’re intelligent enough to read this blog I probably don’t need to remind you of the fact that Barack Obama tried to increase the amount of troops in Afghanistan, where Osama Bin Laden was, while The old man from Arizona voted against it in order to afford more no bid contracts to corporations in Iraq.
Again, Keith Olbermann, thank you for ending your career at a major cable news channel, MSNBC, with a tone of truth.
P.S. I’ve been trying to find any criticism to your insight, however unbridled, and I can’t. The right must all be knee deep in Smear-Obama-Muck.

The Pickens Plan to shuffle our resource usage in order to free America from it’s addiction to foreign oil is picking up steam. Now with over a million members it’s got some political power as well.

T. Boone has recently met with both presidential candidates about the plan. They have no choice now, but to take the former oilman seriously. Energy policy is a huge issue this election and the Pickens Plan website has over 4 million visitors. They’ve got to act interested!

Not only do the candidates take the plan seriously, a national poll shows that most (almost three quarters) Americans believe that it’s possible to completely cut dependance on foreign oil within 10 years. Interesting enough though most Americans have no faith in COngress or the Senate to allow the plan to succeed. Shocking.

I love NYTimes op-ed sometimes. After dubbing to Israeli visionary Shai Agassi as “The Jewish Henry Ford” Thomas L. Friedman heaps some well deserved praise for the efforts of “The Jewish Henry Ford” and the Pickens Plan’s efforts to loosen their respective countries from foreign oil dependence.

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.

Breifly, Shai Agassi is pushing a innovative electric car opperator network, called Project Better Place. The idea is to offer cheap, mass produced electric cars with a network of recharging outlets and even battery exchanges. Those services will be offered in scaled plans for consumers like your mobile phone company with distance instead of minutes. It’s catching on, Gordon Brown is pledging a few quid to make Britan “the European capital for electric cars.”

What about those of us that live in big countries?

T. Boone and the Pickens Plan, on the other hand, is firing at the same target with different ammunition. He too realizes that America’s $700 billion a year addiction to foreign oil is very large monkey to carry on our backs (it’s late, I can’t stop with the imagery). A nationwide electric car operator network as effective as the one proposed by Shia Agassi’s Project Better Place is just not going be an easy sell. He didn’t become a billionaire by ignoring straight economics in favor of lofty ideals.

In a nutshell, the Pickens Plan aims at adding a ton of energy created by enormous wind farms to electrical power grids. The added wind energy should then allow us to shift our ample natural gas resources away from electricity generation into transportation. Every time I think of Pickens and his plan I picture him smirking as he draws a cigar to his lips with his leather gloved hand and telling the nation how he loves it when a plan comes together.

True, natural gas is a fossil fuel that adds CO2 to the atmosphere, but it’s a lot cleaner and cheaper than gasoline. It’s also not so difficult to have existing cars fitted for CNG, at least not here in Thailand (where I’ve been residing for the last several years).

Here at Replacing Oil we think that hydrogen and fuel cell vehicles are the way forward. However, if I had to choose between the Pickens Plan very likely materializing during the Obama Administration or a hazy hydrogen future (despite it’s obvious posibility), I’ll take the Pickens Plan. He’s got enough money and political attention to nudge the lumbering behemouth that is America’s transportation system in the right directions. Just don’t expect Gordon Brown to discard their blossoming EV ambitions for Wind and Gas. The relationship just isn’t that special anymore.