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[BlueMound]

http://www.mercuryne...ce=most_emailed

Bay Area mayors endorse $1 billion plan for electric cars

A Palo Alto start-up with powerful backing on Thursday unveiled an ambitious $1 billion plan to help make the Bay Area the nation's electric-car capital.

Endorsed by all three of the Bay Area's big city mayors, the plan would provide the re-charging infrastructure that must be in place before most consumers would consider buying or leasing an electric car.

Better Place, headed by former high-tech executive Shai Agassi, plans to install about 250,000 charging ports, 200 battery-exchange stations and a control center to service Bay Area electric car drivers. The goal is to have most of the system in place by 2012.

"We need to put together a new industry, and it needs to scale very fast," Agassi said at a press conference in San Francisco. He was flanked by San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed as well as Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Agassi's business plan is to distribute electric vehicles much the way telecoms distribute cell-phones. Customers will subscribe to drive a certain number of miles and get an electric vehicle at a discounted price. Better Place will own the battery.

"We buy batteries and clean electricity and we sell miles," he said.

Better Place already has struck deals in Israel, Denmark and Australia to build battery-charging electrical outlets and stations where drained batteries can be quickly swapped for fully-charged ones. The Bay Area would be the first U.S. deployment of its
technology.

The mayors offered no money but committed to a nine-point plan that includes regional standards for expedited permitting and installation of charging outlets in homes, at businesses and in public parking spaces. It also offers incentives to companies that install electric-vehicle chargers, and sets unspecified goals for electric-vehicle purchases for government fleets.

"We're certainly not going to build cars, but we somehow have to get the infrastructure to refuel them," Reed said . "And we can't wait 100 years for the gas-station model to evolve."

Agassi, a one-time vice president of business software giant SAP, has raised $200 million in venture capital since founding Better Place in 2007. He said he has backing from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Australia's Macquarie Capital Group, did not plan to ask the cities for money.

In some of the previously announced deals, Better Place is working with Renault-Nissan to supply electric cars. While the auto maker didn't take part in Thursday's announcement, an electric version of the Nissan Rogue sport-utility vehicle was on display outside City Hall.

For the Bay Area, Better Place envisions a broad range of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, from General Motors, Toyota, Silicon Valley electric-car startup Tesla Motors and others.

Research released Thursday indicates that 100,000 electric cars would have "a moderate effect" on the California electric grid. The Global Venture Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, says two decades of "significant adoption" of electric cars here would lead to $175 billion in savings at the gas pump and result in a $120 billion boon for the battery industry.

With large-scaled deployment, electric cars will cost $7,000 less than comparable gasoline cars, according to the lab.

Silicon Valley already has a growing electric-car industry. Tesla Motors began delivering its $109,000 electric Roadster model earlier this year, and plans to build a factory in San Jose.

And Think, a Norwegian maker of small electric cars, has opened an office in Menlo Park with plans to distribute vehicles in the United States. Think North America is backed by local venture-capital heavyweight Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In a related development Thursday, Coulomb Technologies of Campbell said it would begin installing charging stations for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids starting next month. Five of those will be located in downtown San Jose, said Richard Lowenthal, chief executive of Coulomb. The company already has orders to install 940 of its wireless Smartlet Networked Charging Stations in 2009 throughout California, he said

[Phil Phillips]

How trendy.

[Owen]

That's the Bay Area for ya.

[Keller Pirate]

The Bay area plan does fly in the face of reality, when you consider that General Motors is giving most of their plants extra down time through next year, but the Arlington plant that builds the least fuel efficient vehicles is getting overtime.