A swap in thinking about car batteries, and gasoline.

Profile in NYTimes magazine of Shai Agassi, an Israeli/American entrepreneur, interesting for a few things.

Agassi, by the way, started a software company that was bought by SAP when he was 30. For 400 million dollars. He was also being groomed for the CEO position, but he resigned to do this.

For the skeptics, the solution to "range-anxiety" and charging times for batteries is at the bottom of the post.

1-"Conscious Capitalism."

'The only way to get consumers to use electric cars, Agassi realized, was to solve the problem of refueling. That meant, to begin with, that some entrepreneur would have to build networks of recharging spots, going country by country. As he crunched the numbers, what really struck Agassi was how lucrative a business like this could be. Powering a car by electricity — even relatively expensive “clean” energy like wind or solar — costs far less than powering it by gasoline. The Tesla all-electric sedan, for example, uses about 1 cent of electricity per mile. A comparable gasoline car uses 16 cents of gasoline per mile. And with the United States market for automobile gas at roughly $275 billion, Agassi figured that a company controlling a world network of charging stations would become so profitable so quickly that it could subsidize its customers’ electric cars, much the way mobile companies give out free phones to people who sign two-year contracts. The electric-car business, in fact, could function like the mobile-phone industry: you could pay, say, $10 for 1,000 miles, $20 for 3,000 miles, or perhaps a few hundred a month for unlimited driving.'
'“If I can give you miles in a more convenient, cheaper way than gasoline, you will take them,” Agassi says. “If your neighbor is driving an electric car and paying me only $30 a week for the electricity, you’re going to buy an electric car, too. If I do it without killing your kids and the planet, then it won’t even matter if it’s cheaper or not; you will just do it.”'

Captitalism isn't changing, it's just meeting some new people. It has always made sense to do things cheaper, that's the essence of the market, efficiency. Concious capitalism comes with the exponentially increasing ease of access and transmission of information; a growing "senstitive" consciousness plugged into global information and concerned about poverty, the environment, human suffering, and with an expanded identity including life in general as well as other groups of humans and a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of one's self and world; along with the decreasing ease of access/ efficiency and political problems associated with energy use, all added to the existing structures of markets. The tools are the same, the people using them different, more plugged in. As with the cars above, it doesn't work if it doesn't make any money. While this, just a few years ago, would have seemed absolutely contradictory, and even today is only beginning to earnestly emerge, you can make money and save the world at the same time.

'Agassi regards the various gasoline-based “range extenders” in electric cars with undisguised contempt. Indeed, he regards cars that rely on any oil at all with a certain amount of derision — not merely because they cause greenhouse gases, but because from his perspective, oil simply isn’t a very efficient way to store energy. To Agassi, it is enormously wasteful both in terms of physics and of economics. Far better to simply trap the sun’s energy with solar arrays — or wind, which is generated by the uneven heating of the earth by the sun — and put it directly into a car’s batteries.'

This brings us to the second interesting point:

2- "Sustainable means Efficiency."

The history of civilization is based much on how expensive and efficient fuel is. From wood, which had to be gathered by many people or chopped down, to sunlight, which can be converted into electricity at an extreme opposite of human labor per joule, freeing other people to do much more of what they'd like. This is also one reason farming, which is labor intensive, relies so heavily on cheap gas, and also why you see great shifts in the dynamics of a society, especially the relative levels of poor, middle or merchant class, and rich, when there are agricultural revolutions. If we can produce entirely renewable, clean energy we may just be able to actually get the whole world to a decent standard of living, cleaning up our water and air as we go, not as opposed to making a profit, but while making a gigantic one. That's the connection that's been missing. Money is abstract value. The more efficient an enterprise is, the more value they can produce and the less they have to waste on production. If you think of the entire human race as one enterprise, then the connection between energy efficiency and total output becomes clear. With clean energy, we'll be able to make more value than we ever have before, and, just as cotton was once a luxury for want of the massive amounts of labor needed to put into its production, so one day not too far away (the market works quickly) may we be able to forget the days when decent food, a clean change of clothes, and a comfortable house were dreams for huge portions of humanity.

Of course, Agassi's firm itself may not succeed (though if you read the whole article you'll see that they have all the right ingredients) but there are hundreds if not thousands of companies out there trying to be the next big thing in cars, and whichever one gets there first is going to succeed, because it makes economic sense. Here's Agassi's biggest idea:

'...Agassi realized he needed one more breakthrough: some way to rapidly charge a vehicle. No drivers, he knew, will tolerate a two-hour wait to recharge when they’re on a 500-mile haul. Then one day, he and an automotive engineer were chewing over an impractical method for quickly replenishing batteries. The engineer wondered aloud: Wouldn’t the fastest way to charge an electric car be to simply replace the battery?
It was, Agassi says, his “aha” moment. The auto industry’s conceptual error, he says, is in regarding the battery as a built-in component of the car, like a gas tank. Instead, you could think of the battery as more analogous to gas itself — an entity that goes in and out of a car as needed, owned not by the driver but by the company that sells you the fuel. Think of the problem that way, Agassi realized, and the recharging company could refill its customers’ cars using battery technology and the existing electric grid without making any radical new technological innovations. The solution to electric cars lay not in re-engineering the battery but in re-engineering the car.'