Better Place electric car experiment not in good place

Byoliveridley

You may have heard of Shai Agassi and Better Place (link’s to a TED talk, so you know he was important!), the car company that was going to revolutionize electric cars by separating the battery infrastructure from the car and setting up a number of battery swap stations. The goal was to remove “range anxiety” as batteries could be swapped out in 5 minutes or less. Their first experiment was in Israel and it appears to have not worked.

Why a Promising Electric Car Startup Failed – Yale E News

But such rosy projections never came close to materializing. One of the unexpected things to go wrong was that the company didn’t get much help from Israel. Although Shimon Peres, the former Israeli president, was an enthusiastic Better Place supporter, Israel — unlike the U.S. — provides no subsidies to EVs. Local authorities, whose permission was needed to build battery-switching stations, put up unexpected roadblocks

Not surprised one bit. System change requires institutional support.The status quo bias in favour of the current infrastructure is massive. Gasoline cars work well for people who drive cars, regardless of the expense, which is incremental, hence easily disregarded, or pollution concerns, which are unseen and to which people only have shallow affinities for. People don’t like uncertainty or novelty in routine. If we want to produce less pollution in travel, electric cars cannot just be plugged in to the current infrastructure. This quote from David Roberts of the Grist explains it well:

Lurking in the background is the notion that the “promise of electric cars” is false until an electric car can plop down in America’s current transportation system and do everything an internal-combustion-engine car can do. <snip> The problem, however, is not merely that our cars consume too much oil. It’s that our transportation system consumes too much oil. A better system won’t merely involve better cars, it will involve driving less, telecommuting more, using more public transportation, sharing cars, making cars smarter, and building more and better electrical infrastructure.

betterplace

The current infrastructure was built with sustained government support over decades and is propped up by trillions of dollars in taxes, subsidies to fossil fuel industry and such. It works for the people using it, if not for life on this planet in the long term. If I was driving, if my commute is 20 minutes, an electric car will still only take 20 minutes. If you’re stuck in traffic in a hellish commute, an electric car doesn’t help you at all. An electric car would save some money in the long run, but  no individual or market is going to build me a charging station in my apartment or workplace, or set up a range of battery swappers from scratch. 

Building a sustainable infrastructure is not something a market can do, or is designed to do. It will be up to us to visualize where we want to go, and spend the money, time and effort needed to make it happen. We are also up against a large and well established system that does not really want this change to happen, and has spent decades eroding trust in the institutions that would have to make this change happen.

Looking forward

What needs to happen for electric cars to be a small part of the solution? The larger part involves system change to reduce daily transport needs, de-emphasize private transport and encourage bike, bus train and walk. For cars to be a part of the solution:

  1. Governments/communities will need to build millions of charging stations (no, markets will not make this happen magically)
  2. Regulations must force electric car companies to provide standard battery replacement systems (imagine a different battery compartment for each battery operated appliance you own!)
  3. Gas stations may need to be retrofitted and eventually replaced with battery swap stations for longer distance private travel.
  4. We need to fund research in better electricity storage and continuous charging using existing road infrastructure.
  5. Money? The true social cost of carbon could be $250 a ton, BC’s carbon tax is at $30 a ton, clearly we are all free-riding. Carbon taxes, financial transaction fees, taxing the rich and more need to happen.

Are our governments and institutions up to this massive task?

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    The Environmental Protection Agency has moved to declare that greenhouse gases are pollutants that pose a danger to the public’s health and welfare. That determination, once made final, will pave the way for federal regulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

    via NY Times

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    There have been recent rumblings that the US Congress would shelve climate change for 2010. While this would please some Americans in the short term, the idea of the US going into the Copenhagen climate change conference without a GHG reduction plan out on the table leaves me very dispirited. The timing of the EPA’s announcement suggests that there might be some pressure from the EPA to get Congress to act. It is clear that the EPA does not have breadth of scope to pull of climate change regulation using a rule making process. Maybe if it starts trying, American politicians may get their act together.

    Clutching at straws…

  • Hansen on understating sea level rise due to climate change

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    Hansen, the grandfather of all climate research has an essay today in the open access journal Environmental Research Letters arguing that scientists are not communicating the seriousness of sea level rise. And, it is open access, so, no kidney sale required!

    Scientific reticence and sea level rise

    I suggest that a `scientific reticence’ is inhibiting the communication of a threat of a potentially large sea level rise. Delay is dangerous because of system inertias that could create a situation with future sea level changes out of our control. I argue for calling together a panel of scientific leaders to hear evidence and issue a prompt plain-written report on current understanding of the sea level change issue.

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    He finishes with a call to action.

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    In this circumstance it seems vital that we provide the best information we can about the threat to the great ice sheets posed by human-made climate change. This information, and appropriate caveats, should be provided publicly, and in plain language. The best suggestion I can think of is for the National Academy of Sciences to carry out a study, in the tradition of the Charney and Cicerone reports on global warming. I would be glad to hear alternative suggestions.

    Do we need another study? As we wait for the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study on how best to communicate the danger of sea level rise, many more villages in India and Bangladesh will go under the sea. Apparently, the sea cannot wait for the best communication strategies. It communicates the only way it can, directly!!

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  • The England Environment Minister Blogs

    Byoliveridley

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    Byoliveridley

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    On behalf of Michael Ignatieff, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent email regarding Bill C-311, The Climate Change Accountability Act.

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    The Liberals are taking the Harper Conservatives to task over their failure to commit to a principled environmental policy backed up by real action. We’re calling on the government to immediately put in place a national climate change plan with economy-wide regulations on emissions and strategic investments in renewable and clean energy.

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  • Coal Fired Power Plants – Moratorium needed

    Byoliveridley

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    Byoliveridley

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One Comment

  1. And before any of that infrastructure can or will change, the status quo must become unworkable, and not just from a policy or advocate perspective. It has to be perceived to be unworkable from the perspective of the redneck oil-rig worker from High River. Until even the most uninformed and unengaged see it as unworkable, it’s hard to see how meaningful change – paradigm shift kind of change – will happen. Right now we have the cake and are eating it too, and this kind of change means taking away one or the other.

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