They did find a few investors who were willing to take the risk and these were people with lots of experience and deep pockets. You don't have to spend billions to start but as I pointed out in another post, Better Place should have gone after the commercial fleets and taxis in big cities along with providing grid storage to utilities - that alone is worth serious money.
"Worn-out batteries"?? I guess you're unaware that when a battery pack is no longer suitable for use in an EV, it still has 70% of its capacity. Those can be repurposed as uniterruptible power supplies & still very useful for grid storage. If you've every had to wrangle even a medium-sized UPS containing lead-acid batteries, you'd be very grateful for ones with Li-on.
It would be 10-20 years before you'd have signficant numbers of lithium batteries that could no longer be repurposed and they are fully recyclable. Different swapping systems? How so? Agassi has said from the start that the Better Place system can handle different batteries. I'm sure you could easily design a system that wouldn't work with their stations but it would be just as easy to make one that did.
While I think they were right to agressively build the infrastructure of charge points and switch stations and did a lot of great work with the swap stations, communications network and publicity, I think they focused far too much on the end-user market, even in Israel.
I'm going to make some assumptions which may be wrong but, in Agassi's place, I would have gone after the utilities more - build the switch stations fairly early on and use them to support energy generation, wind & solar farms, peak-shaving, whatever, for a price. It's hard to say if it would have been profitable but it would have been bringing in some cash on a regular basis and might have alleviated nervousness in the investors. The next failing was having only one (battery switch) vehicle and that being a passenger car - a light truck and / or delivery van ( like Brightsource's effort ) should also have been added which brings us to failure #3 - not chasing company fleets and taxis.
There are lots of crowded big cities with crappy air and people and goods on the move. Delivery vans may run all day but most don't go very far from where they park, much like most taxis. If the effort had been focused on a handful of large cities with the intent of replacing 5% of their ICE taxis and delivery vans, it would have been money better spent and the company might still be afloat.
Under the Better Place plan, you don't own the battery so if you can one that's not up to your expectations, swap it again. I would assume the swap station can test a battery to see if it's suitable for use. Uninterruptible power supplies do this as a matter of course.
I've heard Agassi address some of these. Form: If it's a BEV or one with a range extender that only charges the battery but doesn't power the car, there's no transmission to worry about. Also, you don't need to have an battery-swap version of every possible model; just a couple per automaker would be enough. Cooling: I don't know how the Fluence ZE handled this but they did - and they were selling cars in Israel, a fairly hot country.
Duplication: Actually more like hundreds of thousands in batteries per swap station but a big part of the Better Place plan was a communications network and the ability to both charge from and feed back into the grid, Swap stations could potentially be used as for peak-shaving, load-following or voltage regulation. Since many stations and batteries would be built in advance of significant sales, this would be a initial source of income ( or mitigation of losses ).
Self-service: The swap stations wash the underside of the car before removing the battery; you drive in as you would a car wash. Battery charging isn't that hard and this could be managed remotely, You could also have a pre-set where the batteries charge at some predetermined safe rate if the remote connection is lost and, in any case, the circuit breaker has been around a long time. Since it was also part of the plan to have a snack bar or restaurant at swap stations, there would be staff onsite if necessary.
Certainty: The Better Place Fluence has / had Internet connectivity, a list of nearby swap stations and the ability to reserve a battery .
Shai Agassi has said for years that the Better Place swap stations were designed to accomodate multiple batteries. And what is so terrible about standardizing on a few formats? In a pure EV, there aren't many better places to put a heavy packs other than the floor.
Also, the Better Place plan was fundamentally about charging stations as well as swap. You couldn't buy the car without a charger installed at home and at work. If EVs become as popular as some of us hope, there'll be a huge amount of both charging and swap stations one day, especially if we get larger vehicles running on batteries.
Since Elon has said that the Model S ( and presumably the Model X) is capable of conversion to battery swap, perhaps Tesla will try to get the Better Place switch station tech - despite the company's failure, they did have solid working tech as Tesla could benefit tremendously by not having to reinvent, er, the wheel.
No. There are some who automatically smear others as fanboys inappropriately but if you've spent any time at all on tech sites and read the comments, there are truly diehard fanboys of all stripes out there.
It was established a long time ago that CO2 and H2O absorb different IR bands. Since H2O will quickly precipitate out of the atmosphere, raising the overall temp is the only way to keep higher levels in the air for a long time. Higher concentrations of CO2, methane, or other GHGs, assuming no or very little change in insolation, is how the water vapor feedback increases significantly and stays that way.
From your linked PDF - "The agreement of the reconstruction of the temperature history using only the six strongest components of the spectrum, with M6, shows that the present climate dynamics is dominated by periodic processes. This does NOT rule out a warming by anthropogenic inuences such as an increase of atmospheric CO2(bolding and emphasis mine)
All the records examined in this paper were in a time period where GHG levels were significantly lower than at present and the dominant climate forcings would have been natural ones such as insolation, and volcanic eruptions.
Our use of fossil fuels have complicated the issue by adding significantly large amounts of both warming and cooling agents into the mix. But a net positive heat balance cannot simply be handwaved away into a "periodic oscillation". The heat has to go somewhere and wherever that may be, it will have an impact. Whether or not the impact is significant and long-term is a longer discussion.
Not all of them and it doesn't matter. Necessities are not about comfort but about the bare minimums for survival. There are over a billion who live cradle-to-grave without any of the GP poster's "necessities"
Why are those necessities? Our forebears got along for a very long time without having any of those things provided at their doorsteps by the government.
Most of those same home users might get by with 512 - 1GB RAM and a 1$10 AGP video card; but with millions having multigigabyte machines with vector processor GPUs, the potential for cheap, powerful distributed processing is enormous - if you can convince them to give up a few hours of CPU time occasionally.
Otherwise, well, it's probably just a waste electricity although PCs have been pretty darned efficient in the last few years.
Someone tried to sell Belgium on eBay back in 2007; bidding got up to $14 million before the auction was cancelled. Would have been amusing to see just how high it could have gone.
That 982 MWh or 41 MW sounds impressive or 31000 homes sounds impressive until you realize that 5 - 7 million homes are built in the US alone every year. I'm all for finding more efficient ways to do things but we can likely realize much greater benefit from the traditional financial institutions cleaninp up their act than from halting the wasteful mining of bitcoins.
If it'll make you happy, perhaps Bitcoin mining can be done only when power is cheapest.
Go watch the Republican debates and see which of their ideas "resonate". When you have a large collection of idiots, expect the stupid ideas to carry the most weight. Your free market argument, in this case, is bullshit because those shitty mortgages were packaged up as safe financial instruments and sold as such. That was fraud on a massive scale - and that's a crime.
And those thieving fuckers didn't "simply follow gov't regulations" - they WROTE THEM.
Throw out Citizens United and Corporate Personhood for starters. Put real limits on donations from all sources incl unions, companies and really rich fucks. The creation of an arms-length regulated agency for elections may be required - probably more vital to the health of the nation than the USPS.
The many laws are definitely part of the problem but tying everything back to constitutional principles means that the fix, ultimately requires an amendment.
Enact some measures to prevent the revolving door between the regulators and the regulated which seems to be particularly troublesome with Wall Street, Big Oil and Big Pharma. Government oversight in the form of the IRS seems to work quite well for some problems. Just ask Scarface Al ( and many others ). So there may be corrupt departments but that's a fixable problem if you get the foxes out of the henhouse and put some big cocks in charge.
Congressional reform may also be required but that's not something to be undertaken lightly.
When it comes to controlling financial crises and punishing those responsible, government has become much too weak. The Savings and Loan debacle saw lots of criminal convictions as did the DotCom / Enron / WorldCom fiascos. But the subprime mortgage disaster? As far as I can tell, it was all Bernie Madoff's fault.
"More often"?? Based on Fisker and Solyndra?? The financial crises in my working life, dating back about 35 yrs, were largely due to a lack of government oversight, and were far more damaging than money lost in loans for development.
Since companies and corporations actively try to get government money or favorable policies and since this is supported to some extent by members of both the Dems and the GOP, this won't be solved without changing the constitution.
And your idea for a prize won't work for most serious research as the amount of money needed for development and testing is staggering.
Slashdot Mirror
They did find a few investors who were willing to take the risk and these were people with lots of experience and deep pockets.
You don't have to spend billions to start but as I pointed out in another post, Better Place should have gone after the commercial fleets and taxis in big cities along with providing grid storage to utilities - that alone is worth serious money.
"Worn-out batteries"?? I guess you're unaware that when a battery pack is no longer suitable for use in an EV, it still has 70% of its capacity.
Those can be repurposed as uniterruptible power supplies & still very useful for grid storage. If you've every had to wrangle even a medium-sized UPS containing lead-acid batteries, you'd be very grateful for ones with Li-on.
It would be 10-20 years before you'd have signficant numbers of lithium batteries that could no longer be repurposed and they are fully recyclable.
Different swapping systems? How so? Agassi has said from the start that the Better Place system can handle different batteries.
I'm sure you could easily design a system that wouldn't work with their stations but it would be just as easy to make one that did.
While I think they were right to agressively build the infrastructure of charge points and switch stations and did a lot of great work with the swap stations, communications network and publicity, I think they focused far too much on the end-user market, even in Israel.
I'm going to make some assumptions which may be wrong but, in Agassi's place, I would have gone after the utilities more - build the switch stations fairly early on and use them to support energy generation, wind & solar farms, peak-shaving, whatever, for a price.
It's hard to say if it would have been profitable but it would have been bringing in some cash on a regular basis and might have alleviated nervousness in the investors.
The next failing was having only one (battery switch) vehicle and that being a passenger car - a light truck and / or delivery van ( like Brightsource's effort ) should also have been added which brings us to failure #3 - not chasing company fleets and taxis.
There are lots of crowded big cities with crappy air and people and goods on the move. Delivery vans may run all day but most don't go very far from where they park, much like most taxis.
If the effort had been focused on a handful of large cities with the intent of replacing 5% of their ICE taxis and delivery vans, it would have been money better spent and the company might still be afloat.
Have a look at the battery swap station action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtO3BxnMoAs
Under the Better Place plan, you don't own the battery so if you can one that's not up to your expectations, swap it again.
I would assume the swap station can test a battery to see if it's suitable for use. Uninterruptible power supplies do this as a matter of course.
I've heard Agassi address some of these.
Form: If it's a BEV or one with a range extender that only charges the battery but doesn't power the car, there's no transmission to worry about.
Also, you don't need to have an battery-swap version of every possible model; just a couple per automaker would be enough.
Cooling: I don't know how the Fluence ZE handled this but they did - and they were selling cars in Israel, a fairly hot country.
Duplication: Actually more like hundreds of thousands in batteries per swap station but a big part of the Better Place plan was a communications network and the ability to both charge from and feed back into the grid, Swap stations could potentially be used as for peak-shaving, load-following or voltage regulation.
Since many stations and batteries would be built in advance of significant sales, this would be a initial source of income ( or mitigation of losses ).
Self-service: The swap stations wash the underside of the car before removing the battery; you drive in as you would a car wash. Battery charging isn't that hard and this could be managed remotely, You could also have a pre-set where the batteries charge at some predetermined safe rate if the remote connection is lost and, in any case, the circuit breaker has been around a long time.
Since it was also part of the plan to have a snack bar or restaurant at swap stations, there would be staff onsite if necessary.
Certainty: The Better Place Fluence has / had Internet connectivity, a list of nearby swap stations and the ability to reserve a battery .
Shai Agassi has said for years that the Better Place swap stations were designed to accomodate multiple batteries.
And what is so terrible about standardizing on a few formats?
In a pure EV, there aren't many better places to put a heavy packs other than the floor.
Also, the Better Place plan was fundamentally about charging stations as well as swap. You couldn't buy the car without a charger installed at home and at work.
If EVs become as popular as some of us hope, there'll be a huge amount of both charging and swap stations one day, especially if we get larger vehicles running on batteries.
Elon tweeted this a couple weeks ago:
Can't say for certain that he's talking about battery swap and when it would be available but it seems the Model S is inherently capable.
Since Elon has said that the Model S ( and presumably the Model X) is capable of conversion to battery swap, perhaps Tesla will try to get the Better Place switch station tech - despite the company's failure, they did have solid working tech as Tesla could benefit tremendously by not having to reinvent, er, the wheel.
Sounds like your new doctor is unaware of your medical history.
No. There are some who automatically smear others as fanboys inappropriately but if you've spent any time at all on tech sites and read the comments, there are truly diehard fanboys of all stripes out there.
"These days"? How old are you?
It was established a long time ago that CO2 and H2O absorb different IR bands. Since H2O will quickly precipitate out of the atmosphere, raising the overall temp is the only way to keep higher levels in the air for a long time. Higher concentrations of CO2, methane, or other GHGs, assuming no or very little change in insolation, is how the water vapor feedback increases significantly and stays that way.
From your linked PDF - "The agreement of the reconstruction of the temperature history using only the six strongest components of the spectrum, with M6, shows that the present climate dynamics is dominated by periodic processes. This does NOT rule out a warming by anthropogenic inuences such as an increase of
atmospheric CO2(bolding and emphasis mine)
All the records examined in this paper were in a time period where GHG levels were significantly lower than at present and the dominant climate forcings would have been natural ones such as insolation, and volcanic eruptions.
Our use of fossil fuels have complicated the issue by adding significantly large amounts of both warming and cooling agents into the mix. But a net positive heat balance cannot simply be handwaved away into a "periodic oscillation". The heat has to go somewhere and wherever that may be, it will have an impact.
Whether or not the impact is significant and long-term is a longer discussion.
Not all of them and it doesn't matter. Necessities are not about comfort but about the bare minimums for survival. There are over a billion who live cradle-to-grave without any of the GP poster's "necessities"
Why are those necessities? Our forebears got along for a very long time without having any of those things provided at their doorsteps by the government.
By your blinkered "thinking", all research that doesn't produce instant results is wasted.
Most of those same home users might get by with 512 - 1GB RAM and a 1$10 AGP video card; but with millions having multigigabyte machines with vector processor GPUs, the potential for cheap, powerful distributed processing is enormous - if you can convince them to give up a few hours of CPU time occasionally.
Otherwise, well, it's probably just a waste electricity although PCs have been pretty darned efficient in the last few years.
Someone tried to sell Belgium on eBay back in 2007; bidding got up to $14 million before the auction was cancelled.
Would have been amusing to see just how high it could have gone.
Hey, that's a good show.
+2 Funny!
That 982 MWh or 41 MW sounds impressive or 31000 homes sounds impressive until you realize that 5 - 7 million homes are built in the US alone every year.
I'm all for finding more efficient ways to do things but we can likely realize much greater benefit from the traditional financial institutions cleaninp up their act than from halting the wasteful mining of bitcoins.
If it'll make you happy, perhaps Bitcoin mining can be done only when power is cheapest.
He simply wanted to say "fungible"
Go watch the Republican debates and see which of their ideas "resonate". When you have a large collection of idiots, expect the stupid ideas to carry the most weight.
Your free market argument, in this case, is bullshit because those shitty mortgages were packaged up as safe financial instruments and sold as such.
That was fraud on a massive scale - and that's a crime.
And those thieving fuckers didn't "simply follow gov't regulations" - they WROTE THEM.
Throw out Citizens United and Corporate Personhood for starters. Put real limits on donations from all sources incl unions, companies and really rich fucks.
The creation of an arms-length regulated agency for elections may be required - probably more vital to the health of the nation than the USPS.
The many laws are definitely part of the problem but tying everything back to constitutional principles means that the fix, ultimately requires an amendment.
Enact some measures to prevent the revolving door between the regulators and the regulated which seems to be particularly troublesome with Wall Street, Big Oil and Big Pharma.
Government oversight in the form of the IRS seems to work quite well for some problems. Just ask Scarface Al ( and many others ).
So there may be corrupt departments but that's a fixable problem if you get the foxes out of the henhouse and put some big cocks in charge.
Congressional reform may also be required but that's not something to be undertaken lightly.
When it comes to controlling financial crises and punishing those responsible, government has become much too weak. The Savings and Loan debacle saw lots of criminal convictions as did the DotCom / Enron / WorldCom fiascos.
But the subprime mortgage disaster?
As far as I can tell, it was all Bernie Madoff's fault.
"More often"??
Based on Fisker and Solyndra??
The financial crises in my working life, dating back about 35 yrs, were largely due to a lack of government oversight, and were far more damaging than money lost in loans for development.
Since companies and corporations actively try to get government money or favorable policies and since this is supported to some extent by members of both the Dems and the GOP, this won't be solved without changing the constitution.
And your idea for a prize won't work for most serious research as the amount of money needed for development and testing is staggering.