It was actually a pretty brilliant idea: Israeli entrepreneur Shai Agassi devised a plan to create an electric city with a power grid of easily accessible energy. Instead of consumers toiling to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars buying a car, they would purchase a more economical electric vehicle keyed into the energy grid. Next, consumers would allocate access to energy needed to power the car in the same way that people pay for cell phones. By simply topping up, a person could drive their vehicle anywhere, protect the environment, and participate in using renewable energy. Agassi’s Shangri-La was to be called Better Place.

At a time when gas prices are higher than many can afford and car prices – even for a used vehicle – soar above many households’ average annual income, Agassi’s Better Place is looking, well, better than ever. Vehicles running on electricity as opposed to fossil fuels could have saved businesses and consumers from absorbing the high costs of supply chain issues due to fuel demands. More importantly, the environmental impact of vehicle exhaust and its domino effect on everything from declining animal health to rising sea levels due to warmer climates from greenhouse gas emissions is a tricky genie to coax back into the bottle. 

Silicon Valley and its international sister cities are home to a wide variety of innovative ideas, so when Agassi’s plan circulated around the tech community and its eager venture capitalists in the early 2000s, few could deny that he was on to something. Agassi’s conceptualized world would take the genius begun by Nikola Tesla when he created Wardenclyffe Tower and create a civilization unencumbered by the political wrangling brought on by dependence on foreign oil. Agassi had support from his own country, as well as investors galore. However, a few disastrous business decisions later, the venture shuttered. Still, there are three key reasons why environmentalists and entrepreneurs should revisit this iconoclastic idea.

It was announced in August 2022 that California would be eradicating the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, paving the way for electric vehicles to conquer the market. According to Forbes, California has the fifth-largest economy in the world, meaning that when the Golden State leads, others will follow. It’s assumed that other states will adopt similar measures, therefore the auto industry will have to shift focus to keep up with the West Coast consumer market. California is also known for its booming fruit and vegetable industry, so using electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles to facilitate growing efforts could massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, with the anticipation of so many new purchases of electric vehicles, the high costs of acquiring one will fall, basically playing into Agassi’s vision of economical machinery powered by his roads and charging stations.

In recent years, catastrophic weather events have caused unprecedented suffering. Extreme temperatures, torrential storms, and other natural disasters are now regular fixtures on the nightly news. These events harm humans and endanger domestic and wildlife populations. A more stringently conceptualized Better Place could have a lower carbon footprint than current fossil fuel-driven energy services. By relying more on electricity, businesses could shift their operations to sustainable energy conversion and storage and retrain employees working in dangerous fields like coal mining to learn maintenance of wind turbines or solar installation and upkeep. There would also be fewer moving parts to correct due to inclement weather events.

Hackers are a new danger that many countries have largely been unprepared to handle. Various power companies have fallen victim to ransomware demands, leaving industries vulnerable to bad actors and consumers without essential resources to live and conduct business. However, with one centralized energy source, more time, money, attention, and training can go into internet security protections. If an infrastructure like Agassi’s Better Place were erected and later compromised, older technologies could be utilized as a backup energy source.

Better Place might be a thing of the past, but the idea is brilliant. Perhaps it just arrived a little before its time. Under the right leadership and tutelage, Shai Agassi’s genius could give this planet precisely what it needs most right now: a much-needed reset. 

Sources: Wired, Forbes