Hawaii Is a Better Place for EVs

Hawaii Is a Better Place for EVs
By Ben Mack December 05, 2008 | 2:56:35 PMCategories: Electric Vehicles


Hawaii is the latest place to fall in love with EV evangelist Shai Agassi's plan to bring electric cars to the masses, inviting his startup to build as many as 100,000 charging spots across the state by 2012 and bring EVs into the mainstream.

The deal with Better Place makes Hawaii the first state to commit itself to electric cars on a broad scale and comes two weeks after several Northern California cities joined Better Place to make the San Francisco Bay Area "the EV capital of the U.S." Considering that General Motors, BMW, Nissan and Mitsubishi are among those aggressively developing cars with cords, it looks like automakers and policymakers are finally getting serious about moving us beyond oil.

"This is the preferred future," Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle said in announcing the deal with better Place. "Today is part of the execution of our energy independence, and our getting off the addiction to oil."

It's an ambitious goal, but when you think about it, Hawaii is the perfect place for EVs.

Hawaii joins Australia, Israel, Denmark and several Northern California locations in signing on with Better Place, which aims to revolutionize how we all get around. (Oregon is working with Nissan to roll out a fleet of EVs in 2010, but they'll be limited to municipal fleets to start.) In a nutshell, Agassi's idea is to bring the cellphone business model to the EV industry using a concept he calls the Electric Recharge Grid Operator.

The plan calls for building a network of "smart" charging spots. Drivers can plug in anywhere, anytime, and pay for it through a subscription much like a cell plan. They'd pay for unlimited miles, a fixed number of miles or opt to pay as they go. When customers can't wait to charge up, they can go to automated battery exchange stations where depleted batteries would be swapped for fresh ones in about the time it takes to fill a tank with gas. It wouldn't cost a cent because although customers would own the cars, the ERGO would own the batteries.

William Parks, a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy, calls the idea "really, really groundbreaking." And the bean counters at Deutsche Bank call Agassi's plan "a paradigm shift" and say, "looking at Better Place PLC's model, we conclude that a pure EV should not be more expensive than a gasoline/diesel vehicle."

Like Israel and Denmark, Hawaii is the perfect place for EVs. The island has more than 1.2 million cars and replaces between 70,000 and 120,000 of them each year. Yet most see no more than a few dozen miles a day. Hawaii is aggressively developing sustainable energy sources including wind, solar, geothermal and tidal, and it ranks fourth in the nation in use of renewable energy. And its electricity grid can easily handle the load — if every car in the state ran on electricity, it would require just 6 to 8 percent of the state's capacity.

"That's what makes it so attractive," says Peter Rosegg, a spokesman for Hawaiian Electric Co. "We're not going to need to rebuild the system."

Naysayers argue electric cars don't reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they just move them around because most of our electricity is generated at fossil fuel-fired power plants. Not so, says the Electric Power Research Institute and the National Resources Defense Council. Their research shows plug-ins and EVs could cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 450 million metric tons annually by 2050. That's the equivalent of eliminating 82.5 million gasoline vehicles — about one-third of the number currently on the road in America.

Hawaii has a strong incentive to embrace electric cars. The state imports oil to meet almost 90 percent of its energy needs, and nearly one-third of the stuff is burned in cars and buses. All that oil costs the state about $7 billion a year — more than 10 percent of the state's gross domestic product — and only Alaskans pay more for a gallon of gasoline. Lingle says the deal with Better Place "is a significant move toward our state gaining independence from foreign oil."

Better Place is working with Renault-Nissan to provide the cars, and Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn told reporters at the L.A. Auto Show that the future belongs to cars with cords. "The end game is zero emissions," he said. "I'm talking about pure electric cars, not hybrids. You're going to see many electric cars — city cars, minivans, four-by-fours. They'll be in every segment."

If you don't like Renaults or Nissans, don't sweat it. The Associated Press says Better Place is talking to other automakers, including the Big Three — should they survive. If Better Place succeeds in creating the infrastructure to make EVs viable, it's a safe bet automakers will develop the cars. "Nobody will want to be left on the sidelines once these networks are up," Lingle said.

As for the economic downturn and the implosion of the auto industry, Agassi isn't worried. He's raised more than $200 million to finance Better Place, and the Macquarie Capital Group is committed to an additional $1 billion to bring the project to Australia.