Israel to Get Electric Car Battery Swap Stations
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
http://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html
by the Better Place CEO Shai Agassi.
Unlike gasoline where we own the fuel in our car, it actually makes better sense for the batteries in our car to be a service. Every "gas station" just acts as a dead battery replacement depot.
The only bottleneck I can see with this model is the depot's recharging units. If too many people show up at the same time, there may not be enough stock of charged batteries to go around.
On Top Gear UK a few years ago, Jay Leno was interviewed and he made a point about the viability of electric cars. Paraphrasing, he said that until electric cars can recharge as fast as a gasoline car (i.e.: 5 minutes to pump fuel into a car) the electric car is always going to lag behind fossil fuel vehicles.
BetterPlace is at least a step in the right direction.
There is somewhat prior art in the US. Blue Rhino[1] rents propane tanks. You buy one for $40 or so, or you switch out your empty for a full one for (I think, it's been awhile) ~$15 or so.
"If too many people show up at the same time, there may not be enough stock of charged batteries to go around."
That could theoretically happen with gas, too. Which is why there can be a warehouse connected directly to [insert incumbent renewable or dirty electricity provider here] that charges these swappable batteries 24/7, loads them on trucks and "refuels" the charging stations. The station itself likely doesn't even have to provide charging facilities at all and can go on selling Twizzlers and Funyuns to munchied travelers passing through.
This could actually be a selling point for electric cars. Once standard battery specifications are agreed upon, there's no reason the engineering couldn't get good enough to swap batteries in under a minute.
Blue Rhino works because propane is a commodity and no-one is really shopping for larger quantities of propane, or the ability to put the same amount of propane into smaller vessels. But batteries for electric cars are still undergoing massive innovation; not only in capacity, but in charge/discharge rates (for more-efficient capturing via regenerative braking and more-efficient transfer to the motors).
If Better Place is charging a flat-rate by the mile, what incentive do they have to offer better batteries? Their profit motive would seem to skew heavily toward freezing the characteristics of the launch-packs and running with that as long as possible; allowing improvements to feed their profit margin up until the moment of customer revolt (should that happen).
Allowing people to pay more to 'upgrade' to larger capacities or 'performance' packs would add to the inventory they need to keep on hand at their swap stations and complicate the process.
I guess my concern is that this plan reads as a bold bet that contemporary 100-mile pack performance is good enough.
And truly this isn't a question of servicing most people's daily commute, which I believe is under 30 miles for most everyone most everywhere. But when calculating the hassle involved in taking such a car on weekend trips or vacations, I don't know if 100-miles is going to cut it. Particularly as battery estimates tend to be fair-weather estimates, and the longer trips tend to be highway trips at speeds sub-optimal for efficiency.
Will people put up with stopping every sixty or seventy minutes for a 'swap'?
I know it seems silly to think about the annoyances of trips taken maybe a dozen times a year. But consumers are not always rational. In the end, 100 miles and recharging every hour may not wind up attracting more customers than the existing 40 to 50-mile range electrics.
Competition is the thing that's supposed to encourage improvement - if Better Place can actually make it work, competitors will presumably get funded. It's not just actual competitors, but also potential competitors. A danger then is an oligopoly (where competitors work in concert; a virtual monopoly. Adam Smith has a saying that men of the same trade seldom meet without a scheme to defraud the public being hatched).
But they do have some motivation: more efficient batteries would use less electricity (cost) but give the same kilometers (revenue); fewer changeovers would increase consumer usage (more revenue), and make it attractive to the next segment of the population (more users) - and, perhaps especially, make it viable for larger cities/countries where a greater range is needed to attract even a sliver of early-adopters.
NOTE: Battery tech does improve, but really slowly. It's the least of their problems. funfact: electric vehicles were actually in use about 100 years ago, and edison (for one) was involved in improving battery tech.
I was surprised to hear Better Place described as a California startup: Shai Agassi is an Israeli entrepreneur; almost all Israelis can describe Better Place, but no one knows the company is incorporated in the states.
Better Places is headquartered in Palo Alto.
I remember reading the story a while back and Isreal is just the first place they are running the experiment due to its size and government acceptance to the idea. But the goal is to deploy the cars in as many countries as possible:
"Better Place says it intends to expand into markets where the business model economics and investor returns are “optimized”, citing Europe and Asia specifically. "
They have more strategic reasons than most countries to minimize their dependence on oil.
You generally don't need lots of waste heat from the engine for 6months of the year.
Very nice to see this sort of development, regardless of where it happens.