Off to a Better Place...

No, I’m not referring to the next leg of my journey – to Japan to meet with some of our battery collaborators – but to our excellent visit to electric vehicle services company Better Place in Palo Alto. We met with five of their executives, including Karen Alter (VP, Marketing) and Hugh McDermott (Global Utilities and Energy).

I’ll borrow from their web site in recanting their message to us:
The economics of renewables create an extraordinary opportunity for transportation.  But the economics of transportation also create an extraordinary opportunity for renewables.  A transition from our current system – in which 98% of transportation is powered by oil products – to an electric transportation system based on renewables, would benefit both renewable energy and transportation.

Denmark, for example, presents a strong case for the economics of the transition.  Denmark’s wind farms generate electricity at variable rates caused by unpredictable changes in wind patterns. Further, the wind farms generate much of their electricity at night, when winds are high but demand for electricity is low. If a critical mass of EVs is plugged in at night, they collectively serve as a distributed energy storage device that absorbs renewable energy as it become available, which then powers transportation the following day. Denmark’s DONG Energy estimates that the country’s entire fleet of 2 million passenger vehicles – if replaced with EVs – could run on fewer than 750 windmills (or about 60% of the installed wind capacity Denmark has right now).

Better Place plans to develop infrastructure for charging EVs, including swappable batteries. We need companies like Better Place to accelerate EV adoption; it is all good for battery makers…..and hopefully for Nexeon.

This is my last post from the C&C Mission, and I’d like to give a huge thank you to our hosts and sponsors, the companies we visited, the TSB, UKTI and all the other people who worked so hard to make it a success. When we were selected in a competitive process to present at the Cleantech Forum in the "dealflow session", I was determined to make the most of the opportunity. Although Nexeon is not actively raising capital, we were honoured to be invited to present. Over the last 9 years, CEOs presenting at Cleantech Forums have secured over USD1.5 billion in financing. Wired magazine in their blog this week was good enough to describe our pitch as ‘terrific’, so I hope my message did get across.

The value of the mission has been in several dimensions: the contacts we’ve made, the information we’ve gained and the motivation gained from planning the exciting future that cleantech is beginning to point to.

Extensive follow up actions are planned to make the most of what’s been achieved this week.

Finally, I’d like to wish my fellow missionaries much success; it was an honour and a pleasure to travel with them!